There weren’t any delusions about what was next. We lived in a small city in Western Massachusetts and we were fourteen. I think there was one all-ages club in our town that put on local bands, but we had no idea how to get from Ryan’s basement to that stage.
This was circa 1998/1999 when Green Day was the hottest shit around, Nimrod was my latest musical Bible, and while brainstorming band names we thought, instead of Green it’ll be Blue (but we’d spell it “Blew” in reference to the opening track on Nirvana’s Bleach, the same track I presented in an eighth-grade music class assignment to explain “grunge”). And instead of a Day it will be an Hour. It’s the kind of clever that only fourteen-year-olds can aspire to, and Blew Hour was born.
We practiced all the time at Ryan’s, our lead guitarist’s house. His dad was a professional musician who idolized Stevie Ray Vaughan and played in blues bar bands across New England, so by default, Ryan was the one who had the extra gear, or at least, could get it. Blew Hour only played one real show, in the dead of New England winter at my high school’s annual talent showcase. We were freshmen and my favorite teacher, our English teacher, (she let me use Nirvana’s “Milk It” in a project meant to learn about iambic pentameter, so I knew she was cool), was heading up the audition process.
We auditioned after school, just me, Ryan, our new friend and bass player Jeff, a crash cymbal, and a microphone. We went in with a pitiful rendition of Nirvana’s “Polly,” one of the band’s most dynamic—and easiest to learn—songs. We went for the stripped-down version rather than the punk-infused New Wave rendition, considering we hadn’t yet recruited Brandon, our future drummer (who was actually an eighth-grader—at the time, the middle schools were undergoing massive renovations so the eighth-graders wound up attending our high school. I’m sure this made for some wild formative experiences, in retrospect).
So Ryan traded in his guitar to sing and to hit the cymbal at the start of each new chorus, the only percussion that version of the song requires. It was probably very bad, but I have to imagine our teacher just appreciated that we were freshmen putting ourselves out there, and we were thrilled to learn we got in. I remember reading the post on the school bulletin board and riding high the rest of the day,
And so the hunt for a drummer and the desire to become the school’s greatest band began. Somehow Brandon joined our ranks and Blew Hour was complete. But what would we play? Suggestions were thrown around; Brandon was a hardcore Korn-kid (this was the late ’90s, remember) and we often dicked around playing “Blind” at his request, while Jeff was the only truly talented musician among us and wanted to do something more in the classic rock vein where he could really noodle.
Ryan and me, however, were Nirvana die-hards and knew we had to pay homage to the end-all-be-all of music (this opinion of Nirvana has not changed). We landed on “Aneurysm,” the fan-favorite B-side that most people knew from the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” single or as the closer on Incesticide. More recently, it had been the single released to promote the posthumous live record From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah.
There were plenty of different renditions of the song, even back then, with slight variations on each—sometimes the build to the main riff had a flanger effect on it, sometimes not, sometimes there were backup vocals during the chorus and sometimes not, sometimes Kurt screamed after the build-up to the outro and sometimes not—but we decided we wanted to be as close to the live version we heard on Muddy Banks as possible. (Currently, my favorite version is probably from Live at Reading, but that wasn’t really available at the time beyond some shitty cassette tape bootlegs).
And practice happened often, usually running through favorites from Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine, probably making the neighbors cause a run on earplugs from the nearby variety store. Ryan’s mom was always exceptionally cool about the racket, probably just happy that we weren’t sitting in front of the TV playing video games like usual.
At some point, it was decided that I would shift to vocals and rhythm guitar, and Ryan, the superior guitarist, would play lead. He had a wicked cream-colored Fender Jaguar that begged for shredding with its sharp sound and noteworthy list of guitarists (including, not surprisingly, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix) more than my dad’s Gibson Melody Maker, which never felt like a rock-n-roll guitar to me. This was, of course, dumb, and I’ve since come to love and appreciate the Melody Maker. Both Joan Jett and Slash have used Melody Makers, and there are few people in the world more rock-n-roll than them.
