Skip Week - Inspiration for 1 Way Ticket

Posted by ChrisArrant on Wednesday, November 22 2006 at 8:00 am

Here we are, in second scheduled Skip Week between chapters 2 and 3 1 Way Ticket. Last week, I talked about music in comics…. this week, I want to talk about music in .. well, my life.

Amidst the late nineties, I was part of several local bands that some might say failed spectacularly. But in doing so, we had alot of fun. Degredation. The Silent Couple. The Velocet. Adagio. Memento Mori. Those were the names of the bands I played in. I started as a keyboardist due to 12 years classical piano training, but was quickly pulled into the allure of bass playing following the likes of Peter Hook (Joy Division, New Order) and Simon Gallup (The Cure). I’d always been a student of music, starting with my piano training but also going to my college majoring in radio broadcasting and culminating with performing in bands.

The initial allure was the performance in front of crowds, but once I was “in” I grew to love the practices and camraderie (or lack thereof) that permeated the relationships in a band. All the local bands practiced in a group of storage sheds (as homaged in Chapter 1), and on weekend nights it became a band camp of the best kind with up to 12 to 15 bands playing simultaneously in their badly sound-proofed sheds. It became a subculture of sorts for a few years, with pseudo-groupies coming to sit outside their favorite band’s shed to hear what they were working on, but more importantly, to be with them in this stripped down moment. From the grindcore bands such as Circle and Cede to the grunge throwbacks the Lunge Puppets to my own particular persuasion of gothy new wave / rock, it was all there. Even the cops routinely coming by to cite us on noise complaints.

It was these years that gave me such an interest in the “behind the scenes” or “inside baseball” approach to musicians. And although I ultimately fell out of actively playing in bands, those experiences still color the way I see and create things to this day.

That’s where 1 Way Ticket comes from.

Come back next Wednesday as we begin chapter 3 of 1 Way Ticket, where we learn the effects of Sully’s spectral guitar.

Category: 1 Way Ticket

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