Last October, when Low Skies played the Empty Bottle to celebrate the release of its debut full-length, The Bed (Flameshovel), the band had seen three multi-instrumentalists and a guitarist come and go in just three years. “It was always such a bummer to have new members come in and have to revisit all of these old songs and have to play them over and over so they could get the parts right,” says front man Chris Salveter, who formed the group with drummer Jason Creps in the fall of 2000. “It was really starting to wear Jason and I down.”
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In the summer of 2000 Salveter had followed his girlfriend here from Saint Louis, where he’d been taking classes at a community college, and enrolled at Columbia. He’d played bass in hardcore and indie-rock outfits since he was 13, but had recently picked up the guitar and written his first batch of songs; he wanted to develop them for a full band, and soon recruited Creps through a flyer he’d tacked up around town. In November bassist and keyboardist Spencer Kingman, who’d met Salveter through a mutual friend, signed up, and Low Skies spent its first year as a trio. In the summer of 2001 the band embarked on a leisurely west-coast tour in support of a self-released EP, playing just 12 shows in a month.
Unfortunately, once Salveter raised the stakes by moving away from his girlfriend, Kingman bowed out. Salveter’s search for a replacement led him to keyboardist Luther Rochester and guitarist Pete Wenger, as well as to a couple musicians he knew from his Saint Louis days, Japeth Mennes and Darrell Griewe, who both doubled on bass and guitar. But none of the new recruits ever came aboard as full-time members, and for the balance of 2002 the band made do with whoever was available: a Low Skies gig might be a five-piece affair or just the core duo. Salveter insists he was satisfied with the situation, though: “We always knew it was a temporary lineup, and I was happy with the way things were sounding,” he says.
