Over ten years has gone by since I joined my first real band the Merry Go Rounds. I was one of the original members, a distinction that doesn’t mean as much as it usually does when you’re in a band that has nearly a dozen members at any given time. In my short one-year tenure as the Merry Go Rounds’ percussionist, we released an album, made a music video, toured the East Coast, and played the pregame show at a basketball game at State Farm Arena (then known as the Phillips Arena). We were by no means great, but the Merry Go Rounds set in motion a series of events and life changes that led me to who and where I am today.
Life for me started in August 2013. Due to personal problems, my first two college semesters as an independent legal adult were a bust. Immediately following them was a mind-numbing three months spent interning in Indianapolis, a time I mostly associate with torrential midwest summer rain, Aphex Twin’s I Care Because You Do, and driving up to my hometown in a suburb of Chicago every other weekend to spend time with a childhood friend who would later end up in jail for burglary.
When my internship ended and it was time for me to start my second year at Tech, I immediately tried to get back in with the campus’ co-ed fraternity I had been de-pledged from during my freshman year (at the time, during any given semester, they would typically end up de-pledging half their pledge class before initiation for various reasons). Much to my shock, I was not given a third bid, although part of me suspected that brotherhood wasn’t in the cards, due to the aforementioned personal problems effectively making me little more than a liability to the fraternity.
The past year beforehand, that group of people had more or less been my entire identity and social life, and the resulting crisis practically sent me into a months-long manic episode. Compounding this was my realization that the situationship I had gotten into the second semester of my first year of college would never pan out into any kind of serious relationship, and the next thing I knew, my entire life outside of classes was a big, blank slate for me to try to build a new life on top of. Putting it that way sounds a bit too optimistic - I was horribly depressed, directionless, and had no outlet for any of my feelings or social needs. I spent a lot of late nights isolated in my room in my Vine City apartment, watching police sirens flash red and blue patterns on my wall through my window, talking to high school friends over Skype, and trying to figure out what to do with all the empty space in my life. As a testament to how well I was on the way to losing my mind, there were some nights I’d walk back home from college classes praying that someone would try to pick a fight with me, convinced in my manic state at the time that my scrawny 19-year-old self could definitely, 100% take on someone twice my size in a fist fight. To say I needed help getting my head back on my shoulders and my feet back under me is an understatement.
The first few weeks of classes in fall 2013, I mostly went to a lot of major-specific club meetings. Clubs like Grey Hat and VG Dev. I think I may have applied to shadow an operator at WREK, but I didn’t get up to go to my first training shift on a Saturday at 8 AM. I remember being in a lot of those clubs with other computer science majors, but I never really felt like I belonged in any of them. I didn’t even actively want to be at most of those meetings - I remember leaving VG Dev for good after the kid behind me kept dropping 2013-era Reddit meme catchphrases every third sentence. I’m not a particularly judgmental person (not anymore at least), but even I have my limits.
Among all the clubs I attended, only one wasn’t computer science-related: Musician’s Network. It was also the only club I attended more than two meetings at, and I would quickly come to spend most of my time outside of class in their student-run on-campus DIY venue, Under the Couch. At the very end of the first meeting I attended, one early September evening, a man at the opposite end of the room stood up and announced that he was starting a twee band and invited anyone and everyone to join, no audition at all. Being in a band was something I had always wanted to do, and despite having no real experience playing music with other people (at least outside of my 70-person middle school band class), I knew if I was going to fill my time outside of studies with anything, it was going to be this. We made our introductions: the man’s name was Jared McGrath, and he was already a minor celebrity on campus for being the vocalist and frontman for a band called Champagne Room. I wrote my name and email address on a sheet of looseleaf paper and noticed two things: first, there were already about a dozen names on the sheet before me. Second, nowhere did anyone write what instruments they play - and Jared didn’t seem to care.
Later that week, I was CCed on an email with everyone else who signed up, calling us to the as-of-yet-unnamed band’s first rehearsal at Under the Couch. Additionally, we were each directed to learn Rebellion (Lies) by Arcade Fire and Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners so we’d have some semblance of direction for our first practice.
