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CHEFILEPTIC
by Nate Bennett
EPISODE 7
Hey, good people, welcome on back. Far as I know, I’m still Nate Bennett. This is the seventh episode of Chefileptic, my autobiographical podcast series.
Subjects I discuss in this episode include: how my methodical contingency plans developed, how I realized that my disability can affect others, my first trip to Stanford (Health Care), how my seizure journal started (and grew), and… my very own band.
If you find this episode worth your while for any reason, and/or think you might know someone else that may, let ‘em know about it! It’s as free as free times free.
21. hidden routines
I had walked on a tight wire as I had that first round of ‘official disability’ application going on.
My brother was doing all the driving and we were both barely making it. During this time period, I was having some very rough periods of seizures and Bryan was always looking out for me, making the calls and excuses, getting help from friends when we needed it, and making sure the T’s were crossed and the I’s were dotted at least well enough that we always got the rent paid somehow. As I’ve realized, it was really two of us walking on that wire, and sometimes he was carrying me when I didn’t even know what the hell planet I was on.
We had developed better and better ‘contingency plans’; when I’d start ‘going off’ I’d sleep on the couch downstairs to prevent more falls from the loft I usually slept in, and more than once he’d put my motorcycle helmet on me to keep me from hitting my head.
I guess he had come up with that after one time when he came home to find me having a grand mal, during which I had fallen in our TV room and slid across the coffee table in front of our couch, and had ended up somehow with my noggin inside one of the empty wood boxes we had used as ‘bachelor furniture’ to build shelves with… I was thrashing around and beating my head on all sides for who-knows-how-long before he found me. This was added to my growing history of experiences with falls and the resulting ugly and painful injuries that had come along with them, and it made sense to helmet me up if’n I started spazzin’ out. He told me that he’d often see me roll off of the couch and plop onto the floor, but the helmet thing helped minimize the damages.
No matter how we had tried to keep treatments at home though, I still got another ambulance ride to the same emergency room again just a couple months after the one that had marked the end of my job at the Homeless Center.
Bry told me that it was in the evening time, and I had someone over and was talking to them about doing a part on my music project–but I later had forgotten all the details. Not him though. I guess that the guest had started yelling for help, and when Bry came in from outside I was flipping out full-force and the big 911 was called again.
That round of ambulance-ride-ER-drama resulted in my getting a second MRI.
Just as before, the doctors who reviewed those images could not see the cause of my seizures, only that things looked pretty much the same as the previous pictures, which meant that no super-obvious changes had occurred.
22. no panex
At some point, back when I was still working at the Homeless Center, Bryan had started getting sick in a ‘different way’ sometimes. He wasn’t having seizures or losing consciousness, but he was noticing that he would sometimes kick into a ‘negative cycle’ that would freak him out for a while. He’d realized he might be having ‘panic’ or ‘anxiety’ attacks.
After having the seizure I’d had at work at the Homeless Center on April Fool’s Day of ‘04, I remember asking my boss (the ‘hip’ one with a psychology background) what might be going on. He’d theorized that my seizures might have been triggering my bro’s troubles. I felt so selfish for not realizing that sooner, but I knew he was right. I just didn’t know how to deal with it. My bro and I were taking care of each other then, and I just didn’t know how to handle my end of that dilemma.
It was eventually too obnoxious to be ignored and Bry went and saw somebody about it. It appeared he was indeed suffering from panic attacks.
Well, that doctor he’d seen prescribed a couple of meds for him to try. One of them was to be taken every day, but it made him so sick that he couldn’t even get out of bed at one point because he was so dizzy, so it clearly wasn’t going to help. Another was for emergency use; he could take it if he started having an attack. When he gave it a try, he found out that it would stop the attack, but he hated the side-effects. The drug was called Xanax (spelled X-a-n-a-x, generic name alprazolam). It’s pronounced ‘zan–ex’; and Bry called it “xanex no pan-ex”.
I hadn’t really noticed these attacks so much. I figure that Bry had probably been going to his room when it happened back then, but it wasn’t as dramatic and un-missable as my thing could be. I didn’t really know what I should be looking out for, or what the symptoms were like, at first.
Eventually, I realized that the theory my boss had offered was probably pretty darn wise. It ended up being proven to me a couple months later, after I’d been forced to leave the Homeless Center and officially had become ‘disabled’.
