There were times when the four of us wanted to cut each other's heads off. After two or three months of being a band, we decided that we needed a band name if we wanted to start playing shows. So we all sat in mine and Anna's small apartment, around a small coffee table that had shit all over and on it, to decide on a band name.
Anna was looking for inspiration in this one philosophy book that she always was carrying around. It was called something with music and philosophy in the title. She always had it on her and it was weird how she always got it places because it wasn't the smallest book in the world.
Besides the point, she was looking through the book and there was this one quote in it about pianos and how the keys were always made from Ivory in the tusks of elephants. It was like this revelation that sparked inside all of us and while she read the quote by Yao Ming, we all realized the true consequences of music. "If we buy ivory, it makes all of us killers as well."
That quote made all of us realize that music isn't always perfect and that in order to make music a long time ago, elephants had to be poached and killed just to give up their tusks for the ivory in a piano. So the name "Ivory Tusks" came into the picture and I guess it stuck, given that seven years later, we still have it as our band name.
After we had the band name down and complete, we were writing songs all the time. Dex and Cade often found themselves sleeping at our apartment, a small little apartment that had one bed. We didn't even have enough money to get a couch, so we resorted to air mattresses and we kind of took rotating shifts for who got to sleep on the "real" bed. It was a perfect, bad example of a band that was struggling to get by and kind of lived in a hippie commune.
Our apartment was too small and when we struggled to make it by, we knew we had to make some change. It was as small as maybe two college dorm rooms put together. We had this very small bathroom that was probably eight square feet. There was a toilet and a small square shower. It didn't even have a sink. Our sink was in the small kitchen that had a microwave, a sink and two stove burners. Our oven didn't even work.We had no idea what change that would be, but we made something work along the road. I remember the days when Anna and I tried to contemplate whether or not we should actually get a larger apartment or not. When Dex and Cade moved in, that was when we knew we had to upsize.
Our rent was one thousand dollars a month. And for what even? There were four of us. All pitching in and paying 250 dollars a month for some little apartment that didn't even really hold us. Anna's mom would call her and ask how she was doing and for a while, Anna lied about who she was living with and where. When she finally told her that she was living with three other people, her mom got a little more easy going but when she dropped the bomb that the three people she was living with were Dex, Cade and I, she lost it. She didn't exactly approve especially because we had these huge music egos that lead us to think we could make it super big in the industry but actually brought us to failure most of the time. None of us had a job and it was just a mess.
After the apartment got too tight and we all tried to keep out shit neat and in order, and failed, that was when we decided to try and get a bigger apartment. By this point, we had about 14 songs written and we started playing shows all around the city. Over the course of a couple months, we moved from small, little pubs to big and well-known clubs. It was a pretty big deal to us and it was very liberating and awesome to experience what we were experiencing together. After a while of performing at some well-known clubs, we wanted to move on to the huge clubs in the city.
Our intention was to get very popular in the city and bug the record labels to let us have an opportunity to record with one of them. Nobody was offering us any recording contracts or recording time so we had to make due with what we were doing already, garageband on the computer, in our small apartment. Weeks went by without anyone offering us deals and us being rejected when we asked and about two months rent was due at our rinky dink apartment. We weren't getting much done with writing new songs at this point and people were getting sick of what we were playing, so we resorted to Rage Against The Machine covers for our setlists.
