A Cost-Free Price

    “The first time I did it, we were going fishing and we smoked a bowl (of weed) first and I was feelin’ alright and we got there and we started fishing and my buddy was like, ‘Here, take half of this Xanax,’” said Taylor Price, a sophomore majoring in sports management at the University of West Florida, as he recalled the first time he used pills to get high. “So I took it and, you know, I was already high from weed, and I remember just lying there on the dock, just flat. Just like, staring up at the sky.”

(Google images: xanax & weed)

     Price wasn’t raised in a bad part of town. His parents were not alcoholics or drug addicts and they made every effort to stay involved in his life and to let him know that they loved and supported him. Nothing about Price’s childhood adds up to the fact that he began his journey through addiction to painkillers in just seventh grade.

     “It was just my friends hanging around, man; we had older friends influencing us,” Price said. “One day we just got together and were like, ‘Dude, let’s try this.’ And we did. From there it just kept going and going. The kids older than us were in 9th or 10th grade at that time, they both ended up eventually dropping out. We were in middle school. The kids that I decided to do it all with were all in 6th grade and I was in 7th grade.”

     If you’re thinking to yourself that middle school seems like such a ridiculously young age to get started with using painkillers, you aren’t alone.

(Scene from the 1995 film, "KIDS")

     “It’s been so long ago that when I hear stories about kids doing that stuff now, it shocks me, even though that was me,” said Price. “It’s like, ‘What the heck was I thinking?’”

     Price and his friends’ transition from milder drugs like marijuana to har

der drugs like Oxycontin came somewhat naturally, considering that they didn’t really have to put forth any effort to obtain the pills. One of his friend’s parents were prescribed to the meds, and whether or not they actually needed the refills, they kept getting them. And the kids kept getting into them.

     “The reason I switched to Oxycontin was probably something to do with [my friend’s] parents because they’re the ones that gave it to us, as crazy as that sounds,” said Price. “So I guess when they moved onto bigger and more potent things, so did we.”

(Google images: Oxycontin)

     Many advocates of today’s war on drugs attribute marijuana use as a large reason for so many young people’s introduction to the harder and more addictive drugs. Price doesn’t feel that this was necessarily the way it worked in his case. While he did technically smoke marijuana before he started taking pills, it was only a matter of a couple uses before he was onto the more serious stuff. He feels that marijuana was less of a ‘gateway drug,’ and more like a ‘partner drug.’

     Something else that stood out about Price’s involvement in the painkiller scene was that of his preferred genre of music. Oftentimes music gets associated with certain types of lifestyle. For example, rock music gets thrown in with thoughts of anger and acts of rebellion, reggae makes people think of being happy on a beach and possibly smoking marijuana, and rap music is typically associated with big cars, women, money and drugs.

     While Price was living out his drug-induced years of middle school and high school, he was listening to country music. What’s more, is now that he is clean, he has stopped listening to country and has turned to rap music.

     “I think [country music] just reminds me of that time of struggle in my life,” Price said.

     Many drug addicts will take to either stealing or drug dealing to make ends meet and to ensure that they always have enough for one more fix. While Price did sell marijuana to make a little bit of money on the side, he never really had to actually pay for his pills. He more or less bartered for them. He would trade weed for pills. And while he and his friends did rob people from time to time, he explains that it was more for the rush of it, than to get money for drugs.

     Not everybody was so lucky as to get out of the lifestyle of heavy drug use and theft before it became a serious problem, though.

(a cartoon thief found on Google images)

     “One of the older kids, Joey, ended up robbing people for pills,” Price said. “He ended up robbing his own family members. He eventually got caught by the cops when he broke into his uncle’s house and his uncle hit him in the head with a bat. In his most recent mug shot, from whe

n that happened, he just has a straight line of stitches straight down the middle of his head.”

     What ended up pulling Price out of his Oxycontin-laced rut, was a young man by the name of Matt Galecki, who ended up being one of his best friends. Matt kept inviting him to church, and eventually convinced him to attend a fall retreat. Price says that nothing really clicked until shortly after returning home.

     “I guess it was the night after we got back, I was just in my room going about my business and I just broke down crying,” Price said. “I didn’t know why, so I called Matt and was just like, ‘Dude, what the heck is going on right now?’ and I’m sure I used some expletives. He was like, ‘That’s God man. It’s time to turn your life around.’ So I took his word for it and started reading my Bible more and from that night on, I didn’t touch any of that stuff.”

