In his last column, computer science professor and aspiring rock musician Serge Belongie grapples with self doubt over his musical ambitions in the wake of the Southern California wildfires, only to find renewed drive when his band SO3, led by emerging guitar phenom Mike Artamonov, is invited to NYC to perform at a benefit concert.
The benefit show in NYC succeeded beyond our expectations, with a crowd of 100s bearing witness to Mike’s newly introduced guitar solo acrobatics including the “behind the back attack’ and the “behind the head shred.’ After the performance, in what must have looked like a small press conference, I found myself assuring a group of suspicious audience members that there was no pre-recorded track playing, that indeed every note they heard was produced live.
In the weeks following that show, buzz about Mike and SO3 began to spread through our extended network of friends, and by year end, a critical mass of fans had formed in a handful of cities around the US and the UK. Most fervent among these groups were our friends in San Francisco and London. Logistically speaking, San Francisco would have been the obvious choice, but the emotional draw of London was too powerful, and Mike and I resolved to do our next show there. (This may have had something to do with the aura surrounding the Led Zeppelin reunion show that was coming up in December.)
In the midst of these deliberations, Hugh (Aitchison, drummer for SO3) was doing a fair bit of his own reflection, and announced his intent to go his separate way, due to personal and career considerations. While his departure would not be immediate, the London show would not be included among his final performances with us. Fortunately, due to the efforts of our highly energized support network in London, a number of substitute drummer opportunities presented themselves in short order, along with a variety of venue booking prospects. With the help of some friends in the entertainment industry, I assembled a list of London area rock music journalists, and in between rehearsals, I got to work preparing London for Mike’s arrival. If Mike was the second coming of Hendrix, then I would be his Chandler and Redding, rolled into one.
Our show took place shortly after New Year’s, at a club near London Bridge called The Miller. From the moment he stepped onto the stage, Mike thrilled the audience, attaining a level of comfort and swagger in his improvisation I had never before witnessed. Midway through our set, a group of enthralled fans surprised us by chanting “USA! USA!’ At another point, after Mike announced in passing that he had cut his finger on his strings, the prospect that he could toss out a pick with traces of his blood on it prompted a burst of outstretched hands. The adrenaline levels were so high that it seemed Mike could have played Mary Had a Little Lamb for an encore, and the crowd still would have gone wild. By the end of our set, we had fallen in love with London.
The euphoria of the show’s aftermath, however, would be short lived. In the following days we sat down with a handful of music journalists, managers and label representatives, some of whom had seen us play. Meeting after meeting, we became painfully aware that we had nothing to give these people except a lot of wide eyed enthusiasm and an outdated, poorly recorded demo CD. They needed Product — with a capital P — and we didn’t have it.
Our last couple days in London were somber ones. In a ham handed attempt to cheer us up, I suggested we take an afternoon to visit the famed music shops of Denmark Street. Mistake no. 1: the stores were teeming with other musicians who were also trying to make it in the same crowded scene. Mistake no. 2: we were reeling from sticker shock due to a combination of import pricing and a weak dollar. The London love affair was over. If we were to set up shop somewhere to record a killer EP, it was not going to be in London.
During the long flight home, we mulled over our options and concluded that Los Angeles was the place to go. April 1 would be the day we make the move. There we would be immersed in a world class music scene, while at the same time able to continue working to support ourselves, Mike via part time telecommuting and I via a sabbatical at Caltech, located a short drive from LA in Pasadena.
Fast forward three months, and Mike, Hugh and I are standing pensively in my back yard overlooking the canyon into which we had peed in a graceful arc so many times during the practice breaks of years past. It was Hugh’s last official day in the band, and we were taking time to reminisce. Exactly one year before, on March 31, 2007, we had played our first show as SO3 in a cramped student rec room on the UCSD campus. Over 25 more shows would follow in the ensuing 12 months, in venues as far away as London and Lisbon, and now it was time to take it to the next level.
Early the next morning Mike and I finished packing up our rented moving van and embarked on the drive to LA. While we were in good spirits during the drive, we spoke very little, apart from expressing our commitment (and our anxieties) about making recordings that capture the power and excitement of our live shows. In the space of a few hours we had arrived and finished unloading our boxes at our new place, and we were exhausted. The moving van wasn’t due back till later that evening, but we had an inkling it would be a good idea to take care of it right away, so as to put the move officially behind us. Though we’ll never know what exactly gave rise to that inkling, what we do know is that it resulted in a stroke of beginner’s luck beyond anything Mike or I could have imagined.
After arriving at the rental shop, we took our place in line at the service desk and got to chatting with a friendly guy who was also in the waiting area. First, we are floored to discover that he was the producer on Nickelback’s last album. Second, he turns out to be a very cool guy, and was surprisingly supportive of our music ambitions. Third, he asks us what our plans were for the day, and offers to give us a tour of his studio. Doing our best not to look like star-struck yokels, we accepted on the spot.
That afternoon, we turned up at his studio (actually, one of his studios) in Glendale, and we brought a demo CD in case the opportunity to play some of our songs presented itself. In another act of wishful thinking, we also packed our guitars in Mike’s trunk. He indeed wanted to hear our tunes, and he sensed great potential in one of the tracks, a song called Montezuma. Soon the guitars were retrieved from Mike’s trunk and we found ourselves laying down tracks for a new, Nickelback-producer-produced version of Montezuma! We honestly didn’t know how far he intended to go with this session, and we didn’t want to ask. The time flew by, and before dark, seemingly effortlessly, he had a fully mixed and mastered track ready for us.
We had been in LA less than a day and we already had our first professional recording in our hands. The love we had lost in London had returned: now LA loved us, and we loved LA.
