Wondering how to start a band? I can offer advice on that topic. I’ve done it a handful of times. It’s not hard. Want a successful career in music? Don’t look at me. I’ve always existed on the fringes of the underground. But what I do know is this: if you want to have a successful career in the music business, you gotta start somewhere. For me, that somewhere was The Instant Prehistoric Animals, my first band.
Under the Ground
The undergound is where I’m likely to stay and that’s fine, after all, I never wanted to play music for money or even for the nookie like that ’90s nu metal band suggested. I do what I do (make music, publish zines, draw comics) as a form of creative expression. This should be obvious, but sometimes it needs to be stated.
My motives for wanting to play music today are the same as they were in 1986 when I formed my first band with my best friend. In addition to providing an outlet for creative expression, I had the desire to emulate my heroes in bands like The Clash, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, and too many more to mention.
Off the Radar
At this point in our cultural history, being in a band is a right of passage. With the internet, it’s easier than ever to record and release music. In the mid 1980s in rural Illinois, however, there were many challenges. In my small town of Galena, there were no record stores to buy music or music venues to play it. For records, we had to cross the Mississippi River into Iowa where you would find the retail music chain Musicland at the Kennedy Mall or maybe a smaller independent store that managed to exist for a year of two. Bands that played original music were unheard of.
All this was fine until a certain point in the mid 1980s when a switch flipped inside my brain and I went from a Men at Work and Queen-loving tween to a Pretenders, Cars, and Psychedelic Furs loving teen. It was a short hop from there to college rock staples like The Smiths and REM and from there it was all punk rock with the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Descendents, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedy’s, Dead Milkmen, T.S.O.L. and a slew of SST bands — I could go on.
Out in the Sticks
Out there in the sticks, small glimmers of alternative music and counterculture could be glimpsed. Oddly enough, the import bins of some records shops offered domestic releases from indie labels. Stops in Madison, Wisconsin on family trips allowed me to visit the records stores located on both sides of State Street.
Another seemingly unlikely place to tap into alternative culture was the video tape kiosk at Ron’s Gas Station in Galena which rented movies like Repo Man, Fritz the Cat, Eraser Head and Toxic Avenger. A few of us (very few) had shitty skateboards.
Even so, finding good music, films, and zines wasn’t easy and the opportunity to see live music was rare, even more so for underage kids. Therefore, it was a total life changer when a tiny display ad in Cream magazine prompted me to send 50 cents to the Toxic Shock Mail order company in Pomona, California.
After studying their entire catalog and relying on my recollection of bands I’d heard about, but probably more on the descriptions of the releases offered, I chose three albums. What a thrill to receive those three records in the mail: Hüsker Dü, New Day Rising, The Replacements Sorry Ma and Hootenanny. Along with Soul Asylum, these bands formed the holy trilogy of Twin Cities punk rock.
My First Guitar
By the time I was 15, my desire to form a band grew daily. It took over my brain, in fact. My best friend, Toby, was all in on the idea too, but we both needed guitars.
Toby gots his first, a magenta-colored Kramer — a Christmas gift from his dad in Chicago. Toby’s older brother, who lived in Chicago too, already caught the guitar bug. He was proficient at playing Metallica and hardcore punk riffs. He would stick with it and eventually join the band Trenchmouth.
About four months after Toby got his axe, I had my own guitar. I used birthday money to acquire a Fender Lead II and an Ampeg Gemini I amp. I bought it from the father of a kid who went to my high school who had lost interest in it. $150 bucks for both. It was a sweet deal. It was a right-handed guitar but I strung it lefty and was soon on my way to learning how to play guitar completely backwards.
Geetar Wizardry
Guitar in hand, I immediately started writing songs. Not good ones, mind you, and not even songs, really. More like scraps of ideas executed poorly. As soon as I came up with any type of crude riff, I’d record it. Before long, I cut my first record under the name of Benn E. Gessert, a nod to Dune (an intimidating book that I would start many times before eventually finishing decades later).
