After graduation, I moved to the big city with three friends from high school to play our own radical take on the music we grew up listening to together. Our band was called … let’s just say it starts with L and ends with Zeppelin. Fortunately, one of our members had spent some time touring with the Yardbirds while I was in school, so we were entering the game with a pretty high level of professionalism. Our debut album drew a little bit of noise from the press and the fans alike, we toured here and there, and before you could say “alcohol poisoning” it was all black magic and mud sharks. Then our drummer died in a pool of his own vomit.
Fortunately, our drummer hasn’t met this tragic end. Unfortunately, most of the story hasn’t happened (yet?). I only graduated six months ago, and while the four of us came from Jersey, it’s not the one in England. Instead, two of us moved to beautiful Bushwick, Brooklyn, land of $10 streetwalkers and Colt 45, where rent is cheap and jams run free without too many noise complaints from the neighbors. We set up a studio in our third bedroom, which is actually more of a hallway in our railroad apartment (six feet by six feet would be a generous estimate). We crammed in six amps, nine guitars, a drum kit, two digital recording setups and a miniature xylophone for tuning purposes, and proceeded to make noise on a regular basis for the first time in five years.
Twice a week I’d come home from work (or stumble out of bed to the door in nothing but a flannel shirt and a tequila-themed hat I won playing bingo at a bar) to let the other guys in for practice. We’d draw and send the loser to the bodega for a six-pack or two of 16-oz. Buds, and play until the building superintendent sent his eight-year-old son up to ask us to turn it down a little. We wrote, rehearsed and recorded demos of songs way better than anything on the EPs we made during weekends home from college. We took them to the people, and so far the people have generously refrained from saying “that’s alright, you can keep them.” Mostly because we’re still friends with 90 percent of the people who show up to the bars, clubs and lofts we play.
Then we started getting blog buzz … from one blog, written by a friend of ours (thanks UJ!). We started getting paid for gigs … mostly in free beer (good enough for me). And a label started to show some interest … because I worked with one of its two employees over the summer at a rock club in Hoboken. I was America’s skinniest bouncer before I got fired over e-mail in favor of someone “with a more commanding presence.”
But don’t get the wrong idea: life ain’t exactly nothin’ but bitches and money, canned beer and living in the hood for a working band these days. Gotta pay that rent, gotta put beer on the table when the free stuff runs out. I worked in publishing for a few months until I recently embarked on a more lucrative career as a private investigator (no joke—although it’s not all fedoras and filter-tips these days, or even White Russians and Creedence, no matter what the Dude may have you believe). I have a company laptop. I have a 401(k). I’m becoming a real person at an unsettling pace.
The band is realer than ever, though, and that’s the important thing. There’s no better antidote to a bad day at work than stomping on the fuzz box and ripping out your best tunes with your best friends, on stage or off, especially when you walk out behind a couple strangers mumbling “hey, those guys were pretty good.” We’re even coming down to D.C. this weekend to open for Girl Talk in Bulldog Alley on Saturday night (shameless). Living the dream? Occasionally. Love of the game? Undying.
