shitting in hands part 2

So it’s like, twenty till four and I am sitting here watching an episode of King of the Hill. This is how I spend my off days…sitting on this couch watching episodes of King of the Hill and sometimes watching Dexter on my computer. In about 3 episodes I will be out of Dexter episodes to watch and I have no idea what the fuck I will do with myself.

Sometimes I wonder what I would do if my boss told me that I didn’t have a ob when I got back from tour. I think if I had to look for a new job, setting aside ideal jobs (anything involving writing, really), I think I would probably still end up with a job that involves a certain level of dog shit. I just read Brendan Kellys blog where he mentions the old saying “You can wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.” Ideally I would love to pay bills and buy a house by writing for some awesome magazine, but I’m sure I’ll just stick to dog shit for a little while.

Anyway, back to the bands I have played in…this is where things start to get interesting. There became a point where playing in one band was not nearly enough so things start to get a little wabbly. Hopefully I can keep this all straight. I was drinking a diet coke when I sat down here, now I can’t find it. Anyway.

Left to Rust (August 2003 – October 2004)
So, Rhys, the drummer for Dead By Summer also played drums for Left To Rust. Rhys was (and still is) a very sweet kid, but was not the best and most reliable drummer so he was kicked out of the band long before anyone informed him of this. So when they finally did tell him that he was kicked out of the band (after he fucked up several times at a show and then made a huge scene outside of Swayzes…apparently one of our friends spilled the beans to him that he wasn’t going to be the drummer of Left to Rust anymore…I think they had been trying out new drummers behind his back...anyway) they moved Andrew Wiggins to drums, Marc from bass to guitar, and I jumped in on bass. Andrew had a problem singing while playing drums with a stationary microphone, so we bought him a $100 headset mic that I still have to this day. This was without question the most dysfunctional, miserable band I have ever been a part of, simply because we wanted to sound one way, Wiggins wanted to sound like something else. We all really liked Small Brown Bike and the Honor System and The Ghost and Wiggins had just begun hanging out with Matt Benard and dabbling with his “creative side.” When Andrew first made a myspace for us, under influences he said “Andrew listens to music that sounds like what Jackson Polluck paintins look like. Zac listens to music that Andrew thinks is fucking terrible.” It should be noted that Andrew Wiggins almost kicked me out of playing in Left To Rust because he was so excited to play with Small Brown Bike but was nervous we wouldn’t be ready…so yeah. Andrew would also re-write my bass lines for me because I guess he hated what I was doing. We played a lot of really good shows but as a whole, being in that band was not any fun for anyone. James and Wiggins both quit the band at least once over Livejournal, just to give you some kind of frame of reference at how shitty all of this was. Wiggins finally quit when he wanted to play in Blame Game, and was famously quoted by Marc and James as have saying the reason he was quitting was because he just wanted to “make art.” I don’t know either.

Benard (October 2004 – Present)
So, when Wiggins quit, Josh from Stranger By Day and No Cigar convinced us to keep playing, and that he should sing. We got Alan from Kama to drum for us and we started playing together in October of 2004, and didn’t play our first real show (without Josh…he moved to Birmingham for Law School and never actually did a show with us) until almost a year later. We played at the Die Benny loft in March 2006 and Nathan became our singer soon there after. I don’t have a lot to say about this band other than we are what we are and it is what it is. I’ve accepted that Benard is never going to be the touring band I want it to be, and I’m OK with that. We’ve played a lot of great shows with some great bands (and one terrible one with Don Caballero) and were (I think) the first band responsible for footprints on the 141 Moreland ceiling. Having said all of that, we have had to cancel a show because one of our members wanted to go to Disney World. Sooooo.

Nature Boy (December 2004 – May 2005)
I think the only reason Benard was able to keep Alan Hamilton signed on to playing our version of punk rock was because I would get him to my house early to play double time punk. You see, Alan Hamilton probably wouldn’t listen to Benard if he wasn’t in Benard, and in order to get him over that hurdle, I had to fill his double time urge. So we started a pop punk band called Nature Boy that was in fact named after “the Nature Boy” Ric Flair. If you don’t know who that is then you obviously didn’t grow up in the south. Google it. We broke up when Paul, our singer, moved to Chicago. We made two recordings and A lot like Punx Named Bob, I hated both of them as soon as we finished them.

Carmine (Novemberish 2006 to May 2007)
So Nathan played in Die Benny and Benard when he started playing guitar for Carmine. Carmine was like Nature Boy, only a lot better. I would write the most absurdly technical pop-punk songs I could, clad with the fastest, most sporadic parts and changes that were feasible, and Nathan and Alan would learn them and play them with me. As far as what I was writing, that was probably the most creative I have ever been. We played some shows as an instrumental band and tried out some singers, but we eventually threw in the towel…and the story oh why we broke up is actually way more entertaining than the story of how we were a band. As I mentioned, Nathan played in Die Benny as well. So did Cameron, Carmines bass player. Now anyone who knows Cameron knows the story behind him, but I would just like to put it out there that I had to tune his bass for him once in the middle of our set. He was so fucked up that he couldn’t remember the Blink-182 cover (yeah that’s right fuck off) and couldn’t tune his guitar from Drop D to standard E. Anyway, Die Benny kicked him out of their band, and I joined Die Benny behind his back, going as far as to play the record release show for the record he had recorded with the band. We finally moved Die Benny practice to my house, and when Cameron showed up to Carmine practice and saw Die Benny’s gear, the bells finally fucking rang and he realized that I took his place in Die Benny. He continued to come to practice and would just pout and play bass as loud as he could while Alan and I would work on new parts. So I broke up the band via myspace and Cameron took me off his top friends.

That’s all for now. As I said this is where I joined Die Benny, but we have a show tonight and who knows, maybe something will happen and I’ll quit the band in the middle of our set leaving a much more interesting story to read.

Also, our dogs need food and I need to find my soda...both way more important than talking about shitty punk rock bands that I played in.