My debut music release was titled The Geetar Wizardry of Benn E. Gessert and was recorded over top of a Michael Jackson Thriller cassette. (This was done by putting tape over what are called “write-project tabs.” This allows you to press the record button on a tape player and record over a cassette. In contrast, blank tapes have a small plastic flap over these tabs which you can break off if you don’t want to inadvertently record over your mix tape.)
Birth of the Dinosaurs
The Instant Prehistoric Animals, or IPA as we were more commonly called, formed in 1987, or at least that’s when we came up with the name. “Instant Prehistoric” toys were little capsules, that when soaked in water, expanded to form spongy dinosaurs.
After putting together a few songs with just our two electric guitars, we tried recruiting a few friends to join the band.
Our classmate, Ted (a future Sheriff of Jo Davies County) was going to be our bass player. Even though he never got around to acquiring a bass, Ted remains an honorary member of IPA. Our buddy Chad, a friend since grade school, was next on the list of potential bass players. We went so far as to rent a bass and amp for a weekend so he could try it out. Ultimately, he chose the banjo instead, putting him firmly out of the running for a spot in IPA.
We decided to deal with bass later and instead focused on filling the drummer’s throne. Our friend Dave, a top high school athlete and honor student, was recruited for the spot. He played drums in our high school’s marching band and had his own kit.
We began as a three piece playing in a spare room of Dave’s house on Broadway Street. It was here that we recorded our first EP, Minor, Cuts, Scrapes and Burns. Toby and I had already made a tape of song ideas that we called A Lite Snack. The songs on this cassette are as crude as our ability to play our instruments at the time, but there were seconds of brilliance on them, or so we thought. We listened to that tape repeatedly on the cassette player of Toby’s family’s Renault Alliance.
All About That Bass
Our bass dilemma was solved with the arrival of Jeff. Jeff was a transplant to Galena by way of Las Vegas, and Dundee, Illinois before that. His mom had moved to Galena to open an antique store and Jeff ollowed.
Jeff was 24, at least six years older than the rest of us. I’m not sure how I found out Jeff was into punk rock or played music. He worked at a gas station that sold beer. I think he had been convinced to sell it to a few of my female friends. However it happened, it was a lucky break for us, because Jeff was a bassist. In fact, he once played in a punk band in Las Vegas that opened for T.S.O.L. We were big fans of their Dance With Me album and T.S.O.L. EP.
Toby and I went into the gas station where Jeff worked and introduced ourselves and asked him to join our band. Amazingly, he said yes.
Jeff had a vast collection of punk rock vinyl. I borrowed and taped as much as I could.
I don’t really know how he felt about playing with a group of 17-year-old high school kids. He didn’t always show up to practice if that’s any indication, but he wrote songs and could play scales and had actually been out there in the real world beyond our small town.
Band Practice
As a four-piece band, we moved on from the smaller space in Dave’s house to our friend Rob’s basement. It wasn’t really a basement, it was the first floor of a store front that formerly housed Rob’s dad’s TV repair shop. We called it the basement because Rob’s family live on the second floor. The store was gone by this point and the space was a great hangout spot with a (very shitty) pool table and fridge. It was our own pool hall and was always stocked with junk food. We spent a lot of time at Rob’s house playing pool and listening to metal when we weren’t driving around town in our friend Swede’s Dodge Aries.
The Music
Like many teenaged songwriters, I leaned heavily towards depressingly morose songs with morbid lyrics. (My song “Wishing I Was Dead” is a great example). Even though I’ve held on to much of my creative output over the years, no matter how cringe inducing it is, I have long since purged the scraps of paper that contained those early angst-ridden, juvenile lyrics.
Once we had a handful of songs ready, we recorded them either on my Daytron cassette player or Rob’s fancier boombox. I designed the album covers and dubbed copies to give to our friends. I was proud and excited about those crudely recorded, shitty sounding tapes — probably more so than anything I’ve done creatively since. I loved making the album covers and writing out song titles and lyric sheets and I loved listening to the music we made, even though we were rank amateurs and the production values were non existent.