When the musical chairs were over, the Blew Hour that had auditioned was no longer the Blew Hour who would perform, and that was exciting because that audition sucked.
To this day, there is no rush of adrenaline I can remember more vividly than stepping onto our high school’s auditorium stage for the first day of soundcheck. Being out there on a giant stage was completely riveting to me—I always wanted to be one of the Drama kids but never had the guts—even though the seats were empty. Rushing through our rough rendition of “Aneurysm” with the school-provided Marshall stacks and a full bench of guitar pedals made me feel like I was a teenaged Silverchair performing on SNL.
And then the big night came, where we were paired with another band who were covering Limp Bizkit’s version of George Michael’s “Faith” (again, late ’90s), and despite my then-girlfriend not coming to the show (we broke up soon after when she dumped me on the day of a Foo Fighters show), it was absolutely thrilling. The student stage managers telling us where to wait, when to be ready, having to rush out on stage to plug in and prepare. It was like we were being treated as professionals and were expected to hit our marks. Like that scene in That Thing You Do! where The Wonders are playing the state fair for the first time.
The performance itself was, probably, terrible. I know I fucked up hitting my distortion pedal right before the climactic outro, but I remember it as the greatest moment in my life at that time, like I was Bill and/or Ted giving their history presentation at the end of Excellent Adventure. I don’t think I was ever really an “outsider” in the hierarchy of high school, certainly not in middle school, but it still felt like I was blossoming a new identity in front of my classmates. Shedding the skin of the junior high version of myself that wore baseball caps and American Eagle t-shirts and revealing the alternative grunger kid who secretly lurked within. I vividly remember my seventh-grade science teacher being astounded at our talent (again, more likely, our commitment to putting ourselves out there), approaching me after the show was over.
“Esposito,” he called to me, shaking me out of whatever conversation I was happening. He extended his hand and I shook it. “Didn’t know you had it in you, great job.”
It was, frankly, intoxicating. We rode to an afterparty in the back of a friend’s mom’s mini-van, blaring Nirvana (of course) all the way there and singing at the top of our lungs, reveling in our debut. As most bands do when you’re freshmen in high school, Blew Hour broke up soon after.
But I kept jamming with Jeff, and eventually, we became another band with a friend of his named Al, called The Enemy Citizens. I was no longer the frontman. I moved happily out of the limelight as we played Rage Against the Machine and Screeching Weasel covers, playing high school parties (our friend Jen had Cool Parents, the same ones who drove us to the afterparty following the talent show, and would frequently host ragers—the innocent teenager kind with a never-ending stream of Pepsi and gobs of candy—with a rotating bill of bands set up in the garage) and being content just hanging out. We certainly weren’t memorable, but I have a lot of fond memories of that time, meeting new people who didn’t go to my school, young musicians who were as serious about making music as I was at that age, without having to justify or rationalize it.
That band broke up too, and Jeff and I went through a series of other short-lived groups with names like Unsound and Scrag, the latter of whom played a family BBQ on my parents’ deck to quite a few middle-aged and gracious attendees. Soon, it was a year after Blew Hour’s debut and the talent show was coming up once more. Jeff and I didn’t have a drummer, so he moved behind the kit (though a talented musician, this was flying too close to the sun) and Ryan came back to take over bass. We dragged my starter drum kit and amps to the auditions after school in the back of my dad’s pick-up truck and ripped through a terrible original I had written that I can’t for the life of me recall the title of, but it was undoubtedly an anthem for my generation. We didn’t get in. Brutal.
After that devastating blow, I bounced around trying to jam with different folks, mostly people who went to other schools. There was a local musicians board in the big instrument shop in town, and I’d grab numbers of people who were looking for people to play with, or leave notes of my own and hope somebody called (“Let ‘em riot. We’re Sonic Fucking Death Monkey!”). Usually, those didn’t last more than a jam session or two.
