The ever-progressing musical career of Daniel Dorris, Part III

(Continued) We played our last show in July of 2005.


We had tons of friends come watch our last show. One of these friends was Mike Cammarata, of the Last Chucks. He made mention that night that he was thinking about starting a second band of his own...a more straight-forward rock and roll type project. Since Jason and Brent were moving to Orlando, maybe Goose, Doug, and I should look into this with him. We said sure. Then nothing happened with this project for about a year and a half.


February 2006: I had not played with a band for almost seven months. Despite a healthy marriage, a good job, and an overall happy life, I still felt incomplete. I had played in a band almost constantly since I was seventeen, and now I had nothing. Then one day, I was rooting around on MySpace, and I saw a bulletin that my friend Mike from The Chucks was looking for a bass player.


Going back to the paragraph where I mentioned playing bass in the church band...I didn't mention the fact that I absolutely loved playing bass. In the last few years of Anthem, I had secret fantasies that included Doug having to leave the band for some reason, and me having to fill in at bass. Nothing against Doug, mind you. He's a good friend and a good bass player. I was just jealous.


Back to the story: I answered Mike's bulletin, borrowed a bass, and headed over to his house to practice with him and Brian Cook (Beaker) on drums. Things went well, I suppose, as they liked me enough to let me join. We spent the next few months getting me up to speed on the songs, then started playing out again.


We did a little traveling. We played on the Clemson campus once in South Carolina. We played in Birmingham, Alabama with The Queers (an honor for any fan of punk music). Mostly though, we practiced. The Last Chucks had changed since they had played with Anthem early on. The songs were more complex. They required a lot of thought, talent, and practice to play. Learning and playing the songs was somewhat of a puzzle - a challenge...and I welcomed it. It boosted my skill level exponentially more than I ever would have had the wherewithal or the desire to do myself. I will forever give Mike Cammarata credit for being probably the best songwriter I know personally, if not the best songwriter I know of, period.


December 2006: On a whim one night, I decided that Goose, Doug, and I needed to get together to play some Anthem songs in my basement. The songs were too fun to just let disappear...they needed to be played. We set up in our living room downstairs and realized that we didn't have any microphones. It occurred to me that I had taken all of them to Mike's house for Last Chucks stuff. This ended up being a good opportunity to call Mike and see if he wanted to bring a couple of them over, along with his guitar, and we'd see about this side project we had talked about a year and a half prior.


Things went smashingly. That night, I pulled out a song I had written and we ran through it. Everything felt good. The song (Looking For My Place) was catchy, and we decided to build off of it. Mike got to work, this time writing straight-forward rock songs. It was a great experience. I had my technichal band in The Last Chucks, and I also had my fun rock band, which was untitled for about a year. Naming bands is no easy task, my friend.


After a few months, we (the new, yet-unnamed band) had a solid set's worth of songs, and we heard that Brent may be moving back from Orlando. Mike had been singing up to that point, but he really didn't want to be the frontman of this band. He just wanted to play guitar and be in the background. We decided that Brent would fit right in to this group upon his moving back. If only we had a name of this band, things would be complete.

I'd love to tell you we have some cool story behind the name we came up with, but the truth is, there isn't. After spending literally hours trying to come up with something on multiple occasions over the course of a year, we discussed and discarded such names as The Blue Jeans, The Ruckus, and a slew of others that I fail to remember at this point. Finally, someone (I'm pretty sure it was Mike) threw out "Santa Maria". Some of us loved it, some of us thought it was okay, and some of us didn't really care anymore. Point is, none of us hated it, so that became the name...Santa Maria.


Mike and I pulled double-duty between the two bands for a while. Sunday was practice day. We would have Chucks practice at his house around 1:00, then we would have Santa Maria practice at my house around 5:00. This went on probably about a year, until one day I showed up for Chucks practice, and Brian wasn't there yet.


And he never showed up.


He didn't call, email, or anything. A week went by without his returning any calls. Then two weeks. Then a month. Then two months. It was the strangest thing. The guy just flat-out disappeared! We knew he was alive, as a friend of ours saw him in Athens one day. He just never made any contact with us at all.


After about 5 or six months, Mike and I decided that it would probably just be best to move on and find a new drummer. Re-Enter Goose.

To Be Continued...