DDG in the 21st Century
Not a week goes by, it seems, without someone coming up to me on the street and going, "hey, weren't you in a band once...whatever happened to those guys.
Three factors, the three that kill most of 'em: time, burnout and "creative differences".
The problems started when Pam left. We thought it'd be fun to have a new drummer every week, but soon we'd gotten kind of tired of dragging members of the community in to play whatever sloppy shit they could that week -- after a while the novelty wears off for all parties involved, you know? In the end there were only two we could stand.
Well, the problem was that various members had various crushes on the two drummers, but the fact that they had both been in a (now defunct) band and in a (now defunct) marriage previous made things a little dicey. Everybody would pull for "their guy/gal" to come play the gig, and in the end botched communications would either leave us with no drummer or sometimes two.
Two who disagreed on everything, mind you.
On little things.
Like the time of the song.
So we floundered around for a while before finally deciding we'd take turns filling the role. Each of us tired of our instruments and had become quite unpunkishly proficient, so we took turns on whatever instrument took our fancy that night.
Of course, this sometimes lead to us having three drummers, and things only went downhill from there.
We went into the studio to cut our third album, but after three weeks, the material still didn't sound right and nobody could figure out what it was that wasn't working. We tried everything we could, sometimes sitting down and pasting together the best licks here and the best clicks there.
Debts climbing, we decided to do the annual WEAVE Frank Sinatra Tribute, only to have the whole thing break down. I had been drinking for much of the day and in my annual toast to Frank started to get into some "inside" shit. I was talking a bunch of smack and just generally kind of hot and angry.
Well, let me say...
You know that thing about women who spend a lot of time together....
Make sure your calendar is square on dates, okay?
And don't fuck it up.
So, the cops got called and the show ended horribly. Time heals all wounds and after cooling off for a bit we went back in to try to cut the material one last time. One late night at the studio, we all admitted that our hearts just weren't in it anymore. And we left as friends. We all cut ourselves CDs of the hours raw material and every so often one of us will throw out a mixed MP3 of it on the P2P.
Renee stayed in music and became something of a local promoter. One night, having had her act's van self-combust somewhere around Barstow, she called us in a tizzy. Did we still maybe practice? Could we get together that night and do it again?
Well, apparently she'd been planning this for a while, but only shared it with us then and there. We all frantically spent the rest of the afternoon practicing and by showtime were back to our old ragged selves.
And there, for fourty minutes on the sweltering stage, we reconnected the magic.
And thats where it lays. Renee still promotes, but doesn't call us much. Bryn works as a fairly well-known tatoo artist downtown and I'm living in Arcata off of my dotcom savings. We've cobbled up a good life.
We hope the same for you....