When Bry and me ended up in the hospital overnight for the set of episodes I had on June 14 of ‘04 was when I really got to see what he had been dealing with.
My memory of the whole thing is really just a couple of dramatic glimpses, but when I heard it back from my bro later, I got filled in on more of the details.
It was late-night at the ER and it was lightly staffed. Apparently, the main doctor was busy dealing with several patients, and running around between them. They had me strapped in a bed as they ended up keeping me all night, from 10pm to 8am. Bry described me as having an IV in place, and having some kind of detector attached to me that would cause an alarm to ring if I started seizing, which would bring that busy doctor back to my room to deal with me.
Bry was sleeping on the floor, curled up in a corner of the room. The crew had tried to convince him to go to the lobby for a sofa, but he knew what would happen.
I remember when I started to come back at one point that I had started talking to him. His face was super-strained looking, his hands were curling up, and he wasn’t standing up straight. Now I knew what his attacks looked like.
And there we were, yet again in the hospital, and he was there to look out for me. It felt like my fault.
He told me he’d gone for a moment to get a soda from a vending machine. When he’d returned, the door to our room had locked itself behind him, leaving me alone in there. He could see through the window that I was now on my side on the bed, facing away from him. He had to push a button to get help, and he said that he had to wait about five minutes to be let in.
I guess he had asked me something as he walked into the room, and I wiped my forehead with one of my hands, leaving a smear of blood as I did. He looked down and saw that I had a blood puddle forming on the mattress, and another puddle forming on the floor under the bed. I had rolled over onto the IV, but I was too out of it to know what was up. He said he screamed for help, and a crew came running.
At some point later that night, I made the alarm ring, and Bry said he heard the doctor yell “who’s seizing?!” down the hall—apparently there was more than one customer in the house. Bry yelled back that it was us, and I got more dope put into me to knock me out again for a while.
When I woke up again, I was strapped in real serious. It ended up being a very long night for both of us.
After that night, Bryan totally did the right thing and sought a second opinion about his panic situation. He ended up seeing a psychologist, who agreed that my medical drama was probably one of several things that were aggravating him. The psychologist gave him advice to help him deal with the attacks (without medication), by using some focusing-and-controlling-and-breathing type exercises. Bryan told me that he greatly preferred using these methods and felt that overall, they were more effective than the prescriptions he’d first tried.
I became pretty sure that the prognosis offered by my old boss had, in fact, been correct. It was becoming more and more clear to me that it would be best for Bryan to move away from me eventually, for the sake of his own well-being.
It wasn’t fair for me to keep relying on his help, especially if it was going to cause him health trouble. What I was going through was bad enough, and I sure didn’t want my seizures to fuck with anyone else I loved.
I had then begun to start seeing my isolation as being most likely to be the best way that I could protect others.
23. my Stanford debut
In late November of ’04 was my first visit to the real big deal, where the ‘serious cases’ in that part of the world get treated—Stanford Health Care.
I saw a doctor that I came to learn was well known in his field, apparently just before he retired. He said something that really surprised and reassured me—he gave me a pat on the knee, and said something like “Well, Nate, we’re going to stop your seizures.” I’ve never heard such a guarantee come from a doctor before or since that visit, and perhaps it was a claim that shouldn’t really have been made, but it was a relief to hear it, nonetheless.
I now wanted to help this team help me, and this statement had at least made it seem possible, which was really the first positive experience I had had so far in my ever-lengthening dance with the world of medicine. It appears now that it came somewhat true, at least for some stretches of time. Granted, it took about a decade of very complicated steps and developments, but eventually Stanford and I finally got some results. I felt like I finally had reached the team that might have some of the answers I needed to function in our society.
This doctor was the first one to suggest something called ‘conjunctive therapy’. It seems like a pretty basic ‘next step’: trying combinations of more than one kind of medication. At first, I stayed on the one I was taking then, but we also added another medication. I began taking both together, twice daily.
Also, I now carried an ‘emergency’ prescription of lorazepam (the same chemical most folks would recognize by the original brand-name Valuum). I was instructed to put some under my tongue if I ever felt a seizure starting, because it could shorten the seizures and lessen their severity when used on-the-spot. It wasn’t good to take all the time; for one thing, it is addictive, and for another it doesn’t continue to suppress the seizures in the same way that that other longer-acting, time-released-type medications do. It also has more side effects. But at least I had a tool to carry, like a person who has asthma might carry an inhaler, or a person with an allergy might carry an epi-pen. Even if it really wasn’t super effective, just having something to reach for, in and of itself, was a reassurance. I still carry some wherever I go today.