But eventually, I wound up in a group I joined through a drummer named Andrew that I met through Jeff, who was led by a talented older guy named Tom (older when you’re sixteen is like twenty-two), who I’m pretty sure was trying to hide a drinking problem, had a kid, and lived in a house that smelled like cat shit. But we spent plenty of school nights and weekends together, working out a Weezer cover that he said would get us onto one of those compilation tribute albums (I know, but I’ve actually found some of my favorite bands through those things, so don’t scoff). That never came to fruition, naturally, but eventually, this guy and I formed a little side hustle with him on drums, me as frontman. I was now in my junior year of high school, and auditions for the talent show were once again coming around.
Learning from the mistakes of the year previous, I borrowed my parents’ video camera and set up a tripod to film us in Tom’s rehearsal space. Straight to VHS, we wouldn’t have to lug all our shit to the high school auditorium only to not make the cut, breaking a sweat for nothing. We taped two songs, again, both of them Nirvana tunes: “Sliver,” probably one their poppiest tracks, and “Scentless Apprentice,” probably their most inaccessible one save for the Nevermind ‘secret song’ “Endless, Nameless.” I gave this tape to the same English teacher, confident that this wouldn’t be a replay of sophomore year. I knew that the performance on the tape was sharper and far more passionate than the prior year’s audition. I was more confident as a frontperson. I was probably a better guitar player than I used to be. And wouldn’t you know it? We got in.
I was so pumped, and I blared those songs in my truck stereo on the drive home from school after getting the news. I tried calling Tom to tell him the good news; it’d been a couple of weeks since we made the tape. He didn’t answer that night, or any night after that. I don’t think I ever saw him again, and I still have no idea what happened to him. Needless to say, I did not perform at the talent show that year. Two years on, it was looking like I was a one-hit-wonder.
I still jammed with Andrew, the guy who had introduced me and Tom in the first place, but more as friends hanging out than as an actual band. I’m sure there were more jams resulting from classified ads, but nothing that stuck. I wouldn’t play in a real band again until college, but miraculously, I did wind up playing the talent show again my senior year.
By this time, I was working at a newly opened Best Buy in the mall, where I happened to work with one of my best friends, Erik, and one of his close friends from elementary school, Josh, who went to a different high school and who I always secretly hated because I saw him as a threat to mine and Erik’s friendship. But then we started working together and I was even more secretly displeased that I liked him a lot. We had a ton of fun at work, and somehow the talent show came up one day during a break, and I remembered that Josh was known for being a pretty good singer.
So we decided to get together and practice, just me and him. I brought an acoustic guitar and we played some Incubus ballad that I didn’t like then and don’t like now, but it sounded pretty good and we had fun. So, back to the English teacher’s class I went, asking if it was okay if someone from another school was part of the talent show because he was in my “band.” (I must have blocked the prior year from memory since you’ll recall that Tom was not even in high school let alone a member of mine). To my shock and delight, she stopped me before I even opened my mouth. “You don’t have to pitch me,” she said. “You’ve got a spot if you want it.”
“Don’t we need to audition?” I was floored. I like to imagine this is what I said for narrative clarity, but I’m sure it was closer to “Wait, really?” or “Huh?”
She said, “Just make sure you don’t bail this year, okay?” Then she sent me on my way.
Thankfully, Josh didn’t ghost me and we practiced some more, finally debuting at the talent show to great results. More compliments from more supportive adults fed my desperate need for validation (one Cool Mom told us, unprompted, “You guys sounded great!” and I rode that wave for a week), and we never played together again.
By this point, I was about to go to college and start “real life,” or as real as I thought it could be when I was eighteen, and I brought my guitars with me. At this point is when I really started to work on my own stuff. I’d been writing my own songs in high school, but they were all bad imitations of Jim Morrison and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Of course, I would never play these for anybody, and wouldn’t let anyone hear an original tune for a few years. I’d also become more interested in playing drums in a band.
