A HISTORY OF SWEET NIGHTMARES
Jason Beck, September 24, 2019
Hello Sweet Nightmares fans old and new...
This week is a big anniversary for the show- 20 years ago the original run of Sweet Nightmares came to an end.
I thought I would give a fairly comprehensive history of the show for the occasion. I might be a little off on some of the earliest history- that stuff is kind of fuzzy (Wes can correct anything that I get wrong, tho I believe all of the facts are correct; maybe just some time frames are a little off).
Sweet Nightmares was started in 1987 by a guy named Steve Harrington. I believe that Steve had something to do with a previous metal show on KPFT called "The Random Sampler" which got kicked off the air for an interview they did with Slayer that got the station in trouble with the FCC.
A young metalhead named Wes Weaver heard the first episode, and showed up to the station the second week with some records that he thought should be played on the show. He became the co-host, and before too long the host (after Steve Left- not too sure how long Steve hung around. Wes can confirm that. It wasn't long). There were several other co-hosts that were around in the early days- a girl named Kobi was there for a little while, and a guy named Bill Bishop was there longer, but the most important co-host to come out of the early days was definitely Bill "The Master" Bates. Bill Bates came in the next year (1988) and became the main co-host. After Bill Bishop left a guy named Mike Wakefield (nicknamed Big Jesus Trashcan, like the Birthday Party song) started coming down and helping out some as well. He later got his own show, called The Dumpster, where he played metal, rap, punk, industrial, hip hop, alternative, and stuff like that.
1988 Scoped Tape of Bill, Wes, Lisa, and maybe others.
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- cool promo at the 5 minute 40 second mark: Duane Bradley free speech promo
- Gabby & Mandy Sweet Nightmares promo at 9 minutes 10 seconds
- What sounds like a Ken Nordine station promo at 9 minutes 30 seconds
- A space out promo at 14 minutes 30 seconds
1989 scoped samples featuring Wes and Bill, plus some promo spots for The Civil Service Broadcasting Empire and Xenophile.
But for several years it was mainly Wes and Bill, who both became fixtures in the Houston metal scene and are on quite a few underground band's thanks lists. Lots of interesting stories came out of those early days- I'm sure people can share some here (one thing that a lot of those old stories have in common is that Bill did not like to wear clothes much, even out in public).
Wes And Bill from 1990
In 1990 a kid named Jason Beck brought his band's demo up for them to play, along with some other bands they didn't have. He had been contributing to their fund drives for a couple of years, and had been coming up to the punk show Funhouse and bringing records for them to play for a while as well. At this time Sweet Nightmares went all night- 5 hours long. They had several bands come up and play live in the studio including Alyis and dead horse and put on some monumental live shows at local clubs featuring local, national, and even international bands.
Jason started coming up on a fairly regular basis and bringing records and demos for them to play, and in 1992 the Funhouse (punk) show ended. Since they had so much time on Sweet Nightmares, Wes suggested Jason do a punk/ hardcore/ grindcore/ thrash set for an hour right in the middle of the show. Bill had a decent amount of that stuff as well and contributed to that segment, along with a guy named Dave Freeman. Jason still brought metal down to play on the non-punk hours as well, and the 3 of them together collected and played a huge percentage of the newest and heaviest metal that was coming out at the time (Bill insisted on calling him Stitchface (referencing a joke on an old Simpsons episode) because he thought everyone should have a jolly pirate nickname).
Deadhorse, Live In Studio January 22,1992
However Bill felt somewhat limited by the boundaries of Sweet Nightmares- Tho in the early days they played a bit of regular heavy metal and bigger bands, and didn't just focus on the most extreme and underground bands the whole time, that's what the show had turned into- mostly death metal, black metal, thrash metal, crossover, speed metal, and grindcore (they did play some heavier industrial bands too, since that sound was big around then- bands like Puncture, Fear factory and Godflesh) Bill wanted to branch out and play less extreme forms of metal and bigger bands like Metallica and Iron Maiden, which the show had pretty much left in the 80s.
So in 1994 Bill convinced the station to give him his own show. He called it Ejacula, and it was 2 hours long and came on right after Sweet Nightmares. Unfortunately they took those 2 hours away from Sweet Nightmares, which perturbed Wes somewhat and caused a little friction between the two of them. Bill quit coming on Sweet Nightmares and Jason became the only co-host.
Sweet Nightmares 1.1 was born.
Jason also stayed on with Bill after Sweet Nightmares was over and co-hosted Ejacula as well. Ejacula played a much greater variety of metal and music- besides the stuff that was played on Sweet nightmares, they also played metalcore, power metal, gothic metal, punk, hardcore, industrial, heavy metal, even some nu metal (he played Korn several times, along with everything from Black Sabbath and Lacuna Coil to the Dead Kennedys and Coal Chamber). They also played an entire album every week (you could do that back then because licensing laws were different). I am working on a list of all the full albums that were played on the show to publish here.
Many people seemed to think (or remember incorrectly) that both shows were Sweet Nightmares, but they were two very different shows.
In 1999 the station decided that they only needed one metal show, and decided to keep the less underground one (even tho Sweet Nightmares almost always brought in hundreds of dollars every fund drive- the goal was usually $666.00 and they almost alway made it) so Sweet Nightmares broadcast it's last episode in September. They did not even know it was their last episode because the station blindsided them.
They also cancelled Big Jesus Trash Can's show the Dumpster at the same time.
Bill and Jason's show got an extra hour (making it now 3 hours) but the station insisted the name be changed from Ejacula to something else, so they changed the name to Audio Friction.
Wes went to KTRU (Rice radio) and started a new show called From the Depths that was pretty much the exact same format as Sweet Nightmares.
