The idea of Cold Manicotti originally started in 1994 when musical friends Sebastian Teufel and Michael Moje, both from Frankfurt Germany, decided to share the rent on a rehearsal room in a dilapidated bomb shelter just outside Frankfurt. Bruce Saint-Hilaire from Los Angeles, joined the two in 1996 after attending a show in which he states "For your classic 'Garage Band', the guys were pretty good on stage but the lead singer was absolutely terrible and I just had to help, although my experience was limited to long showers".
The infancy of the band to say the least is quite interesting. After a three week rehearsal period, the band played their initial gig at the exclusive Neues Theatre in Frankfurt Hoechst in the "Music Un-Plugged" series and two weeks later were offered a record deal with the Warner Group. At the time they had only four or five original songs but the combination of songwriters Teufel and Saint-Hilaire, armed with a record contract and very little time, worked out well.
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