TRAVIS MEEKS AND DAYS OF THE NEW ON STAGE PERFORMING A FEROCIOUS VERSION OF THE DOWN TOWN

Because i write about all diffrent sorts of a music, i guess it is hard for me to strike a chord with all of my readers consistently as opposed to if i were to only write about rock music, country music, blues, jazz, pop or classical music. I have come to accept that my audience is as vagrant and Gypsie like as my tastes in music, and that probaly the best way to get a lot of people reading a certain article i write is to choose a crossover artist who has greater populist appeal. Alternative rock often fitted such a description, even if most of the time it was mired in an haze of lyrical ambiguity brought on either by dodgy songwriting or the drug addiction of the band members. DAYS OF THE NEW are a largely forgotten alternative rock band from the late 90`s, they hailed from Kentucky in the US and from experimental metal beginnings with the alternative name of DEAD RECKONING, Days of the New re-incarnated into what can only be described as a hardcore alternative acoustic rock band which on the odd occasion done the influence of Neil Young and Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains proud. But the influence of amphetamines on the the band members, particularly the band leader and vocalist Travis Meeks, unfortunately won the contest over musical influence far too often. Often enough anyway that by the time Days of The New Mark 3 had recorded the third and commercially unsuccessful album in 2002 Travis Meeks voluntarily entered rehab for his chronic drug addiction which he come out and claimed in 2005 he had finally beaten. It is a little hard to work out if DAYS OF THE NEW ever did record a fourth album, i know i haven't seen it in Australia, but the three i know of, besides a greatest hits collection, are known as the orange album, the green album and the red album. The best one is definitely the debut, the orange one. The only thing diffrent on each of the album covers is the colouring, for reasons which only Travis Meeks would know about the band going for a dirty big tree as the image on each of their album covers. The meth must have been working pretty well it seems. DAYS OF THE NEW No. 1 featured two songs that i really like for the acoustic experimentation, the song THE DOWNTOWN and the more successful TOUCH PEAL AND STAND. Compared to some of the drug influenced punk intensified offerings on the follow-up albums, these two songs leave them for dead. For someone who was as anti-alternative as i was back in the 90`s it may seem odd that i took to the two best Days of the New songs. Like any volatile rock band there was a revolving door of band members behind Travis Meeks, i wont bother going through them all, if you want to look them up you can use your favourite search engine to do that. I chose THE DOWNTOWN over TOUCH PEAL AND STAND as the feature clip because it is more crossover and i wanted to keep a few of my country music adoring readers happy, it is not a country song as this band performs it but it could easily be converted perfectly into a great country tune. The only aspect of the song i dont like is the fact you never have a clue what he is singing about, but it sounds great and i guess that's the main thing. Trust me, Meeks makes a lot more sense on this song than he does on most other DAYS songs. Get a load of him on stage when you watch the clip, he is a mean bit of work, intense is not the word. Travis Meeks will always be the king of Ampheto Rock just on the basis of this one ferocious performance.