The Sea of Cortez, or That Time I Used to Be In a Band
Yep, the Nicsperiment used to be in a band. Multiple bands.
Let's back up.
Just kidding, I got tired of making up excuses to my friends for why I had to leave football practice early on Tuesdays, so I quit piano lessons. Slowly, my skills began to fade. First, the ability to efficiently read sheet music. Then the ability to play anything complicated. Finally, doing anything more with both hands than playing chords with one and single notes with the other. It's a bummer. I should have just kept telling them I was going to the doctor to get penis reductions because it wouldn't fit in my pants. Middle school is the best.
My musical talents then lay dormant for an entire presidential term.
However, something constantly bugged me. The cult/church I attended featured a raucous praise and worship band. Being naturally artistic, I often gravitated toward the stage...where I was consistently told I didn't belong. The nadir came when a possibly well-meaning woman told me when I sat down behind the drums, "The Nicsperiment, you aren't anointed to play those."
Yeah, when you're in a cult, people feel like it is their place to tell you stuff like that. That, and, "You only tithed 40% of your Winn Dixie paycheck. You are in danger of hellfire." Awesome.
When I graduated high school, I received a $1,000 scholarship from the Pointe Coupee Parish Police Jury, for the purpose of buying college textbooks. I used it to purchase a bass and an amp.
Within about a month, I was playing bass on stage at the cult, and in a punk band with my buddy, Jordan. A year later, I was playing electric guitar. Two years after that, I owed Musician's Friend $500 over the course of 12 monthly installments for the new drum set sitting in my room.
In that time span, Jordan and I butted heads, I quit, we tried again with our buddies Jon and Travis added, and me on as vocals, as vocals that aren't supposed to sound good are the only kind I'm good at, and punk doesn't work with good ones. We did a pretty decent MxPx cover. I'll mail you the cassette.
Jordan and I were young, facing a pretty big age gap (he was still in high school and I thought he was immature, though I wasn't exactly holding that down, either), had two strong personalities, and were frequently tense with one another. We thought with our drive and focus we would do something great, but in 2001/2002, we were too amped up to make it happen.
Several years passed, I got my guitar and drums, and spent hours holed away learning how to play them. I quickly realized that as naturally as piano and bass came to me, guitar did not. However, another buddy that I frequently played with, Jonathan, got a bunch of people to pool together to buy me a guitar amp with an effects board built into it for a college graduation present, and I found that with that, I could achieve most of the sounds I wanted. The drums were another beast entirely.
I love playing drums. When I first got them, I played them for hours upon hours. I don't think I've ever actually gotten tired of playing drums during any respective time I've played them--I just have had other stuff I had to do. I may not have a ton of inherent talent to play them, but I've always been able to keep perfect rhythm, which helps cover up my lack of skill, particularly with my footwork.
About a year after picking them up, I sat in on a practice with my good friend Dave's band, A Soup Named Stew. They had recently won a pretty major local music show, and recorded their first album. Their longtime drummer had just left, and they were looking for a new one. They drove out to my house to sort of try me out, but with just a year under my belt, I wasn't quite ready. Still, I felt like I should be doing something.
Now Jordan re-enters the story. He never stopped playing music either, focusing on guitar and vocals, both of which he is far more skilled at then I am. He had recently purchased a digital recorder, and as I had been recording my own music by playing a part and recording to cassette, then playing that cassette while I played the second part and recorded on a second cassette recorder, that sounded mighty fine. I mean recording with a digital recorder sounded mighty fine, not that my double cassette recordings, which sounded like the result of tossing a rabid cat into a garbage disposal, sounded mighty fine.
Despite the fact that I was an awful bandmate and a subpar friend to him, Jordan drove out to my house, which, to be honest, was quite a distance off the beaten path, to help me record the music I had been writing. Jordan was a great recorder/producer, making me play each part until it was, if not perfect, at least palatable. Over the course of a month, I laid down two instrumental demos, and a halfway decent cover of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire." However, waiting until Jordan could make the trek out to my wilderness became intolerable. Musician's Friend again gained access to my wallet.
I purchased a Fostex MR-8HD digital recorder, and got to work.
After tossing around several monikers to record music under, I settled on The Sea of Cortez, named for a body of water I had been fascinated with since I was a child, and a name which conjured the image of what I wanted to accomplish musically. Well, actually, I wanted to accomplish a lot musically. I've always had too many ideas, and too little time.
