What's up One Love!

What’s up One Love! This is Gary from the band Article A and I gotta say that I’m pretty honored to be on a site with so many good people who have so many good things to say. To make a poignant example, Chap Stique is probably one of the nicest, most genuine dudes all of us have ever met. If any of you fine looking visitors have time (which you know you do) please check out his and all the other blogs on the site.                                                                  

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about music and how crazy of a ride it’s been getting to the point of even being in a band. One day you’re holding a toy guitar at your 5^th birthday party with no intention of learning because your hands are too weak to even hold the strings down so it just becomes another toy like the Tonka trucks and the set of teenage mutant ninja turtles that are in a state of chaos because Donatello is missing somewhere on the lawn in the backyard. A couple thousand days later, you’re a little 14 year old playing “guitar” on a stringless Harmony guitar while you’re dying to be Noel Gallagher from Oasis. The fact that the stings are absent from the occasion doesn’t distract you from the fact that at this moment you feel the coolest you’ve ever felt, until Mmm Bop from Hanson comes on and deflates the rock god within.  Unknowingly, something this weekend is going to change your life forever. Something that will cause a spark within you that will lead to so many things outside practicality. This Saturday, your sister’s boyfriend is going to hang a black guitar on your skinny frame and teach you an E chord. One week later that “stringless” guitar is now legit and has 6 strings. Six months later you know five chords and you can play “Closing Time” by Semisonic from start to finish. A year and a half later begins the phase where you’re playing to the capacity where your mom states the oh so abrasive “If you could only apply yourself to your schoolwork the way you do with guitar”. ..Rough…but you’ll get used to it! Two years later you’ll enter your Pseudo-metalhead phase where you’re annoying every guitar center employee in North Jersey because you WILL be going into their stores every weekend and you WILL be playing “Enter Sandman” and “Seek and Destroy”. (Eventually you realize this is the cardinal sin of retail guitar playing along with other essential but cliché riffs such as “Stairway to Heaven” and “Sweet Child of Mine” (Don’t ever play them in public….please!!) Next you hit other phases of obsession such as the Jimi Hendrix phase, the Rage Against the Phase, leading to the Led Zeppelin, Van Halen and U2 phases. Then one day you’re 21 and you’re playing in the band at church which is partly amazing because it’s amazing to leave the confines of the rock venue in your bedroom and actually play with other people.

Then one night you’re a leader at youth group and your friend Mike comes over and tells you a band’s playing a across the street and they’re in need of a guitarist. You go over and meet them and you find yourself in the drummers basement the following Tuesday. You quickly learn that the three other musicians in the room are equally as passionate about music as you are. What you don’t learn as quickly is that these three guys will challenge the crap out of you musically every day for the next five years. Since you don’t quite realize this yet, you turn them down because you feel “comfortable” with your marketing degree and your long term relationship. This is, until one day in the fall of 2003 when you realize you’re only in business for money and that’s crap, so you make a sketchy phone call (only because this band you turned down just played an arena show the night and it might inaccurately appear that you’re joining for that reason which would make you a toolbag) to the lead singer to asked for a second tryout. They oblige, and unlike the one day tryout period last May, this one takes two and a half months before you’re officially in. Over the course of the next 2 years you tour in 18 different states, play to thousands of kids, record two music videos, and at the end of this period you finally have an excuse to get out of school because the band you’re in just got a record deal. In six months the record’s written and recorded, one year later it’s out and you’re at an FYE in Bergen County NJ and all you can smell is sharpies as two hundred kids wait in line for you to sign the album that you’ve dreamed about since you learned what an album was. One year and a hundred shows later, its 6:15 am August 4th at Newark Airport and you’re sitting on a plane departing for Anchorage Alaska. You’ve toured half the US and been on radio and TV but somehow this is different. The thought keeps running across your mind that aside from the obvious physical geographic properties, Alaska always seemed so far away and today you’re going to Alaska because you picked up a guitar 11 years ago…and you’re only going to spend $50 because everything is covered by the festival. Unreal! 

Which brings you to October 20, 2008. It’s 1:40 in the morning and your hands are not sore from typing but from playing 30 hours of guitar, bass, and piano in the past three days for various band demos and other recording projects going on right now. There’s a solid decade + of playing and a lot of things now that don’t really surprise you anymore but something you’re about to do in two days is something you’ve never thought you’d do. Something that has never even came within a mile of being considered a thought of something you’d do. Remember that day when you were 14 playing the stringless guitar and that band Hanson came on…………you’re opening for them Wednesday. 

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." –Ferris Bueller

“Bueller!” - Mr. Edward R. Rooney