After this appointment I was referred back to a different neurologist in Santa Cruz, and I was seen by him for 10 years. He turned out to be a great doctor for me, and I’m sure I had less seizures by getting care from him, even though some still did happen for sure.
If there’s one piece of advice I’d pass on to anyone about seeing a doctor, it would be to keep in mind that there’s more than one in the world. What I mean by that is, if you’re being cared for and you for any reason think a different doctor might have a different diagnosis or solution or even a personality that would work better for you, go get another opinion! You’re not ‘married’ to the first doctor who sees you, and it can be easy to forget this when you’re in a situation where you need a doctor’s help.
Now that I’ve seen a good many of them, I know it’s worth getting the right doctor sooner, rather than later.
24. the journal
It was after my visit to Stanford in ’04, followed by starting a new relationship with a different regular neurologist, that I began to make better notes about my seizures.
By that point, I had done much more reading about everything law and medicine related regarding my ‘disorder’. I had realized the value of having records of my seizures. This could not only help me remember later what had happened (after whatever parts of my memory would get blanked), but it also could help me look for possible patterns, so that I could try to find out what might trigger these events.
I wanted to know what might be affecting me, from any kind of allergen to sleep-pattern interruption to weed use and cessation to needing to drink more water or less water or you name it, I wanted to know if anything had anything to do with my seizures. I wanted to know what I needed more or less of, so I could get busy and start getting more or less of whatever it was, and quick.
The journal was the key.
If I could look back at just a few notes, I’d be able to see if there were any consistencies, but I couldn’t always remember the details–which often had already begun to fade into a slur of stuff I didn’t want to have to think about, yet was forced to obsess over in the pure interest of self-preservation.
I initially had already piled up a stack of medical documents regarding a number of my seizures, yet I knew that in spite of all my efforts, these would not make a complete history, right as I set out to list them that first time.
When I filed for Social Security disability, it caused me to ‘sort the stack’ and use the dates as a first round of entries on a timeline. This was now a document that I began to update as seizures happened, but also as I learned about the ones in the past that I had forgotten about.
That’s the part that’s really like archeology—it was like sifting through my own dust and charting it as I found more bits of data. At one point, I found two old calendars that Bryan and I had hung up in our old house in Aptos. When we had moved however many years before, I’d stashed them among my stuff and forgotten them. When I found them, I saw that they had a number of seizures listed with short notes, which I guess had been my first primitive method of journaling them. Now, these are listed on my journal, but if I hadn’t found those two calendars, this info would be long gone.
So admittedly, the quality of my journaling has both gone up and down over the years. I’m pretty sure that I had some stretches having seizures more often that were later the more poorly-journaled times. This would be in part because these periods were often harder to remember later. Also, even though it would seem most important to keep records during these times, I’ve been pretty messed up and just ‘keeping it together’ well enough to get by has been hard enough, without stopping to write down the details.
Also, there’s a sort of ‘atmospheric pressure’ that comes along when a person who has seizures is working and/or driving, but knows a seizure could put a stop to either or both.
I’ll give my goose-step-mocking skills a try here: supposing a person had first started to work and then also began to drive after having been forced to cease either or both due to any kind of mental or physical reason (not saying that anyone ever has)… anyways may or may not that hypothetical person possibly be more or less motivated (or not motivated) to keep a situation which may or may not have been a seizure-related event a strict secret to themselves, if nobody else saw it happen anyways?
Not saying that’s ever happened, though…
So, when I see big blank spots between dates of seizures on my journal, I keep this in mind. Granted, I know I’ve had times when I’ve been doing better I’ve gotten on a roll and stayed overall better for some pretty long periods without having the seizures, but I know that I’ve had times in the past when I was under this aforementioned pressure—and I was really super-motivated to keep working and take care of business, no matter what, so I wouldn’t end up on the ‘other side of the glass’ at the Homeless Center.
As I’ve built and read over the journal, I’ve often remembered bits of details that are not medicine—but have been lost to me for a while. I’ve recalled things about where I was living and what it looked like for example, by having memories come back as I’ve read my notes about my seizures.