Anyway, the first thing I wanted to accomplish musically would be a self-titled album influenced by Dredg's El Cielo, The Appleseed Cast's Mare Vitalis, and Echo and the Bunnymen's Heaven Up Here. The album would have a nautical feel, with lumbering drum rhythms and relaxed guitar arpeggios contrasting with sudden bursts of post-punk. I'll not be lazy, and define that: I spent hours finding a guitar sound inspired by the chorus of Dredg's "Sanzen," where I would rapidly strum slightly distorted, heavily delayed barre chords to create a sort of humming sound for gentle choruses with big ocean wave tom toms in the background, and even more hours finding a tone similar to Echo and the Bunnymen's violent, chiming guitar punctuations from "Over the Wall"'s post-choruses. The arpeggio's I learned from The Appleseed Cast.
These three elements combined to create a sort of boat drifting on an airy blue sky, manta ray sailing through deep water, storm rolling over the horizon diversity that kept the nautical theme in mind. I also utilized some early 90's New Age keyboard sounds to conjure images of the desert which surrounds The Sea of Cortez.
Thematically, I had something very apt for my early 2006 life. Late the year before, I had finally left the cult I grew up in. I was told some awful things upon leaving, particularly that my future would be bleak (and that I'd probably end up the next Charles Manson, a prediction which way oversold my charisma). The lyrics for this self-titled album were a response, the chorus for the first track with singing, "I'll go down with the ship (myself, who was told I would sink), or sail to farther shores." I may not have finished the album, but I'm still here, assholes. Sorry. Back to music.
I meticulously recorded final versions of the second and third tracks. It was so much work, but I was achieving the sound I was shooting for...sort of. Recording layers upon layers of complex musical parts by yourself is quite difficult and extremely draining. Add to that, I was quite impatient. I just couldn't record fast enough to make myself happy, and I knew that even though my musicianship was progressing, I couldn't sing how I wanted myself to sound. I decided to table the rest of that album to work on something more immediate, something I could do more quickly, even though I'd already demo'd 3/4 of the album, and written the rest. I had another project in mind that I could achieve under The Sea of Cortez moniker, called The Easter Parade. This would be a series of instrumentals influenced by The Gospels.
I set to work on The Easter Parade immediately. The songs were less musically complex, and less difficult to play than some of the hand stretchers on the self-titled. They were still wildly experimental, as I tried to make the keyboard sound like a guitar, and the guitar sound like something new entirely, though sometimes I couldn't resist just jamming out.
To this day, I am embarrassed by how hastily I recorded those ten songs. I had zero patience. I'd record a part until it was merely good enough, and sometimes I chose takes that were musically subpar, but emotionally correct. I should have put more time into achieving both. As it stands, over a couple of weeks, I recorded the ten track The Easter Parade, duplicated it on a bunch of CD-R's, and passed it around to my friends. I even gave a lucky few an extended disc with B-Sides--songs I'd recorded during those sessions that didn't fit with the other ten.
I received some positive feedback from friends. I'm not sure how much of it was just people who liked me being nice, or people who didn't like me telling me nice things so I'd go away. I posted the better songs on myspace, and started to get compliments from musicians, and people who had no reason to compliment me. Several bands, one of whom was on a fairly large indie label, offered to take me out on tour. But it wasn't to be...
All of this just happened to be coinciding with me not only getting married and moving to a no-drums apartment, but getting a full time job I couldn't just take breaks from to go on tour.
I'm not going to lie. I often wonder what could have been. Though I am not the greatest musician, I can write songs with multiple parts on into eternity. I never run out of musical ideas. If I could have formed a touring band, I feel like I could have been a contender.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
It didn't happen.
I continued recording songs for a while, finding inventive ways to create percussion and not have my neighbors call the cops on me. I was in a dark place then, and those songs are straight evil, a counterpoint to the hopefulness of the never finished self-titled album. Time passed, and I felt like a great opportunity had passed me by. Thankfully, that wasn't the end of my musical story.
My new apartment was only a couple miles from Jordan's house, and at a moment where I thought music might be done with me, Jordan called me up to ask for help. His fiancée had recently broke up with him, and he had written a batch of dark, angry, frankly awesome songs. They were the best songs he's ever written. He wanted to play them in a setting with just his electric guitar and vocals, and a drummer.
He needed a drummer.
At this point, the lady who said I wasn't "annointed" to play drums would have been looking like a fool, had she still been in my life in any capacity. Bitter over my past drum rejections, I had dedicated myself to the craft like a madman. I took my drums out of storage, moved them to Jordan's house to practice, and then Jordan and I gigged the crap out of those songs.
