Excerpt from "Welcome To The Front Row"
Here is an excerpt from the book I'm currently writing about band life called Welcome To The Front Row. This is the first chapter of the book about my start in music and the early bands I was in. Enjoy.
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Band practice had just been cut short. Matt Feugill, the vocalist, was too nervous to sing and stood idly by the wall, staring down at his feet. He held the microphone loosely in his hands but never brought it anywhere near his face. Jimmy Lantagne, the guitarist, disappeared halfway through our set, unannounced, to make a microwave pizza. The bass player, Nate Dyer, and I continued to make attempts at our songs as the rhythm section with much frustration. Jimmy finally returned to the garage and when he picked his guitar back up, all hell broke loose. The songs were still voiceless, with Matt still focused on the floor while the microphone dangled from his fingertips. Jimmy spewed forth a sea of obscenities about our lack of progress. Nate, always the cooler head, tried his best to lay down smooth bass lines and ease the tension. I stayed behind the drum set and watched the chaos unfold. Jimmy’s voice filled the garage. Finally I stood up and screamed “Five minutes! Five minutes! FIVE MINUTES!” That was our band law, our code. If tensions were high, which they often were, then we take five to cool off. That day five minutes were not enough.
Next thing I knew we were all piled in Matt’s mother’s red 94 Mazda on our way to Wal Mart. We were all averting one another’s glances, the car heavy in silence. Matt’s mother Joyce felt it. “I sense some tension in here boys,” she said. No one responded. I knew what everyone was thinking. Jimmy was right, we were going nowhere. This band was always going to be stuck in the same place. Something needed to change. We pulled into the Wal Mart parking lot and got out, making sure to keep a distance between ourselves. It was a hot day and I was thirsty. Luckily, I had a quarter in my pocket, just enough for one of the cheap Wal Mart knockoff sodas. I ran up to one of the soda machines outside, put my quarter in and pressed the button for cola. The machine rumbled and I listened as the can made its way to the bottom. I reached down and grabbed the can, ready to quench my thirst. I was about to pop the top when I read the can and noticed it was diet cola. I couldn’t take anymore. I screamed, “DIET COLA!” and slammed the can into the ground, causing it to rupture and spray soda all over the sidewalk. The other guys found the situation hilarious and burst out laughing. Then, I couldn’t help it and laughed along with them. That day, it wasn’t five minutes we needed to cool our heads; all we needed was a can of diet cola.
I: FROZEN CORPSE
Gold drums. That’s what really started everything. A piece of shit set of golden, sparkly drums. Matt, Jimmy and I all lived on the same street and had grown quite close throughout middle school. Jimmy and I were in the same grade, Matt a year behind us. We all loved heavy music but it wasn’t until Jimmy and I started eighth grade that we actually talked about starting a band. Jimmy already played guitar and Matt and I were both interested in drums. I had briefly learned snare drum in fifth grade, but quit because I quickly grew bored playing just one drum. Obviously only one of us could be the drummer, and though I didn’t mind being the vocalist, I really wanted to be the one behind the kit. Matt ended up getting word from a friend that was selling a drum set for fairly cheap and was going to buy it. After he bought it, Jimmy and I excitedly ran up to his house to see it. We were going to be a real band with a real drum set! We went into his garage and there it was, in all its golden glory, our drum set.
Neither of us knew much about drum hardware or what constituted a drum set, but this thing was hardly a real kit. The bass pedal was broken beyond repair, so right off the bat the bass drum was out of commission. There was no high-hat. There was one crash cymbal, which balanced on a stand without any washers. If you hit the crash too hard, the stand, which jutted up out the side of the bass drum, would fall forward, causing it to slip off and smash to the floor. The snare was dead, and the high and floor toms both had worn out heads. None of us had jobs, so fixing anything wasn’t an option. The set was an utter embarrassment and yet, we loved the thing.
As for guitars, Jimmy had some cheesy knockoff guitar. It was called a Wildcat by some no name brand. He also had a tiny amp that couldn’t even produce distortion. The amp had two inputs, so we went to Radioshack and bought a cheap microphone for vocals. All we needed was a name. We decided on Frozen Corpse.
