Runnin' Down The Dream
An Essay on ambition, music, and family
“I felt so good
Like anything was possible
Hit cruise control
And rubbed my eyes”
We saw The Strip for the first time in the summer of 1997, whooping and hollering and knuckling each other’s shoulders in adolescent excitement. Seventeen and wildly prone to whim, we had booked a cheap room at Excalibur the night before. At the first of the legendary straightaways on Interstate 15, the sun was high and the asphalt shimmered with desert heat. The road trip soundtrack was, and is, all-important. As life marches on, we might get fuzzy on other details around landmark moments, but we don’t often forget the music that was playing. One song in particular would thread together a generational tapestry of family, music, and friendship. I slid in a compact disc of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Greatest Hits (we all had our own copy) and the four of us belted Running Down A Dream in dissonant unison. We would have topped 100 mph if the old silver Tercel hadn’t maxed out around 75. Reeking of JOOP! cologne and In-N-Out Burger, we quoted Swingers hundreds of times before we even hit Primm. “Vegas, Baby!”. After dropping our rucksacks at the castle we scurried off to scout mini-marts for some degenerate willing to score us a suitcase of Natty Light and/or a handle of Captain Morgan. We stacked our days flirting with vacationing midwesterners at the hotel pool and trash talking at intense mini-golf competitions. At night we got absolutely succotashed, streaking the hallways and making trips downstairs to plunder the Round Table Buffet. We called it an annual tradition for a couple years, but in a few blinks it was all over. One Sunday afternoon we took the long way home for the last time together. We’d had our kicks.
I landed in Isla Vista at some point after high school. It’s a densely populated square mile north of Santa Barbara of relative lawlessness already notorious for various gruesome murders, bank burning, topless girls, drunk kids falling from cliffs, and Toad The Wet Sprocket. A most fertile environment for making mistakes and writing songs, both of which I did a lot of in those few years. Our first show as a baby band was in the driveway of my apartment on Trigo Road and we hadn’t come up with a name yet. We looked around the garage for any remotely cool phrase and found gold on a faded drumhead. We debuted, for one night only, as WEATHER KING.
We tried on other names—Trip South, Wax Poetic—but none stuck for long. Our first official booking at Santa Barbara’s SoHo Music Club created some pressure to figure this out. Again we tried the “Immediate Surroundings Method” - I flipped through a nearby Calvin and Hobbes collection. The phrase shades of gray felt cozy, but a bit too…gray. I asked the boys: “How about Shades of Day?”. Not since my first band saw UPPER HAND written in a dusty windowsill after our first practice have the gods witnessed a new band agree on a name so fast. I’d lament our decision in the years to come though. As it turned out, most everyone could only hear Shades of Gray or Saves The Day whenever we said it aloud. What felt clever at first was a pain for all time, but for that one glorious day it mattered not; our name was going to be included in the finely printed calendar section at the back of the Local Newspaper.
Decades later, chest deep in a late-summer purge, I unearthed a box of old DV tapes. It was August 2024, and I was still deeply entangled in the jungles of grief after back to back losses of both dad and son. The last thing I needed then was more gigabytes of memories to manage, but I’ve become rather adept at organizing the past. Perhaps a surprising new career as an archivist awaits. Before I could overthink it, I sent off the tapes for digital conversion. A thumbdrive arrived a few weeks later. Wincing often, I scrubbed through hours of my early live performances and came across a long forgotten Las Vegas experience: a shameless attempt at coaxing the director of promotions at a popular indie rock station out to our show.
