Quicksand. Inside Out. 108. Burn. 1.6 Band. There’s a thread that ties them all together and it leads back to Beyond. It’s a point that’s driven home in Kevin Egan’s documentary, What Awaits Us: A Beyond Story. In it the filmmaker—who is also the band’s vocalist—documents the history of Beyond, a group whose brief, two-year existence propelled its members to the forefront of nineties underground music.
From their humble Long Island high school roots to the recording of their 1988 Dew It demo tape, their unceremonious ending, and subsequent reunion shows, Egan, with the help of people like Walter Schreifels, John Porcelly and his fellow bandmates, paints the picture of what made Beyond special, and how his high school band fits into his life today.
Can you describe Beyond’s sound?
I think what made Beyond interesting—to me anyway—what I think made us stand out a little bit was, we had an interest in the bands that were coming up, that were playing CBGBs, like the bands from Washington, D.C. Back then, nobody from New York went to shows when a D.C. band would play CBGBs except me and Tom and maybe, like, 20 other people. There was a show that was Dag Nasty, Verbal Assault, and Government Issue at CBGBs, which was kind of a seminal show for us because then Tom—after seeing Verbal Assault (even though they’re from Rhode Island, they had a very Washington, D.C. sound), and they left a huge impression on us that day—and Tom went home and I think maybe he wrote, like, “What Awaits Us” or something that sort of had that feel to it.
There weren’t too many bands that married the New York sound with the D.C. sound. We loved New York bands, and we loved being part of the New York scene, and there’s definitely Youth Of Today influence, for sure, Minor Threat, again D.C., but they were more hardcore, and we were also into the more emo bands like Rites Of Spring and Dag Nasty and those bands.
So, if I think about it, we had a sound that was a marriage of those—those two sounds, but also the fact that, especially the players on the demo were these really amazing metal musicians, so there’s that in it too. There’s Iron Maiden—I made a point of mentioning that in the movie. I think Iron Maiden has to be mentioned at least three or four times in the movie, and I purposely did that because I don’t think I could overstate the influence of Iron Maiden on all of us. They were the biggest metal band throughout the ‘80s, but they were also insanely musical. Our original bass player was a huge Iron Maiden fan, and he could play with his fingers; he could play all that Steve Harris stuff. There is a little Iron Maiden mixed in with that New York and D.C. influence, too.
Was there a conscious thought to blend all of these styles together, or was it just what came out?
I think it’s very reflective of just who Tom Capone was back then. He was a sponge in a lot of ways, and he was also at a point where his guitar playing and his musicianship was really beginning to excel. He played in a band before Beyond with two of the guys that I went on to play with in 1.6 Band, and those guys were just—We went to high school with so many phenomenal musicians, it was sort of like there was just all this music in the air.
Tom was just this sort of vessel in which all this music was flowing. But, he and I were the only two out of those people who were going to CBGBs regularly. So he had this outlet to put all this music, and we were still probably ingesting a lot of metal—maybe not metal, hardcore, but Bad Brains I Against I-era hardcore. That was really popular on Long Island amongst our friends.
We were taking, that and then there was still the fast hardcore that we liked that we would got to CBs for. And then when that band broke up, and he wanted to do a band, I just jumped at the chance. It seemed obvious that it was going to happen because he and I were the only two people out on Long Island where we were from who were interested in that kind of hardcore, and we were hanging out all the time. He didn’t have a drivers license, so I was pretty much driving him everywhere, so it was kind of like we were destined to happen. But it was all Tom and all the music that was flowing through him, and he was at a point where he started writing his own songs, and immediately he must have realized that he had a real gift for it.
When did you realize Beyond was something significant? You mention in the film that no matter what you did later, you were always looked at as Kevin Beyond.
We were really lucky to be able to have (John) Porcell (of Youth of Today) and Walter Schreiffels (of Youth of Today/Gorilla Biscuits) specifically, and Alex Brown from Side By Side and Schism Records—They really loved Beyond, and they were taking us on the road with them. We were a short-lived band, but whatever impact we were able to make resonated enough where I took a year off for college, came back to Long Island after college didn’t work out, and when I started 1.6 Band, immediately it was like, “Oh, the singer from Beyond has a new band.”
I used that to my advantage to get shows, but there was that initial stigma at first where I did want to be recognized for what I was doing at the time. Part of me thought, well it’s not fair to the other guys, because the other guys in 1.6 Band were these amazing musicians, but it helped us get shows, and it helped us build—We were able to take that Beyond momentum and build on it.
Was the interest in Beyond something that continued to grow over the years?
