Terry "Guru" Boling

4 and 5-string basses and 6 and 7-string guitars

*Note: This bio was taken from the old "Liquid Mischief" website when I was a member of the band from Sept 2001 until June of 2004.

"Hello there, fans, I'm Terry Boling and the "old man" of the group. I must be the "old man" because Cory's sister told me that I'm too old for her. ha ha Chris has actually given me the nickname "The Guru" and it has kinda stuck with the rest of the band as well. Being the newest, official member of the band, I'm still to learn and smooth out this material. To get everyone back into the club scene, I learned something like 40 songs in 3 months. Talk about a LOT of memorizing!!! You may want to grab a drink and sit back and enjoy. I am usually long-winded when I talk about myself and my guitar playing. Let's jump back to about 1979 really quick and do a Reader's Digest version of things....

I first started playing the guitar in 1979, and was basically "forced" to by my parents. They tried to get me to learn the piano when I was about 6, but that didn't pan-out. I was stuck in the "Mary-Had-A-Little-Lamb" type of playing off-and-on on the guitar until about 1982. I finally decided to try to get beyond that wimpy stuff and thought about playing the bass. My mother and my new guitar teacher told me that if I could play the 6-string, I can always play the bass, so they talked me into playing the 6-string guitar. Well, this teacher was a country/beach-music bass-player with a local band, which wasn't my type of music, but.....he finally taught me songs that I'd heard on the radio! The itch within was burning as I started to learn how to play "Rock You Like a Hurricane" by the Scorpions and "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by YES. I very quickly bought my first electric guitar, a brand-new 1983 Cort Flying-V in blue.

Then, in about late 1983, I was slapped in the face with the sounds of a guitarist that would guide me into the state of guitar playing that I am in now. Who was this guitarist?.....Hmmm.....well, I ran across a recorded tape of my older sister's that had this guitarist blow my mind away. It was Eddie Van Halen and the recorded album was "Van Halen". The song "Eruption" just rocked my world! I had to learn how to play like that (which I was playing by the time I was 15).

I was still taking lessons from this country/beach-music bass-player, but I discovered tablature notation. I grabbed a book of the first three albums by Def Leppard and started to learn every song. I'd put the record on and jam to each album, note-for-note. Soon, I was going into my lessons and showing my teacher what I'd learned. He finally asked me why I was taking lessons from him. I was caught off-guard and had no idea what he was talking about. He then explained to me that I was learning more on my own than he could show me and was playing better than some people that had recording deals, so......I quit taking lessons.

Being quite shy, I stayed locked up in my room for the next four years. I practiced 2-16 hours a day and only missed about 4 days of practicing in those four years. The family would take a vacation and I'd bring the guitar equipment along. Finally, my senior year in high school, I decided to come out of the Guitar-player's closet and be heard. I went to the local music store where my old guitar teacher worked and started jamming on a guitar on the showroom floor. I drew a crowd of people. Shocked the hell outta me because I really didn't think I was that good! I just finally felt comfortable with my playing. Within about two weeks, I was hired to do equipment demos of new equipment for the store during after-hours, by-invitation-only promos. I think I did about three of these at $50 a pop and then my last semester of my senior year in high school, I was asked to teach at that music store. I was just about the only one in the county who played 80's metal like that and I was teaching up to 27 students a week. Equipment-wise back then, in 1985, I bought a new Kramer guitar, a Vanguard (the Randy Rhoad's "V" shaped one). I then bought a 1985 Kramer Baretta in 1987. These were the brand of guitars that Eddie played and I figured I just had to have the same, since I idolized him back-in-the-day.

Ok....now a jump in time….. Anyway, by about 1996 I got onto the Internet and wanted to find out what ever happened to Kramer guitars since they went bankrupt in 1990. This led to a rekindling of my interest in guitar playing, other than a small stint of learning music theory in about 1991-2, and another learning some classical finger-picking back in 1995-6. I ended up meeting, through the Internet, Michael Wright of "Vintage Guitar Magazine" and together, we wrote a history of Kramer guitars, and 6-part series in 1998. This is when I built up my collection of about 45 Kramer guitars and picked up a San Dimas Jackson and a Lynch Series, Skulls & Snakes ESP guitar. I even started a website on Kramer guitars to share my knowledge with the Internet world. The website is called "Kramer Krazy". Ok, now for how I met up with these guys.....told you I can get long-winded about myself.

I actually went to a Megadeth concert at a local club back in 1998, and Cory, the drummer of our band was there. Turned out that he also worked at the same manufacturing plant (which I was recently laid-off from and caused me to sell off about half of my guitar collection). He walked up to me the day after the concert and just started talking to me. We found out that we each played an instrument and decided we'd get together a few times and jam. We couldn't find a bassist nor a singer, so that kinda fell apart, but we kept in touch even after Cory left the company. Ok.....so, by the summer of 2000, I think it was, Cory called me to tell me that he just hooked up with a local band and was thrilled with the project. I was happy for him, yet, kinda envious....ok, I was. I finally saw the band play at a party at Cory's house in November of 2000 and he'd already told all the other band members about me. Hell, I felt like I had to live up to this reputation that I'd gotten with them just because of what Cory had told them. They eventually heard me play when I went to one of their practices a few weeks after that, and then the harassment to join them began.....well, not really harassment....I liked the attention. ha ha

I had backed off on the guitar playing and was obsessive in one of my other hobbies....riding motorcycles. I soon bought a Ducati and was never home. Ok, well, anyway.....after almost a year, I finally broke down and they now have me as their bassist/guitarist. They are still competing with the bikes and they try their best to keep me off of them and to actually go to practice, so I'm making some bike-riding sacrifices to get them back into the swing of things and to get us in the club scene. Our first gig was in December of 2001 and it went pretty well. Oh, you ask how I got into playing the bass, well......I picked up the bass in 1989 when I bought a 4-track recorder from an ex-guitar student and have almost always had a bass laying around if I ever get the itch to record anything. That's pretty much my story as to how I got to be with these guys. I'm hoping to be rockin' the paint of the walls and blow some roofs of the bars around here with these guys for a while.”