In the early days of living at Keith's place, life consisted of basically three things; working, partying, and sleeping. Of course, being in my early 20's, partying was the only one that really mattered to me. Strangely enough, the partying is what got me back into playing music again. It had been some time since either Keith or me had been in a band, and we talked a lot about someday starting one where we would "only play good songs." Of course, at the time it wasn't much more than that. Just talk. However, we did really like to play, and so did a few of our friends, so we started having what we called "jam parties". Basically, we just started inviting anyone we knew who played an instrument over to the house to jam. It's hard to say just how it all came about, but these jam parties turned into a regularly scheduled thing. Every Saturday night, people soon knew where to go if they wanted to get together with other musicians and play some music while partaking of a variety of mind altering substances like.....ummmm beer, and Cuervo, and ....well....lots of stuff. After a few weeks (or months. It's hard to remember), a few of us began noticing that there was a core group that always seemed to be at these parties. This observation lead to some talk of starting a band. And fortunately, most of us happened to play different instruments. We had two guitarists, a singer, and . . .oops. . . two drummers.
This is where I made one of my biggest musical decisions. Keith mentioned that maybe I should learn to play bass. He even offered me a deal. He would buy a bass and an amp if I'd learn to play it. Honestly, the idea had never even occurred to me before, and at first I was very skeptical, but after looking at the situation, and realizing that my friend Tony was a much better drummer with much better drums, I decided to give it a shot. I think Keith ordered the bass and amp the next day.
So, thanks to Keith's frugal ways, my first bass guitar was a short scale four string bass bought straight out of the JC Penny catalog. No kidding. I swear it's true. The brand on the head says "Synsonics" whoever that is. The amp also came from Penny's. It packed a whopping 25 or so watts of power going through a single 10 inch speaker. I think he paid 200 dollars for the both of them. We made some quick modifications to the amp by wiring a 15 inch speaker cabinet up to it, and I was soon learning to play just like Geddy Lee. Well, not soon, but I did pick it up fairly quickly. A few months later, I bought my first real bass guitar and amplifier. The bass was a bright red Ibanez four string with the general shape of a lightning bolt. It's a good bass, and I still use it some today. There are sure to be some pictures of it somewhere on this page. The amp was a Peavey Combo 300. It was a great starter amp, but I have since outgrown it and upgraded to a Trace Elliot.
The band that eventually materialized out of all that partying is what I consider to be my first real band. We played a lot of "hair band" music by bands like Whitesnake, The Scorpions, Rat, and Great White. From the picture, you can see that we were sort of a "hair band" ourselves.. We decided to name the band Spectre because it sounded cool. I was definitely the lesser musician of the whole group, but I think it caused me to work harder to learn than I would have otherwise. I don't think it took us six months before we were actually gigging at the local bottle club (all night club) called The Nite Owl. It didn't even open until midnight and didn't close until 5:30 am. It had it's own soundman and a sound system that rivals those in many civic centers. It was the best place in the world to cut your teeth as a performing musician. It actually felt like you were on a big stage in front of a million people when you played there. Playing the Nite Owl was the perfect initiation into the world of playing rock-n-roll. For the first time ever, the ladies were actually pursuing me, I was finally making money at music (a whole 30 bucks a night), I was meeting people in other bands, and I was drinking for free. Who could ask for more? I have nothing but good memories about the days of Spectre and the Nite Owl. I look at those times as the best of my life. Well, so far anyway. |
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Sadly, Spectre was destined to burn itself out in a very few months. It's demise followed the same pattern that I've seen happen in many bands I've been in since then. It started when we quit rehearsing as regularly. Then we quit learning new material. Then we started getting aggravated with each other over trivial things. The "party" started becoming old hat, and we just weren't connecting too well anymore. Unlike many bands, we were all very close friends, and the band was putting a strain on those friendships. Something had to give, so we decided to try taking a break from playing for a while. We told the owner of the Nite Owl that we would be taking a couple of weeks off, and we just went off on our separate ways to take a break. That was quite a few years ago (July 14, 1990), and we're still on break. I suppose it was as good a way as any for a band to break up. It was definitely better than a big fight. Now, I'm the only one of the whole bunch that is still playing. Keith moved back up north and is now a regular working stiff, Beckie got married and moved to Indiana, Tony just kind of disappeared, and John (the best musician of the bunch) after making a name for himself as a local guitar hero was killed in a car accident in 1996. Except for Tony, we all kept in touch. Beckie even made it down for John's funeral. Good friends, all. To this day, I'm still searching for that kind of thing in a band. To whoever's reading this, if you have it, don't give it up for anything. It's very hard to find.
