How to waste a year of your youth.

Rock and roll, ay? Well unlike most of the armchair guitarists in the world - i.e. those people who convinced mommy and daddy to buy them the new fender shredomatics or the black Les Pauls with the gold trim, who now have them collecting dust along with the football shoes and the other failed hobbies - I couldn't be content with jamming along to my favourite Sony. So, I decided to one-up my fellow customers at guitar center and actually join a band.

Then I decided to go even further. If I was to be in a band, the band would have to play shows in front of live people. And so we did.

So I was in a band. In Los Angeles, in fact - if you can suffer the cliche. Ahh...Hollywood. That bastion of hipocrisy and fingerbowl of maidenhood. My band, the Idiot Parade (a name carried to mock the idiots on parade in the greater LA/OC area), made a mockery of that town. We persisted to insult the southland throughout the summer of '97. Travelling all over I got to experience first hand the music scene, the music biz, and the music fans. This index is dedicated to those people who fall for that MTV sponsored - "join and band and support guitar center and you will get laid" lie. Well, you know what? No matter what you think the glory of those 15 minutes of fame is worth, it's not. Do something useful with your life. Stay in school, graduate, hell - go to college, do something that really means something to society. Don't just be another whiney musician who writes about how screwed up things are - all the while spending money on rehearsals, luxury goods (like music equipment, cokes, beers, Dennys, and cigarettes). - Christ, what do you got to complain about anyway if you can afford a $600 guitar and a $800 amp - you're lucky you're not slaving away in a Nike factory for 7 cents a day, or in the ghetto getting shot while trying to go to school or picking strawberries for 5 cents an hour. Why don't you DO something about the screwed up things you keep writing about?

  • 1997 tour dates.
  • Tour Journal.
  • Bio on the band.
  • A bona fide album review.