Sometimes it doesn't work out.

I knew what I wanted to do with my life the day I wrapped my fingers around the neck of a guitar. I was 13, and from that point on, nothing else mattered. School, friends, sports; it all paled in comparison to the feeling I got from running pentatonic scales.

I practiced for 4 or 5 hours a day, sometimes longer. I started my first band when I was 17. We were pretty terrible but managed to get booked for a couple shows. I'll always remember the first time I got paid. We played a show on a farm for $60. I don't remember what I did with the money, but I'll never forget the check as it was placed in my hand. "You're a professional now," she said. 

I didn't put any thought into where I was going to college. All I wanted to do was start a band and tour, and I didn't need a degree to do that. I applied to one school and got accepted. Classes started but I barely paid attention. I was on the hunt for a band. The first group was promising and we won second place in a talent show, but split up after that. The next group was a lot more fun, and we played two gigs, but called it quits when summer break came. The third group was more of the real deal. We played about a dozen shows and even did a little traveling, but that band broke up as well. Then there was The Livingstons.

The idea for the band was sparked while trying to fix an antifreeze leak. Once we started practicing together, we didn't look back. Eventually we signed a management deal, changed our name to Fate of Angels, recorded an album with a Grammy winning producer, played hundreds of shows all over the country, opened for some big name acts, and then after seven years, we broke up. No record deal, no gold records, no money in our pockets.

That was five years ago and I've hardly played guitar since.

Sad story? Maybe. I was depressed for quite a while that it didn't work out the way I wanted. I believed with every fiber that it would, and I was wrong. On the other hand, I knew my chances of succeeding in the music business were slim but chose to go for it anyway, and I'm proud of that. I'm also proud of what we accomplished as a band even though the end results weren't what I hoped for. Those seven years were some of the best in my life.

The odds are always stacked against those who try to achieve greatness. Unfortunately, too many people fail at their first attempt and never try again. I fell into this camp for quite a while but I'm ready to give myself another shot. It's very possible I will fail, but I believe the bigger failure is not trying. 

Like Jared wrote in The Friction, "Throw-downs with this world are never easy to win. Nothing worthwhile in this life has ever been."

Luck

I guess I should have figured it out when the bird flew over the entire music festival audience and crapped directly on MY head.

Or maybe the time I got TWO flat tires on ONE trip to visit my folks in South Dakota.

Or maybe, just maybe, I would have figured it out when my brakes failed causing me to rear-end a nuero surgeon on my way home for Christmas break who in turn sued me for about $30,000.

As bright as I think I am, it's taken me this long to come to the conclusion that I'm not blessed with this thing called luck, and not only am I unlucky, but I am contagious.

Fate of Angels seems to be most succeptable to my disease...

Ever since this band started it's been nothing but one unfortunate mis-hap after another. It's actually quite humorous now that I start to think about it. One of the first major cases I can think of was a trip to Kansas. This trip, we decided to borrow a trailer from a friend so that we wouldn't have to take more than one vehicle. It was a good idea, until I saw the size of the trailer. It was massive; absolutely too large to be pulled by Anthony's 6 cylinder Ford Explorer, but we hitched it up anyway and took off down I-80. We stopped about an hour later in York to grab something to eat, and when we came back out to the truck, the transmission was pouring out transmission fluid. I should have trusted my gut instinct and just taken the extra vehicle in the first place, but once again, I chose wrong. The only thing we could think of was to call and and say we couldn't make the show. We dialed up our friends "After the Order" and broke the bad news to them. They wanted us to play the show bad enough though that they conviced us to just grab our guitars and whatever we could fit in the truck and come down and use their amps and drums, and play the show anyway. We concluded that the truck would survive the rest of the 5 hour trip as long as we weren't pulling the trailer, so we quick locked up the trailer at a gas station and jumped back on the road.

You'd think that that would have been enough for one bad day to throw at us, but that was hardly the case.

About 2 hours down the road, we realized that if we didn't hurry up, we'd be late for the show and the whole trip would be pointless, so Anthony picked up the pace.

5 minutes later we were stopped on the side of the road, and the friendly Kansas state trooper was writing Anthony an $80 ticket. Now we were even more behind schedule. Just what we needed.

As if that wasn't enough, about 30 minutes down the road, Anthony looked down at the gas gauge and decided it was time to get gas.

5 minutes later, we were all praying that we could coast long enough to make the top of the hill so that we could roll another quarter mile down-hill to the gas station.

The first stroke of luck that day was that we made the top of the hill and we didn't have to do any pushing.

Once we were filled up, we jumped back on the road and made the rest of the trip with relative ease. We arrived just in time to plug in our guitars and play the show.

The rest of the night went fine. The show was fun and the trip home was uneventful (though Anthony's transmission bit the dust the next week).

I've said on numerous occasions, that it feels as if we've got cords around our ankles. That we're like a dog on a chain, and the chain is only so long. We start running just to get yanked back by our throat.

But then I think how far we really have come from where we started. For every 2 steps back we had to take, we would take 3 more steps forward, and through the years those tiny steps forward have started to take us places.

So here's to the destroyed vehicles,
the big shows that got rained out,
our drummer being sent off to war,
the blown speakers,
getting stuck in the mud,
30,000 people walking away before we had a chance to perform,
the trip to the wrong airport,
the forgotten merch and cymbals,
the broken relationships,
the alternator that caught fire,
the 6 channel board with six inch main speakers,
the wedding rehearsal cancellation,
getting lost on the way to the show,
the outdoor show we played while it was snowing,
the outdoor show we played in the middle of a tornadic thunderstorm,
renting a venue and having only 5 people show up,
the shows we never got paid for,
the friends who didn't come like they said they would,
our radio promoter who fell in a man-hole and broke his leg.

For the bands that have come and gone while we've stayed together.

Like Jared wrote in The Friction, "Throw downs with this world are never easy to win, nothing worthwhile in this life has ever been.

For some reason were still here and I don't suspect we'll be going away any time soon.