I found out at one point that one of my doctors at Stanford considers me an “excellent historian”. I was flattered. I can definitely assure you this would not be the case for me without my having the journal to come back to. I see it as being a living document, like the U.S. Constitution—made to be adjusted and updated.
Obviously, the journal has grown since it was first started. It’s a file that is about fourteen pages long now, with some seizures well described and others noted without any details other than ‘event’ or ‘episode’. As I got better with noting the details around 2004, I usually managed to get whether or not I only had the déjà vu part, or if it had become a full-blown grand mal event. Also, I often better noted lengths of time they had lasted for, usually depending on whether or not another person was present; when I was alone, I’d often have less details to list, because I likely didn’t remember them.
The journal showed a grand mal in April of 2005, but then there was a remarkable break of seizure activity over the next few years. I eventually had made whatever updates I could find, and thought it was as complete as it was going to get, but again… I unearthed yet more ‘broken pottery’ from the past.
I searched through my old email to find out something unrelated from this super-dim time period in my memory (which now to me is sort of a personal ‘dark ages’), and I noticed that I had at one point confessed to having had seizures, but concealing them, in an email conversation.
A number of times I’ve found out that I’ve really not done well on being able to remember much about that time period. I’ve forgotten details as large as where I lived for a year and what job I worked at over a summer, and I’ve realized this when I’ve tried to come up with complete lists my work history and places I’ve lived.
There was a time period where I did have some progress, I know that. I’ve been able let myself begin to believe, maybe more than once, that the seizures were over long enough that I got my license back and started driving again– but I know I was under all that foresaid pressure to keep myself rolling and working.
And now, as I’ve dug around more while researching so I could write this, it’s looking like I could still possibly be finding yet a couple more holes in that damn journal. Again–the thing just grows and grows, I swear.
Apparently though, I’m an ‘excellent historian’–just putting together someone else’s history.
25. the Playset
I’d begun working on my album Red Dam in the early Nate-e-o-zoic era, back in the spring of ’99.
Bryan and I had been in the Aptos place for a while (near Santa Cruz), and all during that time I was riding and driving wherever the fuck I wanted all the time; I hadn’t gotten the ‘tough news’ yet.
I remember that I was always blazing on up to Mike’s new house in the mountains about a 40-minute drive away. He was building the new quilted fish records, and obviously doing it very seriously. It turned out to be a really bad-ass facility.
At that point, I had gotten to where I’d record some parts at home—stuff I could plug directly into my PC like keyboards and electric guitars and bass, and I’d head up to qf to record the parts that needed seriously nice mics and a good room, like drums and vocals.
This was the first time I was ever expecting to make something where I was playing more than one of the instrument parts, and I was like… free time! It was totally different for me, and it was really fun to watch the project grow—just how I wanted it to.
Mike had lent me a few bucks to get a cool guitar-synth, a sweet axe that can control synthesizers and sound as awesome as an old fashioned heavy-body electric guitar. Having that tool, along with gradually learning to play keys, was giving me access to all kinds of new sounds.
When the instruments were finally done, Dianne and Pete (our friends from Michigan who were the former singing team of Patchwork Apple) did backing vocals on the album, and Timothy (of the then-defunct how’syerdey) did most of the drum tracks (I did a couple also). It had been turning out really good, and I was very proud of it, when I had my first diagnosed episode.
Soon after that, I had finished an album and I couldn’t legally drive. I had no idea how I’d get a band together to support the album.
Mike and I got it mixed. We next needed to complete it with a process called ‘mastering’, which is where you take your mixed album to a nice professional studio that specializes in this process, and they help you ‘iron out’ all of the songs to make a nice, consistent-sounding finished product.
We went to an acclaimed studio called The Record Plant in Sausalito (just north of the Golden Gate from San Francisco) for that adventure. That cost Mike/quilted fish a bit, I’m sure. He was out to make a great-sounding project, and that was the way to finish it. That experience was probably the closest I’ve ever felt to ‘famous’… I’ll never forget walking down the halls to use a restroom, drifting past all these gold records hanging on the wall that had been made there… so many were so damn famous I could hardly believe it—I had owned and grown up on a number of them myself.
They helped us put the finishing touches on our mixes and Red Dam turned out sounding really pro.