In 2002 Shades of Day relocated to Ojai, and for several years we spent weekends playing the Deer Lodge, dodging falling wine bottles at Movino (Now Sam’s Place), and even once disgracing The Hub. As the summer of 2006 fired up we had finished building our band clubhouse/recording studio here and were set to release our debut album “MAYDAY!”. A longing for out-of-state adventure birthed The Short Bus Tour; a whole two shows that we conquered in a friend’s retired short bus. The footage induced further nostalgia: flip phones, Discman, long hair, the DV cam itself… It was a cuspy time for tech and I marveled at how different the culture and business of music looks today. The tour was a full year before the iPhone debuted. Youtube was only months old. Myspace was in full swing, all of us still agonizing over our top-8 and blissfully unaware of its impending doom. Watching me and Ricky The Drummer searching for (and flyering the back of) a cab and visiting a radio station with absolutely no appointment while recording it all on a dying media that would then lie dormant for the entire second half of my life… well I felt things. Yeah these tapes dated me, but at the same time I could almost feel my bare skin fusing to the hot puke-green vinyl of those bus benches and taste the last warm beer from the little red and white Igloo. I can definitely hear the ringing in my ears from the show that night, which we played to a modest crowd of slot zombies, cocktail waitresses, and members of the other band on the bill. (Um, no, Patrick from Area 108 FM didn’t make the show that night, and neither did the station’s demure receptionist.) Feeling victorious nonetheless, we returned to Ojai sunburnt and high on ambition, ready to conquer the rest of the world. Though we would dominate downtown Ventura for the next few years, the Short Bus Tour owns the distinction of being both our first and last.
Years of music biz dances taught many a lesson, maybe none of them more valuable than this: “I’ll definitely be there” almost assuredly means “Bless your heart, kid. Best of luck.”.
Here’s the scene:
I didn’t see Vegas again for another 10 years. It was August 4th, 2016 and that night my band Grizfolk was supporting Andrew McMahon In The Wilderness. The moment was tender for all of us. After playing some 300 shows around the world, playing Letterman and Conan, logging tens of thousands of miles through whiteout blizzards, blistering hangovers, and every last Guitar Center, we were abandoned by our label. Our debut album Waking Up The Giants was charting in the midwest and by all appearances our first national headline tour had gone well. It had all started at the top of the Capitol Records building with so much promise. We had congregated in then-president Ron Fair’s office for a legendary deal-closing speech that I will never forget.
“You’re in the NFL now boys!!
This is the big leagues. I promise you guys, a year from now,
you won’t recognize your lives!”
The funny part is that he wasn’t wrong, technically. Ron had massively overspent his way out the door a year prior, and like him, we stood in the direct path of the bloody budgetary axe of the new label boss. I remember watching the sun come up over Sin City from a rooftop pool with Bill The Drummer (drummers are always down for adventure), hashing it all out. What the fuck did it all mean, anyway? After we polished off the last of the Coors Heavies, we wobbled down the street in search of breakfast and answers. I ordered a rack of ribs, fries and a coke with ice. I thought about my pops, who coincidentally really loved Bill. How did he feel when he reached his own tipping point of frustration with the music biz? I never got an answer.
“It was a beautiful day
The sun was shinin’
I had the radio on
I was drivin’”
It would be another 5 years before I’d come around that picturesque bend on I-15 again. February 22, 2021. There were no friends along whooping or hollering this time, and no soundcheck to make. I turned off a few miles short of The Strip and headed east to Dad’s place in Henderson to handle his affairs. Two years earlier he had escaped to Nevada, freshly retired and divorced. He’d had enough of the bullshit California taxes and the damp, cold weather. I could almost see the middle finger thrust out the driver’s side window as he tore off. Dad adored Sinatra. I recall him crooning everything, always peppering the room and amusing himself with an improvised couplet. I think he fancied himself an honorary member of the Rat Pack, and after a few drinks - a proper Goodfella. He played the nickel slots, presumably for the free booze and the chance to flirt with the women shuttling them. I struggled to support the move, but I get it now. Ever since The Ulcer he refused to make any changes. A defiant beeline straight to the fridge to crack a beer the minute I got him home from the hospital sent a clear message: a rebel til the end. Cut from the same cloth, my rebellion was equally isolating: I refused to watch him die.
Before he moved, we met up for a belated birthday brunch in Palos Verdes. While he did his best to charm our server by complimenting her looks and asking what she was doing later (“I kid I kid.. But seriously, you free?”), I quickly ordered the BLT with an apologetic grimace. I had come to lunch with a hidden agenda - to continue to pry about his side of our family. My grandpa was a mystery man with a poor reputation and I had met him only once while still a toddler. I asked Dad to tell me anything about him, but after staring down at the table for almost a minute, he wiped the corners of his eyes, looked up at me and said “Don’t ask me about that, son.”. The flirting then continued on as our food arrived, and we kept the talk on the small side from then on. Out in the parking lot he had something important to show me before we parted ways. “You ever heard of George Strait?” he asked with a straight face as he opened a new looking jewel case and slid in a CD. “I love this guy!” he announced before I could answer. I watched, fascinated and a little concerned as he lit a fresh cig and sang along to the parts he knew. His eyes turned misty and he crooned along with George as he started in with Amarillo By Morning. “Everything that I got is just what I got on…” I’d never known him to have anything nice to say about country music, but there we were in so much uncharted territory. I remember feeling surprised at how little I actually knew my father. I had so many questions, but he was all bottled up. I just sat there in his passenger seat for a few more songs, saying nothing until the cd skipped and I mustered a quick “Love you pops, gotta go.”. That was the last time I saw him.
