From the beginning of Ivory Tusks, we never really had any differences with each other. We had always gotten along well with one another. When I was younger, I had always had a love of music and I was kind of swallowed into music as it was swallowed into me, if that makes sense. I was always banging on pots and pans with wooden spoons and then regular household items with pens and pencils.
I have always known that I wanted to be a drummer. It was just something I picked up at birth when my parents were bringing me up. They always played music like Jethro Tull, Metallica, Rush, Pink Floyd and more. I was always listening to music wherever I was, still am. I guess the point of this book is to tell everyone the story of how Ivory Tusks came to be, through me.
When I was a teenager, I stole a set of drums from my high school and brought them to this abandoned shed that was in the middle of this field. It was the stupidest idea I had when I was a teenager. I never realized that I could go to juvie for stealing and breaking and entering but I really didn't care.
In that shed, I would play the drums to my heart's content and no one could tell me to quiet down or stop playing, because I was in the middle of nowhere and it was awesome. There is something about drumming that is more freeing than any other instrument. I think if you have a lot of anger to exert on something, you should be a drummer. When I played, I had a lot of anger and high school stress was easy to get out onto the drums that I stole from the high school in my hometown.
I tried multiple times to start a band, but it never worked out because there were always creative differences and I ended up having to do all the writing, which I struggled with because I wasn't familiar with guitar, bass or vocals at all. I needed someone to relate to musically and they just weren't there. No one I had played with was at the level I wanted to be at and I know that sounds really bad and egotistical but it's the truth.
I lived in a small town in Michigan and I wanted bigger and better things, so I tried really hard to practice at drums and percussion and then I auditioned for the Manhattan School of Music and I ended up getting in.
I remember how hard it was to get into the school. My mom was hesitant to fly all the way to Manhattan just to bring me to a college music audition that I had no guarantee of getting into, so she took a chance on me and thank god she did.
After I auditioned there, three weeks later they accepted me into the school and I was over the moon excited. I moved there with my parents and started going to school there. I admit, I was a little out of my league when I got there because everyone was musically and classically trained on their instruments. I just listened to many drummers on tape and studied their techniques, trying to be one of them, the greats.
I had never taken any music theory class before in my life and most of these kids had. They all studied Broadway shows, musicals, classical composers and even more. I didn't know any of this. They would all go on their own "field trips" to Broadway and while I did enjoy some of the shows for what they were, it really wasn't my thing.
After my freshman year started and was about halfway through, I met one of the most musically knowledgeable people I would ever meet in my entire life. Her name was Anna Huntley and she was like me, she loved rock, punk and all that darker side of music. She also loved Broadway, musicals and knew a lot about music theory but told me she had never taken a proper music theory class before. She was really close to a lot of the students at the school and I figured out that she didn't actually go to the school, which I found really strange.
Anna was someone I never knew I would be friends with for a decade. She was definitely a music enthusiast that was way past a required audition at the school.
If I am truly honest, I met Anna through a bulletin post that she stapled to one of the bulletin boards at the school. She was asking for a drummer, rhythm guitarist and bassist. I had called her number on the flyer and asked her if I needed to audition for this band spot and she immediately said no, she sounded really desperate and I kind of felt bad so I agreed to play some material through with her.
The first song we ever played together was "Killing In The Name" by Rage Against The Machine. Little did we know back then that we would meet them, play with them and get to know them well. It is really crazy how the world works sometimes.
So after a while Anna and I started to get to know each other better and I learned that she got rejected from Manhattan School of Music, Berklee College of Music and more music schools which was honestly very surprising because she was actually really good at playing the guitar and singing. Maybe they just thought she was too Urban and too rock for their classical curriculums. We honestly may never know because it's been too long since then.
Like me, she was raised around a lot of music. She grew up on The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles and Metallica. For a while, we wrote songs together and a lot of them took a while because it was just the two of us who were in this nameless band, that wasn't really even a band since we didn't have a bassist or a rhythm guitarist.
For a while we would write songs while we would sit down in this small apartment that we got when I dropped out of the room and board at the music school, but I was still going there. She would come up with bass lines, lead guitar, vocals and rhythm guitar parts because I was not trained or taught in any of those departments while I just came up with the drum parts. It was a very, very long process that took forever. I always felt bad because I didn't want her to take all of the burden of writing songs on her shoulders but she has earned all the credit to this day. She really knows what is up in songwriting.
The first song we wrote was "Make Me Wanna Die" that we never got the chance to play live for about a year. We looked for two more people to be in the band and it was not an easy process. Anna and I were comfortable with each other and bringing new people into the picture was kind of a strange idea that neither one of us wanted to think about.
I ended up dropping out of school and trying to help Anna full time with finding new band members and writing music. She ended up teaching me how to play the guitar because I really wanted to help her write music and a lot of it was easier on the both of us.
At this point, it was late 2009 and we had finally found someone to bring into the band. Cade Ashby was the bassist we kind of brought into the band. Anna was out on a coffee run to a Starbucks or something and she met Cade. He was standing in line behind her and I guess he was wearing a music shirt and Anna had a hunch that he was a musician and she started talking about the band and asked him if he wanted to be in it. He has always told us that he wasn't too keen on saying yes because he didn't know how good we were but somehow, he said yes and gave us a shot.
Now, we had a couple songs written, Make Me Wanna Die was the first one and we had finally played it with Cade adding a deeper bass sound to the song. It was nice to hear it being played through without having to play different parts and piece them together on a computer. We had written a few more songs with Cade called Light Me Up and My Medicine and Cade took it upon himself to find a rhythm guitarist, which we were fine with because you could see how long it took Anna and I to find Cade in the first place.
Dex was originally brought into the band as the rhythm guitarist but we would later realize that that would be switched. We sent Dex the tabs to Make Me Wanna Die and he learned it. Once we pieced it together, it sounded really good and we thought that we could actually make it somewhere with this. Only we all thought we were in a good place.
Dex wanted to quit after the first week despite us sounding good together. Cade had convinced him to stay somehow. Anna got very angry with Dex for wanting to quit and the apartment we lived in, Dex and Cade basically were moved in too. She got very frustrated and started throwing things around, screaming and complaining. We all looked at her like she was crazy, because she is, but we also understood where she was coming from because we were all going crazy too. We needed a bigger place to practice in and we couldn't afford it.
Dex has told us that he thought the whole band was lame and stupid at first but then got used to it because he actually wanted to be there to see the progress of the band. Somehow we all made it work and Anna never killed any of us, thank god.