So, I really wanted to release it–but I wanted to be able to support it right with a serious and well-rehearsed band.
I had a good rehearsal setup working in the house I shared with Bryan—the living room was all ready for a band to play in (one of the two little bedrooms served as our living room). Basically, all the gear, including a drum kit and PA system, were pretty much just waiting to rock with, right in the middle of our little house.
Now I’d just have to somehow attract some players.
And I did a few times; there was more than one good jam here and there, but during the next couple of years the medical drama was kicking in hard. I had first gotten diagnosed, and then had more and more serious seizures until I not only had to stop driving (twice), but finally even had to stop working (when I lost my job at the Homeless Center).
So I was stuck at home with all this music gear in my face, most of which I had ‘bought out’ from how’syerdey back when it had fallen apart a couple years before. I knew I was sitting on an album that I was proud of that was made already, but I was broke and stranded and getting sick a lot.
I had come far, but was going nowhere.
Somewhere around spring or summer of 2004, I started getting another idea. I had begun to learn more and more about ‘sequencing’, which is recording with MIDI (using electronic instruments and computers), and this helped me begin to convert what I was able to play with my instruments into written parts.
That’s when I decided that if I was going to be stuck at home, I might as well make another album.
By this time, I had realized that if I did my homework a little bit, I might be able to use my tools to make parts that other players–who read music–could perform and record. Problem was, I didn’t yet have enough music-theory skills to pull it off quite yet.
Bryan and I had always stayed in close contact with our Boulder Creek buddy Mark (remember, he was the one who helped Bry take care of me during the whole status epilepticus thing). Cabrillo (a community college) was right around the corner from where Bryan and I lived, and Mark and I decided that we’d take a couple of music theory classes there. We both took a classical type intro-to-music course and an intro to jazz theory course, and the combo was just what I needed to ‘move up a level’ in my ability to understand how music actually ‘works’.
I began to make readable parts of all of music I was writing, using MIDI to record ‘dummies’ that I’d be able to replace with recordings of real instruments (once I found them). I started writing parts for horns and other instruments I didn’t even know how to play, as well as making readable sheet for parts I knew I could record, but (hopefully) would later be able to recruit other players to perform ‘live’.
Next, I put up flyers around the nearby area of Aptos and around Cabrillo’s campus—a pretty small area that wasn’t anywhere near any ‘hot’ music scene or anything, but somehow the right people saw them. Soon, I had met Delisa, who played trumpet, Jen, who played alto sax, Kris, a rippin’ keyboardist, and Wendy, a naturally talented and ambitious vocalist.
I was able to record some of the ‘foundation’ parts at Bryan’s and my house, as I planned to record the remaining stuff I could not do well enough at home at quilted fish, like I had done with Red Dam.
Next, I reached out to Timothy.
After howsyerdey had ended, he’d really dived into music and eventually became very educated, on his path to becoming a super-skilled musician and producer. He had moved to Santa Barbara (about a four-hour drive south of Santa Cruz), where he was attending the University of California, and had joined up with a superb progressive-rock band called Oso.
I managed to get him to not only come and visit to record drums for my new project, but also to recruit his band-mate Andrew to record bass for it as well.
Now I had some serious talent involved in the project.
The recording all came together pretty quick, once it was moving. Only glitch with putting a live band together was that now I’d need a rhythm section (bassist and drummer) to support the CD, because Timothy and Andrew were ‘guest stars’ that didn’t live nearby.
Another person stepped into the picture that, over time, would end up meaning not only a great deal to my work, but to my entire ‘bigger picture’ too.
Tim Gard was a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and computer-programming geek that had also migrated west after he’d graduated from Michigan Tech (in northern Michigan, where the rest of our little music ‘clique’ had come from). He had been in the same music scene that how’syerdey was, but I hadn’t really ever gotten to know him, until he came to California. He was friends with my friends, though, and at some point, he’d decided to come to Santa Cruz to get a change of scenery and a new job.
He also ended up recording a wonderful album at quilted fish called Iceberg in the Hot Tub using the artist name Rong (spelled R-o-n-g, that’s right, with no W).
As we hung out, I started talking more and more with him about all things music and electronics, and soon he was helping mix my new album at quilted fish, which now was called Mechanical Conspiracy. He had a lot more music theory knowledge than me, and was able to help me there, too–repeatedly, over the years.