Under the Couch, in its incarnation during my time as a Tech student, was in the Student Center, adjacent to the help desk and across from the second floor food court. The space wasn’t just a venue, complete with an elevated stage and professional-grade sound equipment: there was also a practice space/live room and a control room. During the daytime, tables, chairs, beanbags, and of course couches were scattered throughout the space, and in the evening, that same space would turn into the pit, the MN staff arduously pushing all the beanbags, tables, and chairs outside the venue into an adjacent study area in the Student Center, next to where the rentable gear lockers were. There wasn’t much in the way of bureaucracy, at least compared to what Musician’s Network has to go through now to set up a show: several officers had 24/7 access to Under the Couch via keys to the doors, no reservations with the Student Center were necessary to schedule rehearsal or recording sessions, and shows typically featured a healthy mix of larger touring bands, smaller local bands, and the occasional Georgia Tech dorm band. Over the last several decades, practically every single notable indie punk/emo/hardcore band had passed through Under the Couch, from Braid to Jimmy Eat World to Tigers Jaw to Pg. 99.
Anyway, given the sheer number of people who had signed up to be in Jared’s band, rehearsing in the practice space simply wasn’t possible. Seventeen people showed up, so we all set up on the stage. It was also quickly apparent that I wasn’t going to play drums in this band: there were already two drummers set up on stage, each with their own full drum kit. Not that it mattered anyway - my drum kit was still at my parents’ house in the Chicago suburbs, and all I had was an electronic practice kit that lived in my apartment, and an Alesis drum machine I bought in 2008 with money from my first summer job, both of which I kept plugged into a Peavey KB 1.
Before actually jamming, Jared showed us a half-serious, half-comical slideshow he had prepared to explain to us the concept of twee. To be honest, I didn’t care much for the indie pop genre at the time - I was still stuck in my prog rock/R.E.M. phase. But a band is a band, and I was happy to be able to make music with anyone, and even happier that I had a reason to leave my apartment and something to look forward to a few times a week.
Our first practice was unusually productive for a group of 17 who were, for the most part, only meeting each other for the first time. Our cover of Lies never ended up going anywhere, but we jammed on D major and B minor chords until we had written our first song, christened “PB&Jam.” We also decided on calling ourselves Jungle Jim & the Merry Go Rounds that very same practice, in keeping with the twee theme, before shortening the name to just the Merry Go Rounds. With that, my second year of college was instantly off to a way better start than my first year: I had a new social group I got along with, an emotional outlet for everything that had been building up during the year prior, and something to spend my time on other than going to college classes to get a degree I wasn’t all that excited about getting.
A month or so after our first rehearsal, we were asked if we wanted to perform at Georgia Tech’s annual fall festival in November. This would be our first show, and by this point, our lineup had stabilized around a consistent 11 people. As if our personnel weren’t enough, our instrumentation ventured into the territory of absurd: a combination of guitars, multiple drum kits, bass, Latin and African percussion, saxophone, trumpet, violin, cello, flute, three-part harmonies, xylophone, piano, and organ, just to name what I can remember. Despite the odds, we were show-ready: we had written four original songs and learned a spot-on rendition of Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners for a five-song setlist, the perfect length for a band that needed 40 minutes to set up and sound check for a 20-minute set.
The festival wasn’t really a music festival - it was a student festival that just happened to have four bands play on an incredibly tiny impromptu stage on Tech Green, Georgia Tech’s campus quad. The only other band on the bill I remember was a Florida-based band called Cointet, whose bassist Chris Kingsbury was a student at Georgia Tech and a friend of Jared. Even for a more sensibly-sized band, the stage was small, but somehow, all of us managed to fit - even both drum kits. The stage’s low profile allowed us to compensate for the lack of real estate by taking turns jumping off and running laps around the crowd during songs, giving the impression that we were as much a performance art troupe as we were a band.
At this point in the band, my setup consisted solely of my eight-pad Alesis drum machine, almost always DIed. It was a setup dictated purely by working constraints: with timekeeping duties already fulfilled and our sonic range already mostly filled out, whatever I played had to be a) as small and portable as possible, and b) couldn’t step on the toes of any other instruments. I couldn’t play drums in the Merry Go Rounds, but I wanted to play percussion, and I didn’t own any percussion instruments, so I played a drum machine with percussion voices. Eventually, when we had come a little closer to finding our voice, I would add a glockenspiel to my setup - our bassist Tom Speers and I went to a used instrument liquidation sale at a warehouse in south Atlanta, where I got the idea to buy a more melodic instrument. The lows and mids had already been filled out, so I bought whatever was available that could fill the highs.