 (Above: Taylor Price, absent of drugs & full of love in Oct '11)

      There was no use of drugs to help him come off the drugs. There was no admission to help facilities.

     “I just quit,” said Price. “That night when I broke down, the next day I gave all my stuff away and never went back to it. I had about a week and a half of nausea and that’s it. Compared to other stories I’ve heard, that’s easy stuff.”

     Looking back on his life and where he is now, Price has no intentions of going back to his old ways. He has found himself a new group of friends and is enjoying sharing his story with others to help encourage them to get clean and stay clean of drugs.

     “I would love to coach a team,” Price said. “There’s not much money in it, but I would love to coach a high school team because that’s when kids are going through a lot and they’re really malleable as to the way their lives end up from there. That’s when my life got turned around, so I think if I could go back and share my love of basketball with kids and not only be a coach, but be a mentor to them, it would just be awesome.”

     One person who has benefited from the sharing of Price’s story, is Patrick Goen. Price and Goen met at UWF while playing basketball after the Thursday night BCM (Baptist Collegiate Ministries) meeting was over.

     “I was just sitting down because I was still detoxing at this point,” Goen said.  “I was just feeling like crap, and [Taylor] just started talking to me and shared that he was a recovering addict too. Me and him clicked because we both love basketball so much.”

     Goen has since sought out further help to get off drugs and while Price is not his official accountability partner, he does attribute much of his strength to him.

     “It’s cool to see somebody else who’s gone through addiction that acts like Taylor. Just to know that he went through that and he’s this great guy now, that’s pretty cool to look at that.”

     If either you or someone close to you is struggling with addiction, To Write Love On Her Arms, is an excellent place to start the journey towards getting your life back.

Dear Mr. Watterson

     “Dear Mr. Watterson” is a newly released documentary exploring the cultural impact that the popular comic strip Calvin and Hobbes and its creator, Bill Watterson, had on the world. We Were Pirates, the musical pseudonym of DC-area native and multi-instrumentalist Mike Boggs, was chosen to be the sole provider of the film’s soundtrack.

     We Were Pirates has been putting out music since 2008 and has had his music featured on the public radio program This American Life as well as on MTV’s “The Real World: DC.” “Dear Mr. Watterson,” however, is his first strictly instrumental album.

     The soundtrack is made up of 14 original, instrumental songs that were created specifically for the film. As an added bonus, there are three extra songs thrown on the end of the album. These include an alternate version of “A Bit of a Troublemaker” as well as a vocal and instrumental version of “Don’t Forget,” a song that first appeared on We Were Pirates’ debut release, “Cutting Ties,” which is also featured in the film.

     Much like Calvin and Hobbes, the soundtrack does an excellent job at capturing both a feeling of happy-go-lucky innocence while also adding a slight introspective undertone to the mix.

     “Sunday Paper” starts the album off on a playfully upbeat note, reminiscent of something you might have found on the “Where the Wild Things Are” soundtrack.

     The aptly titled “A Boy & His Tiger” comes up next and slows things down a bit with a gentle acoustic guitar accompanied by a simple melody coming from the keyboard as well as drum work focusing mainly on the cymbals and toms.  

     The third track, “A Bit of a Troublemaker,” takes listeners back to the playground of their minds. The song opens up with whistling, a funky drum beat infused with maracas, and both acoustic and electric guitars intertwining with one another to come together as perfect music for day-dreaming.

     On average, most of the songs hang around the two-minute mark, with the exception of a couple longer tracks such as “Into Thin Air,” which provides listeners with just over five minutes of aural Xanax, and the aforementioned “A Bit of a Troublemaker.”

     The “Dear Mr. Watterson” soundtrack boasts the same sound that helped to achieve We Were Pirates’ current level of success in the indie-music scene. This soundtrack will make WWP fans happy and will likely have viewers of the documentary looking up the soundtrack online to find out exactly who We Were Pirates is and how they can get more of the music.

     “Dear Mr. Watterson,” the film, is currently going around the film festival circuit. The film premiered at the Cleveland International Film Festival on Apr. 9, the same day that the soundtrack was made available via iTunes, Amazon mp3 and Bandcamp. The album is also available for free preview online through Spotify and Soundcloud. Once the film’s producers are done showing their final product at festivals, they plan to make the film available on DVD and Blu-ray.

     Find out more about We Were Pirates on www.wewerepiratesmusic.com and the film, “Dear Mr. Watterson,” at www.dearmrwatterson.com. 