I think yes and no. In the mid-‘90s, that’s when Sammy (Siegler of Youth of Today/Judge) and Walter and Matt Pincus’ [of Judge] record label, Some Records, they rereleased the Beyond record, and so there was this sort of second wave of interest. Quicksand—They were taking all that, and they were taking it to a new level. They sort of created their own genre or definitely their own sound, and I would imagine there probably were people who were Quicksand fans who probably never would have heard of Beyond if it were not for Quicksand.
At that point, I do think life went on, and periodically, Beyond-related things would come back into my life, like a reissue or something, but musically, I could not have strayed further from that sound. It wasn’t until 2006—and there’s footage from it in the movie—I can’t remember what prompted it but, I guess Quicksand had broken up for a while, and someone had contacted Tom about Beyond playing. We did two reunion shows; we did one in Washington, D.C., and we did another one in Connecticut, and the footage of the movie is from Connecticut, but that was so weird. It was just very weird; it had been 17 years since I had played a Beyond show. I had played 1.6 Band shows, but I had not played a Beyond show.
I don’t know if I had even seen Vic—he was living all over the world in different Krishna-related places, and then he was living in California—I probably hadn’t seen him in about 15 years. It was all so strange. There was a blizzard that first show in Washington, D.C. There was only about 100 people there because of the blizzard, which was pretty amazing that 100 people showed up, but at the same time, it was like a dress rehearsal for the second show because it took me two shows to really get back into the groove of being that person again, or just even embracing those songs.
That first show felt really weird to be on stage and be singing those songs, but by the second show—The second show was in Connecticut, which was always a warm place for us to play; we were always welcome there; we always played big shows at The Anthrax Club—So when we played that second show, it was perfect, and we ended up headlining because I think someone from Bold had to leave early or something.
So after Bold had played, everybody was just really perfectly in tune to the whole thing. There was something really magical about the second show. And then life went on again; I moved to Texas for five years, and there was a couple offers to do shows in Texas. At that point, I don’t know if I was that interested in doing it. It wasn’t until I moved home from Texas in 2013 that we played a Black N Blue Bowl show, and from then on periodically there were—I don’t even call them reunion shows anymore because we would play maybe two shows a year and the last couple years before the pandemic hit—There’d be more than that, like five shows a year or something.
So when did you get the idea to make the film?
That train trip that I document in the film. We were asked to play Rev Fest in California (in 2017) and just that day that it came up to play at Rev Fest I had been reading about—I had never taken a train ride across country, but I always wanted to do it, mostly because of that movie Silver Streak with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. It always seemed fascinating. The train ride wasn’t anything like that. But I was reading about it; it came up in my social media feed, and it was only like $250 from New York to San Francisco, and it was that day that Tom called up and said they wanted us to play Rev Fest out in California, so I got in touch with the promoter, and I asked him if he could buy me a train ticket instead of plan ticket, and they were very accommodating.
So, I took a train ride out there and my friend Jason, who we always considered the fifth member of Beyond and is still one of my best friends, he leant me his camera—this Canon DSLR camera—and he said you should document this train ride and then just film everything when you get to California—film everyone hanging out; film the rehearsals; have someone film the show; maybe even talk to Walter or Porcell—and so I did all of that. I came back from it, and the footage of Porcell was out of focus, but the audio was good. The footage of Walter was great but the audio cut out right at the beginning. But I still had enough.
I in no way envisioned it as a 65-minute movie, I figured it’d be a 20-minute thing, and I’ll post it on YoutTube, but then because both Walter and I lived in New York—We were living in Brooklyn at the time—I just reached out to him and said, “Hey, that footage, the audio totally crapped out, can we do it again?” So we met up at a neighborhood bar and did it in the back of the bar, and that ended up being over and hour, maybe an hour and 20 minutes, he and I just talked about Beyond and memories from that specific time.
That was encouraging enough, and I wasn’t even sure if I was going to reach out to Alan Cage, our drummer, because I hadn’t spoken with him in, like, 20 years, but he was encouraging. He was like, “You should ask Alan, I think he would do it.” So I did, and then Alan turned out to be a really long interview. He was very—I don’t know if it’s a Quicksand thing, like these guys are so trained doing interviews; they just talk, but his memory was great and he remembered things exactly how I remembered them and so after that I figured ok, this could be bigger. I sat down with Tom twice because the first time the lighting was terrible, so we redid it. When I sat down with Tom; between him and me, we’re sort of the common thread through the history of the band, so then I actually had an idea to do a movie and then it just kept snowballing from there. Once I got those guys, I would just call everybody else.
What was it like for you going back and revisiting all this stuff mentally and physically as well?