| After Spectre, it was quite a while before I found any real band to speak of. Keith and I tried to put together a variety of projects all of which were geared toward music by Styx, The Damn Yankees, Journey, Kansas, and other groups with similar sounds. These were the kinds of groups we liked to listen to most, and we naively thought that everyone else did too. But it was the early 90's, and popular rock music was in the process of a really big change. Pearl Jam and Nirvana were starting to appear on the national scene, and most of my favorite music would soon became sort of passe', and most people weren't interested in playing it anymore. |
Another problem with playing my favorite music was that it required a whole lot more talent and work to perform. Keyboard players and quality harmony singers were becoming scarce, and well. . . . to put it simply, we were just too late. Our music was a thing of the past. I don't remember how many projects we tried, but none of them ever got to the point where we could gig with them. It kind of stinks that we used up a lot of good band names on projects that really went nowhere. My favorite unused name was Popeye Sphynx. We came up with that one one day when we were sitting on the beach looking at some puffy white clouds. Someone said one of them looked like Popeye, and someone else said it looked like a Sphinx. We jammed the names together and, tada!! We had a name.
One positive thing to come from all those failed projects was that I got to start learning how to really hook up and use a PA system. We rehearsed in a variety of places, and each time we practiced, someone had to hook everything up and make it work. Keith knew how, but I wanted to know too, so he showed me the basics of how it was all done. It wasn't too long before I was in complete charge of all PA duties.
Another good thing to come out of all that struggling period immediately following Spectre was that I became acquainted with a variety of musicians. Each time Keith and I tried to start something new, we would put an ad up on the local music store bulletin board asking for whatever types of instrumentalists we were hunting for that particular project. We soon discovered that finding musicians that way didn't always yield the results we were looking for, but we did find one musician in particular that would eventually play a prominent role in my musical future. He was a keyboard player that could obviously sing very well. When he tried out for whatever project we were working on at the time, both Keith and I were very impressed with this newly discovered talent. Like I said before, keyboard players are really hard to find. I remember playing "Separate Ways" by Journey and being totally blown away by his perfect duplication of the keyboard sound. Even so, there is more to putting a band together than just finding a hot keyboard player, and that project also eventually fizzled out and went nowhere.
