THE COMPLETE FB HISTORY
When I was in the Air Force, I was stationed in Cheyenne, Wyoming.  I left the Air Force in April of 96 and was making plans to move back to Texas.  In June of 1996, my old band S.I.N. for S.I.N. found ourselves opening two dates for the mighty Mortification.  After the June 6th show, I went to the hotel to shake the boys out of their beds and get ready to play Denver that night.  Steve Rowe sat me down and gave me some very staright constructive criticism.  He told me to fire one of the band members flat out and make another band member stop playing certain parts.  Needless to say I was shocked but, encouraged about the rest of what he said.  The old band didn't last much longer at all.  I'm not even sure if we played any shows after that.

S.I.N. for S.I.N. had been given a spot for the upcoming Rowe Productions North American Metal Compilation titled MASSIVE FREQUENCY OVERLOAD.  It was coming out in early 1997 I believe.  I left Cheyenne for Texas and in the meantime I had contacted Steve Rowe to see if I could still get a spot on the compilation but, with a new band.  He agreed and Faithbomb was born. 

I didn't feel like I could pass up the opportunity to be on a compilation that would have major distribution so I called up my old friend Chris Manning to see what we could do.  I had known Chris for years as I had booked his old band Drastik Measures a few years before.  Chris is a natural born guitarist and could completely shred.  He was now playing in a Dallas metal band called Dvinity.  I told him about the chance to get my stuff on the comp and he jumped at the chance to help.  I told him that I had the band name figured out and I'd be back in Texas before fall of 1996.  We planned to do a song called THE DOWN ROAD that was a re-tread of a S.I.N. for S.I.N. "power ballad".

Chris and I kept in touch and he assured me that his band would learn the song and record it on the fly at Dmitri Thomann's apartment.  That's exactly what happened.  I was completely overwhelemd and intimidated because these guys could play better than anyone I had ever been around, except Chris.  Chris was always good.  Always.  The guys tore through the song and we recorded it in about three takes.  The only thing I ever thought was bad about the whole process was that I thoguht the choruses lacked a heavy punch that I was looking for.  Regardless, the recording sounded far and away better than anything I had ever been involved with.  I was happy that Chris' band was able and willing to help me out.  So the very first incarnation of the band was me, Chris Manning, Dmitri Thomann, and Rich Guess.

Chris and I knew going into the recording that we wanted to do something different than the other bands would be doing on the compilation.  We knew that it would be full of death and thrash bands all doing their thing.  We thought a ballad would stick out and be memorable.  We were right!

The Massive Frequency Overload CD came out in the early part of 1997, I think.  Nearly overnight I was getting e-mails and interest in the band.  I thought it was kind of funny because it was completely a studio band that was thrown together for making it on the comp.  Very quickly, I got a call from Neil Edge from the old Deadzine.com site.  He showed some interest in the band and did an interview with me about what we had going on.  He was always cool to us and gave us some serious love on his site.  Deadzine definitely helped us out in the beginning.  If not for Neil, who knows.  We may have never done anything else.

By this time I had decided that I needed to get an album out.  I had several songs that I wanted to use from the old S.I.N. for S.I.N. days and a few things that I had come up with later.  I was realizing how expensive it was going to be to record so, I started buying equipment and turning my extra bedroom into a small recording space.  The studio came together quickly and I found myself trying to score a few recording jobs to pay for the gear I had purchased.  Once again, Chris came through in a pinch.

My brother knew that I had come up with this "studio" and that I was trying to get some local bands to record.  He knew some guys in a punk band called THE HASBEENS that were looking to do a 3 or 4 song demo.  He gave me the number for a guy named Mike that I needed to call to try and set something up.  I went up to Sherman, Texas one day and met Mike at The Blue Door Cafe where he worked as a Prep Chef.  He was a cool guy and we set a recording date.  Here's where Chris comes in.  I had gone to see THE HASBEENS rehearse so that I would know what I was getting into.  I was basically seeing what they had and checking out the drums to see how many mics I'd need.  The day arrives for the recording.  I have turned my whole house into a makeshift recording studio with the control room being located in teh back bedroom.  I had a snake running down the hall to the "drum room" in the formal dining room at the front of the house.  The band was warmed up and ready and then sheer panic set in.  I couldn't get any signal to tape.  I put the band on a "take five" and I called Chris.  He walked me through my signal path and the rest is history.  I got along famously with the guys in the band and at some point I asked Mike (guitar), and Scott (drums) if they'd help me with this whole Faithbomb metal band thing.  They were both huge metal fans so, they were in!  WOW!

