Disaster strikes: the first gig
I know this is a really long piece; in fact, it's the longest thing I've published. So I couldn't do it myself. I'd like to thank Hynson Marvel, Greg Burgess, John Schlickenmaier and Alissa Chase for pre-reading this and showing me the error of my ways. I'd also like to thank everyone who made this possible; too many to thank right now, you know who you are. If you read this, kindly take a minute to let me know what you think at wschlick@erols.com. Cheers...WS
I've been a musician since I was four years old. That's when my parents decided I should have piano lessons. I took piano then for ten years from my grandmother. I was never the most adept of players, but I learned scales, chords, and the like, as well as an appreciation for how awesome a Steinway can sound when you hit the ivories just right. Piano taught me a lot, but it felt like forced labor at times, especially near the end. I stopped taking lessons when I was in eighth grade.
For a period of about a year, I really didn't play anything. I might go over to the piano occasionally, but my heart wasn't in it. Besides, I always figured that the piano was an instrument for geeks.
At the end of eighth grade, things began to change. I had known guys who were rock musicians for years -- guys like Phil Carluzzo, whom I remember would come over for my brother John's birthday, or for some other random reason, and bring his guitar. I always remember that when I was in seventh and eighth grade, he could play Nirvana and Guns 'N Roses. He was a year behind me, in my brother's class, but I would see him and his bandmates all the time.
I still remember how Phil's band (it was called Squall at the time) was sooo cool. I'd hear about their gigs and whatnot, and I'd hear them playing sometimes. I couldn't really see myself in a band, though -- I didn't fit the image. And what was I going to play, keyboards? Remember, this was the grunge era.
Things began to change when I got into high school. A friend of John's and mine, Bob Oliver, got a guitar and learned how to play. The three of us were sitting around at some point, listening to Stairway to Heaven as young people are want to do, and we were talking about how cool it would be to play in a band. At this point, John was changing from playing saxophone in the school band to playing drums. Talk about an important change. Then, for Christmas, my he got his first drum set. He also happened to have the chicken pox at the time, my Christmas gift to him in a manner of speaking. I remember how that day was the first day I was in a band. For more details, click here.
I got a karaoke machine. Not the greatest instrument of all time, but I could sing through it. And sing I did. There exists video somewhere of myself and Hynson Marvel singing along to Metallica's Black Album as John played drums. Silly. But, things changed again at my birthday, three months later. Then, I got my first guitar.
I still have that guitar. The electronics need to be fixed, the headstock has been catastrophically damaged once, I replaced the bridge, but it's still the same guitar. I got a book of chords, and I taught myself to play.
Allow me to editorialize here for a moment (it is an editorial magazine, after all, and I am the editor...). I need to address a common problem among aspiring musicians -- the idea that you have to take lessons to be able to play. That's bs. I have never taken a guitar lesson in my life, and I've learned a lot. My brother John is classically trained in percussion by some of the best around, but he never took a lesson in his life in set drumming (which, trust me, is completely different), and he's one of the best drummers I've ever heard. Greg Burgess, a person I'm honored to call a friend and the best guitarist I've heard, taught himself to play rock guitar the right way -- by sitting on his tail and practicing, day after day after day after day. That's how I learned, too. Now that's not to say that you should be a hermit. At one point, I needed to know how to play power chords. So I talked to Steve Nielsen, Phil Carluzzo's drummer back then, and he gave me a little hand-written chord chart for how to play power chords. I still have that up on my wall. And if I was having trouble, I'd ask someone. But I never took lessons in how to play "12-bar" blues, or how to play scales, or anything like that. And I never suffered.
Back to my story... I now had a guitar. So I started writing music. That's something else I have to emphasize -- writing music is absolutely essential. I'm in a cover band, and it's a lot of fun. BUT... writing music teaches you a lot. It lets you work at your own pace, and move upward. I started writing music that was literally three notes. I didn't know how to play the chords I wanted, so I played bass notes. One of my friends, Hynson Marvel, wrote some lyrics, and we had a song. It's called "Too Young to Die," and I still remember how it goes. I don't play it much anymore, but I still remember it. As my playing became more proficient, the songs would get deeper and deeper. I did start learning to play covers, too. This was 1994, so I learned some very basic Metallica, and a lot of Nirvana. Them was the days -- young, idealistic, three chords and a song.