To listen to the entire album for free right now, you can click the link below.
https://soundcloud.com/wewerepirates/sets/dearmrwatterson

William Beckett: The Pioneer Sessions

     For his latest release, singer/songwriter and former front man for Chicago-based pop rock band The Academy Is, William Beckett decided to take a purely acoustic approach to his music. Over the course of the last year, Beckett released three EP’s on his own, without the help of a label. His newest production, The Pioneer Sessions, came out on January 30 and is a strictly acoustic composition of his past three releases.

     While this technically isn’t new material, it’s still always fun to hear a new twist on an old song (if you even want to call these songs old).  The track listing is arranged in order of their release date, with the first four tracks coming from his Walk The Talk EP and the last four coming from What Will Be.

     This album makes me think of Brandon Boyd’s solo acoustic album, The Wild Trapeze. While the music is certainly a step away from the sound associated with the previous full band arrangement, it doesn’t step so far away that I couldn’t imagine the band performing them. Where Beckett’s previous three releases instill images in my mind of a house party still in full-swing, Pioneer makes me think more of the after party scene; with the energy level more along the lines of watching the bonfire slowly burn out as people polish of the last remaining drops left in their bottles.

     Some of the songs have taken on a completely different vibe, now that they are absent of any effects or extra production. “Compromising Me,” originally from the Walk The Talk EP comes to mind. The original song puts off more of a beach-bound top-down Saturday afternoon kind of a vibe but the acoustic version leans much deeper into a country-folk sound. The next track, “Girl, You Shoulda Been A Drummer,” keeps your foot tapping throughout the entire song. From Beckett knocking on the hollow body of his acoustic guitar, to his snapping fingers and flawless vocals, this song is a head nodder for sure.

     “Great Night,” the first track from the Winds Will Change EP and fifth song on Pioneer, didn’t really change all that much, which isn’t a bad thing. Another song that helps keep up the up-tempo flow is “Scarlett (Tokyo),” which for one reason or another had me wanting to listen to BBMak’s “Back Here.” In addition to the catchiness of the guitar, the chorus is fun to sing too, especially with the way Beckett accents his vowels in the lyric, “I wanna go to Tokyo from the west-most coast…”

        The last four songs of the album, all coming from his What Will Be EP, perfectly escort listeners from the mostly upbeat song list into the soft and slow ending that almost leaves a bittersweet taste in your mouth, not unlike a great summer fling that you knew was bound to come to an end. “Stuck In Love,” a song that originally featured guest vocals from Ryan Ross, of Panic! At The Disco, was just as catchy as the original. Beckett’s voice proves itself as more than sufficient in the absence of others’. If there is a song on here that actually sounds better performed acoustically, it’s without a doubt, “Slip Away.” Hearing Beckett sing, “Let’s slip away off to a place where everything you wish comes true. Let’s stand hand in hand, face to face. I’ll take your breath away from you,” it’s hard to imagine this song being done any other way.

     All-in-all, The Pioneer Sessions, is definitely something you want to hold in your possession as a fan of William Beckett and/or The Academy Is (RIP). I foresee many people learning these songs on guitar and showing them off at parties and on YouTube. Might as well go ahead and embrace it. It’s William Beckett for cryin’ out loud!

     Oh, by the way, he just so happens to be on tour right now, with Relient K and Jillette Johnson, in support of all this music he’s been putting out. Check out his Facebook page to find out if, and when, he’s playing near your town. 

Take It or Leave It Tour: Sleeping With Sirens, Conditions, Dangerkids, Lions Lions

     Sleeping With Sirens’ “Take It Or Leave It Tour” recently made its way through Pensacola, Fla. bringing the party to American Legion Post 33. Supporting acts for the boys in SWS included Conditions, Dangerkids, and Lions Lions.

     First up was the Boston-based pop-punk quintet, Lions Lions. Any preconceived notions I had about this show being nothing short of an upright mall-core emo fest were thrown out the door upon the first 20 seconds of these guys taking the stage. Front man/vocalist Josh Herzer took great advantage of the fact that he didn’t have a guitar weighing him down. From holding the mic out to dedicated fans in the front row allowing them to show off their reverence to the band, to climbing to the top of the tower of speakers on stage, the guy clearly knows how to keep the crowd interested. Herzer wasn’t the only driving force behind Lions Lions though. Drummer, Brian Cauti, never missed a beat and the full bearded bassist, Jon Kay, perfectly filled out the band’s sound with his vocal harmonies. The band currently has two albums and one EP which can all be purchased on iTunes and has another album in the works.

