Anne Gomez has made a couple excellent appearances this year at The Kraken with The Blue Green Gods and The Former Action Figures. Dave Cantwell has also rocked our stage with Horizontal Hold and Drug Yacht. Most excellent performances!
“Cantwell, Gomez & Jordan arose from the ashes of the much-ballyhooed mafia-ridden ‘Chapel Hill Scene.’ Anne Gomez had just been thrown out of UNC’s prestigious law school and was looking for some paying gigs to support her Army of Three-Legged Cats.
She was known for her electric bass and vocal stylings in the rather esoteric world of beach resort dance bands like Special Agents of Her Majesty’s Secret Cervix, The Blue-Green Gods, and the seminal Shaggy-Dawg’s Shag-o-matics.
Anne hooked up with her former sorority sister Shannon ‘The Biggest Drumset in the World’ Morrow. Shannon was the unifying ‘backbeat’ behind HMS Cervix’s spankin’ rhythm section, as well as the blood that flowed through the mighty Bicentennial Quarters, Hillsborough’s finest metal outfit since the Unoriginal Sinners.
Anne and Shannon immediately re-bonded but still needed a guitarist.
They needed look no further than David Jordan. After his expulsion from UNC’s Ph.D. program, guitar player David Jordan decided to end his self-imposed hiatus from music. A veteran of such staples of the Catskills circuit as Polycarp, Glockenspiel, and Tony D’Antonio’s Blue Velvet Chillers, he had certainly racked up his share of ‘cred.’ He had a vision for NC’s musical future; he just needed some partners.
David completed his community service just in time to join with Shannon and Anne to create Cantwell (named in honor of Shannon’s favorite Alaskan nineteenth-century Goldrush town, the study of which had always been a passion of hers). The music was dangerous, edgy, and threatened to dismantle Rock as we know it — and reassemble it into a soul-less musical Worldcode for the twenty-first century.
But, after a handful of promising shows and one brilliant long-player, Shannon ‘had to leave town.’ This time for Joliet. No one said a straight life was easy, and old habits DO die hard. Maybe life ‘on the outside’ was too stressful — and too full of temptation.
Anyway, Anne and Dave still had bills to pay, so they got the first drummer they could find to fill in until Shannon was ‘all better’: Dave Cantwell, backbone of party funk-metal jokesters Analogue (and his own solo experimental hip-hop John Williams tribute ‘project’).
In a bizarre coincidence, the young drummer shared a name with the band he once drunkenly heckled. To avoid confusion (and dispel rumors), Anne and Dave Jordan decided to re-christen the band Cantwell, Gomez and Jordan. Says Gomez: ‘We were hoping the name would sound like a law firm or an ice cream company or something. You know: conceptual and shit.’
Conceptual and shit, indeed! Gomez and Jordan’s exciting, original, quirky tunesmithing combines with Dave Cantwell’s ham-fisted drumming to create a new NC music like no other. Well, maybe like some other things, but I can’t remember any of their names right now.” – Daniel Forthrite, 307 Knox Records (http://www.307knox.com/art_cgj.html)
