That Time I Was in a Bunch of Rock Bands
The crossroads of dreams and reality in the world of music and comics
When I was young, say around 9 or 10 years old, if you’d have asked me about my ultimate career choice, it typically came down to two options:
Join the Beatles
Draw comics for Marvel
Both seemed like the best jobs in the world! How could you not like being a Beatle? All the music, the adulation, the fame, and all that came with it. And being a comic artist seemed like one of the cooler ways to spend a working day crafting images and stories of stubborn and flawed superheroes.
Suffice it to say that neither option worked out. There were no openings in the extremely exclusive club of John, Paul, George, and Ringo (although Billy Preston somehow made it in for a couple of songs!), and I had extremely limited talent and skill as a comic artist. I knew that for a fact, even though I spent a ton of my youthful hours listening to rock and roll and making comic books. At one point I signed up for a cartoon correspondence course, in which I would get assignments via mail, do my best to tackle the job, and send it back. After a few weeks, I’d get a response from my teacher, and it was generally bad. I mean, the feedback was encouraging, but my drawing skills were atrocious and there wasn’t much to build hope on.
That all may explain why I ended up in radio: I could still play rock and roll, and paint pictures with words and babbling built around the beats of cool rock songs.
But I still hankered to play live music. After all, I’d spent my entire middle school and high school behind the drums, and loved it. In fact, I was pretty good.
When I found my second radio job in Salem, Oregon at KBZY, I met the boyfriend of the receptionist, Sandra. His name was George and he was a complete long-haired southern California hippie. And he played guitar and wrote songs, which astonished me, in a good way. They are good songs with a good structure, good melodies, and something to say. It wasn’t long before I acquired a secondhand set of drums for $150 and we started jamming together. A year or three later, he and Sandra broke up, and George and I moved in together with a set of rotating roommates. We lived in a huge Spanish-style house with lots of room for a couple of years. We partied, played music at all hours, and slowly built the basis of what would become a handful of lineups and different band names:
Creative Living Council
A Band of Songs
Excuses
Truckload of Kaleidoscopes (a one-time gig, but a memorable name!)
This was the mid-80s. George had moved to Portland with another girlfriend. A month later, after getting let go from my radio job, I followed, hoping to find a job in Portland radio, which I did after a bit.
The bands continued. We did gigs. Not a ton, as we weren’t trying to make a living with the band. George worked at a warehouse, and I had a news director job, so the band was more like a hobby where we got to dream. And it was definitely fun.
Here’s Art Appreciation from Bootleg B-Sides:
Watching George write impressive song after impressive song helped inspire me to start writing songs. I had been playing guitar since I was a teenager, and while I couldn’t play a solo to save the world, I picked up chords easily. With a percussion background and training, it was easy enough to keep the groove and rhythm going. I’d learn songs by playing along with records, which was also easy for me.
Now that George and I had another guitar player or two (George generally played bass), we wanted to record some of our original songs. That led to saving up some bucks and making our way to a recording studio.
Both of these recording projects with Creative Living Council took place in 1990.
Here’s St. Einstein, one of my favorite of George’s tracks:
Frankly, my memories of the recording sessions are not as detailed as I’d like. We had fun, got the songs down, and got out. Studio time wasn’t cheap, and we weren’t flush with cash, so the projects had to be quick by design. But we got them out and released them on cassettes, which was the norm for low-budget band releases in the 80s.
And damn, if they aren’t fun to listen to now and then. As George has said to me, “Oh, yeah, young men feeling their power!” which was indeed true.
George wrote 90% of our original songs, although I snuck one or two in now and then. Here’s one I wrote called I Can’t Stand Still:
Both of our “albums” were recorded in 1990: Bootleg B-Sides in March and Tilted Little Ball in September. George came up with the album titles and directed the whole process, mainly because he had formed the band and written most of the material, including this track from Tilted Little Ball, Party Line Court, where he describes a world in which everyone is online and vote to decide someone’s fate in court. Kind of futuristic looking and maybe not that far-fetched:
I learned a few things through the years of playing in bands. First, I realized that as a drummer, the chances of latching onto a band with a top-notch singer and group of players that were going somewhere were extremely low. We knew and saw a lot of bands with more experience, chops and skill that were trying to do the same thing, and they weren’t getting anywhere. Not too many artists came out of Portland in the 80s and 90s to hit the top of the charts. To name a few, Quarterflash, Nu Shooz, Johnny and the Distractions, and the Dan Reed Network. Some others that made waves include Billy Rancher, the Obituaries, Crazy 8s, Cool’r, and others. Although originally from Georgia before his family moved to Tacoma, Robert Cray also spent a ton of time in Portland before taking his act on the road for several decades. He’s done okay: five Grammys and a world of acclaim in the blues strata.
The second thing I learned was that I was not fond of being a roadie, having to schlep my drums in and out of downtown clubs at wee hours, double-parked, and so on. Not fun. I ended up sticking with radio, and when my first son was born in 1992, it prompted a move from Portland back to Salem to accept a new radio job. It also effectively took me out of any chance of playing in George’s rotating band lineups although I have jammed at his place over the years countless times.
Looking back at these images, I’m reminded of how often we just got our instruments and played songs, either jamming on oldies or rehearsing original songs. So much of our playing was in living rooms and bedrooms or basements, just the two or three or four of us. Sometimes, we’d stuff our ears with earplugs and protection; sometimes, we wouldn’t. Such fun and energy!
Here’s another track from Bootleg B-Sides called Consumer, a swipe at the prevalent consumer culture:
One song George wrote came from something his grandmother told him when he wanted to take out his grandfather’s gun and shoot it at cans and stuff: Devils Live in Guns:
And one more fun track to close out today’s musical performances. It’s Sing to the Machine, George’s look at the electronic side of music and life:
And I still play my own drums, a couple of guitars, and a bass guitar. I continue to write music, but that comes and goes as the mood and opportunities arise. Part of me yearns to play in a band on a regular basis, but I also know that would mean a lot of the things I don’t like about that scene (schlepping drums is a big one), but the chance of finding a band that fits my sensibilities would be difficult; finding a schedule to practice is also dicey, not to mention where that would take place. Yeah, playing in a band is fun for a lot of reasons, but it brings up so many other things that after splitting Portland in 1994, I haven’t been in a band. Just jam sessions.
Do I miss it? Oh, yeah, but we’re presented with choices, and you have to pick a path. And while I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the past and what could have been, it’s often a nice place to visit for a few songs now and then.