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.
Piper: [smiling] It was Leo's songs.
Jason: Leo is my best friend, was back then too. And when you look at him, you don't see a writer. You can't tell that he's thinking all these things and spitting out these great verses.
He always smelled like oil and smoke, from the forge or cigarettes. Always had a tool belt on.
You look at Leo and think, man he's good with his tools.
And that's what his pen was. Just anouther tool.
Piper: I said yes the moment he sang me "Red."
Leo: It was just something I'd been humming to myself you know. Then Jason suggested making some music, asked for any songs or beats we had to play with.
So I showed them my notebok.
Piper: For as long as I've known Leo, I have never seen him without his black notebook and red pen.
Leo: I was nervous about showing them. Really nervous man. I had never shown anybody, and I was scared that my only two friends in the world would laugh at me and tell me I was shit and my songs were too.
Jason: Drag me down into darkness/ Side by side with the dead/ I'm bleeding out gold/ But all I can see is red/
[whistles]
We were a bunch of nobody's from Texas. But we had "Red." And I belived that was enough.
Piper: They were all good songs. Really any of them would have persuaded me that this could be something. But "Red"... it was an angry song. And for a rock and roll artist, angry has never been my thing. But when I heard the lyrics /red like the shins of your hair/ red like the feeling of cutting loose/ oh there's something wrong with me/ cause the world I see is the color of you/
Leo had written a love song.
Leo: I wrote that song about my mom.
It... [looks away from the camera]
This all started as a release. For me that's all it was. We were all angry, hurt in our different ways. Banging sticks on metal helped, writing helped even more.
Piper: I knew how to play bass, one of my Nannies used to play and taught me when I was thirteen. I was nothing exceptional, but it was a start. I taught Jason the beginnings of guitar.
Leo: Man we practiced all day everyday.
There was this old bunker I'd found out in the woods, we hauled some instruments out there from the music room, and we played. For months.
My thumbs would be blistered and bleeding when I went to bed at night. Always. It was a good day when I couldn't feel my fingers.
Jason: Leo always used to say that was when he played on his first drum set. I'm here to set the record straight- bullshit. He didn't have a drum set. All he had was a crash symbol a snare and two toms.
Oh yeah, and spare sticks he dug out of the trash.
Leo: [grinning] I made it work.
Piper: For all of us, it wasn't a real thing until we met Percy and Hazel.
Hazel: I had learned piano in New Orleans. It was an easy transition to the cheap roll out keyboard Leo took from some toy store.
I didn't know he stole it till years later. I was very upset.
Jason: It was easy to pitch the same camp to our parents after we graduated. It was easy to book a flight up to New York. And when we met Percy and Hazel there I knew that this was what we needed. They cinched it for me.
Leo: Camp Halfblood. What a weird fucking name. I still think about that.
Piper: Every summer, after school got out, our parents shipped us off to a summer camp.
I mean that was just the cycle, a boarding school. Then a summer camp. Then ignoring you for any span of time in between.
That's how it was with our parents, me and Jason's at least. Leo had things a little different.
Leo: Once you run away enough times, once you go through enough foster parents, the system starts to give up on you.
When you get lost, nobody comes looking for you anymore.
I was seventeen. Practically grown. Nobody gave a shit if an adult didn't have any parents. [Shakes head] That's so fucked up man. I mean I needed somebody more in my twenty's then ever before and... adults need guidance too. They act like something magic happens when you hit eighteen and suddenly you've got shit figured out but you don't. You don't, and you're stumbling through life knowing you're a lost cause. Because they couldn't fix you. They couldn't fit you in their box. And you're the villain, why did you run away? Why didn't you cooperate? Nobody stops for a second to think about the system they built and shoved kids into where it's better to sleep under a bridge than stay another night there.
I was put between a rock and a hard place. I had something worth running away from, but nowhere to run to. I chose to do things on my own terms.