I really wish there was a recording of the first club show we played--my first public performance not on a religious stage. We were great. Jordan was just so damn angry. It suited him so well, though ironically his nature is calm and kind...the sloth is his power animal. I was angry, too. I beat the hell out of those drums. I had to get the thickest heads I could find because I was tearing holes in them. That was so much fun.
Then Jordan decided he didn't want to dwell in that darkness anymore. The adventure was over, seemingly as soon as it had started. I have never gigged in a non-church setting again.
I did go on to play some awesome improv sessions on guitar with my buddy Chris from As Cities Burn. Those times were a blast, but my cousin Adrian (on drums) and we were the only people to witness them.
Jordan and some of his pals started a local record label. They put out a sampler featuring one of my songs, carried by Baton Rouge's local music stores. My wife's church, which I joined when we married, got wind that I was a drummer, and put me to work. When it became clear the need was even greater on bass, I took over there. I got to sit next to this wizened guitar gentleman named Jeff, who was in his teens during Beatlemania, and who has more guitar and musical knowledge than anyone else I've had the privilege of knowing. We jammed Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs during practice lulls. It was awesome.
My family later moved to a new church, and I'm still playing bass there. It's the largest setting I've played in, and it's fun...
but it's not The Sea of Cortez.
One day, I'm going to go back and finish that first album. I'll record the parts perfectly, and I'll get a singer for the vocal parts. One day...
In the meanwhile, I just visited The Sea of Cortez's myspace page. Myspace was once the best hub for bands to meet each other and get their music out to the public. It currently appears to be under deconstruction. I visited it about sixth months ago, and my non-band friends' profiles all still existed, and were still "Top 8"'d in my profile. They're all gone now. All that remains are links to the band pages I had befriended. None of the songs, including my own, are playable. The playcounts look like they were reset. Any updates I posted are gone. Here's a link for history's sake. 12 years ago, this was the place to be.
That's just not acceptable. I've got a Youtube channel where I post obscure video game music. Might as well post some obscure The Sea of Cortez, too...
Let's back up.
* * *
Like most middle schoolers, I took piano lessons. Unlike most middle schoolers, I actually liked to play the piano. I took to it like a duck to water. In case you weren't aware, ducks like water. They are an aquatic fowl. After a year of lessons, I was able to read sheet music, play fairly complex pieces, and use my left and right hand independently of each other. The sky was my musical limit.Just kidding, I got tired of making up excuses to my friends for why I had to leave football practice early on Tuesdays, so I quit piano lessons. Slowly, my skills began to fade. First, the ability to efficiently read sheet music. Then the ability to play anything complicated. Finally, doing anything more with both hands than playing chords with one and single notes with the other. It's a bummer. I should have just kept telling them I was going to the doctor to get penis reductions because it wouldn't fit in my pants. Middle school is the best.
My musical talents then lay dormant for an entire presidential term.
However, something constantly bugged me. The cult/church I attended featured a raucous praise and worship band. Being naturally artistic, I often gravitated toward the stage...where I was consistently told I didn't belong. The nadir came when a possibly well-meaning woman told me when I sat down behind the drums, "The Nicsperiment, you aren't anointed to play those."
Yeah, when you're in a cult, people feel like it is their place to tell you stuff like that. That, and, "You only tithed 40% of your Winn Dixie paycheck. You are in danger of hellfire." Awesome.
When I graduated high school, I received a $1,000 scholarship from the Pointe Coupee Parish Police Jury, for the purpose of buying college textbooks. I used it to purchase a bass and an amp.
Within about a month, I was playing bass on stage at the cult, and in a punk band with my buddy, Jordan. A year later, I was playing electric guitar. Two years after that, I owed Musician's Friend $500 over the course of 12 monthly installments for the new drum set sitting in my room.
 |
| December, 2004, Glynn, LA |
Jordan and I were young, facing a pretty big age gap (he was still in high school and I thought he was immature, though I wasn't exactly holding that down, either), had two strong personalities, and were frequently tense with one another. We thought with our drive and focus we would do something great, but in 2001/2002, we were too amped up to make it happen.
Several years passed, I got my guitar and drums, and spent hours holed away learning how to play them. I quickly realized that as naturally as piano and bass came to me, guitar did not. However, another buddy that I frequently played with, Jonathan, got a bunch of people to pool together to buy me a guitar amp with an effects board built into it for a college graduation present, and I found that with that, I could achieve most of the sounds I wanted. The drums were another beast entirely.