The End of the Band
The Instant Prehistoric Animals didn’t get together much after high school graduation. Toby, Jeff, and I were all employed full time at the Galena Territory Golf Resort as a bellman, bartender, and dishwasher, respectively. Dave was a life guard at the municipal pool. We were busy that summer and as college loomed, there didn’t seem much point in it.
We got together at least one more time to record a song Jeff wrote for a coworker he was crushing on. We learned it and recorded it in an afternoon. I have no idea what this woman’s reaction was when she heard it, but I don’t think it led to any sort of romantic entaglement.
At summer’s end, Dave left to play football at Northwestern. Toby, who opted to start using his given first name of Max, left for Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. I took my Fender Lead II and a Gorilla practice amp to a dorm room at DePaul University in Chicago where I would almost immediately fall in with a bunch of like-minded kids who would make our own attempt at rock and roll immortality with a band called MotherSratcher, but that’s another tale.
IPA Lives
Incidentally, the year after college, we were all back living and working in Galena for the summer. After our jobs at various restaurants, we would invariably end up at a place we called The Spot. The Spot an outdoor wooden platform on the grounds of General Ulysses S. Grant’s preCivil war home. It was in an open field, but couldn’t be viewed from Bouthillier Street. And it had a great view of downtown Galena.
One night after walking the short distance from the street to our hangout, we discovered a pair of high school girls occupying our place. We struck up a conversation with them and asked what bands they listened to, never thinking in a million years one of those bands would IPA, but it was. Somehow copies of those cassettes survived and were passed down to a new generation of teenagers.
Why Start a Band?
Our band was a great learning experience. It was something we did outside of school. It was outside of any other organization and outside of the family. There were no teachers, coaches, or parents to tell us what to do or how not to do it.
Our skill levels as musicians remained rudimentary at best, but we never let that stop us from practicing, writing songs, and recording and “releasing” tapes. My sister, who had gone off to school a year before me, got a song of ours played on her friend’s college radio show in Bloomington, IL. That was huge. We did everything we could do as a band in our small town environment. There’s no doubt we were the only punk rock band in town, maybe the only band playing original songs, period.
Blasting the Past
I was reminded of all this when earlier this year, I dug out my old IPA cassettes and digitized them. While listening to these tapes, I remembered every note, right or wrong. I recalled the pre-song banter and every failed take. Looking at the album covers, I was reminded of how proud I was of what we did. These dubbed cassettes with photocopied j-cards gave me as much joy and sense of accomplishment then as any of the dozen of releases I’ve been a part of since. Nothing has equalled those early days of discovery.
My college band, MotherScratcher, never developed into anything beyond the walls of the dorm, and it would be a few years of failed attempts before I was in another functioning music project with Team Satan in 1995. For the next 17 years I was heavily involved in music. Reagan National Crash Diet followed and then Soft Targets. I was able to continue my love for writing, playing, and recording music and for creating album art as well as booking shows, short tours, and starting my own record label which I did with RoosterCow Records in 2001.
Postscript
In 2012, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin. I was tired of the big city, where I’d spent the previous 24 years. I needed a change. Madison has always occupied a special place in my consciousness, due to the many early music discoveries I made there on State Street as a teenager. I formed Empire Smalls there as a solo project. Once I moved back to Chicago in 2015, after a few false starts, I expanded it to a 3-piece with old friends Tim Davison and Mike Dixon.
This incarnation of the band played in the basement of our house in Portage Park. We hung out, talked, played music, and drank (probably too much) beer. It was a return to those early days in Rob’s basement in Galena. We recorded a full-length record during COVID and had enough leftover tunes for a follow-up EP.
When Tim moved to North Carolina, we attempted to replace him, but ultimately decided to disband. Now, I’m back to making solo recordings, but on a laptop computer instead of my trusty old cassette player. Things have come full circle and that feels right to me. I’m not saying I will never play in a band again or take the stage to present my songs to the public, but there’s a good chance I won’t, and I’m OK with that.
