Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Part 7: Hell Comes to the Suburbs

Yeah it’s been a while.  But I’m fairly certain no one really reads this blog too much anyway so I’m gonna call it “good.”  It ain’t like I got a bunch of e-mails asking for more.

Let’s talk a bit more about Darin Bluhm.

Darin Bluhm
I feel I might have skimmed a bit over the importance of Darin to Zombie Apoclaypse NOW! last time so I’ll try to fix that today.  Basically if Darin hadn’t joined the band the band wouldn’t have made the jump from barely-playing-basements-amateurs to venue-playing-professionals (Or “Talented Amateur”, if you prefer).  The reason was, in my opinion, two-fold:

1) Darin had a lot of connections and a lot friends in town so while I was being a big dopey nerd with no real idea where to start with things like booking shows Darin would just call up a buddy or a co-worker and say “Hey, do you think we can place this show on this date?  Nice.”   This is how we played at the Strutt and at Papa Pete’s as much as we did, at least in the beginning.  I don’t know if the Strutt would have ever let us play if I or super polite Travis had checked in with them.   Darin’s outgoing nature is what taught me how to book shows and any success we had in 2009 came because of that.

2) Darin was ambitious, more so than me or Travis.  While I was, am still am, a very long term goal oriented sort of person who likes to take it slow and steady and Travis is more “Go with theFlow” Darin was a “Right Here, Right Now” type of guy when it came to making music.  Now this obviously had some good points to it and some not so good points to it.  On the one hand he had far grater expectations from us than we could sometimes give, which could result in some in-band issues from time to time but on the other hand he tended to force our hands into doing something we weren’t planning on doing at the time but seriously needed to be done.  And when they worked out they tended to work out big time.   Case in point the release of our second demo “The Sellout Demo” which we would have never done in the Winter of 2009 if Darin hadn’t insisted on it.

First band photo of the new version of ZAN

More after the jump.