We were lucky to catch up with Cade Gilbreath recently and have shared our conversation below.
Cade, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
Back in high school, my friends and I invented a beautiful sport that we decided (after much deliberation) to call ‘car surfing.’ It was perhaps the greatest sport of all time. What made it so great was that there weren’t any dumbass rules, like the ones that take all the fun out of baseball and soccer. It was a simple sport—you simply climbed on top of a sedan and hung on as best you could while your buddy sped down the street trying to throw you off. It was all fun and games until one guy fell hard and hit his face on the pavement.
The next day, after he’d been discharged from the hospital, we went out to his parent’s place to visit him. The left side of his face was all swollen up and covered in bloodied bandages, but he was in good spirits. There was a little guitar in the corner of his bedroom, a real tiny child-sized one, and a friend of mine picked it up and absentmindedly started picking through ‘Come As You Are,’ the Nirvana song from Nevermind with the watery intro riff.
I’d seen a million people play a million guitars and I’d never given even a single damn, but for some reason that riff crawled into my brain and laid eggs in there. I asked him what song it was, but he only knew it was ‘some nirvana song.’ I’d never gotten into Nirvana, or any other alternative music for that matter. I’d always been into the Old Gods—Skynyrd, Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe—but there’d never been a song recorded later than 1989 that had ever caught my attention until that day.
I scoured Nirvana’s discography on Spotify until I found out what song it was, and later that night I grabbed an ancient, busted up guitar my mom used for decoration and looked up a video tutorial. Something drove me to learn how to play that riff. I figured I’d learn a couple of easy songs so that when I inevitably encountered a guitar out in the world I’d be able to play something.
I picked up the guitar that day and never put it down again. I figured I’d lose interest after a couple of weeks like I do with most things. My whole life, I’ve done that: I’ll find one thing that really interests me, and then I’ll learn everything I can about it, then I’ll get bored and move on to the next thing. The guitar was different, though. The more you learn, the more you realize you do not know. There are these layers to it that keep unfolding into more layers, and 8 years later I sincerely believe that it’s impossible to ever truly master the instrument.
Once you have the basics down, the water gets really muddy—there’s a lot of esoteric knowledge you have to dig deep to acquire. You really have to fight hard for months just to be able to play one single thing that actually sounds good. I remember how unnatural it felt at first, especially the open chords. Our hands simply aren’t meant to be distorted into such shapes.
After years and years of playing the thing every day, something happens that hooks you for good: something comes through you, moves your fingers without you having any say in it. It feels like possession. There are moments where you almost black out, and you’re not thinking at all, and then you go back and watch the videos and see yourself swaying and playing the instrument in a way you could never replicate. It’s spooky, really.
Sometimes I think it’s something supernatural. If you don’t believe that music (all art, really, but music especially) comes from Somewhere Else, you’re wrong, and I can prove it. All one has to do to see that there’s something fishy going on with rock and roll is watch the video of Led Zeppelin performing the 30 minute version of Dazed and Confused at Madison Square Garden; it’s simply too good. Man cannot play that well by himself, it’s just not possible. Man has to have help to really make art, and it comes from Somewhere Else. I have no idea where, nobody does, but I get the feeling that it’s some ethereal realm where very powerful things swim around in the sky.
But sometimes I think that’s all in my head, and that it really does all come from inside us. Learning an instrument is like learning a language—you start with the alphabet, the words, sentence structure. Or, in music, the notes, the chords, songs written by somebody else. And then you get into the hard stuff—intonation of your voice, slang, the subtleties of a language that you only pick up on and understand after years of speaking it. So it has been with learning the guitar. And I think that in those moments where you’re really ripping it, really comfortable on stage and not thinking at all, what’s happening is that you’re speaking the language of the instrument. You’re not having to translate it in your head first, not having to think about what note is where or what chord is about to come up next, you’re just putting it straight through from the brain to the fingers to the amplifier. Either way, it’s a beautiful fucking feeling, and there really isn’t anything like it.
When I first started, I found that playing relaxed me in a way nothing else did. I think it’s because you have to use your entire brain to play the guitar. It has a way of forcing you to concentrate, there’s no room to think about anything else, and concentration has never been my strong suit. Playing the guitar emptied a tank in my brain that had been full for years. I couldn’t imagine giving it up, and I still can’t imagine it now. Hell, it took over my entire life. There’s no way I’d be in Austin with shoulder-length hair right now if I hadn’t started playing. I’d probably be a Short Hair, still back home in East Texas working at a meat packing plant, or, God forbid, in College Station.
