LOCAL BAND PART I: I NEED TO COME CLEAN ABOUT OUR BAND NAME

I am currently sitting in a Continuing Legal Education class right now, and I am incredibly bored. So here's a story about my old band. 

This is me coming clean. I’m going to write a follow-up post to this one entitled “Local Band Part II: Lessons Learned From Being In A Shitty Local Band”, but before I get to that, I have to come clean about something.

I was in two really crappy bands that started in my undergrad and continued into my first year of law school. The first one was Local Chump. The second band I was in was called My Dear Watson. This is the story about how we named the band My Dear Watson. If Jake (our drummer) reads this, I’m sorry man. It’s nothing personal.

The summer after I graduated college, Local Chump took a break. Our two guitarists left for the summer. One went on a study abroad, and the other took an internship out of state. The remaining three members of the band still wanted to keep playing together, so we started a new band. Local Chump had been fun, and we intended to continue the band once our guitarists got back from their summer internship/study abroad, but like I said,  we wanted to keep jamming over the summer. That's kind of hard to do without guitarists. If I am being totally honest, I was bored and didn’t have much going on in life. I was literally just waiting to start law school (and had a soul sucking summer job that made me wish I was never born). So, we found a couple of other guitarists to jam with. Turned out that we had some pretty good chemistry with them. It was something different. It was fun. It was new. It was sexy. The mistresses that stole our hearts. (Mostly Nui. Sexy little minx.)

Overall, it had a new sound that I always described as Local Chump’s older brother. You could tell it was related, but it was a little more mature (in the most intentionally cringey and pretentious of ways). And we just kept going with it.

To symbolize this new sound we had found, we wanted to change our band name. We kept bouncing ideas off of each other, but couldn’t decide on any one name. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Marshall and The Partials (Marshall wasn’t having it)
• Marshall Hicks and The Demand (An Econ joke. We were all Econ majors at college. We’re super cool.)
• The Great Malt Shake (being based in Salt Lake City)
• Taco.
• Black Light Therapy (this was a serious contender)
• Headlight Dreams (this was a serious contender)
• My Dear Watson (this was a serious contender)
• Dan Siego (this was a serious contender - like san holo and ritt momney)

There was one more serious contender which I can’t remember. But we were pretty split on the top five we have settled on. Since we couldn’t decide on a name, we decided to make a google survey to send out to our friends and family and let them decide for us.

Well the results were in and My Dear Watson won out. Our drummer Jake was pretty bummed about this at the time, and would periodically ask whether we were sure we really liked My Dear Watson and wanted to change it to Dan Siego. Marshall and I doubled down and said, “No, we’re not changing the name again. The poll chose My Dear Watson. We’re sticking with it.”

Turns out, there was a flaw in our survey. We forgot to make it  so each person could only take it once. Our friend Brian figured this out and took the survey multiple times. So many that he pretty much single-handedly chose the name for us. Our name was built on a lie. Doubling down on the name, all of it, was based on a sham.

Now, I didn’t know about this for over a year. How did I eventually come across this story you might ask? It’s definitely funnier than the story itself.

Let's take it back to January 2019. Marshall was about to get married. Brian, being his best man, thought it would be a funny present to make a mockumentary on Local Chump and My Dear Watson.

The mockumentary is honestly pretty funny. We interviewed me (bassist, former student athlete, and band bad boy), Tim (Local Chump co-founder, lead guitarist, and Taco Bell enthusiast), Brian (personal friend and our band’s biggest critic and hater), Chris (one of Marshall’s friend who I am not sure if he ever went to one of our shows or listened to our music) and Greg (my roommate and had definitely never listened to our music).

We could polish it up a little, and it could be funny to anyone, regardless of whether or not you have even heard of Local Chump or My Dear Watson. A modern day, shitty This is Spinal Tap. Maybe one day I can get the full video from Brian and will post it here.

But as a part of Brian’s interview, he divulged his story on rigging the system and choosing My Dear Watson. Me, having been a part of the band and having never heard this story was blown away. I thought it was the funniest thing ever. We had doubled down with Jake about not changing the name again (even though I personally didn’t care for it) because we thought our friends and family liked it the most (and we didn’t want to change it to Dan Siego - Jake, to be fair, Dan Siego wasn’t second place either). Based on that small sample size, we were sticking to it.

So, there you go. I wash my hands of this. I have made my amends. I stand before you a repented man. I can now die in peace.