When Mike, Scott, and I made the metal connection, we all became great friends.  We immediatley started writing songs, reworking old S.I.N. for S.I.N. songs and jamming on ideas.  The process was pretty easy because these guys had been playing in bands together for a long time.  They were like a machine.  It just clicked.  I couldn't believe it.

The lineup, if you want to call it that, was me, Chris for bass and guitar solos, Mike on rhythm guitar, and Scott on drums.  We never really rehearsed as a band.  We'd just throw on some headphones, practice the riffs in the control room and roll tape.  I had ADATs back then and we were all crammed into this cleared out bedroom at the back of my house.  I could not get drum sounds that I liked and so we built a triggered kit out of two sets of practice pads and an Alesis D4 drum module.  This ended up being my only option as I could not afford proper mics and preamps and all that stuff at the time.  We actually bought the D4 from Dmitri of Dvinity and I thought it had sounded great on the recording of THE DOWN ROAD.  I learned quickly how to program the thing and get the kit we had built not to crosstalk to the different triggers.  It worked pretty well.  So what you hear is actually Scott playing a drum kit that triggered a sound from each pad he hit.  I thought it was pretty cool.  I was still nervous about the sound.

We recorded the album THE AMERICAN JESUS entirely in that little room on that crazy drumkit we had built.  The album went very quickly.  We'd rehearse the part 2 or 3 times to get it tight and immediately lay it down to tape.  What you hear on the CD is probably a second or third take at the most.  I mixed that thing 100 times it seemd like.  It was my fist full length recording project and I really wanted it to be as good as it could for what I had to work with.  Chris, Mike, and Scott really did a great job fighting through the rookie engineer's shortcomings.  Thanks guys.

Enter Ty Tabor.

I had heard about this process of "mastering" that a CD had to go through before it was released.  This magical process made the CD louder and globally EQ'd it.  Hmm, sounds nice.  Ty Tabor was offering this process on the web via his Alien Beans studio site.  I e-mailed him, made a call, and sent the DAT tape master.  He calls me 2 or 3 days later.  "That is the worst snare sound I have ever heard".  Oh crap.  I was a major King's X fan and I was seriously nervous to be talking to Ty on the phone.  Once again, constructive criticism pays off.  We talked a few times over the phone about the recording, what processes I was using, and how it was sounding.  We "fixed" the snare as best we could.  We couldn't re-record the whole thing so we tweaked it and sent another DAT.  He mastered it and that is what we ended up with for the release of THE AMERICAN JESUS.  Not too terribly bad for a self taught recording/engineering idiot like myself.  There was a timing problem on one small part of a song that was never fixed but, oh well.  I was proud that I had a CD with me on it, with good players, and mastered by Ty tabor of King's X!  I win!

The art for THE AMERICAN JESUS was done by a guy called Scrybe.  I don't know how I got in touch with him.  He did a great job on the layout from my ideas.  I wanted to make the chrome logo on the front look a little tougher but, I was afraid to ask him to change it.

We released THE AMERICAN JESUS CD in July of 1998 at the Texas Rockfest in Marble Falls.

Let me back up a bit.  At some point along the time we were recording the album, we decided to play a show.....live....for people.  We got in touch with some dude called "C-Monkey" that worked at God's Place.  They had an old church that they had converted into a concert venue.  All the big Christina metal bands played there.  We got booked with Clearview and Extol (not the famous one).  We practiced our butts off and Craig Long from THE HASBEENS was playing bass for this show.  I remember Craig sweating the fact that he was still trying to learn a song or two in the van outside before we were to play.  Funny.  None of it mattered because not one paying customer showed up.  Not one.  It was in January or February, it was miserably cold and they had left the doors open all day.  The sound guy got us rolling and we were off into our very first Faithbomb show.  We opened with Rise Above and I jumped off the drum riser and landed flat on my back.  Mike was just lookng at me and shaking his head.  Craig said later that he played the completey wrong thing on two of the songs.  We sucked but, at least nobody saw it.  Even the sound guy left.  The funny thing was, we could see Clearview sitting out in the lobby at there merch table freezing to death.  They still had to play.  Lame.

