Slow Ride, Take it Easy
I’ve been enjoying a slow growth experience as a musician in Bend, one of the most beautiful parts of the Northwest, which, not long ago was a seemingly untouched and unsaturated music scene. Actually, this moment in the post-vac period reminds me of that time in the Central Oregon music scene.
Up to now, I’ve never really been at level you’d need to be to make a living from performing music. In a way, both Bend’s music scene and I shared green-ness. Giving all of us the room to adjust and develop, and we had a good thing going.
Meanwhile, KouseFly became a sort of a fixture in the music scene. We saw bands pop up and disappear, and after a while, promoters started to see that we are not really going anywhere and so they would book us.
It was comfortable, we had something, and we were bringing on new musicians (to the band). At the same time, treading the dynamics of managing a band, and losing band members while having a gig coming up helped us learn how to be dynamic and how to be a real-life band. The slowdown was probably the best thing that could ever happen to us.
We had all the elements to record the album. Bird edited all the tracks, and he laid down bass tracks. He did a wonderful job editing and producing the songs.
We were missing one key element, drums. We were in-between drummers and were on the look-out for someone who would be willing to track out the drums. I knew a guy, I think from being out in the scene, his name is James. He played drums for his female-fronted hard rock band “MakeShift," and we opened up for him one night with the band. I connect the dots with Bird and him.
James is, I would say, a drum entrepreneur. He has always been a drum entrepreneur since I knew him. He was interested in the craft of tracking out drums for musicians around the world as a session artist. It seemed to be a good opportunity for him. Bird worked with him, and before you knew it, we had a full drum track.
At the time, he was really locked into his project, MakeShift, and he made it very clear that he wasn't playing live with us all the time and wasn't a core-drummer. Though, eventually, he became our core-drummer and then eventually became a core-band member.
We did some things that the average local performer didn't do; we were having a lot of fun with it. The one thing we did was we have costumes for a lot of shows. That started from KPOV Beatles Sing-Along, we showed up a Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band, I found a marching band blue jacket, something that Paul McCartney would have worn, and Bird found some gold-golden thing to wear.
We kept on doing it, wearing costumes. I played the Bend Summer Festival looking like a Viking; and Halloween? Well, that wasn't a problem. We kept on wearing fun costumes.
The other thing we did is we gave a theme to our shows. Our bassist, who was a tech guy, who we called Sunshine, let us borrow his computer stuff, and we projected Pac-Man, and we had a Pac-Man Party, where people would try to get the highest score. Whoever got the highest score during our set won the pot of money (that everyone threw to participate), and we walked away with zero cash.