If 2020 could be summed up in a sentence from a friend who followed the entire creative process of forming my first musical project called “Zero Glamour,” which was mainly inspired by 70s heavy blues rock, such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and the early days of Black Sabbath, that sentence would certainly be: “I had a Cross Purposes shirt”. He repeated this phrase so much in 2020 when we lived together during Zero Glamour period, that in January 2021, I dreamed that we were the members of Led Zeppelin and we were doing a spectacular show at Cheers Rock Bar in Santo Ângelo city (our hometown, in southern Brazil). I was Robert Plant, alongside Jimmy Page and John Bonham, representing Led Zeppelin at their peak.
But wait a minute, where’s John Paul Jones? The reason my brain didn’t process him is that I wasn’t a bassist yet, and Zero Glamour didn’t have any other members besides me and two friends, so poor John Paul Jones didn’t appear in the dream (laughs). But we put on an incredible show. The audience was freaking out and beer was spilling all over the place! We ended the night with “Whole Lotta Love”.
Well, about Zero Glamour, the project was basically just me and my guitar back then (which I affectionately called Christopher in homage to Chris Cornell, my favorite singer, and years later gave as a birthday present to my brother Gabriel), since I had just turned 17 and I ran away from my father’s house in Ijuí (the city where I was born and where he lived at the time) after some relationship problems with him, to return to my hometown, Santo Ângelo, where I grew up with my younger brother, Gabriel, on our parents’ old farm in the city.
It was a two-story chalet that my own father built on a property of almost a thousand square meters in a wooded area that he acquired a few years after Gabriel and I were born, around 2007 (Gabriel is from 2005 and I from 2003). But when I returned to the city, our older brother, Rafael, lived there and also rented the space to other people, so I was invited to stay at the house of this friend from the phrase about the Black Sabbath t-shirt and his girlfriend at the time, whom I will call Neil J. Oliver, a pun on his real name that only he himself would understand, to avoid exposure, since he is no longer my friend for several subsequent personal reasons.
So, I started a candy delivery business called “Glamour Candy” (another pun, but with Zero Glamour) with another friend called Max who was also living there, sharing the same room with me (Neil’s intention was for us to form this band together; he was learning guitar and Max was learning bass, and I was the only one who had actually been playing guitar and singing for years, so he helped us by letting us live there for a while with that goal in mind.), so we could help Neil and his girlfriend with basic housing costs. After all, I needed money and didn’t want to ask my father for help, since I had argued with him and that was the reason I ran away from his house. It was enough to buy new strings for my guitar and continue composing, doing some rehearsals, and continuing the project with them. After two months, I left Neil’s house and moved into the house of my then-stepmother Ingrid, my father’s girlfriend at the time. I lived with her for four months, and in the meantime, between Neil’s house and my stepmother’s, I was also dating a girl for the first time, for whom I made a point of writing several love ballads on Zero Glamour’s first album. Unfortunately, after I broke up with her at the end of that album composition period, I deleted all the lyrics and audio files I had stored on my phone. Nowadays, only one song remains, written in an old notebook that I used to write the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns I ran during tabletop RPG nights at Neil’s house back then.
Returning to the dream, to conclude; moments before leaving the stage, sweaty, wearing the classic Madison Square Garden live in New York City outfit by Plant (famous for appearing in “Starway To Heaven”), I intoned my last words into the microphone: “We are Khaos Purposes “. And my eyes opened.
~Arthur Lacau.
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