This is kind of the sequential time line of my tenure in the band scene.

Looking back maybe you can say we were pushed aside by the building wave of Grunge but at the time it didn’t dawn on me that it was happening. Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Ozzy, Kiss, etc, were established acts that were surviving fine in spite of the new Grunge sound. The last band I was in, Ballistic, wasn’t really a “hair-band” like Dokken, Ratt, Cinderella and Poison. The early 90's was the dethroning period of these hair bands specifically due to Grunge. I thought we were more like Ozzy+Lynyrd Skynyrd+Led Zeppelin, etc. I hoped that we would be some kind of hybrid heavy/rock/metal with an original musical component, since original songs were my goal... and of the people who went through the revolving door of the band.

It was hard to keep a band together as people/musicians were very unreliable. Drugs (pot, crack, alcohol) had a major part in it as we lost a couple of good singers and a guitarist to booze and crack. One singer brandished a gun in a bar and went to jail — well guess what — no more singer! A week later Atlantic Records called me at our house and I talked with an A&R guy who wanted to come and see our next show. Imagine the disappointment when I had to tell him we had just lost our singer! Another singer got mouthy while drunk, with his girlfriend's ex-husband, and got the crap badly kicked out of him which put him in the hospital. And youth was another problem, as one guitarist couldn’t hold a job which meant he couldn’t afford a car to get to practice. He even at times hocked his guitar for money just to get by. Other members quit because they thought they’d have a better chance in another band that was more popular, or had a demo CD or was playing more shows. Yet, in another band, we lost two members at once because the bassist and female singer had a drunken one-night-stand. The bassist was “in love” after that night but she (the singer) regretted it and didn’t want anything to do with him. She quit first to avoid him and then he quit because he felt like a jerk and had his heart broken.

It was a big pain loading up all our gear from our practice shed, then driving to the gig site, unloading it all, setting it all up just to play 30 minutes (maybe an hour) if we were lucky. If our gig was in Seattle we had to deal with parking and the possibility of getting our cars broken into. The biggest name we ever played with is when we opened for Eric Burdon (of The Animals) at the Ballard Firehouse. Also notable was when we played a couple private parties that were fairly large. But 90% of our gigs were on week nights for small crowds of 15–30 people. When going through all the effort to get yourself up there on stage and then to only play for a few people, I seriously started asking myself if this was really worth it?

About the last two years of playing in bands during the “Seattle Feeding Frenzy”, the clubs starting charging money from the bands to play in their club, which became known as “Pay to Play”. This was because the “Seattle Sound” had already launched and clubs knew that people would come out to see all the new Seattle band hopefuls. So why not charge the bands since there was a hungry, craving audience and a gluten of bands wanting to ride the Seattle scene and hopefully get discovered? The clubs (and bands) knew many record companies were coming to Seattle to set up offices in order to scout the scene for “Seattle Fodder”. “Pay to Play” was executed by two different methods, 1) Getting charged by the club anywhere from $50–$250 and 2) Having to sell your own tickets. The first method was when the club would give you X amount of branded tix worth... say $100. If you wanted to break even you had to sell about 80% of those tix to your friends and anybody else who would come. The last 20% you were able to sell would be your profit. The tix you didn’t sell were the ones you essentially “bought” yourself. So if you only sold $65 dollars worth of tix, then you had to pay the difference of $35 dollars to play. The second method wasn’t as bad. Here you'd get a bunch of tix, for example for $5 dollars each and if you sold 20 then you made $100. The cheap clubs let you do method #2 because if you brought in the audience, the club hoped to sell them a lot of drinks.

These two methods got old very fast if you didn’t have a promotional manager or friends who would spread your poster all over town because you can only get the same 30 or 40 friends to come to your gigs so many times every other week before they get tired of your songs!

Record companies would “sign” 100 bands. Each band would get some money to put together a demo. The band may not be aware but they are charged for the engineer, producer and studio time and fees, etc. The record company will then listen and do “test market analysis” on some of them to find the five or ten with star-power that they want to keep and they cut the other 90 or 95 of them loose. The bands have to pay back all the money the record company fronted them even though they don't stay signed. They sometimes can shop the demo and get picked up by another label. And of course, with the internet just coming on board back then, some were starting to sell their records themselves. They gathered up all the groups they think have, then after more analysis they keep only those they want.

As noted above, working with so many flakes and slackers, I was the one who played referee when band fights broke out, did most of the band bookings, sent out the demo tapes to record labels, arranged band practice days, and called the members when they didn't show up. All this really wore me out but it did give me a lot of experience in the semi-pro side of the business!

Lastly, but not least, all this experience helped me survive, learn and flourish in my recent 4-year stint in a prison ministry and worship band. I'm now interviewing for another new ministry band that will do music geared for a wider spectrum of youth. We'll be doing stuff like Staind, Trapt, Three Days Grace, and Breaking Benjamin. All the ear-training I've had has made it possible to listen to and learn this modern rock sound of today (and I “like” it). I'm looking forward to the future and wouldn't be able to do it without all of my past musical experience!

P.S. I think my interest in music rubbed off on Randy a bit as he started building his music library fairly young (about eight or nine years old) while I was doing the same and playing in bands.

EZO baby!!!