It was a dark and stormy night. Or afternoon. Or morning. It’s hard to tell which in Seattle, really. Sometime after August, when the rain comes, the shadows get longer and the days get shorter, and the blurry haze of Fall takes hold. It is somewhere in that blur that this band takes shape. LSD is an autumn band if nothing else. A band of rain. A band of change and chance. A band of the inevitable Fall. A band of laborious metaphors.

Late September Dogs was formed for the first time in Torino Italy in like 1996, we think. We weren’t aiming for a lifelong commitment or anything, just really a one-off gig. A bar in Torino liked the idea of having the adorable little American girl and her goofy brother come in and sing songs in a foreign language for a few hours one Thursday night, and through the obligatory furious hand gestures and yelling characteristic of such an informal gathering in Northern Italy, it was arranged. We would, furious hand gestures and all, form a band and perform some songs on The 25th or the 28th or 67th or something of September. Cool. Word. We got this.

Now, to find a band.

Being in Italy, which is a fine country, but which features copious and rather self indulgent amounts of things being closed all the time, we knew that we would have to plan ahead. We had about a month, which, having gigged for years in other countries and in other venues with other band members, we knew was PLENTY of time. It turned out to be, really, plenty of time. Time to rehearse five people who, never having played before and who didn’t really speak a common language, and included a very blonde and very Swedish keyboard player who, one time, when presented with a large bowl of warm octopus turned a bright and rather alarming shade of pink and emitted, what to this day I swear was an actual SQUAWK, actually pulled their shit together and learned two hours worth of music, some of which was not really very simple, but was played with enthusiasm, which it turns out, is really all people need to get through a random Thursday in September in Torino, Italy on a rainy night, somewhere in 1996.

What we didn’t have was a name.

All great rock bands have a name. We were not a great rock band. We had a drummer who didn’t speak English, a bass player who spoke English, Filipino, German, and when he was rather intoxicated, something he liked to call “Marco”, a Saxophone player who couldn’t believe we were forcing him to play the arpeggio riff in Bryan Adams “Summer of 69″ and myself and my sister, who was 16 years old or thereabouts at the time and also a girl, so you can well imagine, you know, all the things.

Still though, no name.

Melissa Etheridge is among the great songwriters of ever. There isn’t really a debate about this, because if you don’t believe me, you haven’t heard her music, or if you have, you haven’t listened. She beats on her acoustic guitar like it owes her money and she has a voice like a gravel road, and she writes songs that we mere humans don’t really understand until about the third time through. From her first album, “The Late September Dogs” is one of those songs. Heck, it’s three of those songs. It’s four chords, the whole thing. It’s all kettle drums and fretless bass and heartbreak and agony from a window. It’s brilliant and painful and frightening and not entirely unlike thunder. And we learned it. BADLY.

But we learned it. And we were going to play it.

The freedom of youthful musicianship is not having any IDEA how bad you truly are. And we didn’t. We had no idea. We thought we were KILLLLER. We thought, yeah, our show is September 25th or 26th or something and we’re only doing one show and it’s late September, and whatever the fuck, dogs are cool, so we’re going to go ahead straight up gank the song name from Melissa Etheridge because it’s just this one time right?

That was THIRTEEN YEARS AGO.

Lots has changed since then. We moved to LA from Italy to try and make a go of it, but LA is like the Pit of Despair only with extra despair so we bailed out and moved to Seattle where it’s happier because not everyone is trying to fistfuck each other to get a piece of an ever-smallening pie. (YEAH I MADE A WORD. DON’T LIKE IT? GO READ YOUR OWN BLOG.) Come time to form a real band with real members, we got ourselves a full set of cover tunes and one or two originals to throw in there and yeah, now we’re starting to book some shows at tiny German restaurants in Kent, and we still don’t have a name. Come a week before showtime we figure ahh well, Late September Dogs was fine, we’ll change it here pretty soon.

That was NINE years ago. NINE.

Name is the same.

Only the people change.