A Strange Impulse.

Every band is doomed from the beginning. There is a shelf life, a best by date, and some continue for long after they’ve gone rotten. The songs may remain amazing, but the spirit of the band moves on. The spirit of the individuals evolve, and the summing of those parts into something greater is a fragile and elusive recipe. Creating it, sustaining it, and recognizing when and how it happens is an art in and of itself. But on those occasions when it does happen; when you work together and make something that is far beyond what any of you can do individually, it is the closest thing that I’ve found to heaven on Earth.

It is a strange impulse, starting a band. When you consider the amount of time and energy it takes to get a group of people together, write a bunch of songs, get proficient enough at playing them to desire to play them in front of people, booking a show, making a demo. And how fraught every step of that process is with landmines and pitfalls. It is quite a wonder anyone does it (do they still do that?). It’s absolutely astounding that anyone actually pulls it off and succeeds and moves their band forward, even to the most modest levels of commercial success. This is a story about one of those bands. If you were around in the midwest emo/punk scene in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, you may have seen us open for a band that you liked. You may have even bought a patch or a shirt or a demo. Or maybe we forced a hand scrawled CD-R on you as you were walking out of a show. This is a story of all those would’ve/should’ve/could’ve bands.

As I sit writing this many years later, it’s impressive how some of those songs stick with you. I had this experience recently where I got the chorus to a song stuck in my head. I walked around singing it for days and being unable to remember the rest of the song, or the band that played it. I listened through a bunch of stuff that sounded similar but couldn’t find it. After a bit of time it occurred to me that it was a song by Oblivion (linked up top) that I have on a 7” I bought at a show when I was 16, and probably haven’t listened to it since I was in my early 20s trying to impress my punk credentials on someone with swoopy hair. And yet there I was, singing it for days, 20 years later. And now I am sincerely wondering if the cavalry ever did recover from their Gum Cancer? Maybe I should write a letter to the PO Box on the back of the sleeve and find out.

The impulse hit me early. I think we started my first band before I even got my first guitar. And from the instant I picked it up, I just wanted to write songs… maybe it was because I was too bad to even play the simplest songs, maybe I had deep unresolved trauma that can only be expressed through a mountain of distortion and pounding drums, maybe I was just bad at sports and short and chubby and nerdy, and this was the only way I could make friends and feel like I could fit in somewhere, but the cause doesn’t matter. The effect of this had a giant impact on my mind. And I did it. I wrote songs, our imaginary band became reality, and my path was set.

As I went on through high school I played in a few bands, we played a few shows, one even made a demo on my Tascam cassette 4 track. It was magic. Making something out of nothing. Spending hours in the basement or the garage, creating and expressing, figuring out details, learning the process of songwriting. Then there is the ecstatic feeling when you finally get it all locked in and the song is done and you play it through. In that moment, all you want is for everyone in the world to hear it and see it. Then you have to remember how you did it and do it again and again until you literally can’t mess it up. Even today I can remember some of those songs we wrote in a sweaty frenzy better than I can remember my first kiss or details from my wedding day.

The Vehicle city started when I was a freshman in college. We went through a few names before we landed on that… We also went through a couple of line up changes during our time.. It wasn’t the first band I was in, but looking back, it was the first real band I was in. There were two core members, myself and Kyle. We both played guitar and sang. He was a bit better at singing, I was a bit better at guitar. We went through two bassists and three drummers, who tolerated our drama as long as they could. We loved and hated each other. We pushed each other, and we also let our competition and insecurity sabotage our friendship, and eventually the band. I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot about how to be in a band from our run.

We formed in our college book store and had some good shows, recorded some songs and released them, did a couple of small tours, and right as we were about to move to level up, we imploded under the weight of our idiocy, immaturity, and youth. In this aspect, being in a band and writing, playing, living together is a lot like being in a romantic relationship, but it’s with 3 or 4 other people, and you all have various creative and administrative duties to maintain that relationship. I honestly don’t know how ska bands did it… but I digress.

My plan is to upload demos and tell the stories behind the song and behind the band as I make my way through this hard drive of random stuff that I found. I think it’s from around 2005 or 2006, so it was probably transferred over from analog sources or dead formats, so it may take some time to update and remix things. Who knows… if they’re bad enough I may even re-record a couple of them. I just want to tell the story of how this came together, created something beautiful, and then fell apart in the messiest of ways.

This is not my music. It's a link to the song I was referencing in the text. By Oblivion - Johann's Face Records.