I love playing drums. When I first got them, I played them for hours upon hours. I don't think I've ever actually gotten tired of playing drums during any respective time I've played them--I just have had other stuff I had to do. I may not have a ton of inherent talent to play them, but I've always been able to keep perfect rhythm, which helps cover up my lack of skill, particularly with my footwork.
About a year after picking them up, I sat in on a practice with my good friend Dave's band, A Soup Named Stew. They had recently won a pretty major local music show, and recorded their first album. Their longtime drummer had just left, and they were looking for a new one. They drove out to my house to sort of try me out, but with just a year under my belt, I wasn't quite ready. Still, I felt like I should be doing something.
Now Jordan re-enters the story. He never stopped playing music either, focusing on guitar and vocals, both of which he is far more skilled at then I am. He had recently purchased a digital recorder, and as I had been recording my own music by playing a part and recording to cassette, then playing that cassette while I played the second part and recorded on a second cassette recorder, that sounded mighty fine. I mean recording with a digital recorder sounded mighty fine, not that my double cassette recordings, which sounded like the result of tossing a rabid cat into a garbage disposal, sounded mighty fine.
Despite the fact that I was an awful bandmate and a subpar friend to him, Jordan drove out to my house, which, to be honest, was quite a distance off the beaten path, to help me record the music I had been writing. Jordan was a great recorder/producer, making me play each part until it was, if not perfect, at least palatable. Over the course of a month, I laid down two instrumental demos, and a halfway decent cover of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire." However, waiting until Jordan could make the trek out to my wilderness became intolerable. Musician's Friend again gained access to my wallet.
I purchased a Fostex MR-8HD digital recorder, and got to work.
 |
| Pictured: Dream Maker, 2006 |
Anyway, the first thing I wanted to accomplish musically would be a self-titled album influenced by Dredg's El Cielo, The Appleseed Cast's Mare Vitalis, and Echo and the Bunnymen's Heaven Up Here. The album would have a nautical feel, with lumbering drum rhythms and relaxed guitar arpeggios contrasting with sudden bursts of post-punk. I'll not be lazy, and define that: I spent hours finding a guitar sound inspired by the chorus of Dredg's "Sanzen," where I would rapidly strum slightly distorted, heavily delayed barre chords to create a sort of humming sound for gentle choruses with big ocean wave tom toms in the background, and even more hours finding a tone similar to Echo and the Bunnymen's violent, chiming guitar punctuations from "Over the Wall"'s post-choruses. The arpeggio's I learned from The Appleseed Cast.
These three elements combined to create a sort of boat drifting on an airy blue sky, manta ray sailing through deep water, storm rolling over the horizon diversity that kept the nautical theme in mind. I also utilized some early 90's New Age keyboard sounds to conjure images of the desert which surrounds The Sea of Cortez.
Thematically, I had something very apt for my early 2006 life. Late the year before, I had finally left the cult I grew up in. I was told some awful things upon leaving, particularly that my future would be bleak (and that I'd probably end up the next Charles Manson, a prediction which way oversold my charisma). The lyrics for this self-titled album were a response, the chorus for the first track with singing, "I'll go down with the ship (myself, who was told I would sink), or sail to farther shores." I may not have finished the album, but I'm still here, assholes. Sorry. Back to music.
I meticulously recorded final versions of the second and third tracks. It was so much work, but I was achieving the sound I was shooting for...sort of. Recording layers upon layers of complex musical parts by yourself is quite difficult and extremely draining. Add to that, I was quite impatient. I just couldn't record fast enough to make myself happy, and I knew that even though my musicianship was progressing, I couldn't sing how I wanted myself to sound. I decided to table the rest of that album to work on something more immediate, something I could do more quickly, even though I'd already demo'd 3/4 of the album, and written the rest. I had another project in mind that I could achieve under The Sea of Cortez moniker, called The Easter Parade. This would be a series of instrumentals influenced by The Gospels.
I set to work on The Easter Parade immediately. The songs were less musically complex, and less difficult to play than some of the hand stretchers on the self-titled. They were still wildly experimental, as I tried to make the keyboard sound like a guitar, and the guitar sound like something new entirely, though sometimes I couldn't resist just jamming out.
To this day, I am embarrassed by how hastily I recorded those ten songs. I had zero patience. I'd record a part until it was merely good enough, and sometimes I chose takes that were musically subpar, but emotionally correct. I should have put more time into achieving both. As it stands, over a couple of weeks, I recorded the ten track The Easter Parade, duplicated it on a bunch of CD-R's, and passed it around to my friends. I even gave a lucky few an extended disc with B-Sides--songs I'd recorded during those sessions that didn't fit with the other ten.
