BLISStory......

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The boys, with manager Jeffery Deutch, moved into the airport Econolodge outside LA and started recording with legendary producer Keith Olsen (Fleetwood Mac, Rick Springfield, Foreigner, Santana..). Some of the finest musicians in LA worked on the album. Jason Scheff from CHICAGO played bass and sang backup, and Alex Liggertwood, from SANTANA sang back ups, David Raven, from Amy Grants band played drums, Tim Pierce, who's played on just about every album, TV show and commercial in the last 2 decades, on guitar, and Richard Baker, who was in SANTANA, and SAGA on keys and programming.

While New Religion was raw and funky, the Bliss sound was polished and professional. Though, still Scott's project, for better or worse, he did trade some of his control and vision for financial backing and the promise of fame and fortune. Scott and Patrick recorded a few songs from the New Religion cd, wrote some brand new ones, and picked a couple cover tunes to round things out, and before they knew it, the CD was done! The next part proved to be harder than they thought.

Finding band members to go on tour indefinitely in another country (about AS FAR away from Philly as you can get) AND play the parts laid down by LA's finest studio musicians, AND look the part, proved to be QUITE a task. While Scott was recording vocal tracks in LA, Jeff and Pat were out auditioning prospective band members. The search continued for months, they flew around the country, and flew musicians to them to audition....nothing. The record company was growing impatient and threatened to hire actors to play the part of musicians for Bliss for the upcoming promo tour. Finally Pat had the idea to go check out Berklee School of music, so they all flew up to Boston twice to audition people. Scott and Pat were amazed at how few good rock musicians there were at Berklee-mostly jazz guys and some really green rock players. They picked 3 musicians from Berklee, that seemed to be decent choices. The new members were Tony Grey on bass, Matt Catterette on guitar and Alan Brown on Drums. Matt was a native of Boston, Tony from England, and Alan from Scotland. "At the time we knew [the new members] were a bit inexperienced, but we really thought that they would see how great an opportunity this was and rise to the occasion" remembers Scott.

The band immediately moved into a house together and started rehearsing, and shot the video for "Baby He Loves You". The band quickly found out they had little in common, and had a rough time of it at the start. After 3 months of rehearsing, the boys were off to Asia. The first stop being a warm-up gig at a hotel in Thailand, for which we added a female singer named Toby Lightman. The gig lasted for a couple months and by the end Matt was gone-replaced by Tony Ormand from New York, who brought some balance to the band (he had earlier attended Berklee, but also was a working rock musician). The rest of the band met Tony Ormand, had 1 practice, and the next day they were in front of all of Singapore on a late night talk show (a la David Letterman), saying (on strict direction from the record company) how well they all get along and what great friends they all were! The next few months were a whirlwind of touring, radio, tv and newspaper interviews, shows, and autograph signings. Miraculously, through all the work, the boys were starting to get along, or at least tolerate each other. BLISS was gaining momentum, playing big concerts (up to 30,000 people!), shooting new videos, that would soon find their way into the top 10 of the MTV charts, and recording some new material. In March of 1999, the record company said BLISS would go home for a 2 week break and then go to Europe, but after being home 2 weeks, no one was calling. As it turns out, the record company had closed down!
Even though the boys were getting along better, with no label, it made no sense to stay together, so they disbanded. Scott, Patrick, Tony G., Tony O., and Alan had toured 11 countries, scored 4 top ten singles and 3 MTV videos....
and the rest is....BLISStory

Click here to see video excerpt of BLISS videos

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