     The second band to take the stage was no exception to the high level of energy brought forth by Lions Lions. Dangerkids are a five-piece hip-hop/metal core act based out of Dayton, OH. Think Linkin Park, but cooler, and replace the turntables with synth. Fronted by two vocalists, there is hardly a dull moment on the stage as Andy Bane (singer/screamer) and Tyler Smyth (rapper) seamlessly hand off vocal duties from one to the other. Aside from the fact that there is arguably nobody else in the music scene doing what this group is doing, they are also driven by a female drummer, Katie Cole, something else you don’t see much of in any genre of music. Considering the fact that Dangerkids just recently formed in the earlier part of 2012 and already landed a deal with Rise records, it’s safe to say that these guys, and gal, have only just begun. Keep an eye out for their self-titled debut album, set to be released this summer.

     Conditions, a quartet based out of Richmond, VA., played third and served as a perfect bridge between the opening and closing acts of the night. With their combination of melodically intricate guitar riffs, at times jazzy bass lines and frontman Brandon Roundtree’s sometimes soothing, sometimes angry vocals, the crowd had something to pay attention to at all times. While the tour was in support of their newest album, Full of War, set to be released March 26 on record label Good Fight Music, the guys made sure to play a variety of songs, both old and new.

     After the first three bands warmed up the crowd for the final performance of the night, Sleeping With Sirens finally ran out on stage greeted by a deafening wave of girls’ high pitch squeals and shrieks of excitement and quite obviously, a large dose of desire for lead singer, Kellin Quinn. They opened up the set with a live debut of the unreleased and heavy-hitting, “These Things I’ve Done.” Keeping the level of intensity high, they took it back to 2010 with the title track from, With Ears To See And Eyes To Hear.

     Two songs off of 2011’s Let’s Cheers To This later and all of the band left the stage except for Quinn and guitarist Jesse Lawson. “Where’d everybody go?” Quinn asked. Lawson responded with “They all had to go home.” Of course, the crowd was privy to what was going on and was soon rewarded with acoustic versions of “Scene One: James Dean & Audrey Hepburn” and “Scene Two: Roger Rabbit” from the 2012 EP, If You Were a Movie, This Would Be Your Soundtrack and With Ears To See and Eyes To Hear’s “Don’t Fall Asleep at the Helm.” After 15 minutes or so of Kellin wooing the crowd, the rest of the band returned to the stage welcomed warmly by the crowd and went straight into “Tally It Up, Settle The Score” followed by “The Bomb Dot Com V2.0” and “If I’m James Dean, You’re Audrey Hepburn.” The lights dimmed, and the boys in the band exited stage right. There was no way that the hundreds of teenage girls and their jealous boyfriends were going to let them get off the hook that easy though. Beckoned back out to stage by a variety of screams, squeals, “one more song”, and encore chants, SWS came back out and finished the night with “Do It Now, Remember It Later” and “If You Can’t Hang” from Let’s Cheers To This.

     Check out www.ryanscott-photo.com for pics from the entire concert as well as video interviews with Josh Herzer from Lions Lions and Katie Cole and Andy Bane from Dangerkids.

https://www.facebook.com/LionsLionsMA?ref=ts&fref=ts

https://www.facebook.com/wearedangerkids?ref=ts&fref=ts

https://www.facebook.com/conditionsband?fref=ts

https://www.facebook.com/sleepingwithsirensband?fref=ts

    

    

Pomeranians, Jimmy Buffet and Gansta Rap

      When I pulled up to Big Lo (James Lopez’) house in a small suburb of Milton, FL., the six-foot-something bearded Spanish-American was standing outside, rockin’ an ODB t-shirt, basketball shorts and flip flops, smoking a cigarette as he waited for his Pomeranian, Buster, to finish peeing. 

 

Considering most rappers seem to have a certain affinity for pit-bulls, I knew Lo had something different to offer.

     He offered me a beer and led the way to his “lab”, an average size bedroom currently housing his recording studio made up of equipment that he has accumulated over the last 10 years. He estimates the net worth of everything in there to be about $20,000 but says he paid closer to $12,000. 

     “One of the next things I wanna put in [the studio] is one of those lounger sofas from the 70s,” Lo said. “See if I can find one at a thrift shop and maybe have it reupholstered to match in here.” 

     Something I noticed about Big Lo right off the bat was, while he is obviously a hard-working business man, he also likes to chill and just have a good time. 

