El Patapsco: Me Dejo - $8.00
El Patapsco: L.R.D.G. - $9.99
El Patapsco: Me Dejo
About the Band
El Patapsco is an instrumental Rock Band from Baltimore, Maryland. We are influenced by the usual suspects like Link Wray, Dick Dale and the Ventures as well as contemporary instrumental bands like Man or Astroman, Laika and the Cosmonauts and The Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet. That being said; we have never made any real attempt to emulate the 60’s surf style and you can hear plenty of punk, reggae, rockabilly and jazz in our songs. We are also big fans of TV and film scores of all eras and often tinker around with Mancini and Morricone tunes as well as more modern stuff like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme.
El Patapsco is Currently
Mark Gatlin: Drums, Jerome McManus: Guitar, Marc Raley: Guitar, Ted Wedel: Bass
A Brief History of El Patapsco
Somewhere back in 2003, Mike (Jerome McManus) and I (Marc Raley) were on the rebound after the breakup of our last band, Defender. My wife had been nagging me for months to call her friend Betsy’s husband who plays the drums and maybe get something going with him. I finally gave him (Mark Gatlin) a call and we set up a practice session at his space in a “lively” section Southwest Baltimore. Note to all: drummers who come with practice spaces are a valuable commodity. We worked on a few songs and things went pretty well; we were definitely impressed with Mark’s drumming. The next time we got together Mark’s friend Ted showed up and we had a bass player. We were a pretty casual “beer and peanuts” operation, practicing every couple of months and playing a few local shows and festivals. We also played a few regional surf shows arranged by a crazy surf music promoter named Unsteady Freddie. We went through a whole string of band names but settled on The Patapsco Kings.
After a year and a half or so we band added Becky Nachman on keyboard and we forced to find a less masculine moniker. We briefly toyed with calling ourselves The Patapsco Queens but in the end we opted for the more gender neutral El Patapsco. Becky rounded out our sound nicely and brought loads of musical knowledge to the group.
Becky only had a month or two to cram all of our material before we went in the studio and laid down tracks for our first album, L.R.D.G. We recorded the album in early 2005 and it turned out surprisingly well, thanks in no small part to the superb engineering of our friend of Tanuj Kundi. We had 500 CDs made and to our astonishment, almost all of them are now gone.
We continued with our extremely loose practicing and gigging schedule for another year or so and slowly built up enough songs for another album. We began recording our second album in the fall of 2006 with help again from Tanuj. We ended up calling the album Me Dejo because Mark quit the band right before we recorded it. Fortunately, he was kind enough to stick around long enough to record his tracks. Overdubs, mixing and mastering were done at an extremely leisurely pace and the finished CDs didn’t arrive until April 2008.
A few months after he quit, Mark had second thoughts about quitting and the band reformed. Becky was busy working on her PhD and having a baby at this point so she opted not to rejoin. Some people have no priorities! El Patapsco continues to soldier on and we still get together every few weeks to write songs and practice. We are well on our way to another album worth of material and will hopefully head to Tanuj’s studio again soon.