Another formative experience back then was my first exposure to a band that would prove to be very influential. Bob's older brother, Ed, went to UVA back then. He was friends with this guy who had a band down in Charlottesville. In fact, Bob told us he roadied for them. Bob brought over one of this band's CDs one day, and John, him, Hynson, Hynson's sister Francoise and I sat around and listened to this one song. It was "All Along the Watchtower," off Recently...by the Dave Matthews Band. I figured the chord progression out from Bob, and we started covering it. Of course, now I look back and it's kind of funny that I was actually one of the believers before DMB became so massive. Such is fate...
We practiced a lot over that period from my birthday (March) up to and including the summer of 1994. John and Bob were both going to be coming to Bishop Ireton the next year, so we figured it would be cool to have a band together. We practiced stuff we heard on the radio (a lot of Nirvana and other alternative), and we worked on originals. Then came September. Hynson's birthday was coming up in October, and he decided it would be cool to play at his party. We all thought it would be the coolest thing -- a gig! Were we ever wrong.
Disaster Strikes: The First Gig
It got closer and closer to the gig. I still remember a week before, it was a nice day in early October. Hynson came over to my house (he lived down the block from me then, as he does now), but he had some bad news. Some stuff had come up, and he wasn't going to be able to do it. Suddenly, we had a major problem - a gig in a week, and no vocalist. John and Bob knew this guy from Ireton who they figured would be good. They talked to him about it, and we decided to give it a go.
The day of the gig rolled around. That morning, Hynson snuck over to talk to me. He wanted to know if we were still playing. I told him what our plans were. He was a bit apprehensive about our new vocalist (who I'm not going to name because I haven't seen him in years, and I don't want to slander him or anything), because he knew this guy had some personal problems, mainly with drugs. I didn't believe him, told him so, and proceeded to prepare for the show. That night, we set up at the house across the street and got ready to play. Hynson's friends showed up, and we started playing. We were bad. Strike that. We were bad, and the audience made us worse. They were rude, and yelled at us to play what they wanted to hear, or they would turn on a tape player or something. We had one song, Far Behind by Candlebox, that they liked, and I think we played that about five times over the course of the night. The vocalist ended up leaving about 2/3 of the way through the set, and by the end, Phil, Stephen and S.P. Sheehan (who had shown up, among other reasons, for moral support) ended up jamming with us. To top it all off, it started raining at the end.
Granted, this may have been my low point as a musician. I felt rejected, low, and lame. But afterwards, people would come up to us and say that we weren't really all that bad, but that it was a bad situation. Remember, even if you get booed off stage, at least someone will feel sorry for you. We ended up chalking it up to experience, and moving on.
The vocalist who played with us that night didn't stay with us for too long. He ended up moving on to other things. Because of his schedule, Hynson wasn't able to work with us that much, either, so it ended up being, for a time, John, Bob and I, just like it was in the beginning. We mainly played Nirvana and the Doors, and had a great time doing it. My brother has a tape of us playing in the living room in my house, and I still like it. However, I met this guy during the end of my freshman year and the beginning of my sophomore who would end up impacting my playing quite a bit, for a time: James Fox.
James and I didn't exactly see eye to eye when we first met. He and his friends (who I eventually became tight with) didn't get along with me freshman year. But James and I started talking at some point after the debacle at Hynson's party, and I discovered that he had a guitar, but didn't know how to play it. I offered to teach him -- not as in formal guitar lessons, but just to get him started, teach him the basic chords, etc.
Eventually, James became our vocalist. With Bob and I on guitar and John on drums, we were a frightening concept, to be sure. We played a couple pretty bad self-produced shows, but most importantly, we recorded. This was formative for me. I learned that I liked being behind the boards, putting together a song from its bare bones to its final components. By this time, we also had a name: Insomnia.
Insomnia was a major stage in my musical life, and our album, Heavy Sedative, was the reason for that. We recorded it on my karaoke machine (see, I knew it would be useful at some point) and released the songs. Some of them were really silly, others were more serious, but almost all had a common denominator: no Bob. Bob played on only two songs on Heavy Sedative, and he was for all realistic purposes on his way out of the band. I had purchased a bass guitar right before Hynson's party, so I played both on the album. Then came the biggest day of Insomnia's life: tryouts for Ireton's Field Day.
