Envy Never Forget cassette/ Larry Ransom notes and backstory

Envy were a great mid 90's straight edge band from Buffalo, NY. I had the pleasure of being friends with some of the guys, played with them(with Halfmast and No Reason) as well as booking them a few times. I always loved their pre-LP demo and recalled that it was initially going to be a second 7" on a west coast label. I couldn't remember the specifics, so I reached out to Larry Ransom, who sang for Envy, and he took the time to write a little something. Check it out and the great info from Larry (that's him as a youngster on the cover).

 "Hello everyone. Jeremy asked me to chime in on this demo tape so I thought I'd write out all that I can remember.

Going back a bit before this tape, I had released two 7"s on my label, New Direction Records. The first being an awesome and pretty much unknown 7" from the Buffalo band, Against All Hope (go seek it out) and the second being the self-titled 7" from my band, Envy. One of the distributors for my releases at that time was Network Sound (New Age and Conversion Records) in California. Their buyer at the time, who would call me when they needed to order a restock was this kid Jason. He was cool and easy to deal with and would always make sure that Network Sound would get me paid on time. He was friendly on the phone and we would often just end up shooting the shit about hardcore and filling each other in on cool new records we had purchased and what was going on in our local scenes.

At one point he was starting up his own label that was going to be an inprint under the Network Sound umbrella and he asked Envy if we would like to release a 7" with him. I talked it over with the band and we decided to do it as we had a grip of new songs we wanted to release and we thought the Network Sound distribution would be a big help in getting the record out into the world.

He named his record label X-hibition Records. The first release for his label was going to be an album from the New Jersey band, Strength 691. He had linked up with Strength 691 through a recommendation from Joe D Foster from Ignite. The Envy 7" was going to be the second release.

We booked studio time with Doug White at Watchmen Studios. We had recorded our original demo with Doug when the studio was still in his parents basement.  But now we would be the first band to record at his new studio on Snyder Rd at the corner of Robinson Rd. We were the guinea pigs of sorts for Doug's new studio so he cut us a great deal on studio time. I think he may have only charged us $100.

I don't recall too many specifics about being in the studio. I think we had done our best, performance wise, in the studio compared to our previous recording experiences and as always, Joe drove Doug crazy by trying to get the best sound and mix we could. At the end of the recording session we all signed and dated a dollar bill for Doug and it's still hanging in his studio as we were the first customers. I think next year will be the 20th anniversary of that day and recording. Scary to think!

Joe did the layout for the 7" and CDEP and we sent the layout and master recording to the label for the manufacturing etc. I know things started to go into production as test pressing were made and he sent us 4 of them so each member could have one and he sent us a CD of the mastered recording for CD version of the release. Things seemed to be fine at this point. We had even made flyers and started promoting the release at our shows.
 Things started to slow down after that and he was beginning to be hard to get ahold of and eventually he got fired from Network Sound. Things were starting to remind me of the all too familiar "Hardcore records take forever to come out" scenario like what happened to local bands that had come before us... The No Joke 7", The Slugfest 7" and the Fadeaway split 7". Records that took years to come out after they were recorded. Except ours got worse. It never came out! 

Finally I got ahold of the guy and he admitted he wouldn't be able to continue with the label. The Strength 691 album didn't come out either and I think the guy basically disappeared from HC all togother. We were excited to get that recording out so we pressed up a quick 100 copies as a demo to sell at an upcoming show we had with Mouthpiece in the summer of 1996. We had the tapes professionally dubbed at this place ESP and had the shells printed which was cool and we just made photocopy covers. We sold all 100 copies at that show. We didn't give that tape a bigger pressing or distribution as we had already written a bunch more songs by that point so we thought we would re-record those songs along with all our new ones for an album, which we did do.

So that's pretty much the story on that tape. It's probably the recording that turned out the best for us and the one that people tell me they like the best.

Thanks Jeremy.

-Larry"

Envy Never Forget Promo Cassette