It started out as me and my buddy, Bucky. He played guitar, I didn't play anything. He had actually been in a real band before college called Suburban Empire, so he had the necessary experience and equipment needed to start a band.
We were walking down Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena trying to think of a good band name. We were mostly reading signs we passed and seeing if they'd make good band names, but also dipping into our literary influences as well.
"Made By Humans," I suggested, reading the sign off of a nearby building.
"That's actually pretty good," Bucky said.
We quickly recruited a girl named Monica who also lived in our dorm. She also played guitar. Her talent was pretty impressive. She could play pretty much anything you put in front of her by ear. She was also fond of the Golden Girls, which endeared her to me.
So, we had a two headed guitar monster and a guy who didn't do anything. I wasn't a stranger to writing poetry, so I decided I'd write lyrics. That, combined with the fact that I didn't have any musical talent, made me the de facto lead singer.
That first round, I never actually ended up writing anything. We mostly just played a song Bucky had written before college. At the time it was called "Thinking About Thinking." It was catchy and had some clever, insightful and honest lyrics that I could relate to. He also had another catchy tune called "Acorn Family" which had lyrics, but they didn't make much sense.
The first time we practiced together, we went through "Thinking About Thinking" once or twice then stopped to discuss.
"You should sing more," Monica said.
"What do you mean?" I asked, thinking I had been singing the whole time.
"I mean, you're mostly just talking," she said.
"You start out each line good," Bucky elaborated. "But then it just becomes talking by the end of the line."
Although Bucky and Monica both played guitar, they had very different styles. If you had to assign each of them a specific job, I'd say Monica was the lead guitarist and Bucky was the rhythm guitarist. They both had a lot of the same influences -- they were metal fans. But, Bucky had more punk, pop and grunge influences and Monica leaned more towards hair metal, glam rock and prog rock. Bucky liked a catchy riff while Monica liked complex solos.
Some times Monica would complain about the simplicity of Bucky's songs.
"There is so much strumming," she'd say. Then she'd suggest places where we could put solos.
This frustrated Bucky, because he was the one writing songs. Maybe if she wrote songs, she could put in whatever she wanted. But as long as he was writing songs, he'd write them the way he wanted them. No one was stopping her from writing songs. In fact, it would have been nice if she had written something so that we could have expanded our catalog.
Eventually word got to a cool guy named Scott who lived down the hall that we were trying to put a band together. He played bass and joined up. So, now we had a hot chick, a cool guy, a guy who wrote songs, and a guy who tried to sing but mostly talked. I never actually went on to practice with the band, now that it had a bassist, and kind of just faded myself into the background, since I was basically useless. If I remember correctly Scott hooked the band up with a drummer, and they practiced a few times with all the pieces in place.
In any case, at this point I wasn't really participating any more, so I kind of lost track of what was going on. Somehow everyone one cooled down on the band and went their separate ways, and though we'd talk (and argue) about music all the time, we didn't try to do anything of our own again for a few years.
During my junior year of college I decided to take drum lessons. Growing up, I had always wanted to play drums, but felt like I needed my own set to really learn. My parents weren't interested in getting me a set, so the only time I got to play around with the drums when I was at my best friend's house where I could use his. I picked up enough to carry a simple beat and developed an affinity for air drumming, but never really learned or had time to teach myself. As my musical tastes changed through high school and college, I began to fall more and more in love with The Who, and especially Keith Moon's insane drumming style (and personality).
So, I finally took advantage of the fact that my school had a huge music department and started taking drum lessons. The benefit of this was that it gave me full time access to the practice room in a building just a few steps from my dorm. I could go in there any time it wasn't in use by someone else and play the drums. I used it to practice for my lessons, but also loved taking a stereo in there and blasting songs I could play along with (or pretend to play along with). One of my greatest achievements was the time I hit my knuckle on the edge of the snare drum and split the skin, sending blood gushing. It was then that I felt like a true drummer.
My first semester taking drum lessons, Bucky was studying abroad in England. When he returned to school, he brought his guitar and amp and suggested we go down to the practice room and try to play something together.
Thus, Made By Humans was reborn, with the two original members -- Bucky on guitar, me on drums. Both of us on vocals.
We dragged our would-be hit single, "Thinking About Thinking," out of moth balls and gave it another shot. By now it had been retitled, "Poster Child," which was a fitting and clever title that both referred to the first line ("Pattern my thoughts around the poster on the wall. . .") and to the fact that it was a kind of coming of age story.
