Photograph by Beau Roulette
They seem like normal guys, but they call themselves dredg. They are (from left) Dino Campanella, Drew Roulette, Mark Engles and Gavin Hayes.
By Clarence Cromwell
At 15151 Karl Ave., in an unassuming suburban ranch house behind a hedge, is a room that Mark Engles' mother calls "The Pit."
This is just the type of place one would expect a band named dredg to crawl up from: It's littered with the remains of a futon, a stack of air conditioner-sized speakers, a guitar, keyboards and various tambourines. It looks as if a vacuum cleaner last crossed this floor when Duran Duran was cool, and there's some kind of sticky substance stuck to the top of the speakers.
This year dredg hopes to make enough of a name for itself to sign a record deal, and the band is already scoring gigs at popular clubs around the state, including San Jose's Cactus Club. Its members are four Los Gatos High School students, present and former: bassist Drew Roulette, vocalist Gavin Hayes, drummer Dino Campanella and guitarist Mark Engles.
Despite their lowlife name and their pit, dredg members are somewhat normal. Off the stage they tend to be polite and more reserved than one might expect from a group of people labeled "hardcore" by one college radio disc jockey.
Dino and Mark, Los Gatos High School seniors, began jamming together in eighth grade, and their older cohorts joined during the next few years. Drew now studies fine art at San Diego State University (he designed the dredg logo), and Gavin studies commercial art at Northern Arizona University. Both are considering a move back to the Bay Area to keep the band together, depending on how the group does this year.
Dredg has a following in the Boston area because vocalist Gavin Hayes' roommate sent a dredg tape to his friend at the college radio station. WERS, Emerson College's 4,000-watt radio station, with listeners in four states, currently shows a dredg song as one of its top five most-requested. WERS disc jockey Rick Grayson added dredg to his playlist because a couple of the songs appealed to him, he said. Then Boston listeners picked up on the band.
"It's very rare that I would put anyone on my show--[someone] that no one's heard before--that would draw so much attention," Grayson said. He said the station got 10 calls the first week he played dredg, and listeners still ask every week where they can buy the tape (They can't, since dredg currently has only a few demo tapes circulating).
Grayson describes dredg as a "West Coast hardcore" band, similar to Rage Against the Machine, Deftones, Korn and Sepultura.
"They have some Korn influence and some Sepultura influence. But what really impressed me was their originality," Grayson said. "they incorporate rapping and some hip-hop grooves along with the heavy beats."
"Rhythmically aggressive" is how band manager Brian Lillie describes dredg.
The Boston exposure may pay off this week. Dredg hopped a plane to the East Coast to play live on WERS, followed by a few gigs in New York and, they hope, an audition with record industry executives.
The band has a couple of road trips behind it already--the kind of trips that would make anyone want to be part of a struggling pit-nurtured band. These have been seat-of-the-pants gallops up and down the state, with the band and its gear crammed into a family van or rented trailer, usually during a school holiday. All four members would pack sleeping bags and shack up with friends and acquaintances in college dorms around the state to save cash.
During the first week of March the band played first at San Diego State University, then at the Cactus Club and then at a Bakersfield club called Bottoms Up. "We're just trying to get our name out," Drew explained.
Cactus Club Manager Calvin Trippett said the band played so well at the gig last month--part of an amateur night for local bands--that he asked them to come back for an 8 p.m. April 25 show.
For tickets call 491-9300.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, April 16, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.