disBAND: Street Pharmacy

November 8th, 2009

street pharmacy

Watch out for Street Pharmacy on season 2 of of disBAND!

For the last 3 years, my three best friends and I have slugged it out at small clubs, bars, basements, lift bridges, house parties and various other places in and around Southern Ontario in pursuit of hewing our craft; professional musicianship. We have written and recorded 3 full-length albums, travelled to Cuba to record one of them and self-produced two professional music videos. We did all of this while the four of us successfully obtained university degrees while living in four different cities all over Ontario. Sometimes, we would have to learn new songs in the parking lot of the clubs before we played our set due to our scholastic obligations and geographical separation but somehow, we always had the time of our lives. To say our plate has been full for the last 3 years is an understatement.

Street Pharmacy is and will always be a labour of love for the 4 of us and that was the type of mentality that we had at our audition for season two of disBAND. It’s funny how things happen in life. On the eve of all of us finally obtaining university degrees, we got the opportunity we had all been hoping for in the form of a MySpace e-mail. During the process of organizing and running our very own music festival in our hometown of Welland entitled Bridgestock, we received a message from MuchMusic asking us to come and try out for the second season of disBAND! All we had to do was make a video expressing why we believed we deserved to be on national television.

Recording the video for this was pretty fun. We decided to take a natural approach to the process. We are four guys who all grew up in the same neighbourhood in the same small town and we weren’t about to try and be anyone else for the purpose of getting on MuchMusic. So we did what Wellanders do best. We ordered pizza and shot the shit about life, girls, money problems, work, music, sports. You know those conversations that I’m talking about right? The ones that are your everyday, run of the mill conversations you have with your buds. Thanks to our videographer Ben Burns, some sort of cohesive video was strung together for Much and sent in. We waited..

About a week later we heard back from the wonderful people at MuchMusic and the word was good. They were going to actually give us a shot at this thing! We celebrated with a band practice/pool party with our friends where cell phones were water-damaged and brain cells were killed (in true Welland fashion of course). But soon, reality had set in and we realized we had an even bigger dilemma on our hands. How the hell are we supposed to select a song to perform for the judges when we have three albums worth of material? Now, from what I understand most bands have the opposite problem but we were honestly torn on which song to choose. Here was the catch; MuchMusic told us we could only play 1 verse and 1 chorus for the audition because of the multitude of bands they would have to audition that day.

I wish I could tell you that we had selected a song weeks before the audition but the fact of the matter is that we made the decision minutes before we walked in. We chose “Welcome 2 tha Street Pharmacy” despite the advice of our friends and manager who thought that the song was a little “over the top” for MuchMusic considering that we sing our own name in the song. Either way, we busted in that audition with our serious game faces on and it was business as usual. They loved it and had nothing but positive things to say which eased all of our worries and anxieties going into the audition. The judges did make one suggestion that threw us off our game a little bit. They recommended that I drop the guitar for our next performance for the purpose of enhancing the stage show for the episode even though I am the lead guitarist as well as the lead singer. I didn’t have a clue what we were going to do now. Normally I am the guy with all the answers but I wasn’t sure if this was the right move for us in the long term for us. Wanna guess what we did?

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