History of a Band that Never Was

Well, it still could be...

I started playing music when I was a wee toddler, with my Casio Keyboard and a 4-hour drive both ways once a week to Massachusetts, which gave me plenty of time to play as we went to visit family.

When I was 16, I got an acoustic guitar, and when I was 17, I got an electric. I had been hanging out with a group of friends that were a little different than the kids in school, and I still associate with them as my main group of allies. Brian (or Tin, short for Awful_Tin, his screen name) and Travis (we'll talk about Travis later) played together, guitar and drums respectively, but Tin lived up in Westfield so we hardly ever saw him back in those days when we depended on our parents for rides. I played bass when Tin was around, guitar otherwise. Travis was practically my neighbor, so we took to playing music pretty much every day. This is what we came up with...

A few years later, and a lot of drama came and went. Travis and I became bitter enemies over a girl, I stopped hanging out with everyone for a while (because that same girl had infiltrated our bunch!) and generally I kept my nose out of people's business, went to Europe, had a girlfriend for a while, stayed clean-headed for a while, but eventually I had to go back to see what I was missing. Some of my friends were doing drugs I wasn't happy about them doing, and I realized what a mistake it was to leave them all like I had. Without me to suggest, you know, what a stupid idea it was, they just went ahead and did it. Now things are different.

Travis and Tin had been playing with a friend of a friend from South Brunswick. Travis now played bass (like he did as a kid) and Bobby played drums. For two years they worked and played every weekend, only to come up with a mush of clashing noises I could only dare call "experimental." It was a failure of communication, to be honest, and although I knew it was Travis who was to blame for all of this, he blamed Bobby, and Brian fell in line with the dictatorial bassist.

Travis picked up the drums again, and I switched to guitar... now missing a bassist, we wrote several songs of indeterminable length, never complete, never really worked on at all. One beast of a song is finished being written, but the rest never really got any progress. Travis always had "a headache," or was "too sleepy" and some more real life drama with his girlfriend, his own instability as a person in general, and Brian and I and decided we had had enough of Travis, all together, as a friend. We could no longer trust him when he lied to us about having brain cancer, and when we stopped hanging out with him, things stopped mysteriously "disappearing."

Now, Brian and I try to play with Bobby, but he never makes it to band practice for some reason. We try to write songs together, but without a drummer or a bassist, it's hard to make any concrete decisions. We try looking on Craig's list, but the people there, I think, want to do something other than "jam."

So if you know a drummer or bassist who likes odd time-signature changes, psychedelic progressive/classic rock... you know where to send 'em.

Here's some more of our recent recordings:

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=8330231

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=8330228