Videos of our first show were recorded, but have since been lost to time. Not that it was much of a loss anyway - who wants to hear a bunch of kids who had never played in a band before try to play a show? With the exception of a few members who had played in bands before, we were all amateurs: sloppy, unpolished, and wholly inexperienced. But we all had fun on stage, and the level of energy and sheer wall-of-sound quality to our performance resulted in rave reviews from everyone who watched. More importantly, we realized we could actually play shows. We realized we wanted to play shows. All we needed to do was record a few songs to have something to pitch to venues we wanted to play at and bands we wanted to play with.
The good thing about having a dozen bandmates is that inevitably, at least one of them is going to know their way around a studio. For the Merry Go Rounds, that was Archie O’Neil, our saxophonist who had played bass and shared vocal duties in local bands The Tides and Ground Rules. Archie wasn’t just a skilled engineer and producer - he was a virtuoso at nearly every instrument he played. To this day, Archie is the most brilliant musician I’ve ever played music with. The fact that he picked up saxophone specifically to join the Merry Go Rounds, never having played sax in his life, and then reaching proficiency with it in a matter of months, tells you everything you need to know about his dedication to his craft.
In December of 2013, we reserved time at Under the Couch to record our four originals for an EP. Since Under the Couch was a student lounge until 6 PM every weekday, our recording was usually done at night, with sessions going until 11 PM or later. The era of Musician’s Network’s unbridled freedom within Under the Couch is long gone, but ten or so years ago, you used to be able to access the space any hour of any day, so long as you had a copy of the key to the door. As a result, you ended up with studio projects like Chicken Dinner Faceplant (a two-piece band featuring Archie and Merry Go Rounds’ backing vocalist Alex McIntyre), whose marathon 12-hour overnight writing/recording/producing sessions birthed the concept of “styrofoam punk.”
Recording of the debut Merry Go Rounds EP was done shortly before finals week, with the goal being to record the whole thing and have a first pass of rough mixes done by the start of winter break. We accomplished this, but not easily: due to the shortage of mics and XLR cables to live-track all of us at once, everything was single-tracked for the most part. And then we went back to do overdubs, often tracking parts that we couldn’t physically play live. It’s kind of ironic that despite our massive instrumentation resulting in a wall of sound, we felt the need to track overdubs and auxiliary percussion, but trust me: no matter how many instruments your indie pop orchestra has, there’s always room for more.
Despite the challenge we had given ourselves, recording those four songs may have been the most fun I’ve ever had recording. The fact that so few of us fully understood how the recording process happens worked in our favor. There was an unrepeatable, un-self-conscious energy to the whole EP. We didn’t really overthink anything because we didn’t know what to think in the first place. We were just a bunch of kids trying to create something without knowing how to create it - which meant we also didn’t have any concept of limits, didn’t box ourselves, and didn’t worry about what people would think when they heard the final product.
The day I left to go home for winter break, Archie had sent out an email containing all of the “rough mixes.” We had joked about making really fucked up joke mixes with ridiculous effects put on all the tracks - all of us except our vocalist Caroline Walden, who we made sure not to tell as the unwitting victim of our prank. I listened through the mixes at the airport, trying as hard as I could to contain my laughter in the terminal when the opening track started with extremely deep-fried distortion and vocals pitch-shifted a half step up (but everything else in the original key). Poor Caroline wasn’t in on the joke, and thought that that was just how the songs sounded when all was said and done. Fortunately, Archie followed up the same day with a new email containing the actual mixes, which sounded far more listenable.
The EP was to be called Recess, but it was never released. After winter break, when we reconvened in January of 2014, it was decided that rather than release the EP, we would expand it into a full-length LP. Two of the tracks we recorded - Dearly Blue and PB&Jam - were benched for the full-length. Another, ICU, was also benched, but with a few more overdubs recorded for its eventual full-length debut. The last - We Know Yr Secrets - was rearranged, reworked, and re-recorded, with the original more or less being a high-quality demo by comparison.