I never did have a teacher. The closest thing, I guess, would be Jimmy Page, but of course I’ve never met the guy. He’s the greatest guitar player to ever live. You can’t tell from the studio stuff, but watching the videos of Zeppelin live really melts your mind. The way I see it, there’s no point in really listening to anything except Zeppelin. They conjured the spirits better than anyone else ever has, and most rock and roll since has just been mimicking them in one way or another. They invented it all, everything. They were the first ones to do it the way it should be done. There are other bands I love, like a lot of groups from the Seattle scene and a few here in Austin, but I can’t help but feel that it’s all been downhill since Zeppelin.
I guess I can’t finish this up without mentioning The Shed. It was a dingy little building behind my childhood home, and for most of my life you couldn’t even walk around in there because my mom had stuff stacked halfway to the ceiling. She’s not a hoarder, don’t get me wrong, just a very enthusiastic and prolific collector of antiques. One day in high school, my friends and I had the idea to clean the place up and turn it into a hangout. It took us several days, but we got all of the clutter stacked neatly in the back, bought a couple of couches of questionable cleanliness for 5 dollars each at the thrift store, set up a drum set, and that was that. It was very similar to Forman’s basement from That ‘70s Show—nice ambient lighting, guitars and magazines laying around, and, of course, the sacred circle. If it wasn’t for that shed, I wouldn’t have been able to crank my amp up all the way and play as loud as you have to be able to play to really learn the ins and outs of the electric guitar. I spent thousands of hours in there over the next few years hunched over the amp learning and writing songs. The atmosphere in there was perfect for it. Incense burning, old movie on the DVD player with the TV muted, Planet Caravan or No Quarter coming through the big speakers on the work bench—I miss it horribly, and I always will.
But it had to die so that I might live. Playing in a band was always a pipe dream back home, nothing ever happened there, but something happens every day here in Austin. I thought rock and roll was dead, but once I got to the city and discovered the scene, I found that it is still very much alive. Bands like Being Dead and Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol have been putting out incredible original music here for years, and they’re starting to get some serious recognition. There’s a lot of great music in this city, you just have to put a little bit of work into getting underground and finding it.
Cade Gilbreath
Lead Guitar, Shivering Demons
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I started playing guitar in high school, way back in 2016. It started as a hobby, and pretty quickly it just took everything over. I’d daydream about being in a band and playing for people, but I didn’t think it could be done anymore. From my perspective in my little hometown of five thousand people, rock and roll seemed as dead as Elvis.
What ended up changing my mind was an Australian shed rock group called The Chats. I stumbled across their first music video online somehow and fell in love with them. For the first time, I’d found music that I really loved that wasn’t recorded twenty or thirty years before I was born. I went to see them in Dallas on their first US tour, and the show blew my mind. I’d been to a few concerts before—Mötley Crüe, Alice Cooper, stuff like that—but I’d never been to a *show.* People sat quietly and listened at the concerts I’d been to, so when the crowd started moshing and moving like a stormy sea when The Chats started playing it opened my eyes to a world I didn’t know still existed. Here were these three teenage goofballs from Queensland, playing guitar and singing for fun just like me, and they were able to cross the ocean and played a sold out show in every major American city just because people liked their vibe.
After that, I realized it could still be done. You could still start a band and play and there were still people who would come and enthusiastically listen. Before long I decided that Austin was the place to be—The Live Music Capital of the World. I didn’t know any bands here, I didn’t even really know there was an underground rock scene, but I had a feeling. In hindsight it’s pretty wild to think that I moved here based on that feeling, but it all worked out. It didn’t take long for me to find my way into it once I got here.
Demons shows are a lot of fun. We’re pretty over the top when it comes to theatrics and people seem to always enjoy themselves. I think we’ve got a good mix of decent musicianship/songwriting while also not taking ourselves very seriously at all. Our shows tend to be part music, part stand up comedy/performance art.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
It took me two years to get to Austin once I decided to come here. The first obstacle was COVID—I was locked down at home for a while with my family, and I was anxious to get down here. Then I got into a pretty bad wreck and broke both my legs, several ribs, my back, and lost my spleen and part of my intestines. As soon as I was out of the wheelchair I got a job at a meat packing planet and suffered through six long months there to save enough money. Once I had enough, I quit, and within two weeks I’d moved.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
The best book I’ve ever read is called ‘If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him.’ When I found it, I was really into learning about different religions and occult belief systems, and the one thing about them all that turned me off was that they all require you to believe in at least a little bit of bullshit. But this book takes an approach to how to deal with life that’s rooted entirely in reality. It doesn’t ask you to believe in anything, it just points out a few basic truths and gives you some ideas about how you should go about living your life. It profoundly impacted my thinking, and reading it finally allowed me to find some inner peace.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @shiveringdemons, @cade_gilb
- Youtube: @shiveringdemonstv280
Image Credits
@thomaseganphotography