Metal Sludge — A recent online post from Adam Bomb delves deep into the history of his band Tyrant with an up n’ coming Tacoma Washington area lead singer named Geoff Tate.

This all is before Queensrÿche existed and covers the years 1978 and 1979.

Bomb goes into detail about how he first met Jeff Waterfall (his stage name at the time) later professionally known as Geoff Tate.

Bomb tells Metal Sludge that Tate was embarrassed about his last name, as it was the same as the character Larry Tate from Bewitched.

A secondary stage name used by Tate was Jeff Dharma, and that he borrowed that from Buck Dharma of Blue Oyster Cult fame.

Bomb talks about Tate and his attraction to High School girls and how he use to screw them in his Volkswagen van.

Bomb details his experience working with Tate and the other members of this early era rock band Tyrant.

Below is that post that appears in the World Famous Metal Sludge Gossip Boards forum.

Read the full Bomb blog below.

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Attention Adam Bomb!
By: Adam Bomb

Hi. I just saw this so with your thread title I had to respond. I honestly don’t look at Metal Sludge too often for no particular reason so luckily I saw it today. I’ll do my best to think back on it. We are talking 1978-79 so I was 15. I’m sure I was preoccupied with smoking pot, trying to get laid, and getting my drivers license.

Jeff was not so difficult to work with in our cover band called Tyrant. When he started with me, I was just 15. Most kids that age that think they know the world are idiots, so I had a limited view on experience. I just had a few guitarists I worshiped and a few groups I liked. But I did like 70s rock music in general so I tried to go to as many shows as I could. It was kinda like this – I saw YES but I hated YES but I always respected good guitar players and wanted to understand how they did what they did.

I remember Jeff’s audition. He had an typical 70s fro. He drove a beat-up brown VW van. He was over 21. I think he was 23. He had this hairy chest and an open shirt. It might of even been like a girl’s blouse. He was into YES and Genesis. He had never heard of Judas Priest before he met me and my drummer Gary.

Editor’s Note: Geoff Tate was born Jeffrey Wayne Tate in January of 1959, so he would have been 19 in 1978 and turned 20 in early 1979.

His immediate comment when he walked into Gary Thompson’s parent’s basement was – “I really like the ambience you guys created here.” We had 2 or 3 par cams lights with colored gels. Par cam lights were professional lighting that big groups used, but big groups used 100s or 1000s. Gary had a Ludwig chrome set and I had a 50-watt Marshall half-stack. Still the same amp I use to this very day.

I think we played “Tie Your Mother Down” and “Rock Bottom.” Probably a Rush song, and “Green Manalishi.” We just wanted a lead singer that wasn’t fat or bald. Randy, the bass player was older like 28. He had a mustache and the 70s hair and drove a Datsun 240-Z and he had a blonde girlfriend with huge tits. I was 15 and Gary was 16, so that’s a huge social age gap. I might have offered pot to Jeff but I don’t think he smoked.

The band ideas were all Gary’s and his friends from Redmond. If something was not in our cool book, it got ridiculed and shot down immediately. I was not a big fan of Queen but Gary was so we ended up learning a lot of Queen like “We Will Rock You” and “Now I’m Here.” It seemed to be work with Jeff’s thing. He was polite, cooperative and probably what you would call an effeminate womanizer.

He lived in Tacoma so it was always an hour and half drive for him to rehearse. We did gigs. Like we did my high school outside and then went to a stoners house after to party. He f#@ked a lot of High School girls in his van.

I helped him get a job at my dad’s bakery in Bellevue because I guess he need money. At the time Gary and I were just kids were not aware of things like that. What it took to survive away from your parents. Jeff lived with a blond girl his age that was probably his High School sweetheart. I think her name was Sandy. She got a job at the bakery too.

We rehearsed in Gary’s basement for months. We played High School dances and the summer of ‘79 we did this Battle of the Bands which we went to the finals and lost so we broke up.

We never got to the point of doing originals. I remember playing riffs I came up with and he’d ask “What’s that?” and I’d say “I don’t know.” He said “I can’t wait to get to the point where we start doing originals.” But our relationship was only time spent in Gary’s basement.

We played the senior keg in 1979 that was an outdoor party in a field where they built a stage at the Seniors asked me if my band would play it. It was a big deal because I was only in 10th grade. Jeff drove his van there, I remember going there in his van it was a pretty exciting rock show. Probably our best show. After the show people just wandering around from car to car and tried to hook up. I was in 10th grade so it wasn’t so easy. But Jeff spent the night in his van f#@king a girl name Corey Houston who was stacked, way overdeveloped for a teenage girl. It was like a teen movie from a crazy party. That party was the end of 70s.

I was a pretty accomplished guitar player for 16 and Jeff was not a very experienced singer. He could do Judas Priest type scream though. But most of his tricks at the time were pretty lame. I remember listening back to tapes of us thinking his voice sounds like it could be on the radio until he did some weird vocal shouts that sounded like a drunk pig and we’d cringe.

At that time Jeff was not a badass but we tried to steer him in that direction. More Priest, less fairy dust. We were all about hard cool guitar rock and he had a soft spot for progressive pop. We had to meet in the middle with the songs we played. We named the band after a Judas Priest song but Jeff was into a different scene. But I think he liked the girls that were attracted to rock bands so he was pretty easy going.

Had we not lost the BOTB which was rigged for us to lose anyway, we might have stayed together but we broke up. We lost to a pop band that played “My Sharona” and was signed to Unicam who put on the Battle of the Bands. The prize was money and studio time and free gear. We were very good that night but it ended up being our last gig.

Jeff continued to work at the bakery as a bread slicer/truck loader for a couple of years until he got caught one day sneaking a few bags of food to his car during lunch time. Since he wasn’t a pothead and he was an adult and I was teenager we didn’t have anything in common so we stopped talking.

He later joined the warmup act from the BOTB called Joker, replaced their singer Paul and that band became Queensrÿche. When I heard him on the KISW I thought to myself, he does have a voice that sounds good on the radio.

I was really impressed to see them on them on MTV and was blown away when they played the Grammy’s but I really knew they made it big when I had an affair with a beautiful girl in Wetter, Germany and she had a QR tramp stamp tattoo on her back.

Well that’s about all I can recollect without speaking to some other people that were around at the time. But I haven’t spoken to any of those people in 20 or 30 years. Maybe more. I have not spoken to Jeff or Geoff as he’s known now since at least the 90s. I hope he’s proud and happy with his life.

Well maybe this will give you some insight and thanks for giving me an opportunity to go back in time and remember those days.

RLF AB

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Bomb has shared another detailed posting about Tyrant and being in that band with Geoff Tate.

This post is on his official Facebook and digs into the same subject, which also includes the photo shared above.

To see that post, go HERE.


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