The Merry Go Rounds - Recess EP track listing
We Know Yr Secrets [Slow Version]
Dearly Blue
ICU [Drumless Version]
PB&Jam
Embedded above: the original version of We Know Yr Secrets that was originally recorded for the demo.
When the spring 2014 semester began, we knew we had to get something out there. Our live shows were well-attended and the crowds were enthusiastic, but we knew we had to keep the momentum going by giving people something to listen to without having to leave their house. Seeing as PB&Jam was our standard set closer and our most popular song (based on crowd enthusiasm at least), we decided to release it as the lead single for the upcoming LP even though we hadn’t even finished writing the rest of it, let alone recorded it. We set a release date for PB&Jam for early February and started putting together a single cover and promo materials.
Coincidentally, around this time, we were approached by someone – a friend of someone in the band, but I can’t remember who exactly – to film a music video for Georgia Tech’s annual campus film festival. The timing was perfect: we had an avenue to create the ultimate promo tool for our debut single and we wouldn’t have to worry about filming it ourselves. In fact, I’m not sure we even had to come up with a storyline – our new filmmaker friend may have already written a script for us.
Although the music video would feature everyone in the band, the star and main protagonist of the music video was Jed Paz, one of our drummers. The storyline was simple: a new student starting their freshman year of college is struggling to fit in, they’re invited to see a live band perform, and they find their place on campus at the show. It’s a bit cliché and the messaging was a bit heavy-handed, but it fit the Merry Go Rounds’ concept perfectly, considering we were practically approaching music with childlike naivete, sugar-coating our songs with a kid-pop sheen.
For whatever reason, moreso than any other shot in the video, I distinctly remember all of us gathering in one of the lecture rooms in the Howey physics building, Jared playing the role of an ornery professor with salt-and-pepper hair, scolding the class while we all threw paper airplanes at the chalkboard. I think we all thought it was pretty funny – Jared was in a PhD program at the time, and as the oldest member of the band, it all made too much sense that he would play the role of a college professor.
One of my favorite memories of my time in the band is the evening we spent on the top of the Ford building on Tech campus pantomiming playing the song. Though the Ford building’s rooftop has long since been locked off to students, around 2013-2014, it was an open secret that due to a programming oversight, it was easily accessible to anyone with a Buzzcard, even if their GTID wasn’t registered to grant them access to the Ford building. I would occasionally bring friends up there late at night to admire the beautiful, unmarred view of the Midtown and Downtown skylines, then much sparser than they are today. It was only a matter of time before I brought my bandmates up there, and we quickly realized it would be the perfect place to film B-reel footage for the music video.
Shortly after the video’s release, word got out that students were co-opting the Ford building rooftop. That the roof was ever accessible to anyone was a huge blunder on part of campus administration, and they quickly closed it off, denying all but the most qualified personnel from taking in one of the most gorgeous vantage points in Midtown. I apologize to all the classes of students since then who never got to experience one of my favorite hidden spots on campus.
Funnily enough, the official PB&Jam music video wasn’t the only music video for the song. We were asked by a YouTuber who was putting out a series of short videos for “lonely stoners” if he could use PB&Jam as the background music for his newest installment. The videos followed a pretty straightforward formula: a guy, sometimes accompanied by friends, goes to a wilderness area and rolls and smokes a joint to background music. There was some contention within the band about whether or not we should take the opportunity, and understandably so: although we weren’t really a straightedge or anti-drug band, our music and personnel certainly had an innocent, childlike aura that didn’t exactly lend itself to adult themes. But an opportunity is an opportunity, and after a vote, we decided to go ahead and let PB&Jam be the theme to a video about friends smoking weed together. The free promo paid off: the day after the stoner video aired, PB&Jam reached an all-time high in Bandcamp downloads, with the r/trees subreddit driving most of the link clickthroughs.
One of the last pieces to fall into place was the single cover: convening at Home Park institution Rocky Mountain Pizza Co., we threw around a number of ideas as we waited for our pizzas and wings to arrive. I remember the idea of Jed being front and center was proposed, given that he was the main character of the music video. The idea I backed the most, though, was a literal peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a plate sitting on a table. Eventually, we settled on a photo of Archie in his trademark rainbow sweater, arms crossed, his head cropped out, leaving only a torso adorned in red, yellow, green, and blue stripes.
The single went live in February.