This was around the same time I’d had an epiphany that Kurt Cobain was no longer my I-wanna-be-like-him idol, but rather it was Dave Grohl. Not only was Dave the definitive drummer of the greatest band to ever exist, Foo Fighters let him showcase his stature as a songwriter and charisma as a frontman, all while part-timing in bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Killing Joke. He was a true wizard with a great sense of humor, and I truly, deeply admired him. Still do. (Of his early touring days before Nirvana’s massive success: “Cigarettes were cheap and Taco Bell was everywhere.”) It’s definitely cooler to burn out than to fade away, but if you faded away with a huge body of work behind you, then that’s not so bad, right?
I’d gotten a drum kit early on in high school (the same one we lugged to the ill-fated audition sophomore year), thanks to my oldest sister and her husband, who was a wicked jazz drummer that had been giving me paradiddle exercises to practice on pillows since I was in the single-digits. It was an entry-level kit that I could never quite tune to my liking and had cymbals that cracked way too easily, but it did just fine for jamming with my headphones strapped on and Discman stuffed in my pocket. You’ll remember Discmen weren’t the smoothest CD-playing machines, and having it in your pocket as you banged on drums certainly didn’t improve the situation. But still, it was fun and it was loud, and my parents never complained. I’d never played them as part of a band, other than some brief instrument switching during practices with Jeff, but in college, I decided that should change.
In my sophomore year, I discovered Craigslist as a 21st-century version of the old bulletin board in the music shop back home. Soon enough, I found a very talented, introverted weirdo named George who loved The Beatles and wrote incredible hooks. To this day, I have recordings from some of our later sessions that he considered garbage and I still consider incredible. Anyway, soon enough we were meeting up regularly at a studio in Manhattan to practice for hours, almost entirely original music. We recruited a bass player named Micah, still one of the coolest and most chill dudes I’ve ever met (I think he has a clothing line now), and we played. A lot.
But George was terrified of playing in front of people and we never played a real show, however I recall one time we invited a bunch of friends to the studio for an impromptu party/show. In fact, Ryan (of Blew Hour fame) was visiting me at college and was there for this one-off showcase. I think I even made them play “Aneurysm” in his honor. We were pretty tight playing together, and it was really the first time I’d had a band in which all the members felt as committed as I did (besides the no-live-shows-yet thing).
We wound up taking a trip from the city back to my hometown for a long weekend, because I’d found an audio engineering student who lived in Albany, under an hour from my parents’ house, that was recording bands dirt cheap to build his portfolio. So we cut four tracks that weekend, the first time I’d ever been in a “professional” studio setup, and it was a blast. When we had the final tracks we still didn’t have a band name, but we desperately wanted to put them online (MySpace Music was just coming into its own) and so we settled on The Blisters, which George hated and I kinda liked. Micah was indifferent, and to be fair to George, it is a bad name. Incredibly, the songs are still online.
In general, I find when I’m being productive in one part of my life, it spills into other parts and the creative juices flow a little more freely. I don’t know if there’s anything scientific to that or if it’s just a coincidence. But during The Blisters era—going into the city to practice, going to George’s mom’s house in Queens to write new songs—I found myself writing a lot of music on my own. My best friend/college roommate Tom and I would blast music in our dorm room and jam together, me on guitar, him on bass, usually ignoring whatever else our group of friends wanted to do that night. We called our little group R0flC0pt3r.
Or I’d privately record lo-fi acoustic demos through my computer either in my dorm room (only if my roommates weren’t around) or in my parents’ basement when I was home on a break or for a long weekend. I think there were a couple that I brought to The Blisters and we dicked around with a little, but mostly I kept them to myself and a very close circle of friends. I did, however, put them online (MySpace and SoundClick) for strangers to listen to.
My junior year of college I started working at Starbucks. This is still one of the best jobs I’ve ever had in my life, even though I was completely miserable. Go figure. As many of you probably know, if you’re looking for a group of relatable people with artistic aspirations beyond whatever bullshit is directly in front of them, work at a coffee shop. And if you want to build character, work at the busiest Starbucks on Long Island with some of the most challenging clientele. The kind of place where a snooty regular named Meryl asked for José not to make her extra dry cappuccino because, and I quote, “he didn’t do it right.” Fuck off, Meryl.
