Northstar “Rigged and Ready”

Northstar was a band that I loved in high school and to this day I still do. They even influenced the name of this blog. I was really into the Long Island/New York scene that was going on back in 2000-2001, but later discovered that the south was starting to make it’s own noise and one band that caught my attention was Northstar. They hailed from Huntsville, Alabama where they played in whatever club, VFW or bar they could get a show at. They got some help in spreading their name to labels when a band called Taking Back Sunday played a show with them and Adam Lazzara called them his favorite band with the greatest lyrics in the world. They caught the attention of Triple Crown Records and released Is This Thing Loaded? in 2002. Triple Crown was one of those labels that if you played this style of muisc you wanted to be sign by them.

Once I bought this record I popped the cd into my cd adpter inside my parents 1999 Buick Le Saber and blasted it. (Side note: in 2003 I would blow out those speakers making my mom very annoyed that she couldn’t listen to the radio, also that same year my friend Ryan Dolton would have a fire cracker he was attending to throw out of the passenger side window bounce back in and melt part of the dashboard.)   In 2004 they released their follow up to Is This Thing Loaded? entitled Pollyanna. I bought the record from Eides Entertainment (overpriced store IMO) and kept wondering when the hell is this band going to play Pittsburgh? That’s one thing that still interests me about this band, I never got to see them live. I thought I was finally going to get my chance when they were suppose to play Warped Tour 05, but the band ended up breaking up. Nick Torres the lead singer started a new acoustic style band called Cassino in which I got a chance to see at Cal U back in 06. I do enjoy Cassino but I still wish that I would of gotten a chance to see Northstar. The band did play Cleveland a few times, but back then my parents never enjoyed me driving their car to Pittsburgh for shows so Cleveland would of been out of the question.