Just weeks after PB&Jam dropped, Atlanta was hit by a historic snowstorm that shut down the entire city and led to classes getting canceled for nearly a week. When the snowfall began and we got the email saying classes were canceled, we got the idea to record a topically relevant song: Jared brought a song he had written years ago when he was still living in the Washington, DC suburbs called First Snowfall to the band, and proposed recording it later that night in an impromptu 10 PM recording session. One by one, each of us showed up to Under the Couch, most of us learning the song and coming up with our own parts on the spot. In the end, though, what we ended up recording was deemed unfit to keep, and never ended up being more than a demo of what the song would actually become. Not that it matters though – it was the creative energy that we fostered in moments like these that drove the band forward rather than the fruits of a recording session, or new fans gained after a show.
It’s the little things like that that we did that I remember the most. I don’t really remember many of the shows we played, but I remember the kickbacks. I don’t really remember many of our practices, but I remember the times where a handful of us would meet up, hang out, and have long, meandering conversations about whatever was on our mind at the time. The essence of Merry Go Rounds, at least to me, was never solely about the music – it was about everything we did that lead to the creation of music, or was done tangentially to the music. I’ve carried this mentality over to every band I’ve been in since, and by doing so, I’ve prevented music from ever becoming a “job.” Sure, playing in bands is my primary income at this point, but it’s never felt like something I clock into and clock out of and get a Venmo deposit a day or two later. It’s things like getting together in an DIY club-run college recording booth late at night on a Monday, knowing you don’t have to get up early for class the next day, and seeing what sounds you can capture from a xylophone or cello to an SM57.
I don’t remember exactly how it was decided, but we eventually came to agree that if Recess was going to be released, it would be released the first week of April. Toward the end of February, though, we only had about three-quarters of the album composed, arranged, and demoed, with lyrics and all. Recording the rest of the album hadn’t even begun – how on earth were we going to finish writing, recording, and press the album before our self-imposed April 4th release date? The clock was ticking.
If you think about it, though, it makes perfect sense that we would decide this timeline for ourselves. The biggest takeaway from this memoir, the overarching motif of this whole era of my life bears repeating: we were inexperienced and operating outside the framework of a more experienced indie band. No one told us to stop, take a breather, and draw things out if need be. We just wanted to do something. Unadulterated, starry-eyed optimism was our driving force, and it certainly showed over the next six weeks.
Come March, we decided that we would dedicate our whole spring break to recording and mixing this album. If the idea that a dozen kids in a twee orchestra who barely knew their way around a studio and were only semi-competent at their instruments could be their own engineer and producer, on a zero dollar budget, and produce something worth listening to sounds too ridiculous to bet on, you would have passed up a fortune. This magical week in March was one of my fondest memories of my time as a college student. I don’t use the word “magical” lightly – an entire album by an 11-piece band could only be completed in the span of a week via forces that transcend the laws that govern our universe. For seven days, a dozen of my closest friends and I holed ourselves up in Under the Couch, each of us entering the recording booth one by one to record our parts, stepping out to practice whatever we were going to record next (or in at least a few cases, writing whatever we were going to record next), taking breaks shooting the shit, and ordering pizza delivery from Papa John’s.
Archie was once again our engineer and producer, pulling an all-nighter on the last day to turn in our final mixes. I don’t even remember if we actually had them mastered or not – we we quite happy with what we heard, and immediately started burning them to 50 or 100 custom blank CDs in custom gatefold jackets, just in time for our release show at the Drunken Unicorn a few weeks later. For fun, we also put small prizes like stickers, temporary tattoos, and condoms in each CD case, kind of like getting a prize in a box of cereal.
Each CD was emblazoned with a photograph of a custom cake Jared and our violinist Mike Stearns had ordered from Publix. One night, just days before the album was finished being mixed, I went over to Jared’s apartment at the Biltmore by Tech Square, armed with a Nikon D40X camera I received for my 13th birthday, and we spent several hours talking about the album and photographing this cake from multiple angles. Eventually, I had gotten the perfect shot: a top-down view of the round cake, a near-perfect circle, the multicolor of Archie’s rainbow sweater adorned around the edges, the band and album name written in icing on top. The photo we went with has since been lost, but a few outtakes remain:
The Recess album release show at the Drunken Unicorn on April 4th was one of our first shows outside of Under the Couch. In fact, it might have been our first show outside of Georgia Tech’s campus. Opening for us were two bands called The Hotels and Swervocity, two bands that are now just as inactive as The Merry Go Rounds. To be honest, I remember virtually nothing about the show, except for two moments: the very start of our set, and the end of PB&Jam.