The official cause of death indicated heart failure, but I think it was more complex than that. I stayed out there for a week; sifting through his belongings, making the necessary calls, listening to music, crying, laughing, and wondering. I remember feeling surprised at what bubbled up. I found lighters in every coat pocket and collected them in an old Christmas cookie tin. Every jacket was a smoking jacket. I’ll be surprised if the haul isn’t a lifetime supply for me. It sure was for him. YOW. The myriad unopened Radio Shack electronics, cheap tools, and bottles of tire cleaner from decades past were notable. I found incredible rock n roll memorabilia that I had never seen before and his prized black 1978 Gibson Les Paul with rusted strings. Childhood memories were everywhere—his and mine— he hadn’t ever thrown much away. At the center of all that he left behind–the eternally beating heart of his soul–was a weathered cardboard box of loose cassette tapes. Dad’s music.
When I first showed an interest in music as a teenager, he gave me three things: a black Maxell cassette with a handful of his favorite demo songs, a cd of his old band with a closeup woman’s crotch in a red swimsuit on the cover, and a black Ibanez electric bass guitar. In the 1970’s, he was hard at work carving his name into the rock n roll family tree as the fresh new voice of Montrose. Plucked from the Sunset Strip at age 22 and signed to Warner Brothers Records, he was outfitted (by mom) in crop tops, leather flares, and platforms, lit up in a special at The L.A. Forum, and rolled out on tour with The Rolling Stones, Kiss, Aerosmith, Skynyrd, Blue Oyster Cult, Foghat… to paraphrase that perfect line in the movie Almost Famous - It Was All Happening. But the Big Ride is fast and dangerous. Even the mega-talented often struggle to hold on. The cassettes are full of music he made after all of that: his demos, his visions, his dreams. His best work (in my completely biased opinion) now lives in my studio, digitized and organized alongside all of mine. I had long believed he’d simply given up after quitting Montrose, but listening through the tapes revealed a different side of the story: Like Ol’ Blue Eyes, he wanted to do it his way or not at all. I see him more completely now than I ever could while he was here, and I’ve forgiven the both of us. I suppose getting to sift unimpeded through someone’s entire life history helps with that. One of my favorite lyrics from his song Keeping Love Alive goes: “I didn’t fall I just missed my mark, it’s crazy not to try… there’s a fire that lives in a broken heart, keeping love alive”. We might have commiserated about the marks we missed and the dream we had both run down. Alas.
I arranged transport for things I wanted to keep and drove his ailing Mercedes SL500 convertible back home to Ojai. In the passenger seat was a small stack from his CD collection - Jump On It and Warner Bros. Presents by Montrose, of course. Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. Harrison’s All Things Must Pass…and three Greatest Hits Compilations: George Strait, Sinatra, and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. As I throttled up the eager V-8 onto southbound I-15 I thought about that first trip to Vegas in the 90’s. Some kind of saving grace that our transportation back then had so little horsepower. I slid the Petty disc in and cranked the volume on track 13 as I hit the first straightaway and let the speedometer tickle 100 mph. I caught The Strip in the rearview and watched it fade away, shimmering in the highway heat. My eyes turned misty as the first chorus hit. I sang along with Tom, all too aware there’s a last time for everything.
“Yeah running down a dream
That never would come to me
Workin’ on a mystery
Goin’ wherever it leads
Runnin’ down a dream”
Beautifully written story of catharsis and genesis. Thank you for sharing, B. Felt like a breath of fresh air... or ... hot desert air, to be precise. :)
I just LOVED hearing about your start with SOD. My favorite backup band :) JK. This is great writing B. Would you consider offering this as an audio file? Would love to hear you!