I got pretty tight with my Starbucks crew (we’ve mostly stayed in touch passively through Instagram and Facebook, and I often wish we’d stayed closer), and we used to regularly frequent a Wantagh coffee shop called The Cup. It was located just off Sunrise Highway, nestled near an overpass of the Long Island Railroad, and had great coffee and desserts. Most importantly, every Wednesday they had an open mic, where you could show up around seven and put your name on the list. The earlier you arrived, the better chance you had at a prime spot—if I had the option, I would always go somewhere in the middle—not too early that nobody was there but not too late that people were ready to leave. The stage was at the front of the store and was freezing cold during the winter with its pane glass windows and constantly revolving door that blew the cold air directly onto the act that was on stage.
There were regulars who could be counted on to be there week after week, including the host with real Meg White vibes who’d sing a few haunting acoustic tunes to get things started; the buff guy with a resplendent Puka shell necklace collection who sang passionate Sublime covers and originals that seemed designed to channel the spirit of Bradley Nowell himself; there was an oddball hipster duo who used a handsaw as an instrument; and there was the one stand-up comedian who showed up every so often to polish new material even though everybody else was there for music.
You’d get to play three songs, the choices of which I’d toil over all week, changing them up to the last minute, even as I hid in my car to pound Heinekiens to loosen up before the show (a habit that would come to haunt me years later). There was also a nearby Irish pub called Mulcahy’s that had ten cent wings and Miller High Life for two dollars on Wednesday nights, which was a frequent stop for us as well—I’d pop into The Cup to put my name down and then we’d each spend our week’s tip money on cheap beer and wings.
I typically played original songs, which were claimed to be well-received, though I’d sometimes throw in covers of songs I knew specific attendees would like, including “Welcome to the Machine” by Pink Floyd, “Mad World” by Tears for Fears (I once made a comment about how no one should call it “that song from Donnie Darko” and the Meg White Host said it was by Gary Jules and I had to correct her because I just couldn’t keep my inner Rob Gordon from popping out).
One cover that stands out to me is that of “Next Year” from the Foo Fighters’ third album, which I deliberately worked on for two weeks in honor of a Starbucks co-worker who was about to leave to study abroad for the semester. He was in another room when my turn came to sing it and missed the whole thing. I stopped going to open mics regularly after that, but that same co-worker later gave me a set of Incredible Hulk pint glasses that I still use, so I forgive you, Greg.
The end of college and the beginning of living on my own is a blur for various reasons, but through all that time I was writing music and sharing it on the internet, while still jamming on occasion with George even after The Blisters had fizzled out. But eventually, those jams faded away too. I’m realizing in retrospect that this time was also one of the loneliest times in my life, and I think maybe no longer having a regular musical outlet was a large part of that.
But soon after I had gotten my first post-college “real” job (making videos about wrestling toys, which I did with Tom of R0flC0pt3r fame), and was feeling motivated by my first real forward momentum in adult life. At the time, I was living in deep Suffolk County on Long Island, the middle of nowhere, especially for a twenty-two-year-old (Nirvana was over by the time Dave Grohl was 24, so I was dangerously close to being a do-nothing failure by this measure), and was on the hunt for a more lively social scene in Brooklyn. Once again working through Craigslist, I hooked up with a chain-smoking metal dude named James, who had a ton of heavy-ass songs and killer riffs and lived in an overcrowded Bushwick loft where bands could play in the middle of the night and no one would care.
We hit it off immediately through a shared love of Nirvana (one of our earliest bonding moments was jamming to the deep catalog rarities “Oh, the Guilt” and “Talk to Me”) and began practicing regularly at The Sweatshop, a subterranean shithole with graffiti all over its walls but with decent equipment in each of its rehearsal studios. We spent the befores and afters of practice drinking and eating tacos at the nearby Union Pool, while pounding tallboys at practice working out new songs, me behind the drums and James on guitar and vocals.