The letters and e-mails started to really pile up.  I couldn't believe it.  Chris built us a website and the thing really sort of took off.  We stocked the CDs a few places.  Blastbeats.com carried it and it was in a few stores.  We sold some direct through the webpage.  It was fun.  MP3.com really went quite well for us.  We got tons and tons of plays and some nice royalty checks out of the deal.  We were actually on the Metal charts in the top 10 numerous times.  I have a printout of us alongside AC/DC and Danzing in the Metal top 10.  We dominated the Christian Metal chart on there as well.

My favorite fan contact was with a guy from Bahrain named Rajeev.  He wrote us a letter and bought a CD.  I had been to Bahrian and Saudi Arabia in the Air Force and it was very cool to me that he was from that part of the world.  I was so glad to get a letter from him that I sent him some free stuff.  I got a picture back a few weeks later of him wearing our t-shirt.  Cool.  If you are lucky enough to have a Faithbomb shirt, you have a true rarity, we never made even 50 or 60 total.  I have one left in my closet.

Faithbomb played the 1999 Texas Rockfest.  We opened the show at high noon.  It was hotter than blazes.  The lineup was myself, Mike Griffen on Guitar, Chris Manning on guitar, Skip Akin on bass, and Scott Carter on drums.  We only reheasred with Scott once before the show because he had moved to California to play with a couple of punk bands.  The rest of the band rehearsed for the show in the studio with headphones while listening to Scott's recorded drum tracks.  Scott got in the day before the show, we practiced for a couple of hours, drove down the next day and had a nice set.  We were pretty tight all things considered.  I don't believe this lineup ever played another show together.

In 1999, Dwell Records contacted us about appearing on 2000, THE SECOND COMING - A Christian Metal Compilation.  We signed the licensing deal, got paid $250.00 and they put Rise Above on the CD.  Dwell was known for releasing tribute albums and that sort of thing.  I was pretty excited to expand the discography.

The history gets fuzzy here.....

The time between 1999 and 2001 is very strange.  I was trying desparately to hold the band together.  Scott was in California and Mike was soon to move there to join Tsunami Bomb.  I played the Texas Rockfest 2000 under the Faithbomb name with a backup band that I had done some recording for.  The band was from Howe, Texas and they were called Cavil.  I had committed to playing the Rockfest that year and I wanted to keep my promise to Blanche Paul, the promoter.  While recording Cavil, they learned 5 FB songs, we rehearsed a few times and got therough the set fine on the day of the show.  It was funny because they were all high school kids and I was so much older than them.  I wore a Hawaiian shirt on stage.  Oh no.

2000 was probably the hardest time for me.  I had recorded a band called 8th Sphere and recruited their guitarist, Greg Kennington to play in Faithbomb.  We had a number of guys in and out of the band during this time.  We never got anything recorded and we only played one show with Greg.  The show was in Bastrop, Texas and we headlined, weird.  I remember the show being decent.  There were about 80 kids and they seemed to be into it.

The lineup around this time was Greg, me, Chris on bass, and Fred Boyce on drums.  We practiced a ton and just never came up with anything.  Previously Greg and I had tried to record a followup to THE AMERICAN JESUS with a couple of guys from Clean Slate.  It never got off the ground. At some point I got frustrated, dismissed the rest of the band and called it quits.  It wasn't really anyone's fault, we just could not get songs together as a band.  We ran Eric Curtis in on drums for a bit.  He was is a band called Edom.  He helped us out a another Bastrop show we played with Disciple.  He played the show of his life that night.

