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

(continued) 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.


Right around this time, Lily was pregnant with Reese (their third). They already had twins, Ty and Nolan. Mike and (his lady) Hilary had one boy, Holden. By that point, we had a pretty standard process for dealing with events such as new babies, as far as participation in a band was concerned. When a baby was born, we would take about a month-long hiatus for the new daddy to get acclimated with his newly altered homelife, then once a certain comfort level was reached, we'd jump back to it.


The only problem with this is that really only one band "jumped back to it". Thank goodness for Mike's persistence. The Last Chucks got back to work (or play, I suppose), and Santa Maria never really recovered. It wasn't really because of the new baby, though. Back in Anthem, it was hard to get 5 guys together to practice regularly, and we were all young adults with no children back then. Add about 4 or 5 years to that, and it's even harder. Jobs got busier, lives became more hectic, schedules didn't coordinate well, and it's just darn near impossible to get 5 guys together to practice with any kind of regularity. It's a shame, too. Some of those Santa Maria songs are awesome, and we just flat out stopped playing them. So, after over a year and a half of preparation, Santa Maria ended in a whimper...having never played a show. We did record a 4 song demo. It will be filed in the "Songs I Play On" playlist on my iPod, along with Anthem and The Last Chucks. I will remember it fondly.


As I said though, The Last Chucks were back at it. When Goose joined The Chucks, we started working on only four songs. These were songs that we were planning on recording, so we wanted to get those down first before working on anything else.


I'll be completely honest with you. When Goose joined The Last Chucks, I knew he was a good drummer. I had played with the guy for about ten years at this point. But here's the thing...Brian (Goose's predecessor) was a great drummer. As hard as these songs were to learn on Bass, they were even harder on drums. I was really hoping Goose would be able to keep up, but I won't lie...I was worried. As it turns out...I was worried over absolutely nothing. Goose came in and not only surprised me, but amazed me with how fast he picked up the songs. As an example...we have a song called Spider. It took me about 3-4 weeks worth of practices to learn completely. It took Goose about an hour.


In May of 2008, we went into the studio (read: Jason's mom's house) to record. Oh, I didn't mention...when Jason (formerly of Anthem, for those keeping score at home) went to Orlando, his main objective was attending Full Sail University, which specialized in entertainment, music, recording engineering, etc. By the time he finished, he had become quite the producer (or recording engineer, or whatever he's called). We had him come up for a weekend to record the aforementioned four songs. The weekend went relatively well. We got three of the songs finished. *Side note: Jason also recorded the previously mentioned Santa Maria 4-song demo.


One of the songs, Bluebird Revisited, found its way onto the Diner Junkie Records compilation, Open 24 Hours. Another song, "What Can Bring A Smile" will be on a compilation cd which will be released in a month or so.


After recording, we spent the next year and a half working on the rest of the songs. There were more breaks over the course of the year, as Kimberly and I had our first baby, Cohen. In September of 2009, Mike and Hilary welcomed their second boy, Jack. In December, Goose and Lily were blessed for an all-too-short time with Evie (whose story you can read at bilslandfamily.blogspot.com ...again, no html...just copy and paste). Point is, we all had important things in our lives. Things that were/are more important than playing in a band, regardless of how good the band is.

So here we are. It's 2010, and we're still doing it. Well, by "still doing it", I mean we're getting together once a week to take out our frustrations on our instruments. The songs are still great. We're pretty dang good at them, being that we've been playing them for a number of years now.

Mike and I have different philosophies on a myriad of things, but one of the differences applicable to this story is the emphasis placed on recording versus playing live. In an ideal world, we'd be doing both. That's not the case, however. Mike loves the recording process...the ins and outs of it...the retakes, the tweaking, the scientific approach. I'm more of a live show kind of guy, myself. I love nothing more than to get up on a stage and play for an hour (or longer, as was the case in most of Anthem's shows). I don't want people to hear my band play. I want them to see us play.

Problem is...we're doing neither. Scheduling and money are hurdles as far as recording is concerned. I've been pushing Mike to book some shows, and hopefully it will happen sooner rather than later, but up to now, it hasn't.

All in all, I'm still satisfied with where my musical career has brought me so far. I have a wonderful wife and son. I have a job that I (most of the time) love. AND, I still get to play music regularly. My personal income from music is a total of $150 over the past twelve years (the Anthem fund was divided by three and doled out when Jason and Brent split...sorry guys). As Buckcherry states, though, "I didn't do it for money. I did it all for free. I did it all to fill the f***ing hole inside of me".

In addition to the weekly play-along with The Chucks, I have also recently taken up playing in the youth praise and worship band at Central Baptist Church. I started out in the summer of 2009 on bass, just to see how it'd go. After a chain of events, I now find myself playing guitar temporarily. I initially just thought it'd be fun to go in and play around with some simple songs once a week. Here lately though, I have taken it a lot more seriously. I have had a revelation of sorts, and I now realize that I am taking part in facilitating an atmosphere of worship for the students in attendance. Things have been going much better since that realization. I feel like my playing now has more of a purpose than simply entertaining myself once a week.

That, my friends, is the short version of my musical life from 1998-2010. I hope (but doubt) that you have found it as interesting to read as I have found it to remember. Maybe in 2022 I'll post another four-parter updating my faithful few readers on what has transpired in the subsequent 12 years. Until then, I'll continue to post things that make me mad/make me laugh on my one square acre of the internet.

Oh, and I think I'll start telling some of those war stories, too.