My Band

I used to be in a band called Deft. There were five of us. Brandon, 19, was our singer, Rob,16, was lead guitarist, Kevin, 18, was the drummer, his little brother Jason, 16, was the bassist, and I played rhythm guitar. Kevin and I had been working together for four or five years, ever since he moved to Watertown. We had been in and out of several bands, but always stuck together. My dad came home one day and told us about a friend of his whose step-son played guitar. We called him up and had him come over to audition. He was amazing especially considering his age, 15, so there was no way we could pass him up. A week later, the three of us a played a county fair Battle of the Bands and lost. This was no big deal, since we had been together for exactly a week. Over the next couple months we searched high and low for a singer and a bassist, when we realized what we were looking for was right under our noses all along. Kevin’s younger brother Jason had played upright bass in middle school so we recruited him for the low end. A close friend of their family, Brandon, stayed with them every summer. We got to thinking and realized that he had a great “choir” voice, so we brought him to a practice and had him audition. He was the best vocalist we had ever played with, so there was no doubt in our mind he was the one.

After being together for well over a year and playing various gigs, we began to get on each others nerves. Jason was immature and always acted childish, Rob had an ego the size of Montana, and Brandon lived in Milwaukee depending on everyone else since he had no job and no ambition to get one. One night at practice, we were trying to learn a new song. I was playing around with some different effects to use on the song. Rob told me that he knew how to get the right sound. I calmly requested that he wait a minute because I wanted to try and get it myself. He insisted that he knew how to do it, so I asked him to show me and started handing him my guitar. Rob said “Well, I don’t know how to do it.