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 feel that we too belonged to the same scruffy musical fraternity of little gigs and big dreams. Every band had its own style, its own sound, but we were all scratching the same itch.

Eventually, we found a permanent rehearsal home at Ambience Studios, suitably situated on the seedy side of Ramat Gan, under the friendly management of Dar Nahmias (a.k.a Dari).  For about a decade we met there every two weeks (at best) for intensive four hour sessions.  

Entering the initial hush of that soundproofed room, anticipating the earsplitting electric wail that would soon envelop it, was like walking on hallowed ground.  A Hendrix poster hung above the raised dais for the drum set. Here was the entry point to an alternative universe in which we would shed our workaday personas and morph into Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger, Neil Young.

Fun and games at Ambience Studios.

But first, we had to become a ‘real’ band, and since we’d decided to concentrate on original material, we needed to forge our own repertoire.

If you are a keen amateur but most of your playing is done solo in the kitchen, it’s easy to get stuck in a musical rut. Yes, you might excel at performing your personal well-worn bag of blues riffs, folk tunings, jazz chords, bass lines, drum breaks or whatever.  And inside your own echo chamber, as you loop proficiently through the tricks you’ve learned, you may feel like you’re in control. However when plunked down with other amateurs, each with his own particular set of weaknesses, and your aim is to turn rough song ideas into tightly arranged, rock diamonds, matters can lurch out of control. 

Not being trained musicians, and with no clear “leader” we had no choice but to become a band the hard way: through trial and error, false starts, screwed up middles and messy endings, endless repetition, experimentation and fine tuning, all accompanied by democratic discussion. It was hard going. Each song had to be painfully stitched together. Songs that didn’t work for everyone were ditched. So were songs that everyone liked in principle but we couldn’t get right.

Essential to getting it right was to find the groove. Either the groove was there or it wasn’t. And for it to be there, all four of us had to have it simultaneously. When it was there, with all of us floating together in perfect, natural sync, it felt like we had attained a higher state of consciousness.

Mistakes were the norm and frazzled nerves would occasionally flare. Like a foursome in a compulsive relationship, the same old accusations would be levelled over who was: speeding up the tempo/ playing too loud/ not coming in at the right place/ cutting into the vocals/ forgetting the harmony/ not indicating that the song was ending? 

Sometimes, work on a song would veer off at a tangent into an endless jam that started as hard rock and somehow evolved into long stoned atmospheric meanderings that seemed to carry deep meaning. “Why didn’t we record that!” we would cry in despair, deeply conscious that a rare and precious moment of magic had been lost to posterity.

Somehow, at a glacial rate, through a combination of donkey work and occasional flashes of creativity, each new song took on a little more style and distinction.

By the end of a rehearsal we were wiped clean, our heads pulsating, wearing inane smiles yet bound together by the sonic vibrations we had created.  We schlepped our gear down the grimy stairwell (soon to be visited by the local hookers and junkies) and headed back into the real world. Each session ended with faithful vows to learn the parts we’d flubbed, at home. Rarely have vows been broken so frequently.

I’ve been writing songs since I was a teenager and there was a period back in the late 1970s when I was (occasionally) paid for writing English lyrics for Israeli artists trying to make it overseas but output throughout my 30’s and 40’s had been limited.  Now, in my 50’s, I was in a band that needed new material and I ended up doing most of the writing. Sometimes it would be an entire song from scratch and sometimes the inspiration (a line, a phrase, a chorus) would come from another band member and I’d complete the picture. Apart from the eternal theme of romantic relations, MLC’s lyrics tended to fall into three categories: songs, influenced by living in Israel, that foresaw impending disaster (Smart, Shaky Ground, War Zone, It’s Gonna Blow); songs about the frustrations of middle age (Midlife Crisis, Dirty Old Man, Dreams, Change) and songs that took a swipe at organised religion (God Doesn’t Pick Up the Phone, Urgent, He Come Down In a Big Machine). 

Once we had finally cobbled together enough original songs - with a few covers thrown in for audience recognition -  we started playing gigs in small, dingy clubs in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Friends, family and workmates were all co-opted into attending in a bid to cover the bar expenses. The audiences we scraped together seemed to like what we were doing, and there’s nothing like the adrenaline rush you get from a live performance, crammed onto a tiny stage with the audience a few feet away.