I recruited a friend from the Starbucks crew named Kyle—he was a talented bass player but all around disinterested in really being a full-fledged member of the band, I think—and we got a set together pretty quickly. For a while, I was still driving in from Suffolk County with work in the morning, so the nights where I’d drank too much to make it home safely, I’d crash in James’ sweatbox of a loft.
Eventually, Kyle exited the band and a younger, hilarious stoner dude named Carlos joined us on bass. On the way back from a show at Jones Beach (Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction), James suggested the band name Hounds Basket, an inside joke that I can’t remember the origin of, and it stuck.
Our first big performance came at one of the infamous Loftapalooza shows, a rowdy punk show that was a fire marshall’s worst nightmare/wet dream, held in James’ loft where seemingly the entirety of the Bushwick/Williamsburg/Greenpoint indie scene showed up to party and listen to the local bands. These shows didn’t start until ten p.m., and even as a younger person, took the piss out of you. But the first one was undoubtedly one of the best. It was the middle of a New York summer with no air conditioning, people absolutely soaked but still moshing and having a good time, the floor rumbling under our feet. I recruited some of the guys who worked in the warehouse at my job, and they all came and cut loose.
There were many more Loftapalooza shows after that one, of varying stages of wildness, all of them loud with ringing feedback and drenched with sweat. I even managed to work in the now obligatory cover of “Aneurysm,” oddly one of the only video remnants left lingering on the internet from my time with the band. You’ll see Tom (again, of R0flC0pt3r fame) in the center of the pit.
About a year after Hounds Basket formed, we hooked up with an audio engineer named Jeremy, a former pet-sitting client of my ex-girlfriend, where we hunkered down for a long weekend of recording and cut the first Hounds Basket EP. It was the most fun, still, I’ve ever had making music. Hearing it all come together was even better than that time with The Blisters, and Jeremy was more involved in making suggestions and tweaks that really helped the songs. You can listen to the album on BandCamp, along with the band’s other releases from after I left (more on that soon).
At some point, Carlos decided to leave New York altogether and we recruited Jesse, a graphic designer who was a little older and more experienced, and an absolute shredder. Armed with our seven-track EP, we started getting bookings around Brooklyn and Manhattan, usually paired up with more established bands on metal nights at places like The Trash Bar, Fontana’s, Bar East, Rockstar Bar, Ace of Clubs, Kenny’s Castaways, and probably some others that I’ve long since forgotten.
It was thrilling to be emailed by the venue bookers and asked if we were available to fill in the midnight slot at Trash Bar, or if we wanted to open for Acrassicauda, the Iraqi metal band who had recently been featured in the great documentary, Heavy Metal in Baghdad. It was, in the scope of the music world, small potatoes. But for me, whose prior claim to fame was a high school talent show, we might as well have been playing on the same Jones Beach stage where Trent Reznor recently ripped our ears out.
Post-practice drinks at Union Pool sometimes resulted in very low-stakes recognition from the local scenesters (“Hey, you’re the drummer from Hounds Basket, right?”) and it felt good to be a part of something. Friends were designing flyers for us, we had tons of new material that we were excited about, and I could feel myself getting better as a live performer, even though I fucked up—a lot.
One show I remember vividly, and I can draw a straight line from my time pounding bad beer in my car before open mic to this moment in particular. We were playing a mid-card spot at Trash Bar, and I had invited a girl I’d just started dating to come to the show (a very douche move, in retrospect) and as a result, I was more jittery than was usual.
Of course, playing at bar venues like this don’t pay you any money other than your meager cut of the door (which was then split between the band, so… not much), but they did offer drink tickets for the band members. I spent all of my drink tickets on whiskeys and beers before going on stage, and right out of the gate—the opener was a new song we’d never played at a show, which was already a big risk—I was a solid mile behind James and Jesse in terms of timing. We had to start over, that’s how bad it was. I recovered for the rest of our set, but the girl never showed up (and that relationship didn’t last). Trash Bar used to offer complimentary recordings of your set burned to CD, but I threw that one away out of sheer embarrassment. I wish now that I still had it.
