The Roots and Origins of the Patrick Lew Band

The roots and origins of the Patrick Lew Band lie at Raoul Wallenberg High School in 2001 with a few teenagers making ratchet noise in their own garage in an amateur punk band called Samurai Sorcerers...

Samurai Sorcerers (also known as Famiglia) were an American garage punk band, formed by Patrick Lew in San Francisco in 2001, which eventually evolved into the Patrick Lew Band in 2008. Originally consisting of Lew and several schoolmates from Raoul Wallenberg High School and City College of San Francisco, the Samurai Sorcerers took their name from Lew’s fascination with his Japanese heritage and culture, particularly Anime. Lew began playing guitar at the age of 14 and began taking a few guitar lessons before shortly self-teaching himself how to play music.

Lew started a one-man punk project briefly under the name Famiglia, but changed the name to Samurai Sorcerers upon meeting his close friends and schoolmates Eddie Blackburn and Tommy Loi from high school. Some sources credit Lew coming up with the name Samurai Sorcerers, while other accounts credit his close friend Blackburn with the new name. The Samurai Sorcerers would mostly jam and play music at Blackburn’s house in the Marina District in San Francisco, record demos and song ideas using a four-track cassette recorder and would play at house parties, school, amateur local events until Lew began collaborating with his friends Zack Huang and David Arceo from City College in 2005, looking to take the local music scene seriously by forming the post-hardcore band Band of Asians while Blackburn began playing lead guitar in a variety of other projects with friends, including touring locally with his band Nocturnal Rock Turtles. Lew graduated from Wallenberg High School in 2003, while Blackburn graduated in 2006.

The group would record a large amount of amateur material in Blackburn’s home using a four-track cassette Portastudio. This included Patrick Lew Band’s official debut album Psychotic Love, which was later rechristened as Patrick Lew Band’s first indie recording featuring jam sessions, fragments of song ideas and rehearsals of raw material, which included Blackburn performing a cover of the Peter Frampton song “Baby I Love Your Way”. The band Samurai Sorcerers would get their start in the music business by posting their music on the Internet on several different websites, including MySpace and Soundclick.

Eventually, Lew would place more focus on Band of Asians during the mid 2000s in the studio and performing locally. Eventually, Lew and Blackburn would drift apart by 2007 and following a short tour across park and recreational centers in San Francisco and a dwindling lineup of band members, the Band of Asians would amicably break up in April 2008. This left only Lew and Arceo to still collaborate together creatively and to remain close friends, which they decided to perform under a variety of names, including Your Audio 2 Riot, Dexter Rotten and even playing music together under the Samurai Sorcerers name for a short while. Patrick Lew began putting his music more out there online, in hopes of becoming more recognized for his hard work.

In August 2008 through a personal blog, the Samurai Sorcerers group officially changed their name to Patrick Lew Band, and went onto have an interesting recording career in the local Bay Area music scene. The Patrick Lew Band would slowly but surely move away from their lo-fi garage punk sound to attempt a more new and fresh take on late 80’s and early 90’s influenced American hard rock. As of 2017, the Patrick Lew Band has released several home-recorded studio albums, EPs and a concert DVD independently through their own label The Promised Land Recordings and managed to achieve some minor success in the independents.