Brackett and the Drill Bits

I first met Brackett (codenamed) in high school. A class clown, making everyone laugh, writing hilarious essays for assignments like how How to Kill a Mockingbird was a alien conspiracy cover-up or advocating for multisex gym locker rooms. He also sat outside the Music wing of the building in the lobby by these benches made out of trees, cleverly nicknamed the Treebenches, playing guitar. Long story shorter, we made friends.

As a freshmen of 14, I'd just received my first electric guitar ever for my birthday, and it wasn't long until the following Christmas when Santa drove me to the guitar shop again and hooked me up with an electric-acoustic. Epiphone PR-5E. All black, Les Paul cut, was real quiet which I dug since it didn't bother the 'rents when I rocked out in room at all hours of the night, composing overemotional ballads about girls I'd never ever play for them. It was a typical scene, but man I was into it at the time. And watching Brackett play aloud in front of his friends tempted me to develop my skills, learn some songs, and bring my guitar to school.

The Treebenches became a musical nexus after school. The respective Bands and Choirs would come in and go out of their respective practices. I wasn't deeply involved in the drama club at the time, so I just wasted time during the "after school" hours until the late bus there on the benches with my guitar and Brackett. We'd trade it off, playing the handful of songs we knew poorly, showing each other the limited new things we knew the other didn't and so on. And as our friendship thickened, so did the idea.

A band.

I was invited over Brackett's house with mutual friend hereby referred to as Billiam (sorry, Will). Billiam was a well trained piano player and we had a keyboard. Keyboard, two guitars, and a crappy computer microphone plugged into Brackett's PC. We listened to some songs Brackett had recorded all by himself for some inspiration and playfully struck at chords and melodies and riffs and ultimately recorded nothing.

It took a longer time hanging out with them before we were comfortable enough to actually admit this sounded good or that sounded bad. And it took even longer before we had to stop caring about concerns for quality altogether.

One fateful day of "practice," we had Billiam's sister over and our other friend who's image will forever be scarred in my memory from his not-brief-enough stint with a mullet haircut. Sorry dude, but you're Mulletberg forever to me, and so I will dub you on the Internet. Did the Queen dub Knights? Was that "dubbing"? OK. Sir Mulletberg. We cool? Cool.

We all gathered and were just messing around with guitars, keyboards, a recorder, a kazoo, a violin and a tape measure that could sound like a makeshift maraca. And Brackett started recording for the pure fuck of it. Twenty four tracks later...we had songs. And Brackett and the Drill Bits was thus born.

Aaaaaaaaannnnddd so:

Enter "Rock 4 a Cause."
A highschool student group founded for the pure purpose of putting on local rock shows and donating the proceeds to charity. Also, an excuse to get any band we wanted to come play a show in our town for a legitimate reason. The members of R4AC also were in bands themselves and now had legitimate excuses to play live shows. Ofcourse I'm part of this group. Ofcourse the first show R4AC organizes, I instantly mention Brackett and the Drill Bits and we're slotted to open for the larger acts. My bandmates weren't exactly thrilled at the idea of a live performance, since over half our songs had only been done once for that recording. But the core three, Brackett, Billiam and I, we were down. We took our best ones and added a cover of "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Luckily playing before us was another "joke band" called xBaSHx, for Becky and Shelly Heather, the band members, and their loud obnoxious parody of hardcore punk rock. This took some of the edge off.

So we practiced. We practiced hard. Our set list was nailed down. The day came. It was time to rock.

The show was booked in the basement of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Norway, Maine. We had some big names showing up and lots of people came as well to help set it up. The group rented almost all it's audio equipment from the now-defunct Muscle City Productions, back when it was way indie and legit and run by two kids from my high school. Things were looking good. Some bands even arrived a bit early, which is a rare commodity in the local rock show scene.

But when doors opened at 7:00 and xBaSHx took the stage...the crowd was approximately nine people, all from R4AC. Our friends. xBaSH was over in like three minutes, then we were up. Our big moment. Setting up and sound check took a bit, we were borrowing the amps from the band after us, Caligula. Billiam's keyboards took a while to plug in and adjust the levels on, but before we knew it...we had to play. Oh boy.

We opened with "We Suck," one of our strongest tunes and really set the mood for the rest of the set. We wanted the audience to know what we were all about. There was even a tiny, tiny guitar solo before the end by yours truly. I tore my Epiphone to shreds, I tell you what. The crowd had grown incrementally more than nine, and they reacted positively. But they had to. They were our friends.

Next we played "Transcendentalist Blues," a song Brackett composed as a Social Studies project on Henry David Thoreau. Billiam played rhythm guitar. I had no defined role in this song, so we made up a percussion part, which I performed using the Percussion setting on Billiam's keyboard, keeping the beat with the cowbell. After that we had "My Guitar's Out of Tune," Brackett wrote it in his bedroom a long time ago when he couldn't tune his guitar. Billiam back on the keys, and I whipped out my bongoes as a surprise move. The sound guy really wasn't ready for a bongo mic, but we made due very quickly.

After that, we finished the set off with our cover of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with some extremely distorted guitar and extremely distorted (read: awfulawfulawful) vocals provided by me. I even switched a verse to German. 'Cause I know some German. It wasn't a translation. Just the German I know. Phrases like "Supermarket." "Dresden." "I Love You." and "The Boat."

And that was it. Our first and only live performance. The 9-12 folks present were enthused.

After us was Caligula, made up of other friends of ours, some heavy duty Latin rock, then the more popular local acts from the Southern Maine area. Eating Alone, who were way cool and I'd seen around a lot and even been that one kid who wanted to be cool so he helped load out their drum kit a couple of times. I knew their names. No big deal. Then came Every 40 Seconds, another big name. Closing out the night was the most famous. Animal Suit Driveby. They recently got signed to some major label, I'm not even sure if they're still on it, but they changed their name to The Killing Moon and became way cooler. Changed their sound a bit, but that's what happens. Anyways. They were Animal Suit Driveby then, and were kickass. We even got to hang out with them after the show. We wanted to go illegally sledding at the inner-tubing place but people were there, so instead we went to a big, big scary abandoned mill of notoriety. They definitely don't remember, but that was as basically close to fame as Brackett and the Drill Bits ever came.

R4AC ended up raising a good hunk of cash and donated it to an organization helping homeless teens, which is a great cause to rock for. And Brackett and the Drill Bits helped.

We still have a website up. I had to make it in order to pass my Advanced Communications class and I really didn't want to so I had Billiam show me how to construct the barest minimum of design on Dreamweaver. None of the mp3's you can listen to on the site involve me, just Brackett's home recordings, but that's perfectly fine since he's infinitely more musically talented than I am. Regardless, I'll regretfully link to it. Here you go: Brackett and the Drill Bits.

It occurs to me now that linking there has deemed my traditional use of codenames completely moot, but whatev's. I'm not even sure if you can get a CD through that means anymore. I still have one copy of Bionic Telemusic, but it's sealed away to never be listened to ever. Just kidding.