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Hello Greg, so how have you
been?
Well Tom I am doing great, this
is the year I'll be doing a lot of singing which I
love . Our God is faithful and good.
So tell us a little about what
you have been up to since the Watchmen days, it’s
been what? Nearly 20 years?
Well after WATCHMEN, Darci (my
wife of 22 years) and I decided to settle down a
little. We have four beautiful daughters; Destany is
17, Alexandra 15, Gabriella 13 and Madeleine who is
12. We moved to Gig Harbor about 11 years ago. We
have horses, dogs, cat..... and my favorite thing is
our dirt bike track and my girls are really good
dirt bikers. It's been a fun 20 years and God is
definitely blessed us. We've started a couple
businesses. Started TORQUE about six years ago with
my brother Matthew Sweet, Matthew's brother-in-law
Brandon Stanley, Sheldon Blankenship and Kevin
Whistler. I'm currently singing in the worship team
at Life Center First Assembly of God in Tacoma with
Matthew, Brandon and Sheldon. We are starting to
work on the new Torque album; wow! Hard to believe
that 20 years have past.
Lets start off with the Watchmen days, I was blessed
enough to see you guys in concert twice; you guys
put on a great show and were very ministry oriented.
Can you share with us a story of how you saw GOD
change or work in the life of someone through your
band.
When Watchmen first got together
our main focus was to reach the lost, we spent hours
reading His word and praying as a band; we knew we
would be on the frontlines so to speak of reaching
people for Christ. There was never a concert that we
did where we didn't put out an invitation for people
to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior.
Many times we would spend hours after a concert
praying for people that needed some sort of
deliverance. At our Temple Theatre concert a
gentleman started screaming out if we knew why his
grandfather died; we ended up bringing him up on
stage and praying for him. He got delivered,
accepted Jesus and walked away a changed person You
can see this on our website under one of the videos.
The Bible says that we need to be a light on top of
a hill shining that all can see. The word also says
that we should be bold as lions. People need the
Lord, they need to be free. We just figured since we
were calling ourselves a Christian band we should
probably be Christ like and share his love for the
people that were hurting. People are dying to hear
the word of God, to hear the truth; people want to
be set free and to feel loved. In Watchmen we felt a
responsibility to know the word and to share it
boldly and with conviction.
I saw you guys open up for Bloodgood in Tacoma, did
you guys tour and who else did you perform with?
Bloodgood were awesome! Those
guys were out to reach the lost. We loved playing
with them.... They had a fantastic message at the
end of every concert and we learned a lot from them.
The other bands that we played with were Bethlehem
Steel and Lifeguard, most of the concerts we
headlined ourselves.... We got asked to tour a
couple of times with some different bands, however
the first thing their management would ask us to do
is to back down on the preaching. Don't tell people
about Jesus ? Our thoughts were "You got to be
kidding me", who else is going to tell these kids
about salvation, freedom, forgiveness and love. We
would put on a concert that had 175 people, 45
people would give their hearts to Jesus. Could you
imagine the number of kids nowadays that would
accept him, it would be hundreds. At first
this was a huge shock, but then we found out this
was the norm, I called it being lukewarm. Needless
to say we never toured with any of those bands.
What was the reason that Watchmen broke up so early?
I think after the 'Generation'
album we were just worn out, the project didn't turn
out like we wanted it to; three quarters of the way
through it we had to take it and go to a different
studio... Thank the Lord for Dave who resurrected
some of the songs... and to be quite honest with you
we lost our focus. We took our eyes off of the Lord
and put them on ourselves and every time with equal
disaster. We stopped praying and started fighting;
Kevin Whistler left and started playing with
Bloodgood and we slowly drifted apart.
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