It was great. The great part about it is those guys, everyone in Beyond, everyone in 1.6 Band, we were all part of this huge music scene in our high school. We were in the biggest high school in New York State except for New York City’s school system. We just had this huge group of musicians and metalheads and hardcore kids and punks that were all part of. Revisiting that, it was great because I don’t get to see those people a lot anymore, because everyone is scattered all over New York State; some people live in New Jersey; some people live in California. So to just spend time with them, whatever short time it was, was great. I didn’t even go to my high school reunion—It’s moments like these that are my high school reunions.
Like you said, you didn’t plan on this thing becoming the movie that it did; was it difficult putting it together into something on that scale?
I started piecing it together as soon as the interviews were over. I went through all the interviews to see what I wanted to use, what I didn’t want to use, and then I loosely was putting together a timeline, just in my laptop in iMovie. I knew an editor in New York, and he was definitely interested in editing the movie. That was the plan—I was going to put together a loose timeline and narrative and how I wanted it to be structured, and then he was going to take everything and redo it and make it look as good as possible and sound as good as possible.
Then when COVID hit, he left the city. He had epilepsy, so he was really worried about catching COVID, so he left—Weirdly enough, he left New York to go to Florida to stay with his girlfriend and ride out the pandemic—Turns out Florida became a really hot mess as far as COVID was concerned, so he sort of dropped out of the project. I’m pretty sure I had COVID when it first hit New York; I was sick for five weeks.
There were no real tests yet because it was right when it hit, but I was out for five weeks and lost a bunch of weight, and it was awful, but once I recovered from it, there was still going to be a year until the vaccines were coming, so I just was like, “Ok, I’ll just work on my movie.” I worked on the movie from April of 2020 until December of 2020, like, 12 hours a day every day. I think I took my birthday off—it was my 50th birthday, so I did a Zoom birthday with friends. Other than that, I worked on Thanksgiving—because I wasn’t going to visit my mom because I didn’t want to potentially kill her by carrying the virus—and I worked on Christmas too. I just worked every day hoping that I would be able to finish the movie by the end of the year.
The first move was, I moved it out of iMovie, and I was using Adobe Premier, which is more professional editing software. Part of that process was learning the software as I was doing it. It was really the perfect example of learning by doing. I could’ve potentially taken an editing class or read a book, but I just dumped all my footage into Premiere, and then whenever I had a question, I just Googled it.
Some of my days were literally trying to solve a Premiere question—There would be some sort of error in the timeline, and I couldn’t figure out why the movie wasn’t playing, and I would spend those 12 hours of that day watching Premiere videos about that specific issues, reading forums, and finally getting to the heart of why.
So then after eight months of doing that, I felt like a pro at using Premiere. It was the benefit of lockdown. I mean, there was all these tragic elements about lockdown, but it was the one thing I could hold onto, and it kept me focused from the outside world. I just literally buried my head in my computer for eight months.
A very DIY approach about very DIY music. And the movie has that raw feel to it
Yeah, I’m hoping to make another movie, and part of me thinks that is the least ideal way to shoot a movie. Initially, when Walter and I showed up at that bar, there was no one in the bar for, like, the first five minutes, and then suddenly, all these people showed up. This was at like 12:00 in the afternoon, all these people showed up, and they wanted to sit right near us.
And then my friend did the audio for my movie. It was really hard to extract—Initially it was really hard to hear what Walter was saying. My friend John worked diligently for a few weeks to really pinpoint Walter’s voice and to isolate it enough where it could be heard. It was pretty much how not to shoot a scene, or to even make a movie, but all those mistakes aside, I think the charm of the movie is, it’s DIY theater.
I’m not a pro. I mean, I’ve seen slicker movies—music documentaries that were a lot slicker than that—but I don’t know if they have the same heart that I feel like I put into it. If I was hired to make a movie about a professional band then I probably would have gotten fired for all those mistakes. The fact that it was about a band that grew within the DIY scene—it was perfect. And that was kind of the point. The aesthetic of this music is, nothing has to sound slick; it just has to be kind of raw and just from the heart.
So the whole movie is sort of based around this train ride where you are trying to reconcile how Beyond fits into your life today. How does Beyond fit into your life today?
It’s just a matter of just wanting to do it. The older you get, there’s so much uncertainty, and you really don’t know how much time you have. You can literally drop dead. I had a friend, two months ago just dropped dead out of nowhere, 46 years old. It was a matter of seizing the moment because there is so much uncertainty. Like, “Fuck yeah, I’ll play in Beyond again,” because it’s exciting music still for me. I also have a 30-year history with those songs. Those songs have been a very crucial developmental thing in my life. Those songs came into my life and were a huge part of who I was becoming as a person, so I have that 30-year connection to those songs. So it’s really a pleasure and joy to sing them because they are a part of who I am and who I’ve become.
