The story of how I came to do Buzzhead Republic begins in 1991 in the small cities of Woodland Park and Divide, Colorado. I lived on the outskirts of Divide in a run down 50s vacation resort turned suburb called Sherwood Forest Estates, but was a student at Woodland Park Middle School (when it was still in the same building as the high school) in Woodland Park. My 6th grade English teacher would constantly play Nirvana's Nevermind, Motley Crue's....whatever, and Red Hot Chili Pepper's Blood Sugar Sex Magik. But it was in Nirvana that I found a kindred spirit writing exactly how I felt about living in the middle of nowhere with no friends, and going to school in a crime riddled, drug filled town that on the surface looked like an ordinary American city, but you could never shake the feeling that just under that facade was something horrible. I found a lot of parallels between my life in Woodland Park and Divide and Curt's in Aberdeen, WA. Like him, I was an outcast and never considered (except by my parents) to be someone who would amount to anything.
My interest in music increased greatly for the next several years. Living in the middle of nowhere next to a national forest with no friends, save a dog, helped shape my affinity for the organic and solitude within music. I spent a lot of my free time running around the woods and exploring the deeper parts of the neighboring national forest with my dog and little brother, the whole time listening on my Walkman to all the earthy, organic grunge and alternative rock I could find or had taped off the indie radio station 92X (no longer in existence). (This was also the beginning of my now legendary record collection.)
By Christmas of 1995 my parents had figured out that I wanted a guitar and bought me one. But it was a bass guitar. Not what I wanted but I slowly learned to play it anyway. I am completely self taught so early on I couldn't even put two notes together, until one day something clicked and I "heard" two notes that fit together. Eventually I found four notes that fit together in sequence, and started doing the punk thing. I played those four notes four times each, in sequence four times through, and then found four more notes until I wrote a verse, chorus, verse, chorus song. I practiced like this for hours at a time every day, all the while adding to my music collection for the next few years. I never out right learned to play another band's songs. I had always wanted to be able to play my own music. Instead I listened to what they were doing and tried to do the same thing my own way, and as my taste in music broadened so did my playing style.
To go forward with this story, I have to go back to the 1993/1994 school year. Those years were explosive for alternative rock. The success of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, etc. of 1991 and 1992 caused a frenzy among the record companies. They quickly signed everyone they could find that had a similar sound. So by 1993 the floodgates of the underground had been opened to me and I found even more music that I could identify with. Also in this school year I had finally started to make friends with the skaters and grungers who also came from a similar background as me, but were starting to find a way out through drugs and alcohol, rather than music. At the end of the school year something in me (probably God) said that I shouldn't go to Woodland Park High School next year. (In retrospect many of the people I was starting to make friends with probably ended up in prison or dead from an overdose.)
A brand new private school opened up in Woodland Park that year and my mom got me and my brother enrolled and landed a job in their office. It was short lived though. After three or four months, at the beginning of 1995, the school was forced to shut down from lack of funds, but, the school was not useless for me. They quickly found out that I was smart enough to be in college, and was soon testing out of classes and was passed all the way to the 11th grade level. Having my intelligence displayed and showing an interest in "cool" music helped me to start coming out of the shell that I had crawled into as a result of going to public school. I soon started making good friends, and decided that I wanted to play guitar. That Christmas my parents bought me a bass and my brother a keyboard, and in the week back from vacation the school was shut down, so I spent the remainder of the year alone again in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but play my guitar.
The next year another private school opened up in Divide and I enrolled at the 11th grade level in the 1995/1996 school year. Here I came completely out of my shell and found other musicians who liked the same music as me. I completed an entire year at this school before they also had to close their doors.
So I went back to the Woodland Park School District, or actually I tried to go back. The school wouldn't accept any of my credits even though I had proven myself academically. This is the same school district that I went to during middle school. They gave me a placement test when I was in the 6th grade and found out that I belonged in college but did nothing to help me get there. To add insult to injury they now wanted me to start high school over again from the 9th grade level.
At this point I had had enough and got my high school equivalency. I didn't even study for the test. I knew I had proven I was intelligent, and sure enough, I passed the test with a perfect score. So few people do this that they award scholarships to go to college. Given that I was left with no choice but to get my high school equivalency, there weren't many options for college. It took me a few months to decide on a community college that had a music program. In the process of enrolling I found out that the state had taken away my scholarship and given it to someone else because I didn't use it fast enough. But I enrolled anyway.
During the next few weeks while I was waiting for classes to start I kept having a nagging feeling that I wasn't supposed to be in college, at least not at that moment in my life. This feeling kept getting stronger the closer I came to the start of the semester. I started weighing the pros and cons and concluded that the music instructor barely knew more than me, and definitely didn't know what I wanted to learn. Even at this early stage in my career, I knew that I wanted to do music professionally, and I wanted to be able to do everything that comes along with it, i.e. writing, recording, mixing, mastering, live performance, music videos. I also felt deep down that the only way I was going to learn how to do this, really learn how to do this, was to immerse myself in the industry. I did this the only way I knew how. By playing with various musicians over the next year I eventually came to form a band (with a couple of people I had met through a youth group I was going to at the time) that I named White Trash Heroes. I named the band after a song by The Archers of Loaf that came out a little before we started the band.
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