Bands - Team Yellow

Bandless again. But I wouldn't be bandless for long. Drift would rise again.  Sort of.  At least my musical relationship with Jason Boles and Jon Soucy would rise again. And I'd be all the happier for it.

TEAM YELLOW

(2002)

Jason (guitar/vocals), Jon (guitar), Me (bass), Tim (drums)

You see, I'm no dummy. One thing I knew then and I know now is Jason Boles is one of the best songwriters you've never heard about.  He's phenomenal.  At the time we were in Drift he was writing a lot of stuff that would make musicians salivate.  Experimenting with different and unusual time signatures, writing with alternate guitar tunings, tempo changes, etc.  Add to that Jon, who is a monster guitarist, always finding the best inventive riffs to compliment what Jason was doing.

After Jim left the band, Jason and Jon called in their friend Gary Dean to play drums.  Gary is a great drummer, singer and sound engineer.  But he ended up not being a good fit for the band.  Plus the one gig we had with Gary, he ended up getting in a fight outside the bar with some drunk guy in the parking lot.

Enter Tim the drummer.  Jason and Jon had jobs in the video game industry at that point.  Tim was a game designer/programmer they met at work.  He and Jason became roommates, and Drift was reborn as Team Yellow.  That name derived as some sort of inside joke at their jobs. 

Tim on drums

Team Yellow would just resurrect the songs with did as Drift.  This time the one having problems with the band would be me.  I was having trouble connecting as a bass player to Tim's drumming.  His timing was off.  Oh, he could do all kinds of fancy fills and rudiments and whatnot, but when it came to basic timing he couldn't do it.  And I knew it early on.  I would get frustrated and feel I had the take on the burden of controlling the tempo for the whole band by myself.

Tim was a nice guy.  It was never anything personal.  Plus his ability to get some audio recording plug-ins in exchange for some recording time with a talented young engineer in San Francisco was a boon.

Me, Bert and Tim in the makeshift recording studio in a warehouse in SF

Probably the biggest dream of my life was to be able to record in a real recording studio. Well, this was the closet I'd got at the point.  We'd arranged to drive up to San Francisco for a weekend to record with engineer Bert Garibay.    We recorded in the warehouse office of a courier service, but something about that made it even cooler.  (Not to mention we basically "camped out" and slept in the warehouse all weekend.)

me officially laying down bass tracks

 

Bert Garibay

Tim

Jason

 Sadly, this recording session would turn out to be a major bust.  It would take Tim almost the entire weekend to get his drum tracks down.  The culprit?  His timing.  You can get away with stuff playing live that you can't when you record.  We even put him on a metronome and he could not play to the click.  The rest of the band only had a few hours on Sunday to get everything else down.  Needless to say, it didn't happen.

When we got back to L.A., Jason and Jon did the dirty work.  They told Tim he was out of the band.  That would be the end of Team Yellow.  But something even better would rise from it's ashes. The good thing about Team Yellow is I had become comfortable enough to start singing back up.  And although we mostly were doing Drift songs, Jason would contribute one new song, "Last Stop," that showed signs of his developing maturity as a songwriter. 

P.S. - back to Gary Dean being a great drummer, singer and sound engineer.  Somewhere after his brief stint in Drift, Gary and Jon formed a one-off duo called the Byl Gates Trio.  They locked themselves in our old rehearsal space and recorded some songs I absolutely adore to this day.