Ends and Beginnings - Confessions of a dad band member
We coalesced in the early oughts, four, middle-aged men with full time day jobs and families, closet strummers and pickers looking for something more. For years, Danny B and I had been playing acoustic guitars and Zev and Danny Z had been sawing away on electric guitars. But by the time the two musical duos got together and became a quartet, Danny B was also playing bass and I was taking my first steps as a rock drummer. Mmm …two guitarists, drums, bass– a classic lineup. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t too late to realize the definitive male boomer fantasy - and play in a rock band. We jammed, we clicked, we sensed we had a future and we decided to call ourselves Midlife Crisis. Rehearsals began in the moldy air raid shelter of our apartment building, and graduated to a series of bare-bones rehearsal spaces in nearby Florentin. It was cool to hang with younger, unknown bands wrapping up their sessions before ours or coming in after us, to compare styles and sounds and to