Journelism

Rock Act “Get a Life” Doesn’t Give a Damn About the Radio, but They Understand the Sacrifice Needed to Commit Toward their Own Form of Success

It’s not about glory, it’s not about all the $$$, it’s about the best time of your life. The struggling musicians from Get a Life spend their days working and nights rehearsing, pushing ever closer toward dreams of success.

There are no adoring fans here. Heck, there aren’t even any mechanical fans to cool down the musty basement that the members of Get a Life practice in. For three years they have been practicing down here. The amps are beside old Christmas lights and the band is practicing with a guitar that doesn’t have a sixth string. Every shirt is drenched in sweat, but every bolt on the drum set is tightened and every eighth note is perfected. These guys are killing themselves for the million-to-one shot to make it, and every drop of sweat that hits the ground in this makeshift dungeon is going toward evening those odds.

“When you’re our age and have been in a band for three years, this is the time when most bands are saying, ‘We didn’t make it, so it’s time to stop.’ We are like, ‘What are you talking about, you can still do it, you just have to commit to it!’,” says Colin Scull, the band’s guitar player. Commitment is the 10-pound-burger word of the music world. It looks simple at first, but then starts weighing down. It comes more and more, until most give up. Get a Life knows all about what commitment means and what can go wrong when you don’t have it.

Every member of the band is a college graduate. Josh Hurst, their lead singer, often comes to practice in a suit and tie from his job at a car-rental business. Juan Rodriguez, the drummer, is a helicopter mechanic. Almost all of the guys work full-time jobs. Committing 20-30 hours a week to a band doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize that all of those hours must be subtracted from leisure time alone and with friends and family. These guys are practicing with every free second they have, even when they lack equipment.

“I can’t really put a timeline on it because it’s all the time. It is just what I do, I play guitar. Even when I’m in the shower, I’m thinking about playing the guitar,” reflects Scull. “I don’t need a guitar in my hands to write something.” Kyle Macintire, the band’s bassist, adds, “We all have a deep passion for music and feel like we have a talent for it. That’s what drives us to commit the time that should be our quote unquote free time when we’re out of work or school. This is what we want to do more than work in our lives.”

The lessons in commitment have not come easy. The band is currently on its fourth drummer. Not because they couldn’t get along with the other three, it just became a “biting off more than you can chew” situation with the others. Grown men in their mid-20s have bills to pay. Suddenly that drum fill doesn’t sound so important next to a mortgage. “It’s not like I joined the band to get on MTV,” says Scull. That’s good, because they certainly won’t be on “Cribs” anytime soon. Their next big gig is paying $150 for the whole band. That may not pay for the gas down and back. “Every dollar we make goes back into a new shirt or the van,” says Hurst.

This is where greed dies and passion for music rises in its place. The endless practice hours, road trips, schedules and headaches all seem to dissipate when the band gets to play in front of a live audience. They have played to sold-out audiences and to a literal audience of one, Macintire’s brother. Scull says that “at times it was like we were playing music to a brick wall or a black hole.”

They can laugh about the bad times now as they get ready for their next show. A crowd of over 60 people is stuffed into a local church, and a few of them know the words to the band’s songs well enough to sing along with them while dancing around, not ashamed to get lost in the fun that comes with watching a group of young men go out and give their best to something they love.

It only gets harder from here, the trek ever more treacherous. But when the outside bark is scratched off and the core of this band examined, it looks like the road ahead stretches further than the path behind, because of the honest love these men have for music and their connection with an ever-growing population of new fans.

“We want to be on the cutting edge and we want to be where the other bands are going and what the kids are going to listen to,” concludes Hurst. “I think that we’ll know we’re not supposed to do it anymore when things start falling apart, but right now everything is clicking.”