Gig at the Bloom Bar, Tel Aviv, 2008.

But it soon became clear that creating a fan base was going to be challenging. The sort of challenge that, frankly, we didn’t have the energy to invest in. After a few gigs, even the existing core family and friends group was flagging.  So, gigs turned out to be few and far between, among them  a charity race for early detection of colon cancer, a festival at community centre in Haifa (audience - five Ethiopian children and an old lady who was knitting a sweater), and several Purim parties... There was semi-humorous talk of a tour of old age homes. 

With hindsight, with only 8 hours a month (including set ups and beer breaks) to work with, it was inevitable that Midlife Crisis would spend most of its time rehearsing. In fact we agreed that our rehearsals were often at a higher level than our performances. There was talk of inviting people to “open rehearsals”. This idea had the added allure of being able to shrug off mistakes by exclaiming “That’s why it’s a rehearsal!”

Eventually, in 2011, we issued a CD called Emergency Generator  (click and scroll down to listen). Listening to it now, and whatever its faults, you can hear in the tight, fluid playing that those hundreds of hours of rehearsals paid off (although the magic weaved by the studio technicians also helped). Listening to it back then, hot off the CD press, we could proudly say, “We’re a band, and we rock!”

We never had illusions of actually making money from Midlife Crisis and the album was not released commercially. Instead we gave away the CD to friends and relations and at gigs. We also sent it to radio stations. Total radio play consisted of one track (Ecstasy) being played on one occasion on Or Lagoyim (A light unto the nations”) a programme that featured Israeli artists singing in English on the now sadly departed Kol Hakampus (106 FM) local radio station.

Not many people heard Emergency Generator but some who did told us that they loved it, that it was “their” sort of music, that it was “real rock’n’roll”. That made us feel a lot better about the fact that hundreds of copies still remain untouched in our homes to this day.

After Danny Z left the band, we three remaining members had to re-calibrate. Without the special electricity he created with Zev, it was hard to maintain our energy level as a rock trio. So we gradually shifted to an “unplugged” format (in which we were actually plugged in but just played softer). I replaced my drum set with a cajon and also played acoustic guitar. What this lower decibel level lacked in energy it compensated by allowing us a calmer space to listen, connect and experiment. We played a few more gigs, this time mainly in folk clubs, but as in the previous phase, mostly we rehearsed.  

A film about a completely unknown band rehearsing at home might sound like an unlikely proposition but that is exactly the challenge that filmmaker, friend and music fan, Roni Lipetz decided to take up. After first creating a terrific music video for our song He Come Down In a Big Machine he decided that he wanted to document our rehearsals. The old idea of the “open rehearsal” had resurfaced, except that instead of people physically coming to our rehearsals, our rehearsals would come to them via Roni’s film. About a year later, in March 2019, Midlife Crisis  The Movie was being applauded at the Epos Art Film Festival at Tel Aviv Museum. Recognition at last!

Music video: He Come Down In A Big Machine

By now, given the age and condition of its older members, Midlife Crisis had become a misnomer, a dad band old enough to be a grandad band. It was time to wrap things up. We decided to collect the recordings we’d made over our five years as a trio, some at Ambience, others at my home studio, and release them as a farewell album - Ends and Beginnings. No actual CD this time but it has been released “commercially” and you should be able to hear it or download it on all major platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes etc). Here’s a free link to the album on SoundCloud.   We’ll also be posting tracks on the band’s Facebook page

Ends and Beginnings with its mix of rock, blues, R&B, folk and reggae is more eclectic than its predecessor and maybe a little more reflective too. Among the themes  - dreams, fate, change, false messiahs, inspiration, desperation, cultural appropriation, ends and beginnings.  We hope you like it.

Midlife Crisis was a band that made zero impact on Israel’s music scene. We had no fan base and received little attention. It didn’t matter.  We created our own brand of music for (more or less) 17 years and remain friends to this day. I’m eternally grateful to bandmates Zev Labinger (guitars, vocals), Danny (B) Blumberg (bass, vocals) and Danny (Z) Zilberman (guitars) for sharing some of the best times of my life.