We also tried out "Acorn Family," which grew on me to the point where I almost liked it better than "Poster Child" -- it was just more fun to play, like a more up-tempo version of the same song. And, we fooled around a lot, building songs out of improvisations. Bucky would come up with tunes, I'd play along, we'd mess around for a while, then either he or I would take a crack at lyrics, and then come back and see how it worked.
This time I actually worked on writing some stuff. During class when I was supposed to be learning, I'd scribble lyrics in my notebook. Or, I'd take poems I had written over the last few years of college (I had transformed into a writing major since our first band attempt) and try to simplify them and move the lines around to make them more fitting material for songs. I'd give Bucky what I had worked on, he'd rework it so that it would fit into a song structure he'd been putting together, and then we'd try it out. Bucky eventually even brought a microphone and a separate amp so that when we sang along we could hear ourselves.
I was lazy, though. I was getting towards the end of my poetry writing phase and it was hard for me to produce anything that I thought was worth while. So, I'd try to cut corners and Bucky would catch me.
"The first verse is good," he said one time, as he was reading a rough draft of a song I had titled "Puddle of Loneliness" or something similarly angsty. Maybe it was "Puddle of Emptiness." In any case, he said, "The first verse is good -- but the second verse is just the opposite of the first verse."
"Really?" I asked. I took a look at the song and he was right. The second verse was just stating the exact opposite position of the first verse.
"In fact," Bucky said, "it seems like you do that in your songs a lot."
He was right. He had caught me.
Aside from my creative laziness, we had another problem. Bucky's amp. Every day when it was time to practice, he'd have to carry his gigantic amp down the hall, down a couple flights of stairs, about a block away to the building that housed the practice room. At first this was a minor annoyance, but after several days in a row, it became a little ridiculous. Unfortunately there wasn't much else we could do -- we couldn't bring the drum set up to the dorm, I couldn't get my own drum set, it wasn't fun to practice without the amp.
Still, we had some minor successes. Words cannot describe how satisfying it is to be able to get to the point where Bucky and I could both go into the chorus at the exact same time, or go into and come out of the rocking break down at the same time, or -- this was the best one -- end the song at the exact same time. I know, it sounds stupid, but being a complete amateur, sometimes it was hard to know where I was in a song, so it was always great when we were both on the same page and able to really nail something we had been working on.
We covered "Can't Explain," by The Who, at my suggestion and we were supposed to cover a song by one of Bucky's favorite bands but never got around to it. We also planned on covering something by Everclear, since Bucky and I had first met bonding over our mutual fondness for the band.
Aside from the greatness of "Poster Child" and "Acorn Family," and the obvious and pretentiousness of the angsty "Puddle of Loneliness," we co-wrote a few other gems that were actually surprisingly good, considering one half of the band was a complete rookie.
"White Plastic" was a slow, thoughtful, quiet song about the superficial qualities of modern life. "Pleased to Meet You" was a more complex rocker with both slow and fast parts, including an epic rocking break down and a chorus so catchy that it would often be stuck in my head all day. The lyrics of "Pleased to Meet You" were conventional love song lyrics but from the point of view of the singer never having met the chick he was apparently in love with.
We invited a couple friends down to the practice room to watch us do our thing, and I think for the most part they had to admit they were more impressed than they thought they would be. We started talking about eventually recording our songs so we'd have a record of what we'd done together, recruiting some friends and equipment from Bucky's Suburban Empire days in an attempt to get a halfway professional sound, but we lost interest before that came together. All that exists as a record of our songs is the lyrics I can dig up in notebooks, and one micro tape in a tiny tape recorder that we used to record a few of our practices. I played that tape for a girl I was dating at the time, and some friends, and the tinny quality didn't do Made By Humans justice. All I could do was assure anyone who listed that we weren't actually that bad.
Eventually the amp defeated us. It was just too much of a pain in the ass to drag it down there all the time. That, combined with the fact that our school schedules became more complicated the closer we got to the end of the year, spelled the end for Made By Humans.
Since then, there hasn't been a reunion. Neither of us have moved on to do any solo work. Maybe if video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band had existed back then, we never would have gotten together at all, and would have just lived out our fantasies in front of the TV.
As has always been the case throughout my life, among the people I hang out with there are a few people in a few bands. So, on occasion, I get to go to their shows and live vicariously. If I'm not on stage, at least I know the people on stage. And, I half-jokingly got one of the bands to name a song after me. Half-joking means I pretended to be joking so that they wouldn't think I was weird even though deep down inside I really, really, really wanted a song to be named after me. So, there's my ticket to rock and roll immortality, assuming they get rich and famous.
Please, do me a favor. Get rich and famous.
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