And yet I think I would have saved myself from a lot of hell if things had been done differently.
I remember one time I was back in New York, just after getting back up there to do this camp thing. It was early June and I was walking by an orphanage. I saw a little girl on the bottom step. I remembered her immediately. Meg. She must have been only six or seven when I had seen her last, brown hair, button nose.
I walked up to her and I said hi. I asked her how she was doing. I wasn't expecting her to remember me really, but it still stung when she didn't.
She said "I'm not supposed to talk to strangers."
And I said, "I'm not a stranger. I'm Leo."
And that's when she remembered me, I could see her get all excited, but she still was hesitant. She looked at me and she said, "When we asked about you, they told us you were dead."
Piper: [hesitates] I don't know how he made it up to New York.
And I'll never ask.
Jason: I met Percy first, ran into him playing Bowie on his guitar on the beach or something.
I invited him to be in the band.
Percy: We started talking, and I picked up that they didn't have a keyboardist.
I knew Hazel from New Rome over in California, where I was looking at schools.
I told Jason about her and he just said, "Bring anybody that can make us the biggest band in the world someday."
That stuck with me.
So hell yeah I brought Hazel.
Hazel: Percy introduced me to Jason and then Jason introduced us to Piper and Leo.
Piper: It was so nice to have anouther girl around. I love Jason, and I love Leo. But it was so nice.
Percy: At first I had pegged Jason as the lead man. Tall blond and stoic. [laughs] Then I go to rehearsal and Piper calls Jasons vocal idea trash, and Leo tells him how to play a riff, and Piper points out that not ever song needs Leo going nuts on the symbol. So yeah, a lot different than I'd imagined.
It was a meld of all ideas, controlled compromise. I really liked that vibe. I liked that vibe as much as I liked the music.
Hazel: I had thought Leo was rather unassuming. He was so happy, and sweet, and yes more than a little annoying, but I never would have guessed he held the band together like he did.
Percy: I bet you can imagine how surprised we were-coming into this odd dynamic- when Leo had the best songs out of all of us.
Oh and he was ten times better than me at guitar. But hey- man was a drummer at heart.
Leo: I think I did it for the same reason I did everything else. I got bored one day and mastered it. Only this time it turned into something that mattered.
Hazel: We were getting a lot better really fast. I mean we were getting good.
Percy: There was only one problem
Piper: He was writing these songs, we had at least six from start to finish by the end of the summer, and Leo had no interest in singing them.
Hazel: They were his work, I thought he would want to deliver his work. To sing what he was writing.
Jason: Summer was almost over, we were all about to head in a million different directions and yet none of us wanted to lose what we knew we had.
We were looking at our options.
Percy: I thought, well if we're brainstorming its about time you guys meet Annabeth.
Leo: Annabeth scared the shit out of me back then.
Annabeth: I told him that if he sold those songs he was the biggest idiot in the world.
Leo: Is that what she told you? No- no man here's how it went. Percy introduced me to his girl. I showed her some verses then made a joke about selling my stuff and she threatened my life.
I was like woah dude.
Piper: Annabeth and Percy came as a package deal. She had no interest in music, but that girl knew everything.
You could be playing a crossword and you could ask her "Hey Annabeth what's the end of an- I don't know- a shoelace called."
And she wouldn't even look up from her physics textbook to tell you.
She just knew everything. And on the rare occasion she didn't, she would make it her mission to find out.
I liked that about her, she was never ashamed when she didn't know something. She just found out. She knew what she wanted and she got it.
[laughs] She knew what we wanted and she went out and got that too.
Jason: And so when we needed to find out what to do. Where to take this. Annabeth knew. Of course she did.
Annabeth: [smirks] I had made some calls.
Hazel: She introduced us to this sweet old guy, with this head of hair that looked like horns, and severe temperament issues.
Gleeson Hedge (Tour manager for Demi, and Ugly world tour): [scowling] I told them to get their asses out to LA.