Sunshine, look at us now

Demigod, The Rise of The Seven.

1969-1971

Demigod started out as a hard rock band in Texas, before relocating to New York then LA in 1970.

Jason: The first three of us, we all met a wilderness school. I don't even remember the name of it. It was over in the south, mid Texas. [laughs] it was a real crappy place, broken down busses, and gray sludge they called food.

Piper: It was a school for estranged children.

Leo: You set one building on fire and suddenly your [air quotes] wild.

Piper: We we're all so young, Jason must have been eighteen, while Leo and I were seventeen. Teenagers.
I had stolen some things, done some drugs, tarnished my fair share of the McLean reputation. And I ended up there. I remember thinking when I first got there, looking around at the rotting cabins and rusting busses, This is a lot fucking better than Hollywood.
I had met Jason and I met Leo and to me everything didn't seem so bad. There were good people next to me, flipping coins to see who would risk food poisoning to see if the chicken was edible, giving me their blankets because they run hot and don't need them.
If there's one thing LA doesn't have, its good people. That school had one thing going for it at least.

Jason: We would sneak off, slip into the teachers lounge and rifle though the records the principal had.

Leo: [counting off on his fingers] The Beatles, The Doors, Tina turner, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones man.
That principal was an crazy old man. But he had taste.

Piper: We would sit, and we would listen, and we'd sing along. For hours.
We wanted to be the Beatles.

Leo: We wanted to be the stones

Jason: What we couldn't find in the lounge, we found on the radio. There was only one radio in the whole place, and it was this god-awful sound system in the school bus. We would sneak in and turn on the station and we would sit down on the leather seats and listen. I mean we were shoving the stuffing back into the seats of that thing. The static crackled all the way through "I Am The Walrus."

Leo: I learned how to drive in that bus.

Jason: I started thinking, listening to those guys. If they can do it, why can't we?

Leo: It was Jason's idea to start a band.

Piper: I said no immediately. I had spent so much energy trying to get away from all that, my dad and his movie star image, and he wanted me to just go back? Not a chance in hell.

Leo: It was so out of character. Jason? The guy all moms love and bake pies for, suggesting we get together and make a rock n' roll band?
To me it felt like Jason had crossed an invisible line. From us just listening to music, into the world of making it. I mean the idea had been bouncing around in my head for a while, but it putting it out there, into the real world felt dangerous.
It wasn't even a question for me. There was no going back.

Jason: Leo asked me if I had drank some of the bleach I used on my hair. [grins]
Leo really is punchable sometimes.
And for the record, I don't bleach my hair, and I didn't then.
That was a phase in the 80s.

Leo: I was down of course, I mean why not? I had free time. I wanted fun.
That's what it seems like before you do it. Fun. All the drugs and sex and money and fame- to a seventeen year old boy it sounds great. And it was great for a while, being on such a high. But once you start crossing lines, once you dig yourself down far enough, you're right back where you started.
The bottom.
Piper knew better, even then.
I'm still not sure what convinced her to go back.