This time of my life was pretty complicated. I was having a blast playing in Hounds Basket but I was also bouncing between toxic relationships that fucked me up for years. I was discovering my voice as a writer but I was living in my cousin’s basement in Queens. I was having a blast working with one of my best friends making dumb internet videos as a day job but I was drinking a lot and barely sleeping. One memorable night started with playing a late-night show in Brooklyn and staying out until the bar closed at four a.m., heading back to Queens to change and pound some sugar-free Red Bulls, only to be in Manhattan at six a.m. for my work’s big annual event where I’d be interacting with the public all day.
It was around this time I was offered a job at IGN in Los Angeles, where I’d be writing about comics, movies, and TV full-time, and made the choice to leave the band and move across the country. It sucked, because I genuinely loved playing with those dudes, but all of that bad personal life stuff was weighing me down and I thought a change of scenery and career focus would fix everything. As you can probably guess, it did not.
My first tour in LA, I made a few attempts to find people to jam with, but nothing that panned out. There was a pretty good rehearsal studio near my apartment though, and they offered discounted rates for solo musicians just looking to practice for a while, so I took them up on it and visited any weekend I could to bang on the drums for a few hours. As work and figuring out my horror show of a personal life took more of a toll on my time, I started realizing that Hounds Basket was probably the last band I’d be in that really meant something to me.
And that was okay at the time. I’d started getting some published work and felt on an upward trajectory in that regard, and settling for working on my own music alone in the apartment was enough. One time during a visit back to New York, I went to see Hounds Basket play somewhere in Brooklyn and they were great, though I admit I was a little miffed that James didn’t ask me to come play a song with them. Eventually, I left LA and moved back to my hometown in a real what-does-it-all-mean thing (again letting my inner Rob Gordon escape), figuring I’d focus my energy on creative work while living cheap and freelancing for money. I lasted eight months before I needed to get a day job again.
Part of this supposed creative awakening involved refocusing on making music. I set up the old drumkit, the one I’d once lugged to the sophomore year talent show audition, and started recording terrible quality cover songs just for fun (Nirvana, of course, but also some Queens of the Stone Age and Local H). I learned original Hounds Basket bassist Kyle was now an audio engineering student at a reputable audio production school in Manhattan (so reputable that a couple of years later, they closed abruptly with no warning and all the masters housed within were lost).
They needed musicians to record for practice, so I went to the city for a weekend and once again found myself getting dirt-cheap recordings from students, this time my own acoustic tracks. They’re not very good. I think my years away from performing regularly let any confidence I once had, earned or not, dwindle into nothingness. Still, it was a fun time and I’m glad I did it. During that same weekend, I reunited with James and we jammed at The Sweatshop once more, though it had moved locations and was no longer underground nor covered in graffiti. You can’t go home again, I guess, but we played some of the Hounds Basket tunes we’d written together and it felt great.
Finally, that weekend was capped by visiting my then-girlfriend in Queens, who dumped me in one of those long, drawn-out breakup sessions (cue Local H’s “24-Hour Break Up Session”) where you just talk in circles, swirling around the drain of the inevitable. I was supposed to spend a few days with her, but instead, the next morning I drove back to Western Mass without my dignity or my relationship, but I had a CD with three tracks that I was moderately proud of.
Around this time I started frequenting a very lovely local bar called Rumpy’s, which featured karaoke on Thursday nights, and it quickly turned into my new haunt, karaoke my new musical outlet. I’d discovered karaoke around the time of the Starbucks Crew, where we used to go to a sports bar nestled inside of a bowling alley in Levittown on Long Island, belting it out to whoever wanted to listen. This was the kind of place where regulars claimed ownership of songs and brought their own CDs for the KJ. Once, I got to see a regular confront somebody else for singing one of “her” songs: Britney Spears’ cover of “I Love Rock and Roll.” Rumpy’s was much more welcoming. By this point, my chances of starting a band were slim. Approaching thirty, the bulletin board of the local music shop covered with classifieds that I had long since aged out of. So karaoke filled that void and still does.
