My Band Story (part 4)

Our CD (when it actually worked) had some good takes, but people seemed to especially like our "hidden track" at the end. Remember when those were a big deal? I remember scanning every new CD I bought in those days, trying to discover if the band had put a hidden track at the end, and lots of them did. Anyway, we decided to create one too, and it was one of those "hit record and see what happens" moments. The four of us were pretty goofy, fun-loving guys who joked around a lot, so while the tape was recording we just reverted to all the jokes and off-the-wall comments that were normal between us, and it actually turned out to be pretty funny.

After our “tour,” we got fan mail! Sure it was only one person, but we thought that was pretty cool. It was from a young girl that I knew growing up, and she dug our sound, even though she was probably too young to tell if we were any good. She was our biggest fan. She wrote a couple different letters asking about our plans as a band, and telling us we were great. She actually listened to our CD multiple times. We still laugh about that to this day, and I think she is kind of embarrassed about it. She grew up and married a drummer, so now she's his biggest fan. But she should feel proud that she boosted the egos of four college guys who wanted to make it big.

Something we frequently encountered at the shows we played during those years were big promises that ended up being major disappointments, if not flat out lies. I don't know why, but it especially seemed to happen at the Christian venues we'd play at. Some church or coffeehouse would promise us that anywhere from 200-300 kids would show up at our concert, plus we'd get reimbursed for gas or sometimes even paid a stipend. Now we never did any of this for money, because we sure didn't make any and we just loved to play. But when someone promises you some moolah for playing a show for their youth group, it's kind of like icing on the cake, particularly since we were poor college kids. But every time we were promised something like this, it inevitably turned out that somewhere between 5-20 people would actually be there, and then we'd get stiffed on the reimbursement. Usually we got some sob story about how things were a little tight at the moment, then they'd offer us a coupon to Burger King or some cookies instead. Oh, but they would pray big blessings on us before we left and I guess we were supposed to be fine with the whole thing, since we were "serving the Lord" together. Sometimes I wanted to serve them a backhanded slap.

Sometimes we would even get "a word from the Lord" about our band. One guy who was at a show we did at a theater in Indiana told us he had a message from God for us. In fact, he was an angel! We were all very intrigued once he said that (plus, he was an angel with a Yooper accent)! The message was that the Lord was going to bless our band and we were doing good work so we were going to spread our music all over the country. That's quite a nice thing to say to a no-name band that doesn't have a prayer, and even if it's off the wall it can be encouraging. The only problem was, after this guy told us these things and left, Christian leans in and tells us that he was the same guy who was telling people dirty jokes just a few minutes ago, so he probably wasn't an angel. And it turns out that our music didn't get spread all over the country (we couldn't even get it to spread from a CD to a CD player), so he probably wasn't speaking for God.

It wasn't all disappointing though. We had some really great times, too! There was this one dude who was a youth pastor in a suburb of Chicago, and he invited us to play several times. All of our shows there went pretty well, but there was one in particular that we would all probably consider our best show ever. It’s hard to say what was different about that night, but there was some sort of magic in the air because we freakin’ rocked the socks off that place. Energy came from somewhere and we rode it like professional rock stars. All that hard work of practicing and tweaking had somehow converged into a unified moment of transcendence that we all tapped into. We were just one of the openers, too. Actually we ended up feeling kind of bad for the “headliner” that we opened for, because they really sucked and they knew they didn’t hold a candle to our performance. They were this strange combination of music and dancing in spandex that was supposed to give people a worshipful experience, and they kept screwing up their dance parts and playing the wrong music tracks while people awkwardly watched and tried to make them feel like they were still awesome. It finally ended and all these people kept telling us afterward how we rocked it. The headliner band/dance team was actually signed to a record label and the guy who was there from the label talked to Christian about our band, saying he liked our sound. Of course that never materialized into anything, but it still felt good. We even got really great pictures of our band from that night where the light hit just right and the pictures caught us in these great poses that looked totally rock and roll. It was a magical night, and probably the closest any of us would get to feeling like true rock stars.