My Band Story (part 2)

Our band was called “The DoLoreans,” named after the car in the movie Back to the Future, because one of our band members always liked that name. I never quite figured out what the capital "L" was about (we eventually did away with it). I guess he thought it looked cool. But we were also a bunch of Christians, so we decided we wanted to spiritualize the name and we came up with a strange combination of words in Spanish to make it sound legit. We even had a Bible verse to back it up. I’m not sure why we couldn’t just stick with the car image, because that would have been a lot easier. I guess we thought we would be a more positive, Christian influence if our band name was more spiritual than a car from a movie.

We were all going to college classes, but what we really got excited about was band practice. We were allowed to practice in the multi-purpose room at the college, and we had a few crappy microphones that we'd set up to record ourselves and create demos. The problem was, we had no way to balance any levels on the recordings, we'd just do the best we could beforehand and then whatever came out in the recording was final. Oh man, they were awful sounding and to this day those demos give us all a good laugh. The best parts are when the vocals would intensify during a song and suddenly become so loud on the recording that you couldn't hear anything but a distorted, passionate voice well beyond the appropriate level. Or there were times when the guitar solo turned into a mix of improvisation and mistakes, and made some awful sounding squeals that resemble a dying Chewbacca. Then there's the infamous drum solo, which always goes way too long, and isn't great to anyone but the drummer. However, I did use cowbell in the solo, which counts for something. The bass player and I came up with this slap-bass and drum combo thing that we did during performances to fill time while the guitar players tuned, and it was actually kind of cool because the bass player was good.

During our first spring break, our band went on a small "tour" that we had arranged in the Midwest, but before we went, we wanted to have some CD's to sell. We actually saved up money to make a "real" demo with a guy we had connections to through our friends in the ska band. It was an exciting time! So we got it all set up and arrived at this guy's house who had some old analog recording gear in his basement. He was nearly blind and looked like an 80's fan, with a balding top and long hair on the sides. His house was so packed full of crap that we literally had to walk sideways to get through the living room and down into the basement. Plus his brother lived upstairs, and his brother didn't like all the noise we were making during our recording sessions, so every now and then he would come downstairs right in the middle of a good take, and start yelling and swearing at all of us to keep it down. Then he and our “producer” would get into yelling matches while we sat there awkwardly wondering if we were going to be able to finish our session. You can't make this stuff up.

(at our stop in Clay Center, KS, we visited the zoo)

In order to make CD's, we decided to make a print out for the cover, which involved lyrics and an awful picture of the four of us on the front. We tried to look cool, but sort of looked constipated. We had a photo shoot with a guy that our bass player knew from his hometown, who generously accommodated our rock star poses. So we designed the CD cover on the computer, and then made black and white printouts at Kinko's. We chose black and white because it was way cheaper, but we told ourselves it was also cool and made us look a little retro. We also had to burn the CD's manually on our friend's computer, since we couldn't afford to have them made professionally. It took forever to burn the CD's and cut out the printouts, and we were doing it right up until the very last minute the night before we left on the tour. We actually wore out the CD burner on our friends computer, but he was gracious and said it was old so he didn’t make us pay for it. We even had plastic packaging we had somehow acquired so the CD's looked a little more authentic. Sadly, after all that work, close to half of the CD's we had burned wouldn't play on the average CD player and we ended up having to either refund or burn new copies for a lot of the people who bought them. I'm guessing some of our friends and family decided not to even tell us their CD's didn't work because they didn't want us to feel bad. One of my friends worked for a radio station at the time and said he'd give our songs some airtime, so we were pretty excited about that, but when I checked in with him later, he told us that his CD didn't work either. I guess some things just aren't meant to be.