About a year after I moved back home, I met the woman who would become my wife, and about a year after that, I found myself married and back in Los Angeles but happier than ever before. Career-wise, I was all over the place (still am!), random highs (getting a literary agent, being selected for the DC Comics Writers Workshop) and corresponding crushing lows (doing a lot of work writing two books and neither of them seeming to be of interest to anyone, not getting any opportunities in comics following the DC experience), all of which seemed so far out of my control that it sent my self-confidence spiraling. I felt like I’d finally, at long last, accomplished my personal goals of having a healthy relationship that makes me an objectively better person, but now feeling adrift in my professional life, second-guessing everything and wondering if I should’ve listened to my dad more closely when he tried to teach me the carpentry skills at which he is so adept.
Granted, a lot of my self-confidence issues are purely one-sided—or so my former therapist said—people not buying my book or responding to my email is less about me personally and probably more about how everyone else is severely overworked. Still, by the time the pandemic of 2020 rolled around, I was in desperate need of creative output that didn’t live or die at the hands of others. That sounds pretty dramatic, and I guess it is. At the end of the day, I still crave that validation from a stranger clasping their proverbial hand on my shoulder, whether it’s a former science teacher or a Cool Mom or a Twitter rando, and telling me I did a good job.
So in quarantine, I started messing around and fleshing out some old songs, refining the arrangements beyond just simple acoustic jams, and writing some new ones. I put together one track and passed it around to friends. And then I did another and thought, hey, maybe I should put together an EP. Before long, I had ten tracks and a full-length album on my hands, and Rad Mobile (an inside joke with Tom and reference to the video game prominently featured in the all-time classic feature film Encino Man) was born.
The album is called Always a Bummer, and the Starbucks Crew and other friends from college might be surprised to hear some of those old tunes from The Cup albeit in an all-new light. It’s not perfect, it’s not confident, and I don’t know if the world will ever get back to a place where I can put an ad on Craigslist to find some real bandmates, but it felt great to have my energy focused on something productive, finish it, and put it into the world with no middleman. And as I suspected, being creatively energized in this regard replenished other creative buckets, and I’ve been making steady progress on a new book.
Listening to Always a Bummer, whatever its flaws, brings me some joy, because it feels like a culmination of two lives: my younger self who I like to imagine was more free-wheeling and confident than he actually was, and my current self, an aging nihilist who insists that everything is terrible and pointless, while also being fanatically in love with his wife and cooing in a nonsensical language at his dog.
After this middling musical journey that really amounts to little more than a hobby, I’ve realized that continuing to play is the only important part. Getting to go up on the stage, whether it’s your high school talent show or a dilapidated bar in Brooklyn (or Jones Beach, I would guess, but I can’t say for sure) it’s all the same no matter where you are. There’s a thrill to playing music in particular that can’t be replicated—when you nail that transition that tripped you up in rehearsal, when you shred on a solo so hard you’re pretty sure you’re possessed, or when you see people moshing to the noise you’re making—there’s nothing better, even at the very low level at which I have experienced it.
And I’ve realized I have so many friends who’ve drifted in and out of my life through music, some of them still part of my tight circle and some of them not even a connection on Facebook, but all of them taught me something about the magic of playing music with other people.
I know I’m not the best singer or guitar player or drummer. I’m never going to be a phenom who can put together a song in his sleep, but it doesn’t really matter, because I actually feel pretty good about the music I’ve made thus far. From Blew Hour to Rad Mobile and all the stuff in between, I had fun. That’s not something I can say for all of my other creative endeavors.
I plan on putting out some more Rad Mobile, with or without bandmates beyond myself. Maybe I’ll include a cover of “Aneurysm.”
You can listen to Rad Mobile wherever you stream your music, including Apple Music, Spotify, BandCamp, and Soundcloud.