BROWNSTONE
Early in the pandemic I was lucky enough to be asked to help out with one of my best friends’ short films. This is the friend who housed me for my first couple months in LA. We went to college together where we were also in a band. I was high school friends with a couple of the other guys in the band, so I was always at practice. I’ve played music since I was a kid, but honestly I never had the talent or confidence to think that I could actually be in a band. I was happy to help them load in and out and just be a groupie, since that was as close as I was likely to get to a stage. But something happened. I very quickly became close with the two other guys in the band. I mean, honestly it was love at first sight. We somehow knew that this wasn’t just a fling. After a few months of just being a friend of the band, Bryce and Shawn (my new best friends) decided that I should be in the band–talent be damned. This changed the course of my life in an extremely dramatic way.
With four guys in the band, there wasn’t a whole lot of room for an extra, less skilled, guitar player, but Shawn had a solution. He owned a Roland SP-808 sampler and a copy of Propellerheads Reason software. He was willing to let me figure that shit out just so I could get on stage with them. Much like guitar and singing, I was not exactly Trent Reznor up there, but I was in the band. That small step changed music from being an impossible pipe dream to being the sole focus of the rest of my life. I mean it. Once I was convinced that I could participate, it became all that I wanted to do. I bought the DVD manual for the Roland and read the manual for Reason and I was hooked. I honestly never contributed anything super meaningful to that band, but I was a fucking rock star. I toted around a coffin containing the sampler, a DJ mixer (so I could also be a DJ one day), a MIDI controller and a fucking CDJ. That’s right, my brother bought me a Denon DN-S5000 turntable to kick off my DJ career. This was the first CDJ with a moving platter and I could suddenly scratch any music I wanted by putting it on a CD. To be honest, it was pretty ridiculous, but oh my god I was on top of the world.
At that time, we blew up the music scene in Mobile, Alabama. We played the very first rock show at a bar called Cellblock, which then went on to become THE spot in Mobile for local rock shows. We had a lot of friends that came to every show, meaning we could pack out these smaller venues pretty much every time. We really had something there. This gave us the confidence to take a break from school and quit jobs to spend a couple months touring the east coast. We bought a Ford Econoline van to live in and a trailer for our gear and headed out. If you’ve never done anything like that, you can’t imagine the excitement, freedom and fear. Our first show was in Baton Rouge, and from there we went to Miami, then to New York and back—playing shows everywhere in between. This was the age of Myspace and we booked the whole thing by communicating with local bands in the cities we wanted to play. This was circa 2005 so there were no smart phones. I had a laptop, but we mostly connected to the internet at libraries because even Wifi was not very common. We slept in the van, on picnic tables, and locals’ houses. We ate McDoubles and whatever snacks we had in the van. You can imagine how the van smelled, but we didn’t notice too much since we likely smelled just as bad. Y’all, we played at CBGB. We played at Arlene’s Groceries (NYC)—we actually had back to back shows in NYC that night. We were on a local TV show in Jacksonville.
When we left for this tour we were all in school at the University of South Alabama, and Shawn was from Mississippi—so his family was from there. Between the time that we left Baton Rouge and the time we landed in Miami (after a few shows in between) hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast we had just left behind. It was an incredibly scary and surreal time for us and everyone we knew back home. Luckily, Shawn’s family was OK—though their houses were not so lucky. But we stayed the course. This led to us playing a Katrina benefit show in Virginia Beach for like $300, which was way more than we had been paid for any other show. In fact, we barely got paid at all. Most gigs were for nothing, or for a cut of the door. We weren’t a local band for any of the shows, so we were lucky to get a couple drink tickets. Looking back, I don’t know how we did this at all. And just when you think “Ok, that’s a lot”, let me tell you that the transmission went out in the van in Hershey, Pennsylvania. We were incredibly lucky that Bryce’s dad stepped in and hooked us up. How could we have gotten home with all of our gear otherwise? That was an insane risk to take—maybe deep down we knew someone would save us in a situation like that, even if we couldn’t know that for sure. That’s privilege I guess. We got a lot of help along the way. My brother hooked us up with a friend of his from the Marine Corps—Fighting’ Bobby. My brother had more than one friend with “Fightin’” in their name. Fightin’ Bobby said that he believed that Anastasia lived in his house in New Jersey where we slept when she fled the Bolsheviks. Could be true!
The point of this story is that I randomly found two people who believed in who I was as a person so much that they convinced me to follow my dream. I’m not a successful musician. But I’ll never stop dreaming my dream. I had already given up on it at that point when I met them. But they let me borrow some of their confidence and changed my life for the better. Since that time I have had a lot of amazing friends and a lot of support and encouragement. This is just a story about how meeting the right people and being open to accepting their love and support can change your life in extreme ways. I will never be able to thank Shawn and Bryce (and all the people who supported me over the years) enough for what they have done to keep me moving. At this point in my life I’m trying to take their gifts to the next level. I don’t need to be famous, but I’m holding myself accountable to share all of this time and effort I put in to music. I do it practically every day and almost no one even knows. That’s why I started this blog.
This is the point in the rambling where I return to the plot. Shawn made an incredible short film. Once again, he gave me an opportunity to express myself and to step outside of my comfort zone and I am forever thankful that he did. Shawn and Bryce became two of my best friends and we’re all still very close to this day despite my self-isolation. This post is to thank Shawn and to show my gratitude by sharing HIS work with you. So I give to you BROWNSTONE.