After Moby Dick, I took a little break from actively hunting a band for a while. I don't really remember why. I guess I was probably getting a little frustrated at all the different projects that almost turned into what I was trying to find. I decided that, if I couldn't find people to jam with that were going to stick with it and put the effort into things that it takes to get on top of the local musical food chain, I'd start jammin' with myself. Literally. I had about a zillion songs in my head, and quite a few on paper that I really wanted to record, so I dug the old Yamaha four track recorder out of my closet and really started putting some effort into getting my own songs together. I had learned that it's really hard to get musicians to sit in and jam on someone else's originals for free, so I decided I'd just have to do it all myself. A lot of years in a lot of bands had given me the opportunity to learn to play all the basic rock-n-roll instruments at least to some degree, so I thought I could at least write and record some basic simple songs on my own. It was a ton of work. Just learning to use the recording equipment well was a challenge all to itself. It was like learning another musical instrument altogether, but eventually, through an eternity of trial and error, I learned to make the thing do what it was designed to do. Recording uses many of the same principles as running sound, and putting my songs on tape one instrument at a time helped me learn more about the subtleties of sound engineering than I had learned anywhere else up to that point.
That frenzy of recording resulted in twenty or thirty songs that actually made it to tape. Some of them I'm very proud of. Some of them make me cringe when I hear them now. From listening, you can actually tell by the sound quality (and my singing) which ones I did first and which ones I did last. The recording quality as I learned what I was doing improved drastically over time. One of the frustrating things is that a couple of the songs that I think are the best ended up sounding bad because of the recording quality. Fortunately, even with the learning curve in progress, I ended up with enough good songs to make a nine song cassette. I made (by hand) a bunch of tape covers, and dubbed a bunch of tapes on my home stereo system. |
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I named the "album" Inside Out because after looking at the songs on it,. I saw that they were very much representative of my feelings and opinions. Each one had a personal meaning to me. It was what was inside of me coming out in music. I think that's what music should be. When they were all done, I distributed the tapes to anyone who would take them. I got neutral reactions from most of my friends. Some liked them. Some didn't. The truth is, their opinions didn't mean that terribly much. I did those songs for me, and I liked them. I know some are good, and some not so good. It all comes down to taste. There are some clips of a few of them on the "originals" link I have attached to this site if you're interested in listening. Even though I just said it doesn't matter to me, I must admit that I'd love to hear some outside opinions, positive or negative. I can take it.
By the time the tape was finished, I was starting to get that old itch to play in public again. I guess music is a little like sex. You can do it alone, but it's sure a lot more fun when someone else is there. I wanted to get back out there in the world and play, so I put me a brand new ad up on the bulletin board at the music store and waited again for a magic phone call. Just like before, it was a really long wait. . .but this time it actually came . . .sort of. . . .
After fielding a few calls that never amounted to much, I finally got the call I awaited. A girl named Lilly called and said she was trying to put a band together that would play a fresh variety of music. Her definition for "fresh", I soon discovered, was new music. I didn't have any problem with playing that, even though I wasn't too terribly familiar with what was going on in the music world at the time. Moby Dick hadn't really paid much attention to new music, and my time making original recordings had also left me with little time to pay attention to what was current. Therefore, I didn't really know what I was getting into music-wise. Fortunately for me, I discovered, Nirvana and bands like that were just starting to lose some of their popularity, so new music at the time ended up being music by bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, and Live. No problem. I generally liked what she proposed as a song list, so I decided to give it a shot. She made a few more calls and found a drummer and guitar player team (who had just lost their bassist/singer) and a second guitar player, and soon we were off and running.
Our first rehearsal went reasonably well, so we decided to go ahead and start booking gigs. Looking back, I think that was a mistake. We had to really cram to get ready in time for those gigs, and consequently, the quality of our music really suffered. To top it all off, one of the guitar players was only doing it to pass time until something better came along. He was honest about it, though, and committed himself to playing the first three gigs with us. It was a rocky way to start a band. Unfortunately, the band never developed any real chemistry. We could play the songs, but the life and the drive just wasn't there. We really tried to make it work, but, as individuals, we were just too different from each other. The only members that seemed to click at all were the drummer and myself. We got along very well both personally and musically, and soon became good friends. In fact, we still are today. That's one of the perks of playing music. You do pick up friends along the way.
We named the band Asylum after the band the guitar player and drummer had just been in. The name still had some recognition around town, so we thought it a good idea to use it to make it easier to get gigs. It worked too.....until we actually gigged. Then, the bar owners saw a different band entirely than the former Asylum. Due to all the factors listed above, we just weren't good enough to be playing out yet, and the bar owners knew it. We kind of burnt our bridges by playing out sooner than we were ready. It was bad move. What can you say? We just wanted to play. Sometimes it's easy to let your heart rule your mind. So, after we played the three gigs we were obligated to play, we split up. Well, sort of.