After school afternoons became devoted to band practice. Under the name Frozen Corpse we only wrote one song, if you can even call it a song. There were no frets involved whatsoever. It was essentially some strumming on the top string and then a note on the bottom string. I played drums on the song. It had to have been the un-heaviest, least talented song ever crafted. One afternoon, as Jimmy and I were really getting into the song, his bottom string snapped. Well, we weren’t about to let that one little string get in the way of our song! He swapped out the note on the high E for the B string. We started the song again until snap! There went the B string. Before the afternoon session ended, his low E broke as well. There we were, a band that now couldn’t even play the one ‘song’ we had. We literally were a frozen corpse.
I had designed the logo in class. I thought it was badass, and so did Matt and Jimmy. Since Jimmy and I had all the same classes, we were always dreaming up different things concerning the band. We sketched out lyric and song ideas and talked in length about our debut album. Before even writing any songs, we decided we wanted to call the album Fire Within. We thought the duality between the band name and album title was cool.
(Frozen Corpse logo)
That Christmas Jimmy got all new gear. His parents got him an ESP Explorer guitar (Jimmy had wanted one because that’s what James Hettfield used), a 350 watt Marshall amp and a Boss Metal Zone distortion pedal. Forget Frozen Corpse. With all this new gear, things had to change. We could now accomplish so much more. Jimmy had a real guitar with a real amp. The band could actually be heavy; we could sound like Deftones and Staind. Though we were stuck with the gold drums for now, Jimmy’s new gear was a game changer.
II: HYBRID MIND
When I saw a flier for the robotics team at school, I had to apply. What twelve year old wouldn’t want to build robots? Space on the team was limited, so you had to be selected to be on the team. Luckily, I made the cut. To my dismay, we were not building actual robots but instead using Legos with computer chips in them that could be programmed. We had to build a vehicle of sorts and save this village from an exploding volcano by making it following a programmed track. I grew bored with the entire project quickly. My friend Nate Dyer was also a member of the team. We had become friends over a mutual interest in video games and Dragon Ball Z. Before I resigned from the team, he and I got talking about music. Nate, more into bands like Less Than Jake and Phish, was interested in learning the bass. I told him about the band and asked if he was interested in joining. He accepted and soon enough got a bass and started taking lessons. Within a few months he was easily the most talented in the band. Now that we had secured a bass player, we needed a new band name.
I couldn’t tell you who came up with it, but we chose Hybrid Mind as our next moniker. I designed the logo for this band as well, opting for a simpler design this time. I’m not sure where the idea came from or how it related to the band name, but it was essentially a pointed Y with an exclamation point in between the space at the top and a little diamond at the bottom.
(L to R: Nate, Matt, Alex, Jimmy)
The drummer/vocalist predicament between Matt and I still existed. I was by no means a good drummer, but I could, at the very least, hold a beat. Matt certainly tried his best, but nature did not intend for him to be a drummer. The only other problem was he was microphone shy. Whenever I was drumming, Matt would just stand there and stare at the mic like it was some foreign object. Other times I would take the mic and Matt would jump on the drum set. Obviously this formula wasn’t going to last forever.
Our first song, “Oxygen”, was an improvement over Frozen Corpse. This time, Jimmy actually used his frets. Jimmy had written the guitar parts and taught them to Nate. I wrote the lyrics about things that are bigger than you can handle, which at that age was pretty much striking up the nerve to talk to a girl. We recorded the song once on my tape recorder, with Matt on drums and me on vocals. I’d be very interested to hear that recording now but the tape is most likely rotting away in the recesses of some dump.
*
I was pacing about my kitchen talking to Jimmy on the phone. We often talked on the phone at night, discussing band plans and getting more extravagant with conceptual ideas of the future. That night he was telling me about his girlfriend troubles. He wanted to break up with her, but he wasn’t sure how to go about doing it. He was afraid of her reaction, afraid of hurting her feelings. “Let’s write a song about it,” I suggested. After another hour of continued pacing and shooting lyrical lines back and forth, we had written the words for a song called “Confused”. We even had riff ideas for it, but never got around to making the song a reality.
Nights like those were common. Jimmy and I shared the same excitement for the band, and our imaginations ran wild without limitations. When he and I were together and we allowed our dream machines to spill out, anything seemed possible. Or, at the very least, we believed our dreams enough so that they seemed possible. We talked about music videos and being on MTV. We planned concerts and tours, album covers and t-shirt designs. We imagined our name on the second stage roster of Ozzfest. We wanted to be rock stars so badly, to be out there touring, playing music professionally, being interviewed in magazines and have our video in the TRL countdown. We wanted our name up there with the likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit. In our minds, all of this was possible with hard work and determination.