We decided on a theatrical entrance to open our set, something that isn’t as unnecessarily dramatic as it otherwise would be given our large personnel. We just barely fit on the Drunken Unicorn stage with all of our gear. Given that it was our album release show and that we were essentially going to play Recess front to back, we decided to endow our live performance with the grandest possible vision, including every single instrument we recorded, including instruments that we otherwise never played live: cello, flute, and a keyboard, to name a few. With all of our instruments set up, the engineer cut the lights and shone a single spotlight on the vocal mic, and each of us took to the stage in a slow, single-file line. Caroline Walden, our co-lead vocalist, and Lisa Rossi, one of our guitarists, led the pack, calmly walking up to the front to start the set with the album’s opening track, We Know Yr Secrets. The rest of us followed, and the first thing I noticed was the size of the audience: we didn’t sell out the Drunken Unicorn, but we were playing to at least 200 people, which was probably the largest crowd we had ever played to up until that point.
Every time we played PB&Jam, we would all slowly lower ourselves down to the stage floor as we faded out our instruments, playing quieter and quieter over the course of a minute and dropping out one by one, mimicking the feel of the studio version. Our release show was no exception, except there was something that felt more powerful about it when we did it on the Drunken Unicorn stage. I’m not sure how to explain it - it just felt like we were the coolest people in the world, even though we probably looked more like a high school theater troupe. Maybe it’s just because we were doing it at the Drunken Unicorn, or that there were a few hundred people watching, but either way, it felt essential in the context of the Merry Go Rounds experience itself. I think more than anything else, we didn’t really know how to present ourselves, and the responsibility of looking “cool” was so diffuse among our personnel that none of us felt a particular pressure to act a certain way on stage at all.
I remember one more thing at the end of the night: the realization that we’d all be running on about three hours of sleep, because the next day, we were going to drive to Rome, Georgia to play an 11 AM outdoor show at Berry College. I don’t remember how we got that gig, or why we agreed to do it in the first place - I just remember we enthusiastically agreed despite the physical toll because it meant we’d be taking our music on the road. Not very far, but still on the road.
The next morning, we all drove to Berry College, leaving in a convoy of three or four cars at 7 AM. Our actual performance was pretty unremarkable - we played to maybe 15 people by the time our set started. But we decided that we would make the most of our time as a band in a new locale, and we shot a music video for the fourth track off Recess, Darling Diane. In typical DIY band fashion, the music video didn’t have much direction, and is mostly footage of us just hanging out. Perhaps it’s a more accurate window into the band’s essence than anything else we put out, sonically or visually.
On the drive back home that afternoon, I was so exhausted I nearly fell asleep behind the wheel while driving my bandmates home on I-75. I had to put on Frank Zappa’s You Are What You Is to stay awake the whole drive.
Just four days after our show at Berry College, we played what remains one of the most unusual shows I’ve ever played. A month or so prior, Caroline’s RA - possibly the same person who asked us to play our first show at the 2013 fall festival - asked if we wanted to open for a public Hawks practice at the Philips Arena, as Georgia Tech was somehow involved. It was to be in the late afternoon on a Wednesday, and being that it wasn’t even a matched game, it was unlikely there would be more than 50 people in attendance. I’m not entirely sure what role our college had in the event, but whatever the reason, we were asked to play it. We were so excited for the idea of playing the Philips Arena that we commissioned and printed our own giant banner to hang behind us as we played.
“Surreal” is truly the only word I can think of to describe what the event actually was. The estimated headcount was accurate - there couldn’t have been more than 60 or 70 people in this gigantic arena we were playing, and we were doing a stripped-down set, absolutely zero electricity. Not only did we completely lose our wall-of-sound live instrumentation, we were also playing in a room hundreds of times bigger than we had ever played, virtually empty, with no amplification. We had just enough time allocated such that we set up, played PB&Jam, and then struck all our gear in the span of seven minutes. We ended up having to lay our custom banner on the ground, having no way to hang it up.
