Going to high school in a rural community like Sundance, WY has many advantages, but one of the disadvantages is the extremely limited number of people to play music with. So, when Jason (Lanning) approached me to play guitar for a song he had written I jumped at the chance. We performed the song, "Never Had This Feelin," at the local Stars of Tomorrow contest during my junior year of high school ('95), and went on to the state competition. We lost, but everyone loved the song, so we wrote more.
By that summer we had performed as "Stork and Friends" for a few events at the high school with a variety of sit-in players. We decided to find a real drummer because Jason's attempts were sub-par. Enter Josh Tufte. I had gone to church with Josh since I was 5. We started practicing in the church because that was where there were drums, but later had to move to an apartment above Higbee's Restaurant. After our last practice at the church we were sitting at McDonald's trying to come up with a band name and Jason thought of "Allergic."
Once we had put together about twenty songs, we decided to record them so that we could copyright the songs and give them away for publicity. The project, "Hey Fever" was recorded in Randy Crain's basement studio in Upton, WY 40 miles south of Sundance during the winter of '95-'96. Jason and I drove to Upton in bad weather all winter. His mom had a fit the night we went when the road was closed.
Hey Fever was done by New Year's ('97), and we performed in Jason's Grandma's bar, The Dime Horshoe in Sundance WY, and in Deadwood, SD. After that, we were basically done performing live. Jason worked for a year while I finished high school, but his goal was to go to California to try to make it big. By the end of my high school career, my parents talked me into going to college, so we recorded a live demo album called "This Time" to get our new songs on tape and went our separate ways.
I went to Webster University in St. Louis for a year and studied Audio Production. Josh lived at home and worked, and Jason moved to California. Over the course of the year, Jason recorded an album also named "This Time" and he formed a new band: "The Jason Kirk Band." Josh and I went out to join him in Oct.'98, but decided not to stay because we didn't fit in LA.
We moved home and formed a new band called "Room 212" with my brother Tim. We released our first album in December of 1999 and played some gigs in between work and school.
In March of 2001 we finished up a second album called "Vacancies" that we consider much better than the first. The album is professionally pressed and packaged. Room 212 hopes that people will buy it because we're in a bit of debt over the deal.