How Things Got Started

OK so I'm playing around with this blog site for the band.  My thought is that it will be a more long-form way of keeping track of things as they happen, letting some nice long sentences and paragraphs out there to go into great detail on whatever we feel like talking about, instead of the quick and short "hey we are playing on Saturday" stuff that we post on Facebook.  The text message-ization of the Internet dismays me.  I love writing big rambling paragraphs, personally.  Also I'm pretty surprised that mayorforlife.blogspot.com wasn't already taken so I wanted to nab it while I could.

We'll see if this is worthwhile and anyone cares.  At the very least, it'll be worth looking back on it like a journal, for us three guys. So now that I've bored everyone, here's a little bit of a background on who we are and what we do.

I (Todd) have been friends with Rich for a few years, ever since we kept running into each other at Shiner shows and our old bands played a few shows together.  Eventually those bands broke up, and neither of us were playing guitar in any active bands.  I had started up a new project with some friends and asked Rich if he'd be interested in playing guitar with us.  He accepted and that band became All Limbs Intact.

Unless you are really good friends with either of us or maybe we happened to play a show with your band and you stuck around to see us, you have probably never heard of All Limbs Intact.  Which is a shame because I still think that band name was awesome, but was totally our fault.  We were around for a couple of years but spent most of that time in the rehearsal space and/or trying to keep members involved in the band.  The lineup that played all of the shows also included our friends Steve and Jeremy on bass and drums respectively.  Also our friend Lain sang some gibberish for exactly three shows right at the end.  Then everyone but us lost interest and/or flaked out.  This happened right after we spent all of the meager money we had earned from playing shows as a band (a staggering $225 or so) to buy some totally sweet ass western shirts from Alcala Western Wear on Chicago Ave, and happily wore them on stage, amusing solely ourselves, albeit immensely so.  Such a waste.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I loved our songs and we had a blast writing them and playing them to 20 people at midnight on a Tuesday or what have you, but really, I lament the passing of the band name and not really having a good reason to wear those kick ass expensive western shirts.

After All Limbs Intact failed, Rich and I decided to start a new band with the bare minimum amount of people we could get away with to do what we wanted to do.  Less people that can't afford the rehearsal space, less people to email you an hour before practice saying they couldn't make it, less people to realize that they probably need to stop spending their time and money on the band and to spend it doing something that actually supports them and/or their family.

The three piece is definitely the way to go if you have trouble getting too many people in a room at once and you want to start a loud rock band.  So Rich decided to switch to his native instrument, bass, to take lead vocal duties, and we asked his coworker Ulysses if he'd be interested in playing drums.  Uli was a bit younger at 20 years old (at the time), but he possessed very impressive skills behind the kit, and we were all happy with how things sounded and got along like a house on fire.  So we wrote some songs, experimented with different amps and guitars and snare drums and all that fun stuff, and eventually (it took a while...everything does...) we started playing some shows.  Like everything Rich and I do, it started instrumental, but we actually sing now!  I only sing backup yells on some stuff, but hey, technically "we" "sing" when we play.  Things still take a while to happen, but they actually happen.  We all have jobs (and in Uly's case school on top of that) and we're busy but we're able to accomplish some stuff sometimes.  Since we don't currently have any recordings to post up here, here's a link to a search for "Mayor For Life" on youtube, where there are a few videos floating around from our shows. 

Next post will be an update on what we have going on right now.  Good night, faceless void of the Internet, and I will talk to you soon, I promise.

Keep in touch,
Todd