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Founder Bulka says fans led the way for Minus-One
Friday, Dec. 18, 2009
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Minus-One will reunite for a show at Hotel Charles on Dec. 19.
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A week later Minus-One was invited to open for the alt-metal group Godsmack. After their opening set they hurried to their main gig at the State Theatre in Falls Church, Va.
"That was just right time, right moment," says Minus-One's founder Pete Bulka on a Thursday night at Boston's. "We were doing really well with our following. They pretty much brought us there."
But two years later, at a time when Minus-One's efforts to reach a national audience had stalled, or possibly even derailed, drummer Clint Moore, a Charles County native who is now married and living in Annapolis, announced he was leaving the band.
Now Minus-One has a reunion show scheduled at Hotel Charles, and Bulka is talking about the group in the past tense. Though Minus-One has weathered its share of lineup changes (Donovan Willis is the ninth bassist), Moore's resignation apparently shook things up. He had been with the band since 2002, and his departure led Bulka to realize that seven years of pushing music nonstop had left him feeling extremely burned out.
So what's next?
"Right now I'm OK with things, just taking a break from things, living life, I guess," says Bulka, who has cut inches from his hair and is no longer so hipster-thin. "I guess I really wasn't, in a way. All I did was music and bands. Like I wouldn't even take out the trash, you know."
Bulka attended Henry E. Lackey High School, but never graduated. He grew up in Bryans Road, where he hung out with a "bunch of punks" who one day saw a car in a garage and decided to steal it. They drove it down to the river and considered lighting it on fire. Then a cop showed up.
At 15, he spent a month at a youth detention center. Afterward, he focused on guitar, an instrument his father had only recently introduced him to by teaching him how to read tablature. Bulka took it from there.
Now he works for a car dealership. He has achieved the highest level of certification for a mechanic that his company offers.
Minus-One's first songs were terrible, Bulka admits. He had not grown up listening to much music. And although he liked Metallica and Slayer, Bulka was also adamant about not imitating anyone else or playing covers. (So was Moore.)
Early on, the band practiced in Waldorf at Quality Storage, in a small shed with propane heaters blasting through the winter. The early music featured plenty of yelling and screaming. It featured plenty of volume. It featured very little structure — until 2004, when Bulka tested out some catchy melodies. They felt a tad cheesy — until they caught on.
"If you listen to the songs from the earlier albums and compare it to the newer stuff, you can definitely sense that there's a lot more confidence with the writing," says Keith Swan, who lets Bulka do most of the talking. "That and we all got better at playing together." (Swan, the only one in the band who took music lessons, joined in 2005.)
About 2007: Bulka does not remember the year with much clarity. He was fired by his current employer and focused on nothing but music … and going to Bennigan's in Waldorf.
Members of the band hung out there night after night — drinking, sharing good times, making new friends. In a time of MySpace, Minus-One preferred to do its social networking in person (though they do have 30,000 MySpace friends), and they found themselves with the support of some seriously loyal fans, the backbone of any original band.
"It wasn't just support like, ‘Yeah, we'll come out and just drink with you guys,'" Bulka explains. "It wasn't like that. They would sing the songs, man. There were a lot of times I would play the song and just stop at a certain spot and let the crowd sing it."
In the finals of the 2006 Last Band Standing Competition at Clarendon Ballroom in Northern Virginia, Minus-One did not take top prize, though the fans produced nearly as much noise as the band. In 2007, at the same venue, the fans sang along to Minus-One's much-loved ballad "Last Kiss," and the band won.
Some of Minus-One's tunes caught the attention of Ryan and Aaron Escolopio of Wakefield, a Mechanicsville-based pop-punk band. Aaron had left Good Charlotte in 2001 to join his brother Ryan in Wakefield. Wakefield then announced it had been signed by Atlantic Records.
With the Escolopio brothers producing, Minus-One began working on a new EP in the time leading up to the Chili Cook-Off, and Bulka, who is still in touch with Ryan, credits them for pushing his voice to its limit, all the while urging him not to settle for anything less than the best take. If Minus-One were ever going to land a recording contract, this seemed like the best shot they would ever get, Bulka says. Still, not much came of it.
Bulka is not the kind of songwriter who likens himself to a poet, he says. He just wrote whatever rhymed, whatever latched hold of his imagination. Usually the music was ready before the lyrics; sometimes, even, the music was played live before Bulka really knew what the lyrics were. Usually he wrote them in the studio at the last minute. (On the other hand, both the music and lyrics for "City Lights," one of Minus-One's most popular tunes, came together in 15 minutes.)
All told, Minus-One recorded several full-length albums and numerous EPs. Their last record, "Morning Light, Starry Night," from 2008, essentially combines two EPs. The second half of the album consists of songs produced by Ryan and Aaron. The first half, which is less commercial and not as easy to categorize, is a batch of high-energy tunes the band produced later, at Nightsky Studios in Waldorf.
"I really don't even like singing," Bulka says. "I don't even know how I got into it — how I got in that position. I don't like writing lyrics, and I never ever thought I was a good singer." But he was proud of his half of the album precisely because it was raw. He did not use Auto-Tune.
After Moore left Minus-One, he did join the band for a recording project at a new studio willing to grant them free time. As they got close to finishing a new song, though, the studio was robbed — cleared out.
"I wish something better would have happened," Bulka says of Minus-One. "But I think we all still have something to look back on when we're 50 or 60 or whatever. We did all right, man. We got some respect. We did decently."
He's still figuring out what to do next. He would like to record, but it's expensive. He would like to keep the band together, but he does not think he will ever be able to try so hard.
His favorite band is Silverchair, an Australian rock band that hit their stride while Bulka was teaching himself how to play. But lately he's been listening to music from the 1960s and '70s; it's the first time his ears have processed that era in any real way.
Around 8 p.m., members of another Southern Maryland band that came close to busting out of here have finished hauling in their equipment and are taking dinner at the bar. At 9 p.m., they pick up their instruments and start to play.
If you go:
Minus-One and Go Go Gadget will perform at 9 p.m. Dec. 19 at Hotel Charles, 15110 Burnt Store Road, Hughesville. Cover charge is $10. Call 301-274-4612.
