Suburban Dammit

Rare picture of Justin and me, late 90's.
I think we are at Ah Boy's.

Justin and Aaron were my first passengers the day I got my driving license. Test in morning, jam in evening. I couldn't wait to borrow my dad's car out for a spin with them that very night.

For some weird reason, we were actually jamming at Ah Boon's in Potong Pasir that evening.

With wheels, it was much easier to go further out now. Who cares why bass guitars are always so damn huge and heavy.

There was a place out at Macpherson named Room Full of Blues. It had a very interesting concept - it was a jamming studio and cafe. The logic is that you can play and others can watch, and El Dorado's right round the corner if you happen to rock that night and someone from Geffen Records was having a beer there. I still think El Dorado's a myth.

But the idea was good.

1. You pay to become the live band.
2. Thirsty after jamming? You pay for your beer.
3. Patrons get to see a live band.
4. Patrons pay to drink more and more beer to ease the assault on the ears.
5. Patrons can't complain if the live band sucks - its a jamming studio, its practice!

Its all good - for shareholders.

We jammed there once and never went back.

The year between the demo and first album flew by quickly. In our own ways, we got caught up in various school stuff. Lots of mugging for me and lots of grand art projects for Justin and Aaron.

By 1999 our arsenal was a boom-full of rock again. We huddled together to work out which ones would be immortalized. We counted 16 chart-toppers ready to go.

Considering the burst budget experience on the demo, we had to carefully map out our costs.

Aaron had the good idea to buy a button making machine for $100 and make buttons to sell at our gigs. Each button costs a dollar and I am sure you have seen them elsewhere here before.

These sold for a dollar each. Somehow I get the feeling we didn't even manage to sell the 100 breakeven buttons we needed to.

Nevertheless it was fascinating learning how buttons were actually made.

No worries, Aaron had another economic weapon with sleeves up his sleeve. T-shirts!

The T-shirt design came in both black and white shades. I am not too sure how many of these we sold. I have only ever seen this shirt on the backs of 2 people - Aaron and the gal he had a crush on. You know, the shirt she was wearing, might even be the same one I saw Aaron in.

We practised alot before going into recording and we were surprised that we were pretty efficient this time around. Our budget almost matched our hours in there.

Except we forgot all about costs for pressing CDs and making album jackets.

The minimum quantity for the cheapest pressers in town to take us seriously was 1000. What the hell are we going to do with 1000 insane copies? Granted the demo sold out...but thats like 100.

However, what passed through our minds was something like: "Hmmm..1000 CDs sold at $10 each. We can go tour Europe."

I guess greed has a way of making people see chicken where there is only egg and start buying huge refrigerators to keep all that chicken they are going to have.

In any case, it was 1000 pieces or nothing; or bootlegging ourselves on cassettes.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the road that wasn't high - I borrowed an evergreen $700 from my dad to help complete it.