7th Order - History

History

7th Order's pre-history began in Honolulu, Hawaii, where key participants first met in the 1960s). The actual band itself evolved from studio sessions organized in California/Washington beginning in 1999 - the band has identified their influences to be the blues/rock & roll innovators of the '50s and '60s - in a radio interview on Radio Heemskerk, Netherlands in August 2003, band members discussed spending younger days playing in various bands around the US, crossing paths with icons of the rock & roll scene like Jesse Ed Davis, Mick Taylor, B.B. King, Peter Green, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Roger McGuinn, Eric Clapton and others (detailed on their Myspace page) before actual 7th Order recording sessions began in 2001.

While 7th Order had received worldwide recognition via radio and TV exposure since 2003, their progress was reportedly derailed by the death of a band member's 23 year old son (by drug overdose) in November 2004. The band then opted to delay their debut release, "The Lake of Memory" (the title song having been inspired by a line from the writings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner), but had to withstand yet another tragic setback: their manager and longtime friend, Steven B. Williams, was murdered off of Santa Catalina Island, California in May 2006 (Williams had previously been a successful rock radio DJ on stations like Denver's KBPI and Honolulu's KIKI (AM)) though the CD release did eventually take place a few years later (albeit with some incorrect credits on the sleeve). The personnel involved at this point included Daniel Jones (not Daniel Jones of Savage Garden), who also wrote all of the band's material, Martin Pugh and Geoff Thorpe guested on guitars, Benjamin Hadley on bass, and both Tim Kelliher and Adam Gross played drums. Confusion about credits (who was technically 'in the band') emerged as the result of clips from a promotional video segment (and the resulting "stills" taken from the session), as some acquaintances of the band had simply acted as "stand ins" for the video shoot (Thorpe and Pugh were not available to participate), and they were never formal band members.