Just like I was hoping it might work, the players I recorded for the album were finally, at one brief moment, all able to step up for a jam and rock out together. The players had all contributed tracks separately, but most hadn’t met each other yet. When everyone did meet and finally played some of the music, we easily kicked out tunes that a band would normally have had to start rehearsing together from the ‘ground up’, because even though we didn’t all know each other, we all knew the tunes. It was a ‘pro’ feeling for me—a real personal victory.
One of the things that I realized later was so cool about it was that all the people that had gotten together and played probably wouldn’t have met each other and hung out without my songs. I know this is ‘how it’s done’ in much of the professional working world of music, but I haven’t been able to spend much time in that world in my life, and this was one of those few glimpses I got to enjoy of how things still might have been able to go–if my health had allowed it to.
I admittedly had been scheming; hoping I could ‘rope’ players into helping me launch both of my albums. It almost kind-of-sort-of worked… I definitely got some ‘keepers’; people that became important long-term friends, and played a few of my songs along the way.
The keyboardist Kris also was doing my project as a side thing, because he was part of a New Orlean’s-style funk trio called On the Spot that was more his usual genre. In that format, he was on the organ with two hands and two feet (playing bass with foot pedals while playing up top with his hands). In my project, he was using some organ also, but was now working with some synths and MIDI gear, too, so I think he dug the experience and expansion. He’s an incredibly talented and super positive person—I miss him often, but I know he’s out there doing music, it just seems to radiate off of him.
Wendy’s voice had blown me away right from her try-out when she came over to the living-band-room and belted out a version of “Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)” that would have been the envy of Janis Joplin herself (had she still been around to hear it). I could see that she had the skills to do my project, if she decided to, which she did.
She also hung in there to launch the band once it finally came together, and eventually became one of my most important and treasured friends.
I met both Kris and Wendy because they saw one of my flyers; they’ve both come to mean a lot to me. The two of them stuck with my project, even after Bryan and I had our battle with our landlords in Aptos and then moved all the way back up to Boulder Creek in the mountains again.
Once Mechanical Conspiracy was recorded and mixed, Mike and I mastered it, working again with Mike Romanowski, a gentleman that we had previously worked with at The Record Plant and had mastered Red Dam with us.
I then had two projects to release. Lots of material. The second album was finished in 2005, and now it, along with Red Dam (which had been finished since 2001), sat around until 2008, when I finally had a band working to release both with a “high-fashion debut”.
I sure had worn blue for a long time, alright. I’m a man who does his best to keep his word—especially to myself, but that was a commitment I never would have made, had I known just how much and how far I’d be set back along the way to attaining my goal. I had some lesson to learn though, I just I hope I did… and will stay able to remember whatever it was.
Meeting Larry worked out so awesome.
Once Bryan and I had returned to Boulder Creek, I began having to ride the bus regularly to work. Amanda, who’s now Larry’s wife, rode the bus regularly when I did. She had noticed that I always brought a jazz theory book with me and read from it, and at one point she struck up a conversation with me and mentioned that her guy was a drummer—which then was a spot I badly needed filled in the band. I ended up meeting Larry and inviting him to jam.
When he came over, Kris was there, and it turned out they already knew each other—because they were both in another local band called Wubakia. Small darn town!
So then we only needed a bassist. The last member we met, that really completed the picture, was Brett. He’d seen an ad I had posted on craigslist, and when he checked out one rehearsal, we all knew the chemistry was undeniably there.
I was then also working on all of the BS required for the printing and releasing of CDs, and Brett was able to help (greatly!) with making the jackets and graphics for them. Things were looking up then for sure.
We all went back and forth about a name for the band for a while. The CDs had my first and last name on them, so the band name had to have some connection to my name to support the albums. Some of us liked “In It with Nate Bennett”, but Brett soon pointed out how this would be a terrible name to search on the internet due to how many similarly named things of all kinds are out there. We all knew he was right.
Finally, it somehow came around to being Nate’s Action Playset (NAP), because that seemed to be a good way to encompass my name along with whoever I could get together to ‘play a set’–and my crazy pile of accumulated music gear that was often being referred to as my ‘toys’. Kind of silly, but what the hell–the band didn’t always sound silly.
