Winter

We lost our practice space at the antique store, or rather, we left our practice space due to a disagreement with the owner over use of his PA. (He thought our $25 fee per practice didn't cover use of the new PA used to replace the one his son - our practice space point man - took with him when he skipped town.)

I called around trying to find a cheap or free place we could set up without having the cops called on us every time we turned our amps on. Even in this town, such a deal can be hard to find.

We eventually settled into my uncle Sonny's practice studio, which was a makeshift loft built on top of an old barn in his backyard in Selma, IN. It was a good thirty to forty minute drive for even us locals, so practices were infrequent but usually long with part of the time being spent getting one of our vehicles unstuck from his backyard.

Sonny was (and is) a sheet metal worker with a braided beard and pony tail that hung down to his ass who rode a loud-as-fuck chopper with ape hangers and drank like an alcoholic fish. His two bandmates were called Dink and Peanut and they'd all come over while we practiced to slurp beer and dig pickled sausages out of the jar with a set of dartboard darts.

This was a markedly different environment than our hipster basement beginnings, but somehow it felt more at home. We'd play through our set while my uncle and his chums drank in the corner, hooting between all the breaks, and then we'd set our instruments down and join in on the drinkfest ourselves, sometimes picking up the instruments again only this time with Sonny or Dink or Peanut at the helm of a bass or a six-string. We'd go through a Stevie Ray Vaughn-inspired blues jam with me or James on the drums until we decided we wanted another pickled sausage. Sometimes Eric and Sonny would trade off leads. I was proud. Family proud.

It was starkly cold outside those nights. The ground was covered in drifted snow. And we'd be up in this baseboard heated loft, carpeted in scraps in a no-name town in East Central Indiana with a population of 866, drinking and laughing like the cold world outside didn't exist. It made things seem fun again.

I started writing more non-music stuff. I was doing a regular blog for Purevolume, plus writing for the band Myspace blog. I also started writing Last.fm posts for our band account there. Gus from Chord Magazine gave me Dave Palaitis' (Lifetime) phone number so I called him for an interview. I went out and bought one of those suction cup things that stick to your phone receiver and record conversations like a private eye.

It was an interesting conversation. I found a lot of parallels in their story and ours. Not many people got what they were doing at the time they were around. They were too fast to be that melodic. Too melodic to be that fast. Caught in this weird limbo that constitutes a marketer's worst nightmare. Kind of like how we were too weird for the indie rock crowd, to square for the avant garde crowd. Apples to apples, in a way.

I still found myself nervous talking to other bands. I stuttered and stammered from time to time throughout the interview, knowing that Travis Barker had a title of their album tattooed across his chest.

And then I realized that was Dag Nasty, not Lifetime.