I received some positive feedback from friends. I'm not sure how much of it was just people who liked me being nice, or people who didn't like me telling me nice things so I'd go away. I posted the better songs on myspace, and started to get compliments from musicians, and people who had no reason to compliment me. Several bands, one of whom was on a fairly large indie label, offered to take me out on tour. But it wasn't to be...
All of this just happened to be coinciding with me not only getting married and moving to a no-drums apartment, but getting a full time job I couldn't just take breaks from to go on tour.
I'm not going to lie. I often wonder what could have been. Though I am not the greatest musician, I can write songs with multiple parts on into eternity. I never run out of musical ideas. If I could have formed a touring band, I feel like I could have been a contender.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
It didn't happen.
I continued recording songs for a while, finding inventive ways to create percussion and not have my neighbors call the cops on me. I was in a dark place then, and those songs are straight evil, a counterpoint to the hopefulness of the never finished self-titled album. Time passed, and I felt like a great opportunity had passed me by. Thankfully, that wasn't the end of my musical story.
My new apartment was only a couple miles from Jordan's house, and at a moment where I thought music might be done with me, Jordan called me up to ask for help. His fiancée had recently broke up with him, and he had written a batch of dark, angry, frankly awesome songs. They were the best songs he's ever written. He wanted to play them in a setting with just his electric guitar and vocals, and a drummer.
He needed a drummer.
At this point, the lady who said I wasn't "annointed" to play drums would have been looking like a fool, had she still been in my life in any capacity. Bitter over my past drum rejections, I had dedicated myself to the craft like a madman. I took my drums out of storage, moved them to Jordan's house to practice, and then Jordan and I gigged the crap out of those songs.
I really wish there was a recording of the first club show we played--my first public performance not on a religious stage. We were great. Jordan was just so damn angry. It suited him so well, though ironically his nature is calm and kind...the sloth is his power animal. I was angry, too. I beat the hell out of those drums. I had to get the thickest heads I could find because I was tearing holes in them. That was so much fun.
 |
| July, 2007, The Darkroom, Baton Rouge, LA |
I did go on to play some awesome improv sessions on guitar with my buddy Chris from As Cities Burn. Those times were a blast, but my cousin Adrian (on drums) and we were the only people to witness them.
Jordan and some of his pals started a local record label. They put out a sampler featuring one of my songs, carried by Baton Rouge's local music stores. My wife's church, which I joined when we married, got wind that I was a drummer, and put me to work. When it became clear the need was even greater on bass, I took over there. I got to sit next to this wizened guitar gentleman named Jeff, who was in his teens during Beatlemania, and who has more guitar and musical knowledge than anyone else I've had the privilege of knowing. We jammed Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs during practice lulls. It was awesome.
My family later moved to a new church, and I'm still playing bass there. It's the largest setting I've played in, and it's fun...
but it's not The Sea of Cortez.
One day, I'm going to go back and finish that first album. I'll record the parts perfectly, and I'll get a singer for the vocal parts. One day...
In the meanwhile, I just visited The Sea of Cortez's myspace page. Myspace was once the best hub for bands to meet each other and get their music out to the public. It currently appears to be under deconstruction. I visited it about sixth months ago, and my non-band friends' profiles all still existed, and were still "Top 8"'d in my profile. They're all gone now. All that remains are links to the band pages I had befriended. None of the songs, including my own, are playable. The playcounts look like they were reset. Any updates I posted are gone. Here's a link for history's sake. 12 years ago, this was the place to be.
That's just not acceptable. I've got a Youtube channel where I post obscure video game music. Might as well post some obscure The Sea of Cortez, too...
Comments
Will you please email me your cover of I'm On Fire?
: )
davidloti=davidloti
Check your inbox!
"I did go on to play some awesome improv sessions on guitar with my buddy Chris from As Cities Burn."
Woah. Like, play with the "CD Chris" or the real life one???
The Sea of Cortez is a great name ... trademark it!
Heh, the real life Chris. He's from Baton Rouge, and dated my cousin for a couple of years. She introduced us, thinking we'd hit it off, and he became a good friend (and a friend to my wife, as well). The jam sessions we had were really just a good excuse to hang out (and his parents' house had this insane man cave full of instruments and movies and video games). He lives in Seattle now, and is still making music. He put out a really fun psych-pop/rock album last year under the moniker Wall of Ears:
https://wallofears.bandcamp.com/
Man, I really should trademark it! During the MySpace heyday, a few other Sea of Cortez's popped up, but none of them stuck around, or had the playcount I did. I need to get on that!