I started my first ‘band’ when I was 14. It was just me and my friend Derrick “Doc” Gotschall. We called ourselves ‘2’ and every ‘song’ we had was me randomly fucking with strings on a distorted guitar while he screamed into a microphone. It was bad, even by noise rock standards. My next band was both a foreshadowing of the ability to connect people that would become a significant chunk of my identity later in life, and a cautionary tale about why that isn’t always a good thing.
The band was called “Crushed Altitude”. If you don’t know what that means, that makes two of us. I asked everyone I knew that played an instrument to join and in the end we had 12 people. You might recognize that number as being entirely too many. If you’ve ever had to get 3 friends in one place at one time, you’ll understand why we were never able to schedule a full practice in our brief collaboration.
When that project fell flat, I decided to scale it back. My grandmother, upon discovering my interest in music, gave me an acoustic/electric Ovation guitar. I decided to use this guitar to team up with my buddy Jake who recently got his hands on a B.C. Rich Warlock bass. We started a power duo and called ourselves “Talentless Young Pornstars”, a name I’ll stand by until my dying day. Unfortunately, students of the power duo will recognize that the pairing usually requires at least a drummer. This ended up being an insurmountable hurdle for us and we disbanded without ceremony.
By this point, Rock Band was new on the scene and making waves. My buddy Justin ‘Carter’ Carter was the first of us to get a copy and he took to the drums like a fish to water, or like a cliche to this article, for some reason. He soon graduated to a big boy drum set and just like that, I had a drummer. We hooked up with our friend Marshall ‘Treat’ Treat (our nickname game was on point) who played House of the Rising Sun at the middle school talent show and was the only person I knew that could actually play the guitar.
We called ourselves 2Poor 2Steal, which I though was terribly clever, and played really bad hardcore music. We actually managed to stick together for a significant chunk of high school. After a while, we decided we needed bass, so we brought in our friend Kevin Hatibovic. You’ll understand why we didn’t refer to him by his last name. He was an awesome bassist, but he had this tiny little 5 watt practice amp, so we couldn’t hear him. We would play through a song then sit patiently in the silence following while Kevin showed us what he had been playing during the song.
Our biggest performance as a group was my mother’s doomed second wedding (nepotism pays) where we had a fight over the setlist and my strap broke in the middle of Green Day’s Brain Stew. We wore secondhand tuxedos we snagged from a stockpile my Uncle had once accepted to close a debt. It was silly and dumb and fun, like most things that are worth doing.
During my tenure with 2Poor 2Steal, Treat and I would have increasingly heated debates about the direction of the band. I wanted to play hardcore. I was a little flag waving anarchist punk and I wanted to make loud, shouty music. Treat was more technically inclined and wanted to make ‘good music’. This eventually lead us to break up.
By that point, I’d gotten my hands on some cheap recording equipment. I began recording more comedic hardcore music. I would later learn that was a dumb idea, but I had a lot of fun making it. I did it under the name Dramatic Pause, once again very clever. I wish any of those recordings existed today, but I’m a terrible archivist of my own life. If I worked for myself, I’d fire myself.
My next move would be a three piece with everyone from 2Poor 2Steal with everyone besides Treat. By that point, he had moved on to a genuinely good Deathcore band called No Fun Here with Kevin and our friend Will. We didn’t have much time together, but our sessions produced some of the best sounding music I’ve written. The dream died when I found myself moving back to LA. Shortly after that, I’d strike out for Tennessee.
I spent my first couple years in Tennessee trying to feel out the music scene. Got into some of the local bands and spent an absurd amount of time browsing the Musicians section of Craigslist. Craigslist yielded one of my very few genuine regrets in life. I reached out to a ska band looking for a trumpet player. In LA ska bands were a dime a dozen, but I only knew of one in my little corner of Tennessee. They were a surprisingly successful local band called Demon Waffle that packed every room they played in. The ad I responded to, turned out to be a member of Demon Waffle recruiting for the band. He offered to teach me to play trumpet to play with them. I was still a timid, bashful 19 year old, so I declined. That is the one decision in my life I would use a time machine to change.
During that time, I was working at Walmart. During my time there, I discovered a pair of best friends that had a band called Wasted Sanity. It was a send up to the grunge and alt-rock of the 90’s. I caught a couple shows and enjoyed their sound. Internal politics broke the band to pieces and I found myself being invited to join the pair of friends as a rhythm guitarist.
Playing with them was joyful and forged friendships that have lasted over a decade now, but it showed me that my heart wasn’t in music the way I thought it had been. Sean, the guitarist of the pair, could play circles around me and I had a hard time keeping up. I started to realize that I was never going to put in the time required to be that good. The birth of my first child was the last nail in the coffin. I left the band and a few years later Sean took off to Arizona.
I still play. I love to play and will never be able to let go of that part of me. I still jam with friends from time to time. But I have a hard time seeing myself committing to a band with my life as it currently stands. I’ll never say ‘never’, but I just don’t really see it. Of course, my 15 year old self would be disappointed, but I don’t have shit to prove to him.