     One of the DJs that travels around with Big Lo, DJ Bodyslanga, remembers the first time they met very well.

     “I hit him up on MySpace back in the day, asking him if he wanted to come rock a show and he said yeah,” DJ Bodyslanga recalled. “He showed up in pajamas.”

     Big Lo has had some crazy times on tour. From blowing mass amounts of coke in Vegas with Spanish chicks, to blacking out at the “All-3-Coasts” hip-hop fest in Atlanta and waking up in a hotel bathtub, the guy likes to have fun. 

     There’s more to Lo than a gangsta party though. He attended the University of West Florida and dual majored in philosophy and religious studies and went on to get his master’s degree in humanities.

     DJ Bodyslanga says that that is one of the main things that separates Big Lo from the rest.

     “He’s hella intelligent,” DJ Bodyslanga said. “His music has substance. Sometimes he uses big words and shit and some people don’t understand what he’s sayin. So he kinda comes off like a dickhead sometimes. And I gotta remind him of that all the time. I’m like, ‘not everyone is as educated as you, dude.’”

    The fact that he completed college doesn’t mean he hasn’t had his share of hard times. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan completely blew the roof off of his apartment in Pensacola and flooded his car. He has also had the luxury of dating a psychopath.

     “That relationship didn’t work out,” recalled Lo. “It was actually a really bad, violent relationship. I got stabbed, so yeah. I was like, this isn’t gonna work, this is going bad.”

     Since then, the rapper has managed to find his “better half” and married her in August of 2012.

“I definitely found my better half and I got lucky and she’s super supportive of the music,” Lo said. “She can’t trip ‘cause I work a regular job too so it’s not like I’m one of these starving artists.”

     Big Lo’s wife holds down a job as a general manager for their local Denny’s while Lo juggles jobs as a part-time roofer, part-time cab driver, and full-time musician.

     Unlike some rappers, who don’t put any effort into their live performances, Big Lo and his crew make sure to give it their all.

     “That’s probably why we get along so much with the punk crowd,” Lo said. “We take this more seriously as musicians rather than being like, ‘oh we wanna be hip-hop artists and be on MTV and make millions of dollars.’ Nah, I wanna impress motherfuckers with dope-ass live shows and then if we get enough fans where we make a million dollars, then hell fuckin yeah. If not, then at least I know I didn’t sacrifice all my integrity as an artist.”

     Beav Kenoyer, a booking agent for The Handlebar, one of Pensacola’s music venues, has always appreciated doing business with Big Lo.

     “He’s fairly laid back for most of his shows,” Kenoyer said. “He doesn’t really demand any amount of money or any special things. He’s very easy to work with.”

     Big Lo has been into hip-hop, essentially, his whole life. His first record was Kool Moe Dee’s, Knowledge Is Power. In fifth grade he and a childhood friend performed Snoop Dogg’s hit, “Who Am I,” complete with choreographed dance moves for the school talent show. They came in first place.

  

   Although his first album was hip-hop, that’s not all Big Lo enjoyed.

    

 “Musically, growing up, I was all over the place,” Lo said. “I’ve never been one of those people who only listen to hip-hop or only listen to rock. I hate that shit. I’m probably the only person you can quote in an article who calls themselves a rapper and says, ‘yeah, I fuck with Jimmy Buffet.’ I love good music and that’s across the border.”

   

 

     Jay Glock, also known as Inferno, is a local rapper/producer who helped to produce a large portion of Big Lo’s newest record, Magnum Opiates. Inferno says that the album is unlike what most people would consider to be “Southern hip-hop.”

     “We’re from that 90s golden era of hip-hop where complexity in your lyrics made the difference,” Inferno said. “We’re from the era where everything wasn’t cat-in-the-hat-fuckin-mother-goose raps.”

     With so many people claiming to be DJs and rappers these days, Big Lo doesn’t really even like to associate himself as a “rapper”.

      “I don’t even like telling people I’m a rapper anymore because it’s been so depredated,” Big Lo said. “We take our form seriously. Like we show up like, ‘yeah, these are real turn-tables and a real mixer and we’re about to really rap for you.”

     Big Lo is a big fan of Spanish and Eastern European crime films and that is basically what Magnum Opiates is. As Inferno put it, “Lo is an audio-visual fuckin cinematic rapper. [Magnum Opiates] is like a movie from front to back.”

     Keep up with Big Lo from his website, www.biglohiphop.com and make sure to pick up a copy of Magnum Opiates and make it out to one of his live shows when he’s near your area.