Like I say in the movie, their meanings evolved through the years. Like I was saying with “What Awaits Us,” it’s a song Tom wrote when we were 16, 17 years old, when he was just thinking about his grandparents and just about aging. At 17 years old, he’s thinking about aging; I wasn’t thinking about that. I got what he said, and I liked the feel of the song—It sounded like Verbal Assault or one of those bands, maybe Rites of Spring—but then in my 40s when I’m singing those songs, now I’m the aging person in the song, so I have a relation to it more directly and more personally, and it has a different meaning.
That’s a huge part of the reason why I wanted to play in Beyond again, and I think just the excitement of being on stage and singing hardcore songs. I mean, I take pretty good care of myself, and I exercise; I think I eat right, and I still do exciting physical activities, but singing for a hardcore band on stage is an exciting physical activity to do. So why wouldn’t I want to do that?
There’s all those reasons—the sort of existential issue that I was addressing in the movie is more reflective of the entire time from when Beyond broke up to when we started playing again, and all those in-between years. Just trying to comprehend where Beyond, I guess in a compartmentalizing way, where can I put this? Trying to figure out where that goes in my life. Or, I would figure out it’s here in the past, but Beyond would just keep coming back—reissues, or offers to play reunion shows, and then you do reach a point where you sort of surrender to it, and you’re like, “Ok, I should feel lucky,” because there may be people out there who people aren’t interested in hearing their bands 30 years later. The fact that that has become a thing, I should really cherish it.
Over the past year or so, the movie has been screened a number of times; it was up for rental to stream for a while—What is the future for it right now?
I was talking with a record label about doing a DVD release along with a flexi of some unreleased stuff—some tracks from when we played WFMU’s Pat Duncan show in 1989. There were early versions of songs that ended up on the album but with different lyrics, maybe one or two different guitar parts, but they’re still really great. There’s a jam—There’s a point in the set when Tom breaks a string, and this is live radio, so while he’s fixing a string, Alan and Vic are jamming just on bass and drums, and it’s amazing. So we’re talking about doing a flexi for that along with a DVD—a limited amount of DVDs.
People have reached out to me about it, but the fact is, people don’t really watch DVDs anymore, so it would probably be a couple hundred. And then I have been thinking about putting it on Vimeo again. I’ve screened it in a bunch of cities now. I’ve sort of run out of places where I think it would hold interest. The thing is, we were a regional band; the furthest west we ever went was Cleveland, furthest south we ever went was Washington, D.C., and the furthest north was Buffalo. Even though I did screen it in Texas and New Orleans and people did come out, and it was awesome. I’m still interested in doing that, and most importantly, I want to screen it on Long Island. I’ve been reaching out to independent theaters that are out there, and they’re not getting back to me, which is crazy because people tell me, “There’s girls with green hair and hardcore t-shirts who work there,” and I’m reaching out to these places, and no one is getting back to me.
So I’m trying to find the right venue to screen in it on Long Island, which would be the homecoming. If I could screen it on Long Island, then I’d be happy. I would like to put it on Vimeo again to share; people have been asking to see it again. I could potentially do that to raise money for the DVD, or I have another film that I’ll eventually need to raise money for, so I’m thinking of potentially putting What Awaits Us online again to help generate for that.
So it’ll be online again at one point and on probably physical media along with that flexi and then hopefully more screenings. I enjoy those the most; to actually see it on a big screen blows my mind. We screened it at Night Hawk Cinema in Brooklyn, in the big theater, too. They have three or four theaters there, and it was in the big theater. It was funny because on the marquee—the next day The Lord of the Rings was playing—so on the marquee it said What Awaits Us: A Beyond Story and then Lord of the Rings, and then my friends father said, “Well if you’re playing on the big screen, does that mean Peter Jackson’s movie is playing on the small screen?” But it’s pretty amazing to see it on the big screen.
And what about the future of Beyond? More shows?
I don’t know if we’re in a rush to do it. As far as me personally, as far as COVID, I don’t know if I’m ready to get to that. In New York, there were a lot of outdoor shows at Tompkins Square Park and stuff, so outdoor shows with very little chance of transmission. I’m a little hesitant now, but eventually I’m sure we’ll get back to it. Hopefully with the movie, maybe I reached people who had never heard Beyond and might come out to see us. There were so many times in my life when I never though I’d be singing in Beyond again and then it just keeps coming back, so I have no doubt that at one point, but as of now there’s no talk of anything happening. I would think maybe 2023 seems more likely.
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Watch the trailer for What Awaits Us: A Beyond Story here:
For more from Egan and more on the film, check out its official website.
Photo courtesy of Kevin Egan and Beyond