In 2001 I had hooked back up with Scott Carter.  He was back in town.  I was still trying to get the second record done and he was interested.  Mike was doing Tsunami Bomb and would not be available.  Scott had joined a Dallas band called THE HELLIONS and told me that their guitarist, Mike "M.T." Todd would be into playing on the new stuff with us.  I heard THE HELLIONS and I was blown away.  The first I ever heard of MT playing was the opening riff to "Let's Go Do Some Crimes" on their self titled CD.  I was shocked!  Scott and I drove down to Dallas and picked up MT on a Saturday morning.  We ate at an IHOP in Plano on the way to my place.  MT was a super nice dude and so I was looking forward to recording with him.

No kidding, the first time we got together for that session, Scott and MT jammed on some riffs, worked out a couple of songs and we recorded "I Won't" and "Escape/Casting Lots" that day.  These were the first songs we recorded for the BLEED album.  They appear on the record as we recorded them that first day.  We practiced and wrote some stuff at MT's house in Dallas for a while.  Scott moved on for personal reasons during the recording sessions and so I called up Chad Crutchfield. 

Chad was in a band called Savant with Chris from a few years back.  He was originally going to play on THE AMERICAN JESUS until I ran into the team of Scott and Mike.  He and I had always kept in touch.  Chad agreed to finish up the album with us.  We used the old method of writing and recording in the studio. 

We played a show on 10-27-01 in my hometown of Bells, Texas.  The show was booked at the request of a high school classmate of mine.  This was the longest set the band ever played.  We were the only band on the bill.  The lineup was me, Chris on Bass, Chad on drums, MT on guitar.  The show was for a bunch of Junior High kids in the auditorium of the school there.  I think we scared the crap out of them.  They weren't too sure of what to think about us.  They had a good time but, I'm not sure they had heard a lot of Metal before.

We finally finished the recording and released BLEED in July of 2002, four years after THE AMERICAN JESUS.

Scott returned to the band for some shows in late 2002 and early 2003.  We played a show in Canton, TX in August of 2002 with the lineup of myself, Scott, MT, and Dwayne Emmons on bass.  The crowd was very energitic.  We played alongside X-Nihilo and Psoulpatch that night.  Dwayne also played a show in Houston with us and got a couple of girls up on stage dancing with him.  It was pretty funny, they loved single, cute Dwayne. 

After these shows Clendon "Cebo" Miller joined us on bass.  I knew Clendon from running sound for his old band.  Clendon is a monster bassist.  He really added a punch we had not had before.  We played a few shows with this lineup.  I almost got beat up by a giant cowboy when we played in Fort Worth.  The show was on January 25th of 2003.  Celendon came out the side door where we were unloading our gear while the confrontation was happening.  He announced that he was working security for the venue and the giant cowboy left....thankfully.  I think we were arguing over parking.  I can't really remember much about it except the fact the he would have killed me.  He did not want any part of dealing with Clendon.  Nice.

Another funny thing about this show is that there was a band there called PASSERBY.  They had this tiny little lady singing for them and she had a great voice.  I had started looking for bands to record and put on the Bombworks label I had just started a year before.  I tried to contact them about recording and signing the band.  It turns out this was the band that became FLYLEAF.  Lacey actually sang in my old house on the X-NIHILO album that I recorded.  Kinda cool.

We played a nice little show in Sherman in the fall of 2002 as the headliners.  I remember that the stage had shag carpet on it and these red rope lights that went around the edge of the stage.  We had a good show and signed a lot of autographs.  I always felt funny signing stuff for people.  If they'd seen us rehearse and work outside of the band they would have known that we were nobodies.  It was fun though.

Also in the fall of 2002 we recorded our version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen for the S.o.t.D. Records A BRUTAL CHRISTMAS release.  The lineup was me, Scott, MT, and I think Chris played bass.

TULSA.