Come early May, the spring 2014 semester was over, and we were all about to jump into our summer plans: our guitarist Andrew Joyce was staying to take classes, Tom was going to Chicago for the summer, Archie had just graduated and was looking for a job, I had accepted an internship at IBM. For a few weeks, we didn’t do a whole lot musically. A typical day for me was ride my bike and take MARTA to Sandy Springs to work at IBM, clock out around 5-6 PM, go back to Home Park, and hang out with Andrew, Mike, Caroline, and some of our other friends.
My internship at IBM was a rather grueling one. I was hired after one interview by their X-Force Team, wherein it was explained that working there would entail aiding the development of internet security monitoring software designed to run on specialized hardware in server racks. What that actually meant was that my two major tasks over the summer were to:
Rewrite a bunch of Perl cronjobs in Python, and
Migrate their entire MySQL database to DB2.
It was wholly unpleasant, and I spent many golden hours watching the sun slowly fade into the ground from my cubicle, frustrated by my inability to get anything done at a reasonable pace. One particularly bad night, I camped out in my cubicle overnight to babysit task (2) - the DB2 migration. The next morning, the full-time engineers I worked with were astounded that I slept under my desk in a sleeping bag, but it honestly didn’t seem like an irregular occurrence - there was a moment of panic earlier that night, around 10 or 11 PM, where I realized I had left my badge on my desk before going to the bathroom, and couldn’t get back into my side of the office. Enough pounding on the door got the attention of one of my colleagues, who was still working well into the night.
Despite the nature of the job, the pay was great. I was earning $21/hour, which meant that after a few paychecks, I was able to revamp my extremely simple setup, up until that point the same old Alesis drum machine and a glockenspiel. Toward the end of June, I went to Earthshaking Music and bought a conga, cajon, bongo cajons, a doumbek, and a foot cabasa and did away with the drum machine entirely. It’s something I had wanted to do for a very long time at that point - the drum machine stationed up front just isn’t as visually inspiring as an actual percussion setup.
Although playing live shows was on hold for now, and several of us had just graduated and moved out of Atlanta, the band was still very much active and we were in regular communication with each other. We were all thinking about something Jared and Mike had suggested right before spring finals week: what if the Merry Go Rounds toured up to New York and back to support Recess?
At first, to me, the idea of touring didn’t sound possible. It’s ironic now, given that I’m on tour about half the year now, but at the time, the idea of touring sounded like something only qualified individuals do. Like, touring is something “professional” bands do, and that’s not us. But as I learned, any band can book a DIY tour. You can book your hometown, so why not use the same tactic somewhere else? Plus, shortly into our summer semester, Jared told us that a New York date in Manhattan at Arlene’s Grocery had been confirmed - now we had to commit to booking more dates.
Funnily enough, the first show I ever booked in my life was for that tour, and it was our Philadelphia date. I remember being bored in my cubicle at IBM one day, asking Mike if he needed any help booking any of the dates. We wanted to play Philadelphia on the way up to New York, but no one had started working on it, so I was tasked with sending a few emails out to secure the date. I went to Yelp, searched for music venues in Philadelphia, and sent out a handful, including one to a venue called Kung Fu Necktie. They got back to me the same day to tell me the date was available, and that they would hold it for us. We ended up getting a now-defunct band called The Great SOCIO, and played to one of our largest audiences of that tour. Coincidentally, nine years later, I would end up back at Kung Fu Necktie with Michael Cera Palin - except this time, as a full-time musician and not a part-time novice.
When the tour was booked, we started working on the logistics of touring: as an 11-piece, transport is going to be your #1 issue. Fortunately, due to varying circumstances, we were going to trim down to an 8-piece for tour - Archie, Alex, and our lead drummer Chris Deese were unable to partake. To compensate for Archie’s absence, Andrew picked up his saxophone he hadn’t touched in years and learned all of Archie’s parts. We decided that for tour, we would take two vehicles: my car and Jared’s car, both sedans. Each car would carry four people and half our gear, an arrangement that sounds hellish in retrospect, but at the time worked perfectly. We spent most nights at Jared’s parents’ house in their suburb of Washington, DC, until our Asbury Park, NJ and New York City dates where we rented two motel rooms.