KPFT got new management and moved Audio Friction around a bit, and Bill asked if he could call it Ejacula again. The new management agreed it was ok, and the Ejacula show name was back on the air.
In 2003 Jason started going up to KTRU and joining Wes on From the Depts as well.
This went on for several years, but in 2005 the station moved the Ejacula show to a time and day that Jason could not come to anymore because of his work schedule. It was a much earlier and better time (instead of the middle of the night) but Bill would have to change the name again, because they didn't want a show called Ejacula on that early.
Bill wanted to change the name to Mixed Metal Arts because he had become a big fan of UFC, but he also toyed with the idea of calling it Sweet Nightmartes again. Both Wes and Jason were against him calling it Sweet Nightmares because they did not think he could keep the sound and legacy of the show the way it had been in the 90s and they wanted him to do his own thing, however there were a lot of people who wanted to be a part of the show, and he said that they convinced him to call it Sweet Nightmares because that really meant a lot to them to be able to become a part of that legacy.
So Sweet Nightmares 2.0 was born, 6 years after the end of the earlier version.
Jason was given his own show called Deadthyme on which he played punk, thrash, hardcore, crossover, grindcore, industrial, death rock, experimental, and other forms of weird and offbeat music.
Bill actually did a pretty good job of keeping the sound of the old school Sweet Nightmares for a little while, but started mixing in stuff like he had played on Ejacula before too long.
He also had many co-hosts during the earlier periods of Sweet Nightmares 2.0. Luis Carlos was the first to really stick with it, and Slaytanic Sal also stayed around for a while and was one of the better sounding people who came down to do the show with Bill. David Herrera and Jessikill came down and brought more heavy metal and old school stuff, and Herman Garcia brought a lot of local music. There was a guy who I believe was named Marcutio (sp-?) who brought in quite a bit of underground black and some death metal- he was very knowledgeable and contributed a lot to the show. Bill had about decided he would make the best permanent co-host when he ended up having to move to Washington.
After that some other people also started coming down- Krystal Salinas brought more djent and metalcore type stuff and Chaos Andy brought in groove metal. It became a very varied show. Jason still came down when he could, and burned Bill many cds to play so there would still be a lot of underground stuff on the show.
Many other random people started showing up to hang out every week, and with so many people coming down it became very chaotic with a lot of people there all talking over each other and trying to make witty comments about everything Bill was saying on the air and he felt like he lost control of the show, so one day he kicked everyone out and said only a few certain people could come up for a while. One of those people was Herman, who was always respectful and didn't try to talk over Bill or attention whore out. Eventually he became the co-host of the show.
Meanwhile Jason and Wes both quit doing From the Depths on KTRU (around 2010) because the station was changing so much and wanting to focus on mainly having student DJS (and neither of them were students).
On November 5th 2014, Bill was very excited to go to the King Diamond show, but started feeling very bad at the show and even worse afterwards. He had some fairly large health issues and had been in and out of the hospital a bit, but the next day he had a brain incident comparable to an aneurysm and was taken to the emergency room.
He was admitted to several hospitals over the next year, and Herman took over doing the show full time.
Herman was more of a hard rock/ heavy metal dude than an extreme metal fan, so he struggled with keeping the show heavy and underground, even with it already being less heavy and underground than it ever was. He was very good about supporting the local scene, but seemed unclear on the concept of Sweet Nightmares as an extreme, underground show (when Jason chastised him one time for playing Five Finger Death Punch and Black Label Society on the show, he said "But they won a Grammy!". The show was a long way from it's roots. Herman felt that playing bigger and more popular bands would grow the show's fan base more). However he kept the show going and kept the local Houston music scene as a high priority of the show, and eventually when it became apparent that Bill would not be coming back for a long time, he brought in Gilbert Kill Casta as co-host, who had more extreme and underground bands to play.
Sweet Nightmares 2.1 was on the air.
In November of 2015 Bill was fed up with being bedridden and pulled a truly metal stunt, calling Fraser Ian Dawson (who had also been coming down and bringing stuff to play on occasion) to break him out of the hospital. He put on several great shows after he got out, and became a fixture in the scene again for a while. Too short of a while. Tragedy struck in early 2016 when he passed away at the too young age of 53.
We miss Bill and his huge personality; his kind and generous nature and absolute love of music in general and metal in particular, and will for a long time.
Herman also had a tragedy the next year when hurricane Harvey displaced him and he had no choice but to move to another state. He asked Jason if he could take Sweet nightmares back over, however he could not. Jason tried to get Wes to do it (even promising to come up and co-host every chance he got), and Wes really wanted to but could not because of responsibilities to his family, band, and job.
So Herman got the next best thing to bringing Wes back: DJ Metal Lord. Bryan Posey had been doing internet radio for at least a decade, and running his own hard rock/ extreme metal radio station for a while as well. He had the same absolute love of music Bill did, and listened to Sweet Nightmares in the 80s and 90s and was very excited about being a part of the show. Equally as important was that he also had a huge music collection, including lots of really extreme and underground bands to make sure the show never got stale.
Sweet Nightmares 2.2 kicked off with a bang.
That was 2017 and the show is still going strong and in good hands. Bryan has worked very hard to build it back up to a high level, promoting it and putting on benefit shows and getting tickets to give out to other great concerts and many other things.
Jason's Deadthyme show was moved to air after it, so it's almost like the old days with the extreme metal show followed by the extreme eclectic stuff show.
Here's to hoping it's around for as long as radio exists.
1. 2021 Promo
Article collected 2021-12-09 from https://www.facebook.com/groups/2518681711488291/posts/2533763606646768/ and preserved here.
