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).