Part 7: Hell Comes to the Suburbs

Yeah it’s been a while.  But I’m fairly certain no one really reads this blog too much anyway so I’m gonna call it “good.”  It ain’t like I got a bunch of e-mails asking for more.

Let’s talk a bit more about Darin Bluhm.

Darin Bluhm

I feel I might have skimmed a bit over the importance of Darin to Zombie Apoclaypse NOW! last time so I’ll try to fix that today.  Basically if Darin hadn’t joined the band the band wouldn’t have made the jump from barely-playing-basements-amateurs to venue-playing-professionals (Or “Talented Amateur”, if you prefer).  The reason was, in my opinion, two-fold:

1) Darin had a lot of connections and a lot friends in town so while I was being a big dopey nerd with no real idea where to start with things like booking shows Darin would just call up a buddy or a co-worker and say “Hey, do you think we can place this show on this date?  Nice.”   This is how we played at the Strutt and at Papa Pete’s as much as we did, at least in the beginning.  I don’t know if the Strutt would have ever let us play if I or super polite Travis had checked in with them.   Darin’s outgoing nature is what taught me how to book shows and any success we had in 2009 came because of that.

2) Darin was ambitious, more so than me or Travis.  While I was, am still am, a very long term goal oriented sort of person who likes to take it slow and steady and Travis is more “Go with theFlow” Darin was a “Right Here, Right Now” type of guy when it came to making music.  Now this obviously had some good points to it and some not so good points to it.  On the one hand he had far grater expectations from us than we could sometimes give, which could result in some in-band issues from time to time but on the other hand he tended to force our hands into doing something we weren’t planning on doing at the time but seriously needed to be done.  And when they worked out they tended to work out big time.   Case in point the release of our second demo “The Sellout Demo” which we would have never done in the Winter of 2009 if Darin hadn’t insisted on it.

First band photo of the new version of ZAN

More after the jump.

Playing in a tiny corner of a tiny bar.  We have arrived

Following our semi-successful show in Grand Rapids Darin, taking the lead, suggested we start doing Open Mic shows at the Strutt as well a basement show here and there.  This was really the beginning of our band starting to make a name for ourselves in Kalamazoo and for the first time people were asking me when was the next time my band was playing because they liked what they heard.  Darin suggested we do a demo and while I had wanted to do one for a while at this point he’d only been in the band for a few weeks and I thought we might want to actually be more comfortable with each other as a band before we started recording anything.  But, as I said, Darin was ambitious and he insisted.  Now ultimately this was a good decision and it would eventually lead into the band penultimate moment (But I’m getting ahead of myself).  He called up his buddy Ben who offered record us in Darin’s basement at no charge.

While this was happening, as I said, we were playing Open Mic Night at the Strutt a lot and while many of these shows kind of blur together I recall one time particular there was a pretty good sized crowd at the bar and everyone (Except for some guys I can only describe as being “Bros”) seemed to really dig our sound.  I was excited because this felt like a preview of things to come.  But that night has a special meaning to me for another reason because that was the night I first met Dave Andrews.

I was introduced to him by my best friend Mr. Kaze but he had mentioned the guy to me once or twice before.  Mr. Kaze was a bouncer for the Strutt at the time and had told me he’d seen this dude play acoustic covers of NOFX songs, which sounded pretty cool to me (The number of punk kids I ran into in Kalamazoo was pretty low compared to all the indie and folk guys that populate the scene).  He was set to play the open mic a bit later and had literally just missed us but we had a brief conversation:

Dave: Yeah, I’ve been dying to get back into a band. It’s been a while. I’ve been looking around town but so far I haven’t found anyone.

Jay: Huh. [Pause] Good luck with that.

And then I left the building.  I wasn’t trying to be short with him (But I was totally short with him) but to be it didn’t occur to me that this punk rock guitarist could be someone I should, or even could, recruit for ZAN.   I think it was mostly because I barely considered myself a proper musician in a proper band at the time.  But over the next few days it would hit me.   It was probably something like this:

Jay: I don’t know, man.  I think Heroes just isn’t the show it used to be and-Holy shit, I should have asked Dave to audition for my band.  FUUUUUUCK!

