The Okay Samurai Chronicles - Chapter Two: Second Nature
When I look back on high school, I usually have pretty good memories. I wasn't a popular kid in the school government or a nerd who played Magic: The Gathering - I was happy sandwiched somewhere in the middle. My first big breakup with a girlfriend was in 11th grade, which fueled plenty of subsequent song lyrics (I thought I was so clever singing "feeling this pain" when it was actually written "feel, Lynne, this pain"). But I think that the main reason high school was so great was the band. It's the first thing that comes to my mind when I open up a yearbook or talk to an old Robinson friend.
Don started to learn guitar in school, but he was consistently late for his class because he would stop by to talk to me at lunch. Andrew took drum lessons in and out of school, but eventually quit when they were going to force him into the marching band. My piano teacher moved, but I kept playing on my own and continued learning video game songs. Once Don had a few chords and strumming patterns under his belt, we got a tape recorder and set it up in the Basement of Doom. And so began the earliest recordings of some of our "classic" songs. An instrumental called Hammock. A genre-bender called Ballad of the Strange Man. A truly horrible song called Bird Hats. The infamous Golfing With Fish and Instant Oatmeal Road. We would position the tape recorder away from Andrew, since he was the loudest, and then Don and I would spread out with our instruments. No 4-track mixing here, kids. We would tape five seconds of us playing, play it back and realize Don was too loud or you couldn't hear my vocals, and switch it up again. On the old tapes you hear that overdub click sound about twenty times before and after each song. We would also introduce each song with a recorded skit, like Andrew and Don having a back-and-forth about how to golf and fish at the same time. These were great times - Don seemed to come over every Friday afternoon and we would record three or four songs.
I'm going to delve into some family background for a second, but hold on - I'm going somewhere with it. My Uncle Charlie is a cool guy. He came oh-so-close to becoming a recording artist himself and has a great love of music, even if it's not the most profitable thing in the world for him. My Grandfather owned a farm in Linden, Virginia, and now Charlie lives there (and his wife has a vineyard on the property, in case if you've ever heard on Linden Wines). Charlie came over to our house one day and we played him the tapes. Charlie was extremely positive as he listened to us three amateurs scrape our way through original material. When all was said and done, he looked up and said, "You need a bassist".
We decided to hold bass player tryouts - but we only had heard of one kid in school who played bass - a guy called Eugene Jung. He was a friend of a friend at the time, but we asked him if he was interested. Actually, another guy we were starting to become good friends with also came to the tryout as a guitarist, which we didn't really think we needed at the time. Funny how things work out - it was none other than Jeff Chin, who would end up joining the band in college. Eugene was shy, but also a very talented bass player. He soon joined the regular Friday afternoon practices, and everyone would usually stay at our place for dinner. We began to hang out with each other at our lockers before school. I got Eugene out of almost being suspended in school by lying to a counselor. And then one day, all of the sudden, Eugene became cool. He'll even admit to it - it was a dramatic overnight change. One day he became insanely funny and multiplied his personality by ten. I've never seen anyone change so quickly since then. Eugene was officially part of the band.
Our stash of equipment was growing. I remember my Dad telling me, "We want to support your music just like we would if you were playing baseball or doing drama at school." I've seriously got the greatest parents in the world. They were extremely accommodating to our Friday jam sessions and didn't do the stereotypical "turn that rock music down" parent thing - they actually liked our music! They were there for most of our concerts, and Dad captured everything with his video camera. We got a PA system, better amps, another microphone, wires, and all sorts of music gear that I still use to this day. In the home video of me walking downstairs on Christmas to find out that Santa gave us a PA system, I fall face-first on the floor upon seeing it.
We still didn't have a band name other than Geui, which no one really liked. Then at lunch one day, Don noticed that the school napkins said "Second Nature is made with a bleach-free process." Second Nature sounded good enough, and it became official. The annual high school battle of the bands, Ram Jam, rolled around and we entered some of our recordings on a spliced cassette tape under the name "School Napkin". Apparently the tape messed up for the judges (guitar classes) and sped up, so we didn't make it in. It wasn't that big of a deal - most of us were only in 10th grade at the time.
Our first concert was Janine Mason's Birthday Party, who became Don's girlfriend for a brief period shortly thereafter (Don's history with girls could take up an entire chapter alone). We set up in her basement and played mostly original songs, except a covers of Glycerine, Cumbersome and a Candy Everybody Wants duet with Janine. It's humbling to watch this performance on video now. I wear a hat that completely covers my face and I stare at the ground as my voice cracks singing. Don's guitar is insanely loud and he messes up a Happy Birthday solo. Eugene was allergic to a cat and faced the wall most of the night. Andrew jumped in and out of time and missed a few cymbals here and there. But I say this all in retrospect - it was a great concert at the time. We switched instruments for one song and left Eugene to go get cookies while he did an extended bass solo. A few friends sang No Diggity after the show and another friend sat in on the drums for a song.