The band got a little side-adventure-promo-plan together. Everybody agreed to ‘sneak into’ my job at the dining hall where I was working, wearing all my blue clothes, and do a band photo-shoot with my now-wife Amy, a friend I had made on my first day working at the university. She was also in a local band, and had lots of experience with taking pics and making flyers. After taking the pics, she was able to help me get posters and flyers made for our first show that were so cool.
Amy and I had hit it off right away. In our first conversation, my first day on the job, we found out we had both grown up in the same area of lower Michigan… what were the odds? That’s like 2,400 miles away from Santa Cruz—something larger had to be working.
We had our big debut and CD release party at a pretty decent venue, the Crow’s Nest down on the beach in nearby Capitola. At the show I wore my usual blues for the first set. For the second set, I busted out with some funky-crazy-silky-mixed-up Chinatown-type threads–and the rest of the band wore blue.
A few people showed up–including a very important one that would someday mean everything to me.
From then on out, I would let myself wear whatever the fuck I wanted to, where ever I wanted to wear it, (unless of course it was a uniform provided by whatever job I had to work at so I could earn a living while doing that job).
The band did a handful of gigs after that. We also got to appear on local cable TV on a show called Spilly Chile’s Bowl of Rocks for a half-hour show, which we ripped up pretty solidly. We played in one of the dance-clubs one time, we played in the middle of a duck-pond by the Santa Cruz County building one time, we played at a blues bar one time, you know.
We did a few gigs around the area, but it wasn’t exactly the way it was when my old band had first arrived from Michigan (on the day Jerry Garcia died). There were less venues to play, folks that worked in the area were more broke, and there were always more people who didn’t work (and didn’t exactly usually pay covers to get into bars to watch bands). Also, it had basically become impossible to just ‘set up and play’ spontaneously anywhere without very likely being fined.
At first, I thought maybe it was just that I was, you know, getting older–but I realized at some point that the area had just plain gradually become less and less ‘fun’ the whole time I’d lived there, for many reasons.
Had this devolution happened just to that town? Or was it happening to the whole region? Or to the whole country, or the whole planet?
Well, I was sure wasn’t my fault, dammit.
I finally got the CDs out into the world, or at least a few of them. Pretty much everybody in the band was more on top of web-tech than I was back then, and I got help setting up every kind of basic easy-to-get site for the band that I could. That was supposed to make it look like we were ‘on it’, from what I had first learned.
I had gradually been getting better physically by that time; the combo of meds I was on at that point seemed to work for a while and helped me get my seizures gradually more manageable until I had been able to work and drive again (which was very enabling, to say the least). Soon, I was not only out of the blue, but I was working, and driving a car, and riding a motorcycle.
Heck, maybe I’d have finally even let myself consider having a relationship someday, if that trend had kept up.
Eventually, Kris was out on the road too much with On the Spot to be an ‘active’ NAP player. Tim Gard had been starting to ‘guest’ on several instruments with the band, and he stepped up then to play keys more often to help fill the void. He was a regular part of the band from spring of ‘09 on out.
We played again on Spilly Chile’s Bowl of Rocks (on local cable TV), and this time as we rocked, we had a totally skilled couple of dudes from the station putting pictures and video behind us with the ‘green screen’ technique (like how the weather-person does). Both of the cable shows we’d appeared on had turned out great, and supplied really cool and useful demo material for us all to use.
I found an old NAP demo-kit biography from April 2011 that helped me put a lot of these details together. It was from a time when having bios and demo kits ready, along with having business cards and bumper stickers and all of that ‘pro stuff’ seemed to be a big deal. Just in case somebody ever had a real, you know, ‘big gig’ for us to play.
Never know. Gotta be ready. Anything’s always possible.
Sources Cited:
Bennett, N. (2008). Red Dam [CD]. quilted fish records.
Bennett, N. (2008). Mechanical Conspiracy [CD]. quilted fish records.
Gard, T. (1998). Iceberg in the Hot Tub [CD]. quilted fish records.
Leigh, S. (2009 and 2010). Spilly Chile’s Bowl of Rocks [TV series]. Santa Cruz Community Television (SCTV).
Ragovoy, J. & Taylor, C. (1969). Try (Just a Little Bit Harder) [Song, recorded by Joplin, J.]. On I Got Dem ‘Ol Kozmic Blues Again Mama! [Album]. Columbia Records.