| The drummer and I had bonded to some extent, so we decided to try to put something together ourselves. It was a pretty frustrating search, but we had both developed a few connections and, after a couple of months, we finally had a winning combination put together. The initial membership included the drummer (Lisa) and the bass player (me) from Asylum, a hot lead guitarist (Dave) and a singer (Shawn) I had jammed with in the Moby Dick days, and another guitarist (Bobby) we knew who had recently left the hottest alternative band in town. It was a very promising lineup. By the time we had finished with our first rehearsal, we all knew we had something that would work. For the most part, we all got along well right off the bat. |
Once we started gigging, things just sort of took off for us. Everyone liked us, we were getting asked back to play again and again, and we were having a lot of fun. . . except for one thing. Isn't there always one thing? One of the guitar players in the band just didn't fit in. He was a good guy, but, for some reason, it just wasn't working out with him. I still feel guilty about it to this day, but. . . well, we never actually kicked him out, we just quit inviting him to rehearsals. It was a cowards way to do things, but what's past is past, I guess. From then on, Stone Monkey was destined to be a one guitar player band. Those next six or eight months were one of the most fun and hardest working times I've ever experienced in a band. We played nearly every weekend, and rehearsed every Wednesday. It reached a point where we actually had to turn gigs down once in a while just so we could have some time off. For a while, it was exactly what I think a band should be like. We even got on the regular rotation at my old favorite club, The Nite Owl. One of the most fun places we played, even if it was one of the lowest paying, was a biker bar called, Cack's Saloon. There's nothing quite like being in a well liked band in a biker bar. I've never felt safer or more loved in any club. They used to refer to us as "our band".
During that time, we gradually settled on a pretty hard driving song list. It was a good band in that we added songs almost on a weekly basis. Some or our more signature songs were, "Remedy", by The Black Crows, "Three Little Pigs", by Green Jelly, and "Stranglehold", by Ted Nugent. We also had a special sort of gimmick we could employ that really got us recognition. We had three different people in the band who could sing lead vocals. Our drummer was female and had an awesome voice, so we could play a lot of songs by bands with female vocalists that other local acts couldn't do. She didn't really like being tied behind the drums when she was singing, so Shawn, our singer, went back on the drums for most of the songs she sang. Some of those songs |
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Even with all the fun we were having, this band in it's original state wasn't destined to last more than six or eight months. Dave, the guitar player, was offered a spot in a more prestigious band that paid a lot more, so he quit. The remaining three of us immediately started hunting a new guitar player, but the search ended up being a fairly long one, so long, in fact, that Shawn eventually gave up and went back to jammin' with the guys of Wehadkee creek who had recently reformed under the abbreviated name of Kee Creek. That left just Lisa and me again. It was a frustrating wait, but eventually, we found two more guys, and the second incarnation of Stone Monkey soon hit the scene.
I guess I should mention that from this point on, I have been the main soundman for almost any band I've been in. Stone Monkey is where I probably learned most of what I know about running sound so far. It definitely taught me the little practical things like, making do in a pinch and packing 16 cubic feet of equipment into a 15 cubic foot space in my car. Sounds impossible doesn't it? I thought so too. . . until Stone Monkey. Another great addition I can attribute to my time in the band is that the money generated from gigging really helped me to gradually collect that majority of the equipment I have to date. I’ve always kept a day job to pay the bills, but I consider gig money to be play money. That means I can spend all my gig money on musical stuff. If I hadn’t made that decision a long time ago, I’d probably still be playing through my stereo amplifier.
The second version of Stone Monkey probably wasn’t as good as the first. That’s not a reflection on the musicians in the band. We had picked up an excellent and seasoned singer and a hot guitar player to fill the missing spots, but for some indefinable reason, the magic of the band was diminished a little. Having said that, I can still safely say that we rocked just as hard and as well as the first version, it’s just that the feeling wasn’t there like it once was. Maybe it was burnout on my part. It’s hard to tell. In any case, it was still a good band. The new singer (Kelly) had been a pretty popular singer around town and was an excellent showman, and the new guitar player (Cary) had jammed with Lisa and myself in the ill-fated Asylum. We rocked. Unfortunately, Cary didn’t seem to be into the experience like the rest of us, so he didn’t last too long.
| In fact, we went through several guitar players over that rough and tumble summer. I honestly can’t remember all of them, but names like Bear, David, Dave, and Cary all come immediately to mind. I think that difficulty in getting a permanent guitar player is probably what led to the band’s eventual demise. We spent way too much time breaking in new guitar players, and not enough time growing as a band. I felt particularly bad for Kelly. He’d come in at halftime, and never did get to have the full Stone Monkey experience that Lisa and I did. I wish he had. He still stands as one of the most professional and fun people I’ve ever jammed with. |  |
Even with its troubles, this version (with various guitar players) was destined to play nearly as long or longer than the original version. We gigged all the same places we had in the past, and we still got all the attention that I was in the rock-n-roll world for in the first place. Not to mention, I made enough money to buy even more equipment. It was fun, but like all things in life it was to come to an end. I was the one who finally called it quits. Things weren’t going too well for us anyway. That guitar player problem kept plaguing us, and the gigs were getting fewer and fewer, so when a friend of mine called and said he wanted to put together a “different” kind of band, I jumped at the chance. It was hard, but I called up the guys in Stone Monkey and told them I’d be leaving the band.
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This section was last updated on March 21, 2000.
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