Beyond logistical details, I remember very little of that tour. One thing to understand about nearly a decade of touring in bands is that you’ll play 500 shows and distinctly remember maybe only 50 of them, and 30 of those 50 will have been in the last year. The Merry Go Rounds 2014 Summer of Twee Tour may have been the first tour I ever went on, but exactly that, it’s long enough in the past that far more memorable shows and tours have since overshadowed it. I remember a few bits and pieces, though:
On August 3rd, we played a last-second matinee show at a bar/restaurant in Silver Spring, MD at the invitation of a friend of Jared. The other act on the bill was said friend and a group of music students she was teaching - we were, very fittingly, added to a School of Rock student showcase.
In Baltimore, Merry Go Rounds was added to an all-hardcore bill at a tiny venue called Club K. Despite the egregious genre mismatch, the crowd and the locals loved us - we actually somehow had a bigger pit than the rest of the locals. Club K also shared a kitchen with a bar next door, and after our set, all of the 21+ members of the band stayed at the bar at Club K, while Caroline, Andrew, and I - 19, 19, and 20, respectively - went to the bar next door. The bartender knew we had just played next door, and for whatever reason, didn’t card us. “Oh shit, okay,” I thought. “I’m gonna get for real drunk tonight.”
I had never actually gotten drunk before that night, but even from my first tour, I had the touring spirit in me. “I’m on tour, I’m somewhere I’ve never been before. This is the perfect time to get drunk for the first time in my life,” I rationalized. Andrew, Caroline and I took a seat at the booth around the corner on the other side of the bar and spent the next hour or two chatting, drinking the special absinthe-based cocktail of the night, and getting progressively tipsier and tipsier. Andrew was the member of the band I probably knew the least - we had only really started hanging out outside the band over the summer. It was probably at this bar booth that the seeds for our nine-year-long creative partnership were planted.
When we met up with the rest of the band after the show, we were all deeply amused that all eight of us were absolutely wasted. We decided to go to a Chinese restaurant around the corner, but as soon as we walked in, the lone server working at 1 AM knew exactly what was up and immediately kicked us out, leaving us with no choice but to stop at a McDonald’s.
In Philadelphia, my dad came to our show at Kung Fu Necktie. He spent the afternoon with me, Andrew, Tom, and Jed, and then accompanied us to Kung Fu Necktie to watch our set. It wasn’t the first time he had ever seen us, but it was the first time he had ever seen us outside of Atlanta. It’s been almost 10 years since then and my dad has seen me play in various bands in four or five different states now.
In New York, we played Arlene’s Grocery. Being a 21+ bar, all of the under-21 members of the band were not allowed inside the venue until our set, and we were to leave the venue immediately after our set. We ended up talking to the bouncer of the bar next door, who spoke with the most New York accent you can imagine. When I told him I was the percussionist of the band, he asked “do you really play percussion or are you the tambourine bitch?” I chuckled to myself knowing that we actually did have a tambourine bitch in the band at one point.
After our set, as we were striking our gear, a man approached Jared and asked who in the band makes the decisions. “You could talk to me,” Jared replied. The man gave Jared a business card and said he works for Interscope Records. He was interested in hearing what we’re putting out next and asked Jared to send him an email. In the end, nothing ever came of this interaction, but it didn’t stop me from calling my dad right after Jared told me the news to tell him that a talent scout at a big label came to our show and is interested in signing us.
Despite the poster, our shows in Richmond, VA and Greenville, SC never happened. If I don’t remember why the Richmond show never happened, but for Greenville, if I remember correctly, the venue we had booked - the Radio Room - couldn’t find any locals for the bill. Andrew and I ended up not calling off the day after our planned Greenville show, which meant that the day after New York, we would have to do the entire drive back to Atlanta in one sitting. I ended up getting back home at around 2 or 3 AM that night, sleeping for a few hours, and then getting up to go to work at IBM, complete whiplash back to a normal life.
Although I quit the Merry Go Rounds before the end of the year, the band was absolutely formative to my identity and development as a human being. With this band, I learned everything I needed to know to run a band: writing songs, recording instruments, booking tours, gig etiquette. With that knowledge, I felt that I could start a band - one that I played drums in - and take it to at least the level that Merry Go Rounds were at, if not higher.