I decided to pick up guitar and started taking lessons at a local music store, as well as learning to play the harmonica on a cross-country road trip with my family. It wasn't long before we started talking about recording an album. Uncle Charlie had a recording studio room at the farm, and was excited when we asked him to help us. Within two or three trips down to Linden, we completed Grasscatcher, our first album. Ten songs made the final cut - Mind Defrost, Midnight Oasis, Fresh From The Farm, Hammock, Golfing With Fish, Henle's Loop, Pinecone, Setback, Raining In L.A. and Instant Oatmeal Road. It was a friendly and entertaining atmosphere recording songs while Charlie manned the mixing station, all in a small room with a great view of the mountains. We paid him with a 6-pack of beer and he handed us the DAT master tape. We took it to a company called Lion Recording, and they produced around 200 cassette tapes for us. I designed the cassette sleeve - our album cover was "Second Nature" written in sticks on a patch of dirt. We printed off 200 color copies of that sucker at Staples and spent an afternoon folding them up and placing them with our shiny green cassettes. We sold them for $5 each at school and later shows, and sales went fairly well - we eventually covered our costs. Reactions were positive, and we finally had something to show for all those countless band practices in the Basement of Doom.
A few more concerts started popping up around the Fairfax, Virginia area. We tried out for Ram Jam again, got in, and won third place. We played outside at the Burke Centre Fall Festival and got an anonymous donation of $100. We rocked out at a pool party and I remember starting a song when a kid jumped off of the high dive. We even put together an assembly at our old elementary school and rocked the pants off of those kids. Suddenly our senior year rolled around the corner, and Don and I were in the guitar ensemble class together. Jeff (the guy from the tryouts who would join our band in college) was also in it, as well as the child prodigy guitarist Eric Espiritu (who now writes for this site).
We all began to think about recording another album - a CD. At the time, CDs weren't burned like crazy as they are today. No bands at Robinson were making CDs. We decided that we didn't want to take up more of Charlie's time, and we had the finances to look into a professional studio. We found a fairly cheap one in Damascus, Maryland, called Rolling Hills. This was honestly one of the best experiences of my life. It was exciting to hear our songs played back with studio-quality sound. People ask me a lot if it's strange to hear myself singing, and yeah, it is - but being in a closed booth, head clasped in headphones, and singing into an insanely expensive microphone made me feel like a real superstar. Two brothers ran the studio, and these guys were professionals. We laid down eight tracks - Musicfest Orlando, Uncle Charlie's Song, Third, F#, Letdown, Navigator, Grassblade Smoke and A Tribute To Mr. Punhong. We had pizza every day for lunch, it snowed while we were recording, and we tried adding new things like a steel drum to our songs. We manufactured the CD through a company called Discmakers, which also gave us a free website - the very first incarnation of what you're reading this from today. At $10 each, we didn't sell as many as we would have liked to, and never covered our costs. But it was worth it in the end for me - we recorded a freakin' CD!
Our CD release party was held in a huge gymnasium at the Wakefield Recreation Center. We set up the concert ourselves by going to the Fairfax Government Center and pitching the idea through their recreation programs. We had several meetings in the large Government Center building, which always seemed so cool to me - four teenagers in tee shirts circling around in their swivel chairs inside a fancy-shmancy board room. This was when ska was exploding onto the American scene, so we got our friends "The Boys of Skabinson" (a play on "Robinson") to open the concert for us, along with some solo guitar guy named Clint Coo. The show went well and we brought in our biggest crowd yet. The concert had been announced on radio ads because of our connection with the Fairfax Government, and they had a budget for these sorts of things. I got to help design a cool flyer for the show too.
Two concerts didn't go so well during our senior year. They were the type of concerts where you feel like nothing went right and you just want to quit. In our last Ram Jam Battle of the Bands, we didn't even place. Eric Espiritu came up as a surprise guest and rocked the place with blazing guitar solos, and one judge wrote that he "played too many notes." But we took a long time in between songs helping Eric set up, and I think that was what hurt us the most. I remember listening to the judges announce the winners backstage and simply sinking my head into my knees when I heard that an absolutely crappy band called "Boot To The Head" had won. Then, at our high school's All Night Grad Party only a few weeks later, I lost my voice while screaming the lyrics to Third Eye Blind's Graduate - and that was our first song. I couldn't even finish the set and we played to a fairly empty room. I didn't enjoy the rest of my graduation night, and I was convinced that my musical aspirations were dead.
High school ended on an uncertain note for Second Nature. Andrew was still at Robinson, but Eugene and Don were on their way to James Madison University while I was planning to attend UVA. I felt that because of sluggish CD sales and a couple of bad concerts, music was definitely not my true calling in life. College was about to change everything - our name, our bassist, and my attitudes about music.
(The Okay Samurai Chronicles is the four-chapter story of our high school and college band. Chapter Three is on the way.)
Sunday, January 4 at 7:35 PM
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