Fortunately, however, I kept in touch with Jimmy (the keyboard player) after that band fell apart. I don't really remember how it all came about, but I eventually ended up playing in a band Jimmy had put together with his twin brother Tommy and his cousin John. It was an acoustic oriented band they named Wehadkee Creek after a place near John's hometown in Alabama. They were all excellent singers and competent musicians, and I was finally in a band that looked like it was going to actually get to gig. It had been a long time for me since I had gigged, and I was really anxious to get back on the stage. In that band I got my chance, but the gigs we were doing were a far cry from the high energy Rock-n-Roll gigs I had done in Spectre at the Night Owl. It was still fun though, and their musical direction definitely expanded my knowledge of different kinds of music. I guess you could say that up until then, I was mostly a metal head. These guys introduced me to the softer side of classic rock. We played songs by groups like America, Santanna, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. I found this stuff to be very
| different stylistically than the stuff I was used to playing, and I think it helped me to improve a great deal as a bass player. The more styles you can learn, the better off you are. This band was a transitional one for me. It helped me to leave the metal scene to some extent, but I couldn't stay away. I don't remember what circumstances led up to me leaving the band, but the end result was that I left the band to "pursue other interests" as they say, and they went on without me. Instead of replacing me (the bass player), they got a conga/percussion player to round out the acoustic feel of the band and, soon after that, they secured a house gig at one of the best clubs in town. Bummer. I felt like Pete Best. I left just a little too soon. For a while I helped them out running sound, but it wasn't working out too well for me (or for them) so I eventually moved on. Fortunately, that isn't the end of that story, but it was a long time before I hooked up with these guys again. |
By this time, I was a little burnt out on the mellow sounds of Wehadkee Creek and was ready to get back to playing some high energy rock music, so I put my own ad up at the music store and waited. And waited. . . and waited. I got lots of calls, and I even jammed with a few bands, but none of them were really what I was looking for. It was hard finding people that played at the same skill and experience level as me (some were better, some were worse) that also shared my musical ideas. I must have put up ten different ads in several different stores, and I still couldn't find that magical combination I was hunting. I had all but given up when I got a phone call from a friend I had jammed with before when Keith and I had been trying to put together one of our ill fated projects. The guy who called (Dave) was wanting to put something together from scratch, and he already had a drummer lined up. I told Dave I'd make a few calls and see if I could find a singer. It's funny how things happen. I called Shawn, a friend I'd met during the Wehadkee Creek days. In fact, he was the conga player that joined up when I left the band. He had never been a lead singer, but I could see his potential, and it wasn't hard for me to talk him into giving it a try. As an added bonus, we also got John from the Kee Creek band to join up with us. It was just good timing. Wehadkee Creek was sort of on break for a while, and both John and Shawn were hungry for something to do. That band ended up being called Moby Dick after the old Zeppelin song. We played a lot of driving classic rock stuff like Cat Scratch Fever, Riding the Storm Out, and Feelin' Alright, then we rounded things out by playing a lot of acoustic stuff similar to Wehadkee Creek's song list.
Sadly, this band never did grow to be the powerhouse I had expected. There were a lot of weird things going on in some of the guys personal lives, and the band was always forced to take a backseat to those, and eventually, by mutual consent, we disbanded. Even so, some very good things came out of that experience for me. The biggest of which was that I got to get my feet wet as a sound guy. Before we broke up, we got to do a couple of decent gigs where I was solely in charge of the PA system. This was the first time I had ever had to put a sound system together and use it at a gig. We put most of the system together out of various components we all had laying around our garages and bedroom closets. Between us, we had several homemade speaker cabinets for the mains, |
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two cheap monitors, one 6 channel powered mixer, a Roland Space Echo tape delay, and a variety of microphones ranging from SM58s to cheap "Rat Shack" models. What we didn't have, was a main soundboard, a main amp, and a whole bunch of speaker cables. We ended up renting a 12 channel powered mixer and making speaker cables out of stuff we bought at the hardware store. When we set it all up, we used the 6 channel mixer as a monitor amp, powered the mains from the power in the 12 channel mixer, and we were off and running. It sounded surprisingly good considering the system we had slapped together, and all in all I was very happy with my first real full band sound experience. Making a system made of junk work is a fun challenge. I've discovered that there is nothing more satisfying than making a good sound come out of a slam together PA system. There's also nothing like patting yourself on the back for your own creative ingenuity. Usually no one else knows enough about sound engineering to even know what you did. As a sound guy, you often have to pat your own back. . . that is, if your ego needs that sort of thing.
Another good thing to come from that band is that it cemented some friendships that I still value today. I've had a lot of good times with those guys and still continue to do so regularly. Moby Dick also created a variety of musical alliances that continue in a variety of ways. At one time or another, I've jammed with each guy in that band in projects that followed. In fact, I'm in a band with a couple of them even as I write this. I'm sure that in one way or another, our musical paths will continue to cross for a long time to come.
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This section was last updated on March 21, 2000.
Mail me at Bassist@Spydee.net.
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