My Band Story (part 3)

When we finally got finished with the recording, we had finished tracks for 18 songs and spent way more time and money than we had originally planned. Granted, 18 songs is a lot and we should have narrowed it down to save money and do a better job on the best songs. But we also kind of felt shafted. The guy who did the recording liked to talk... A LOT. So in between takes he would tell stories and jokes and rack up a lot of time, which we were paying for. So after the whole thing was done, we got the bill and decided we were going to have a little talk with our "producer" before we left on the tour. For some reason we decided to do this the day we were leaving for the tour. I guess we thought it would be a quick chat and he'd understand our point of view. Had we not learned from our recording sessions that this guy liked to talk a lot? We ended up staying there at his house talking about God knows what, and finally reaching a compromise. Andy, our bass player, had gotten pretty pissed off early on in the conversation and went out to wait in the vehicle while the rest of us reached an agreement that gave us a little more money for the road.

So we finally got onto the road so we could begin our tour, leaving over three hours later than planned and with a little more money in our pockets than we started with. We got onto I-94 heading out of Chicago, when the most ridiculous snow storm hit and backed up traffic for miles. It took a full two hours to get out of the city and on our way. A couple of us took turns driving as we got late into the night. Andy had awesome parents who supported us the whole way and even let us use their minivan for the tour. I remember waking up at one point, probably around 2:30am, and I looked over at Andy as he drove. His eyes were bug-eyed and fixated on the road as he was white-knuckling the steering wheel. Then I looked out the window and noticed how fast we were going. Cement columns and pillars were flying by on either side as we flew through downtown Kansas City. Overpasses were going by too quickly to count. I was too scared to look at the speedometer, so I just rolled back over and tried to sleep as I prayed to God that we didn't all die. We safely arrived at my parents' house somewhere around 5am and crashed for a few hours of sleep. But my dad had promised some acquaintance of his that we could help move furniture the next morning, not realizing of course that we would arrive so late. So we ended up having a really short night, but we were in the town of our first show of the tour and we were pretty pumped.

The tour involved performing in a few of our hometowns, which we were all really excited about because we were hoping to impress all of our hometown family and friends with our rockin' band. The first show was at my home church, and I had asked the youth pastor if we could get reimbursed for gas to help cover costs, to which I received a flat “No.” Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying. The first show went pretty good-- I guess it's not all that hard to impress a bunch of teenagers in youth groups who can't really tell yet if you're good, as long as you're loud and have decent stage presence. Plus, two of the guys in our band, Pete and Christian, were brothers and most girls found them attractive, so that helped. They shared lead vocals and played guitar and both got pretty wild during shows, which increased the overall energy. All of the adults that were there tolerated us, and some even said nice things. My dad bought our CD and asked us to sign it, which was a pretty big ego boost at the time. Most of the youth group kids wanted us to sign our CD’s too, so that was kind of surreal giving autographs like we were someone famous. Little did they know that most of their newly bought CD's wouldn't work in their CD players.

(from the inside of our CD cover)

On our way out to western Kansas, where we would play in two different towns, we took two vehicles because of some travel and lodging arrangements that had been previously made, which required another vehicle. I was driving the second vehicle, and Andy was driving the first vehicle. I guess Andy thought we were still in Kansas City or something, because man did he drive fast! I had the pedal to the metal in our little Oldsmobile just trying to keep up so I wouldn’t lose him, and of course he had the directions to where we were going. These were the days before Map Quest and Google and cell phones, so I had to stay close. Well, I just knew we were going to get pulled over, and sure enough a highway patrol car slowly creeps up behind me before I realize it, so there’s no reason to try to slow down and act like I wasn’t speeding. What surprised me was when the officer began to speed up and pull around me to pass! I thought maybe I was going to get out of a ticket! After all, he really should go get the leader who was going faster than me anyway, and it was his fault that I was speeding. I didn’t want to go that fast. So as the officer passed me, I nervously looked over at him, and he looked mad. But he didn’t look at me at all! He just looked straight ahead with a scowl on his face, lifted his right arm up and made a very deliberate pointing motion to the side of the road as if to signal to me, “Pull over!” I took the hint and pulled over, while he sped up ahead, turned on his lights, and pulled Andy over too! Then he gave us both tickets! I don’t even know if that’s legal, but he nailed both of us. And they were expensive tickets! I didn’t know he could actually do that, but I wasn’t going to question him. I was kind of mad at Andy after that, but he didn’t even slow down. He just kept driving like a crazy person. Somehow we all made it to the next town where we would prepare for our next show.

We played in a rented out store front for a youth group, and we all thought it went great, until the leader told us we weren't invited back because he didn't like one of the songs we played. It was a song about banging your head to loud music, and that was apparently inappropriate. We took turns discussing how stupid that was, and then Christian eventually called the leader and told him it was stupid. The kids loved us, but that didn’t matter. We also played a show in Pete and Christian's hometown, which we were all really excited about because we thought for sure we'd get a big crowd of adoring fans. The people in charge of setting it up even rented out the school gymnasium and the poor janitor had set up a couple hundred chairs in front of the big ol' stage where we were set up to play. You know how many people showed up? Six. And that included our two roadie friends who came along. We still had fun performing on that stage, and the six people watching us really got into it. Pete really took advantage of the room on stage and started skipping back and forth across it. Christian had gotten pretty excited during the opening song and jumped really high while strumming the chords. Unfortunately, he landed on the stand that was holding Andy's other bass guitar, and it came toppling down on the hard floor. I remember glancing over at Andy, who closed his eyes and just shook his head. The show went on and we had fun. But we kind of felt bad for that poor janitor who set up all those chairs for nothing. Then he had to take them all down again.