The Field Day tryouts in the spring of 1995, I am convinced, are the one greatest amalgamation of Ireton musical talent ever put together. You had Vicious Cycle, which was the established Ireton band. You also had a really hot new blues band, Mourning Sun, which would also end up playing Field Day. Then you had the lesser bands. Insomnia had the "honor" of being the first band to play. We started off with a cover, Radiohead's "Creep." Problems ensued. The vocal parts were admittedly too high for James, and his voice cracked on some of the more difficult passages. Altogether, it wasn't a very auspicious opening. It went a bit long, and we were almost pushed off the stage. However, we did an original, called..."Asbestos"--God, that takes me back. It took me ten minutes to remember the name of that song, but we played it in front of the people, and they kind of liked it. I'm pretty sure we came in last in the voting, but oh well. Bob was supposed to play with us, but he couldn't. Later, though, he asked me if he could borrow my bass, to play with this guy. I ended up seeing him at tryouts; he didn't win either, but he was a hell of a guitarist. His name was Greg Burgess, and he would end up becoming the dominant influence on me musically to this very day. He was in a metal band - I wasn't really into metal, but he was insane on that guitar.
After the tryouts, Insomnia stayed together. However, John got an offer from Greg to join his band, Cerebral Onslaught, which Bob was already in. He accepted, and I went with him to Greg's house. It turns out that the original drummer was now the drummer to Mourning Sun (this will be important later), and they needed a new drummer. John filled in admirably, and became a member of the band. He's still in Cerebral, by the way. They were really heavy, but I liked them. I started hanging around the band, and became the de facto soundman. We tried to record using my karaoke machine, but the quality was really bad, so I took some money I had saved and went to Veneman's Music and bought a 4-track. It was a Fostex X-28H, one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I still have it, and it's the cornerpiece of my studio. Greg recently bought a new (and more expensive) four-track, but admits that for some stuff, mine is still better. Everything I record is with this thing...but I digress.
I started producing for Cerebral, and we had some good stuff going. Before long, this was my full-time musical job, and Insomnia suffered as a result. However, we stayed together, but we changed formats. John and James started getting into straight-edge hardcore, and the music started changing as a result. James started playing guitar, as well. I was never successful in teaching him how to play, but I retuned his guitar in what I called "monkey tuning"--all Ds and As, and he was able to play. We went through some name changes as well, which forced me to take the Insomnia sticker off my guitar. We called ourselves Virus, then some other stuff you'd have to ask my brother about. However, we just didn't have the time; for John and I, Cerebral had become full-time. We recorded a lot of stuff, woodshedded, and basically worked our heads off. Bob left the band for a while, so I played bass on and off. There was someone else who came in to play bass, but it didn't work out. At this time, I had also become a bit of an entrepreneur. Seeing myself as the Bill Graham of the 1990s, I decided to put on a free rock concert. It was at Lee District Park, and featured Marble, Disdain (both of which featured old friend Phil Carluzzo--in fact, Disdain was the band that had played all those years ago), Cerebral, and Mourning Sun. Boy, did I take a loss on that. Although the bands chipped in some, I had to pay for most of the expenses. And about 30 people showed up, total. It rained at the end of the Disdain set, so they took all their stuff and left. After about an hour, the show went on. Cerebral played, with me on bass, then Mourning Sun played. It was actually a lot of fun, and a lot of great music (especially the second half). I learned, though, that the next time Cerebral played a show, we had to do a much better job of setting it up. And we did.
One night my junior year at Ireton, Greg called me up with something urgent. He had received a tip that Mourning Sun and another band, the Liquid Caravan, were going to play a show at Jaxx, a club in Springfield. However, he had heard that they were looking for an opening band. So I called the drummer to Mourning Sun, Jeff Cosgrove, who was the original drummer to Cerebral! (see, I told you it would come up) He said that it was right, and that Cerebral was welcome to take the slot, if it was cool with the club owner and the guys in Liquid. I called all of them (boy, was that fun!) and they all said it was all good. Suddenly, Cerebral had a paying gig.
We actually sold real Ticketmaster tickets to the show, and we hung flyers all over Ireton. Bob was back in the band, and ready to play bass. We actually got some people out to the show, and it was a rousing success. A bunch of Bob's friends from Langley (he had transferred from Ireton a while back) showed up, as did a lot of our friends. It was a lot of fun: we videotaped it, and if I knew where it was, I'd watch it. We got mentioned in the paper at Ireton, and we kept working on our recordings. I say "we" and "our" here because when it came to things like recording, I was there ALL THE TIME. Greg and I, forming a partnership that continues to this day, would hunch over the four track, trying to get the song to sound right. However, we never really came out with something tight. There was an album, "Portrait of Hate," but we didn't really push it. It was getting near my senior year of high school, and another major shift was coming for me. The old was coming back, in a strong way.
