Faded Black
A Mongoose Bicycle and a Band Looking for a Drummer
Hector Camacho remembers Faded Black as one of his earliest Arizona bands, possibly beginning around 1979, when he was only thirteen or fourteen years old. The exact dates remain approximate, but the way he found the band has stayed with him.
Hector was riding his Mongoose bicycle around the neighborhood when he met two older musicians, Dave Dickey and Ray Bouchard, near a local park around the 12th Street and Dunlap area. They were putting a band together and needed a drummer. Hector had already been playing drums since early childhood, so when the opportunity appeared, he followed them back toward a house near 14th Street and Dunlap.
A Shed, a Swamp Cooler and Seventies Rock
The rehearsal space was not a professional studio. Hector remembers a backyard shed with a swamp cooler and a drum kit already set up inside. What mattered was that the musicians liked the same music. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Aerosmith and the heavier rock of the 1970s shaped the sound they were chasing.
Dave Dickey handled the vocals, Ray Bouchard played guitar and Hector played drums. Hector remembers Dickey as heavily influenced by Robert Plant, not only in the way he sang, but in the hair, clothing and entire rock-frontman presentation.
- Dave Dickey — vocals
- Ray Bouchard — guitar
- Hector Camacho — drums
House Parties and an Earlier Phoenix Scene
Faded Black belongs to a part of Arizona music history that is especially easy to lose because so little of it was formally documented. Hector remembers playing only a small number of shows with the band, including house-party performances in the Sunnyslope area. One of those houses, near 12th Street and Hatcher, was still standing decades later when he recalled the story.
This was before the Phoenix scene Hector would later know through clubs, industrial bands and the Mason Jar. The musicians were young, the scene was neighborhood-based, and the music still carried the sound and look of the 1970s. There were no smartphones, no social-media pages and no digital archive waiting to preserve the band after the fact.
Before Hector Became a Songwriter
Faded Black was not yet the original-music chapter of Hector's career. He remembers the band playing the heavy rock they loved rather than developing a surviving catalog of original songs, and he says his own serious songwriting came years later.
That does not make Faded Black unimportant. It makes the band an earlier piece of the Arizona family tree: the point where a young drummer who had recently come to Phoenix found other players, learned how bands worked outside a school setting and became part of a local scene that would eventually lead him through very different sounds and generations of Arizona music.
This Is Only Part of the Story
This online profile preserves the early Faded Black history without pretending that every date, member and show has already been proven. Hector Camacho's larger story continues through Him's Rage, Black House Twins, Godless and beyond, with the deeper chronology and firsthand memories being preserved in The Death of Local Music — Volume II: Arizona Legacy Bands.