We continued to write more songs. Our second song, “Blind Drive”, thrashed harder than “Oxygen” and oozed with a St. Anger Metallica vibe (though that album would not be out for a couple more years). Again, I wrote the lyrics to this song, which dealt with uncertainty about the future. At twelve years old, none of the lyrics had any masked poetic sense to them and instead were very straightforward. Our third song, “Kill The Man”, had a groovy rock feel to it. For our fourth song, we decided to strip things down and write an acoustic song. That had always been one of the goals for Hybrid Mind, to be both soft and heavy, like many of our favorite bands. Jimmy threw some chords together on his acoustic and we penned the song “Miss You (So Far Away)”. I wrote the song for a friend who was moving away (twenty minutes away mind you), which again goes to show where my head was at twelve years old. The last song we wrote under the name Hybrid Mind was “Triangle Sand”. What the fuck does that even mean? I honestly don’t know.
With five songs under our belt, we were itching to finally perform for people. That was always the ultimate goal, the only reason for starting the band, playing shows. We figured the best place for having our first show would be right in Matt’s basement. For the show Matt would play drums and I would do vocals, seeing as I was more comfortable with the mic. Guitarmy (see chapter two) would serve as the opening band and then we would headline. We planned the show for March 16th, 2001. I drew up a flier and we slapped a $1 ticket price on it. That past December we had thrown a Christmas party in Matt’s basement and tons of kids from school came. There was no reason why we couldn’t get that same number of kids, or more even, to show up for this. I can’t recall exactly why, most likely the fact that in all honesty we still weren’t ready, the show never happened. It most likely would have been a disaster, but also something I could look back on now and laugh.
My mind has always been ten steps ahead of me. While I’m trying to finish project A, my mind is already thinking about projects B, C and D. As such, with only five songs completed, I had already gone ahead and written full lyrics for our entire debut album and started planning our sophomore record. The debut self titled album was going to have ten songs on it. I had even done up artwork and a CD booklet, which I had printed out, cut up and put into a CD jewel case. Once the ball started rolling with ideas, it became nearly impossible for me to stop it. That is still the case for me today. My mind is a factory of thoughts and ideas that never stops.
During this creative process, I never stopped to consider how we were going to record a ten song album. Not only were we jobless twelve year olds, but the times were much different. It wasn’t like today where everyone and their neighbor have a home studio and recording a song is as easy as opening Garageband on your Macbook. In 2001, computers weren’t as advanced as they are now, the software and much of the equipment people use today simply didn’t exist. Audio recording wasn’t just something you “picked up” by watching tutorials on Youtube. None of us had a clue where a real studio even was. We had heard stories about bands spending thousands on recordings, even thousands on one song. Who was going to front that bill, our parents? And so the album remained non-existent, the songs forever trapped within the confines of a small garage on Alvanos Dr.
III: THE RED EVOLUTION TOWARDS THE TENTH DIMENSION
In May, near the end of that school year, we had grown tired of the name Hybrid Mind. Once again, we had new ideas on the direction the band should take and the name didn’t excite us anymore. I believe it was Nate that came up with our next name, Red Evolution. The name stuck for a little while as we continued to jam. Soon, that name also fell under scrutiny. We were afraid Red Evolution sounded too communist and we didn’t want anyone thinking we were a political band pushing an agenda. Unsure of what to call the band, we floated for a while in limbo between Hybrid Mind and Red Evolution.
*
“We have to kick Matt out of the band,” Jimmy said to me one afternoon. “He’s slowing us down and we are going nowhere. He doesn’t practice or anything. All he cares about is his girlfriend.” I didn’t know how to respond at first. Matt was one of my best friends. How was I supposed to kick my best friend out of the band? The band which, not only did we practice at his house, but he had supplied the drum set to? I felt sick. I hated the idea of kicking Matt out of the band and forever altering our friendship. Even worse, I hated the fact that I agreed with Jimmy and that deep down, now that this dilemma had been brought out into the open, there ultimately was only one solution.
Jimmy, Nate and I talked things over. There were so many factors to consider. Mostly, I was concerned with losing a good friend and doing irreversible damage. But also, we would be losing our jam space and our drum set. We didn’t know anyone else that owned a drum set or anyone that played drums. However, when it came down to the future of the band, we decided that Matt had to be let go.