It was July fourth, 1996. The annual block party was at our house that year, I believe, or it was next door. Something like that. Anyhow, Hynson and Francoise were there. We hadn't worked together on stuff in years, literally, but John and I invited them up to jam on some of the stuff that we had done years ago. It was tight. John was having some tensions in Cerebral at the time (including an incident when Greg threw his drum set across the room, but that's a story in and of itself), and we realized that we had caught lightning in a bottle. So, we went with it. In addition to this, I now had the four track. So what did we do? We recorded. And thus came the birth, or rebirth so to speak, of CPM.
CPM is something special to me. I've been a rock musician for five years now, and it is easily the most special thing I have ever done. The first time we recorded, we were in my brother's room. I can still remember the way we were set up, how the bass would cut out, and how I'd be crowded in a corner using James' old guitar and the four track, and how I was having more fun than I can remember. We ended up recording four songs, only one of which we now perform. But it's a classic, "Happy," still my favorite CPM song. One of the songs was an old one, and then there was one, called "Broken," which I played piano on. This was the first time I had ever written something on piano, much less recorded, but for the time, it worked. Eventually, it became one of my own songs rather than a CPM song, but I still play it sometimes. We then recorded some other tracks, including an instrumental I had penned, and we had ourselves an album. It was called Waiting for the Summer Rain, and it had ten songs on it. However, we never released it in the format it was recorded in, because another major change came about: CPM got a gig.
Exactly one year from when we had gotten back together, we were lined up to play our block party on July fourth. We decided that we wanted something out by then, so we took the idea of Waiting and cropped it down, big time. It became an acoustic album, with only one of the songs on it that was on the original: Hippie Girl. Ask John sometime about Hippie Girl; he could probably write something this length about just it (well, maybe not this long, but long...) But we got it done, and it came out.
July fourth. A lot of things had changed in one year. I had graduated from high school. I was in the middle of a relationship which ended up changing my life, and my outlook on life was quite different. And most importantly for that one day, I was in a real life rock and roll band, and we were going to rock. John and I decided to be "cool," so we wore dress shirts and ties out to the gig. We looked kinda goofy, but it was all good. The gig was pure butter, even though I did mess up 20 seconds into our opener. We just stopped, everyone laughed at me (including myself), and we started over. The nice thing was that we were in front of neighbors and family, so it was a friendly crowd. And believe it or not, we were good. People who had heard us practicing in the basement for years suddenly learned that we knew how to write songs. Our folks learned that we knew old people music -- American Pie, by Don McLean, which we played ALL THE WAY THROUGH. In short, it was great.
The rest of the summer was a blur. We recorded and wrote new songs, came up with new ideas, and set up a webpage for the band. But all good things have to come to an end, and I had to leave for Georgetown. At the same time, my grandparents on my dad's side died, so it was a tough time for the family. I also underwent a change: I started writing lyrics. Up until then, I had always feared writing lyrics. I never liked English class in school, and CPM had two great lyricists already in Hynson and John. Before that, James had always written the lyrics for Insomnia and its successors, and Bob wrote anything he, John and I played. I did write all the music, though; I felt comfortable in that. But I cowrote two songs for Waiting with Hynson: Goodbye and Everybody. At the end of the summer, I finally wrote two songs of my own, a silly little ditty called the Ballad of the Happy Tree and a more serious song named Somehow. I still remember the first time I played Somehow for CPM. I played it, the band came into it, then at the end of the song Hynson turned to me and said that he couldn't believe I had written it.
I'm convinced that writing lyrics is not something you can do at any time. You have to go through life first before you can commit it to paper. I had gone through a pretty serious relationship (which I'm actually back in again, thank goodness), finished high school, and after I left for Georgetown, I saw my grandparents pass away. This was when I started working on a solo album.
Everybody who's a musician always thinks about doing a solo album if they're in a group. Why? Because no real group is a dictatorship. Musical groups are probably a good determinant of democracy, because everyone generally has a veto. Eventually, you do want to go off on your own and do your own thing. However, my solo album is still in the workings -- I have too much else on my plate, musically.
