Nine Years Gone - Ian Kruske (Part One) and Placebo

There weren't a lot of misfits in my High School in Williamsburg, VA back in the late 80's/early 90's.  We all had to kind of stick together.  Often, the only things we had in common were what we weren't - we weren't jocks or preps or hippies or stoners.  You could say we were punk rockers, but even that seems like a confining term by today's standards.  If there was the established clique of punk rockers, we probably wouldn't have fit in with them either.
Ian and Steve Kruske were skaters, two grades or so younger than most of my friends and I.  Like most skaters at that time, they had a disdain for authority.  Of the two, Steve was a little more straight-laced, and Ian was a little more out there.  Ian and I had more similar taste in music, so we would hang out more.  It wouldn't be an uncommon thing for the two of us to be just hanging out in my room listening to Smashing Pumpkins or Jane's Addiction or Bad Brains or Primus (this being a time before Nirvana saved/ruined everything).
When I moved to Richmond in 1992, Ian still had 2 more years of High School.  That first year, we didn't see each other often, but in the fall of 1993, Ian and Steve started coming up from Williamsburg on the weekends.  It must have been around this time that Ian started playing drums more.  He got to be proficient quickly, and was in a band called Placebo (pre-dating that other band by at least a few years - to my knowledge anyway).  Also in this band was Neale Shaeffer (more on him later) and Erik Sugg (more on him later, too).  In the spring of 1994, my band got to play with them.  They also made a demo tape:

01 Here
02 Greed Seed
03 Damocles
04 Dig
05 Royal Rumble
06 The Player
07 95%
08 Someday

To my knowledge, they only played a handful of shows.  Some time in the mid 1990's, Ian moved to Richmond.  That's when things