The professional and courteous thing to do would have been to talk with him face to face, man to man. That is what we should have done. Instead, we went to his girlfriend and blamed her for Matt’s shortcomings in the band. We told her she had turned Matt into a love slave and she had cost him his place in the band. Of course it didn’t take long for her to run and tell Matt about it. I felt awful about the entire thing. That afternoon I got off the bus and saw Matt walking towards his house. I tried to get him to stop and talk to me but he rushed past without even a glance.
That night I went out to eat with my family and told them about kicking Matt out of the band. “You what!?” my mother exclaimed. “Do you realize you just lost your best friend?” It was all too much for me and I started crying. My stomach punched itself and I pushed my plate away. What had I done? Did I really just lose my best friend?
*
Eventually things healed between us and Matt. School was over and Jimmy and I would be starting high school in a few months. We now jammed at Jimmy’s house, though we hadn’t accomplished much since kicking Matt out. Things felt old and uninspired, the songs were devoid of life. We needed something to make us feel again, to motivate us, something that would light the fire within us once more. We were too young to just give up.
Nate and Jimmy went to see Green Day that summer and it changed them. I remember their faces when they got back from the concert. Jimmy beamed with excitement and screamed, “Alex! I’m a punk fan now!” It was with those words that a new direction came into view. We decided to completely abandon our rock/metal roots and start anew as a punk band. Jimmy quickly got to work writing songs. It was, in a way, easier to write punk songs than our older material. Nate was overjoyed to be playing songs more akin to his musical taste. For me however, punk was something totally new. I had never delved into the back catalog of The Offspring or Operation Ivy, but I was willing to give it a shot. And so, with a complete musical makeover and a renewed vigor, we became The Tenth Dimension.
*
Louie’s Music had just opened in Haverhill, right next to the Comic Book Palace on Primrose St. Nate and I noticed it one afternoon walking home from school. I was going to be the drummer for The Tenth Dimension and had started looking for a drum set of my own. Now that Matt was over being kicked out of the band, he let me use the gold drums until I found a set of my own. When we saw Louie’s Music, I was stoked to see what he had for drums. The store still wasn’t open yet, but we vowed to return that weekend.
That Saturday we had our usual jam session at Jimmy’s house. Before we headed down to Louie’s Music, we whipped together a flier looking for a vocalist that we hoped to hang in the store. When we arrived the store still wasn’t open but the owner noticed us outside and let us in. He was a nice guy, short and stocky, and happened to be a drummer himself. I told him I was looking to buy a kit and he started pulling out everything he had and gave me prices. The guy really knew his stuff. We told him about our band and our flier and he told us he would hang it up. We went back to Louie’s Music a couple more times and always ended up shooting the shit with him. I never did buy a drum set, or anything from the store. By the end of the year, Louie’s Music had closed up shop.
When I finally bought a drum set from Daddy’s Junky Music, The Tenth Dimension had completely fizzled out. We had all simply grown tired. Looking back, we had wasted the entire year and had nothing to show for it. We had changed our name four times and changed our musical style. We had kicked out a member. At the end of it all, we only had a few songs for The Tenth Dimension and no drive to continue. It was a vicious cycle that showed no signs of ending. Eventually Nate stopped showing up to practice and Jimmy and I didn’t bother to chase him down. It was time to throw in the towel.
With my new drum set, one that had a working high hat and bass drum pedal, I began to realize just how difficult it is to learn the drums. I had grown so accustomed to the gold drums that trying to now incorporate these new pieces was beyond my capabilities. In a bout of frustration I sold my kit to my uncle, who had played drums previously during his stint in the marines. With that money I bought a guitar and an amp, which I found much easier to learn.
IV: EPILOGUE
Jimmy and I were walking around the block. The nights were still warm but summer was coming to a close. In a few weeks we were going to be in high school. We talked about what it might be like, our hopes and fears, how much we were going to change over the next four years. We wondered what kinds of people we would meet, what new friends we would make and how our friendship would sustain itself. Would we find new clicks and drift away? Would high school be the death of everything we know?
After lapping the block numerous times, we stopped in Jimmy’s drive way. “This isn’t the end,” he said. “There’s so many new people in high school, there’s bound to be new people to jam with.”
“You’re right,” I said. “There has to be someone.”
“Even if we aren’t in a band together, we will find our place.”
I nodded and waved goodbye. As I walked back to my house I thought of all the potential people I might meet in high school. Middle school had hundreds of kids, but in high school there was going to be thousands. It was simple statistics that someone out of those thousands would be fit to jam with. My chest pounded with excitement over the changes that would occur in the coming weeks. Once in my yard, I sat on the swing and watched the sun go down.