CPM was still going strong, but something new was that Greg, like me, was working on a solo album. His, however, was much more advanced than mine. I had the honor (and trust me, it really was one) of co-producing his first album, The Cleansing, with him. He released it at a big party New Year's Eve 1997-98 at his house. It was my first release party, among other things, and it was really special to see something like it come to fruition. Now, though, he's got another one out, called Premonition of the Order, and I even got to play on one track. Fun, fun, fun.
1997 turned into 1998, and all the various sundry musical projects continued. CPM was working on stuff, but we had some problems, too. During the fall semester, we were going to play a show at Hynson's school, Woodberry Forest, but we couldn't because he was working to become a prefect, and it would hurt his chances. I understood, though; this was something important. However, something really great happened right around my birthday in 1998 (notice how things are always around my birthday or the Fourth?) Ireton had been doing these things we called "Open Mics" since I was a senior. In fact, Greg, John and I started a band for them, called Mr. Bigglesworth. We played Guns 'N Roses, other heavy stuff, and generally caused trouble and had a good time. But CPM had never been able to play an open mic, and there was one coming up. Hynson was getting over mononucleosis, and his dad had sent me an email saying that he wouldn't be able to come. However, I got home at 3 pm on that day, and there was a message from Francoise (who, by the way, is our bassist). It said the following: Hynson is home. We're playing the open mic. Get your stuff together. So we played.
The open mic concert was completely different from the Fourth of July. It was a different crowd, we had about an hour before to practice, and we didn't know what to expect. We got up on stage, Hynson introduced us, and I started playing the opening to "Happy." I swear, at that moment, time stood still. It was transcendent: me and my band were playing for people, who actually wanted to hear us. I remember going through the song, and seeing people nodding their heads, smiling, etc. I even saw Greg in the front row give me an approving look during my guitar solo. Then, the song came to an end. People started clapping even before I finished. I hit the last note, and the place went wild. People were yelling, clapping, it was a trip. I remember looking over at Hynson, and just getting this big old grin on my face. We did five other songs that night, and people liked all of them.
Since then, we've recorded a new album, KNOW YOUR ROOTS. We played one other open mic, and we put on another Fourth of July show. Greg and I restarted my old record label, Evolution Records. We've even brought someone new into CPM: my friend John Sudol, playing rhythm guitar. But nothing beats that feeling I had on stage at Bishop Ireton that cool Friday night, March 27, 1998.
Well, that's about all of my musical history, so far. Now that I've bored you to tears with that, there are a few lessons to be learned. The first, and by far most important, is this: If you don't love your music, don't do it. I honestly love what I do. I could see myself not being a musician, but my life would be really boring. Music is not my life, but it's an integral component, because it allows me to express my emotions. I've had bad times, and I've had great times, and I've always been able to channel those through my music. If you can't do that, you don't have the love, and you might as well ought to be programming a computer, for all you're doing.
The second lesson is this: Practice. I said earlier that I never took lessons in guitar. That may be true, but I practiced a lot, especially recently, to get my skills up. My brother practices all the time, and Greg has been known to practice six hours a day. If you don't practice, you'll end up sounding sloppy, bad, and odds are, music won't keep your attention. You have to love it, as I said earlier, to do this, but if you don't do this, you'll spend the rest of your life playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit," a fate worse than death.
The third lesson, and one I've learned most, is: Don't get into music for the money. I've probably "lost" over two thousand dollars in the last four years from playing music. I say "lost" in quotes because I have never considered it a loss; I always got something out of it. If you get into music for the money, that'll become your focus, until the music doesn't matter anymore. If you're not in it for the money, though, you're less likely to "sellout" or turn into Puff Daddy.
The final lesson I can impart out of all this is: Have fun. We at CPM have something called Witty Banter, where I leave the tape running, and we just joke around. It's kept us together, and it makes for a better time. When you're serious about it all the time, the pressure gets up, and it can result in the incident I described earlier when after 20 takes of one song, Greg picked up John's drum set and threw it across his basement. But if you can be a bit lighter, it makes it better.
I've been a rock and roll musician for five years. I've been laughed off stage, I've played to crowds of three, I've gone through absolutely torturous recording sessions, and I've been in fights with fellow musicians. I've also written music that I think will be immortal, made friends I never would have otherwise, and become a completely different person. The sum total? I'm better for it.