Photo by Johnny Anguish/DayKamp Music.
Friday night felt like the night before the first day of school. More specifically 1st grade, 9th or freshman year of college. The transition years– the start of something new. I wasn’t going to know too many people, something I was both excited and nervous about. But like my days in school, I knew there were many friends and memories to be made if I fully immersed myself. And in my involvement I found that to be truer than I could have ever imagined.
Early Saturday morning as I raced over to the Middle East, I thought of my fellow Boston rockers tired/hungover and bleary eyed, making the same trip. Of the people involved that I already knew, I had never seen any of them before nightfall let alone 10 in the morning. The early wake up socializing was met with the anticipation of what was inside the envelopes which myself and 39 other musicians clutched tightly.
Around 10:15 a.m., just as the last of the participants rolled in, Ashley instructed us to open our envelopes and match the sticker on our name tags with others in our bands. “I hate team building!” someone shouted out as we struggled to figure out what our stickers were supposed to be. I was convinced, and still am, that mine was a pot of gold. “Pot of gold? Pot of gold?” I repeated as I made my way through crowd. I was on a mission and if you weren’t a match, you were dead to me for the next 5 minutes. I heard someone else say pot of gold in the back of the room, it was John Sheeran (bassist for Township). Our strategy was to hang tight and let the other three find us. Kerri-Ann finally encouraged us to seek out our remaining members.
Sure enough, three dudes were looking to round out their band. “Owls?” the group said to John and I. We looked closer at the stickers, they were the same as ours. The remaining band was Evan Shore (singer and guitarist: Muck & The Mires), Lou Paniccia (drummer: Oranjuly), and Aaron Rosenthal (keys: This Blue Heaven). Once we had all met up we were asked to conjure up a band name, a really difficult task it turns out for five people who just met eachother. Lou whipped out his iPhone and was reading off possibilities from a random band name generator.
That’s when Ryan Spaulding (Ryan’s Smashing Life) and film crew came over to introduce the new band. We were completely stuck in the naming process. His cameraman Jonathan Case suggested a combination of sticker theories, “How about Golden Owl?”. It was 300x better than anything we thought of (flaccid dolphin being one of the rejects). After 5 minutes of being a “band” we had our name, our first tv interview and a photo shoot. We decided to go for the “tough guys” face. I think it was the right call.
more to come…
http://www.onenightbandboston.com/
http://www.bostonbandcrush.org/