The Tulsa trip was interesting.  Scott and MT were late for some reason and so I was freaking out.  I knew we had a long way to go and I was super stressed about getting to the venue in time for sound check.  They got there and I bit there heads off.  We loaded the van and the trip was tense the whole way.  It was me, Scott, MT, and Clendon.  I stressed for nothing.  We got there in plenty of time.  We got the sound check worked out atfer the PA had some issues.  I got my issues worked out with MT and Scott.  We played with NEVIAH NEVI and JUNKER JORG that night.  I don't know who the opening band was.  It was the opener, NEVIAH NEVI, FB, and then JUNKER JORG.  We had picked up a booking agent named Ronnie from Houston.  This show was supposed to be part of a two week tour for us that would take us out to New Mexico and back.  All the shows fell through for us except for Tulsa and Houston.  We started out the show in Tulsa and I don't remember the first song but I do remember getting caught up in the mic cable and dragging my mic stand down along with MT's vocal mic and cabinet mic.  I was looking like an idiot and so we actually stopped and started the show again.  The crowd was good.  JUNKER JORG played a cool set complete with metal choreography and then during load out proceeded to fill up the venue with exhaust from their ancient "tour bus". 

The Houston show of this failed tour was cool as well.  This was the second of three Houston shows we played.  The stage was a big checkerboard.  During one of the songs MT forgot the solo and so he played the Sweet Child O' Mine riff.  You can see my head whip around when I heard the riff start playing.  There's footage of this show and Tulsa out there on YouTube.  These were the last shows Scott played with us.

Chad rejoins the band in the spring of 2003.  We are working hard on the third CD.  Tension in the band was at an all-time high.  For some reason, the songs weren't happening for us.  We had decided to record the album at MT's studio in Dallas.

In the meantime, we had booked a gig at a festival in Houston.  We rehearsed our butts off and played what would be our last show on May 3rd of 2003.  Chad, MT, me, and Clendon played hard and the show went very well.  We had possibly our best crowd ever and we had a ton of energy.  A bunch of guys got up on stage with us for one song and went nuts.  It was really a good show.  We snapped our last band photo behind the stage right after our set.  We had really come together live.  On the way home Chad smacked me on the shoulder and told me that we had finally become a great band.  He was excited to be a part of it.  I remained silent but I knew it was the last show for me.

We did manage to write some songs and get things rolling for the third album.  We demoed some stuff and the tension was terrible.  Clendon had left and Alan Tregoning had joined us to play bass for the CD.  We recorded a few songs at MT's studio and I never was happy with how things were going.  MT and Chad were arguing a bunch and it was just going nowhere.  I left rehearsal one night and called everyone on my way home to say that it was over.  I don't recall what the reaction was.

We had these songs and I really wanted to finish the thid and now final FB album.  In December of 2003 Mike came in to town on break from Tsunami Bomb.  He and I and Chad recorded 5 or 6 songs in my studio.  This was the best sounding stuff we had done to date.  It still sits there, undone.

Mike went back to California.  Chad went back to other bands.  I sold my studio a couple of years later.  Now we all work.  I am going to be 38 on my next birthday.  I don't know if that last record will ever get done.  I have been eyeing some studio gear lately.

OFFICIAL DISCOGRAPHY:  Massive Frequency Overload Compilation, The American Jesus, 2000 The Second Coming Compilation, Bleed, A Brutal Christmas: The Season in Chaos Christmas Compilation.

THE BAND:  VOCALS - Rob Colwell, DRUMS - Scott Carter, Chad Crutchfield, Eric Curtis (live), Neil Hacker (recording), Fred Boyce (rehearsal), BASS - Chris Manning, Aaron Hamilton (rehearsal), Skip Akin (live), Clendon Miller (live), Alan Tregoning (rehearsal and recording), Chris Manning, GUITAR - Mike Griffen, Greg Kennington, Chris Manning, Mike "MT" Todd.

OUTRO....None of this dream of mine would have ever transpired without Chris Manning, none of it.  Mike and Scott pounded the ground mightily for my musical purpose and I love them for it.  The American Jesus CD nevers happens without them.  MT and Chad are among my very best friends even though we don't talk often enough.  The Bleed Cd never happens without their help.  I consider it a privelege and honor to have officiated MT's wedding.  I truly miss you guys, good times and bad.

Thanks to all 21 people that played in the band....yep, 21!

Rob