Or something; it was a long time ago.  I knew I had messed up; Zombie Apocalypse NOW! needed a rhythm guitarist and I may have let one slip through my fingers like a dummy.  I had absolutely no way of contacting Dave on my own though so my best bet was to go to the next Open Mic and hope he showed up.  So the next Tuesday, on a day that was much less populated than the last time I was there, by the grace of Xenu, Dave did in fact show up to play, armed with a Legend of Zelda t-shirt.  After his set, which was amazing and full of acoustic Lagwagon covers, I approached him and talked to him about my band and asked if he’d be interested in auditioning.  He said he’d like to but he had a problem: he didn’t have an amplifier as his had been stolen fairly recently.  Since Darin had a basement full of equipment I told him in the short term it wouldn’t be a problem but he’d need to get his own ASAP should he make it into the band. He agreed.

He later told me that he had been going to these open mics for the main purpose of being scouted/recruited by a like-minded band and I had basically fallen into his trap. However I maintain this: what kind of dummy tries to get recruited into a band when he doesn’t have the equipment needed to be in a band?

Dave from the Suburbs

I should say a few things about Dave. He’s, in total honesty, the perfect person to be in a band with me. He’s like a weird version of my evil twin…or maybe good twin, I’m not sure.  We’re both punks (Him more so than me by far) so our songwriting is rooted from the same source but at the same time we wrote very different type of songs.  We’re also strangely from he same area; while I’m from Detroit he was from the “Metro Detroit Area” aka the goddamn suburbs, hence my nickname for him; “Dave from the Suburbs”.  When I was growing up I was completely isolated from any sort of music scene because that shit doesn’t seem to float around the Detroit High Schools in the slightest.  Meanwhile, only a few miles away, he’s going to shows all the time and building a relationship with all these mysterious “Detroit Bands” I hear so much about but have never really seen.  He also was the only person in the band who really stood up to me.  If something sucked he’d tell me and usually what would happen was I’d blow up at him, storm off and then at the next time say something like “Dave had a really good idea last time. Let’s try that.”  This happened all the fucking time.  To keep up with him I also felt I had to get better as a bassist and a songwriter so he being there greatly helped me as a musician.  We’ll get into more details about Dave later.

Anyway he auditioned and while it didn’t go super great it was clear that he’d be a good person to have on board.  Oddly Darin was super against having him join and kind of hated him for weeks.  He said it was because Dave didn’t really play the songs well (Though this was because he didn’t know the songs as he had just heard them, meaning he was only a bit worse than the Darin who only weeks more experience) but the real reason was that Dave had rubbed him the wrong way by talking some serious trash about the Doors.  Dave tended to say things that pissed people off.  A lot.  He didn’t give a shit because he was punk.  That is why I recruited him; so someone who didn’t give a shit would tell me how it is and not pussyfoot around with it.  In this regard Dave was invaluable.

So we agreed to let him in the band but we wouldn’t let him play shows with us for another month.  He did come to our demo recording and gave input but wasn’t allowed to play anything (He’d only been with the band two days or something maybe less).  The recording of the demo took two days, and by two days I mean six hours over two days and I don’t think the mixing took a long time either (And was full of reverb).  It was the smoothest recording we’ve ever done, including our most recent one (“Bandora’s Box”, Out 1/14/12). The three song demo, featuring our three most popular songs “What’s Up with Dave?”, “Sellout” and “Justice Girl”, was named “The Sellout Demo” in keeping with the naming scheme form our previous, less awesome first demo.  Now armed with a decent recording, that we have to fucking EVERYONE, and having finally attained a full four-piece and the ability to book shows Zombie Apocalypse NOW! was finally, finally, ready to invade Kalamazoo.  What followed was the best summer of my life.

Next time ZAN spends the summer playing all over town.