Spring Break
'Rash' waiting to breakout
Angelo Lanham
Issue date: 3/4/08 Section: Student Culture
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As the band's guitarist Colin Kutch and drummer Olga Safronova are trading witticisms on their Santa Clara University radio show, bassist Hong Lam and I are playing with Kutch's skateboard, trading pop-shuvits, a skateboarding trick, on the carpeted studio floor.
Lam has superior technique.
Minutes ago, I interviewed the trio and learned the entire history of Touch My Rash.
Although the group's new, polished 12-track CD, "Doomed from the Start," is, as their Web site claims, "12 songs of absolute energy and power," they had rather humble beginnings, Kutch and Safronova said.
The group began in 2002 as a conceptual response to the idea that starting a band would be fun, Kutch said.
Kutch started playing guitar in high school as his baseball career became increasingly questionable.
"I needed a new hobby," Kutch said. "With baseball, I got benched a lot."
So, he got the cheapest guitar he could and started playing Ramones songs.
"I haven't gotten any better since those first three months I'd played," Kutch said.
Kutch's attempt to teach original bassist David Sokh to play the guitar revealed that it wasn't Sokh's instrument, since it required more than one finger, Kutch said.
The bass suited Sokh rather well, though, and Safronova, who said she'd always wanted to play music, started on the drums, using Kutch's rickety old drum kit.
That first kit had a screwdriver in place of a leg which had long since vanished, she said.
Kutch also said that since there wasn't a bass amp back then, it was sort of a mystery how the band truly sounded until they performed a fully amplified show.
Safronova said that she, Kutch and original bassist Sokh had limited practices in those early days - about once a month - and that the sessions veered on the short side.
"We'd go to his (Kutch) parents' house, eat, then after 10 minutes of playing say, 'I'm too full to play,' then watch TV," Safronova said.
After three years of that, Safronova said they decided to change. They wrote four songs in 2005 because they figured they'd need four songs for a demo.
"After three years with our one song, we said 'Let's set goals,'" Kutch said. "More and more shows followed."
The band has now played 40 shows, nearly half with the new bassist, Lam, who has been on board since July 2007, Kutch said.
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