We're Not Listening

Tallahassee is an iffy place. Of course, for starters it’s the capital of Florida. It’s very important in that matter. Another thing is that it’s the home of Florida State University, one of two schools in Florida that nobody ever shuts up about, especially if they’ve attended it. Other than that…it’s a pretty dead city. There are hills, one-way roads that get so confusing when traffic rears its head, and more abandoned buildings than one can count.

There’s not a lot of life there, but Ian, Nick, CJ, and Lauren were determined to squeeze out whatever blood it had into the palm of their hands.

They did this by putting up posters after realizing that they had a good thing going. These posters called out to the bassists and drummers of the Florida capital, explicitly stating the ska nature of their band alongside everybody’s phone number.

As you could probably guess, there weren’t a lot of takers.

There was a guy who got kicked out of his death metal band and showed up to try out in chained pants that got caught in the wires of his bass guitar, and another guy thought that the louder you pounded a drum set, the better you sounded, which obviously wasn’t the case. When opening up, things can go wrong.

But there were two other people who showed up and shocked the quartet by being good. One of them happened to be their eventual bassist, Hunter Westmoreland – he was a wiseass and took a liking to Ian like Ron to Harry, but his punk background landed the high school sophomore a spot in this ska band.

Their drummer ended up being sixteen-year-old Adrian Kinney, a kid who taught himself to play and prided himself on it. He refused to open up a music book and instead went by ear, and as annoying as it was for them to be working on a song with him making it up as he went, in the end, it was worth it.

The two newest members of this band didn’t go to the same high school as the original four, but that didn’t matter. As long as they were within a few miles of each other, they would be able to practice every weekend and make sure that the tunes they crafted were worthy of a fourth-wave ska revolution.

CJ, a boy of many convictions, had originally coined the name The Max. Though it started off as a personal extension of his desire to take everything to the highest degree – or, the max – the other members came to a consensus that, well, it made sense. Everything they were doing in relation to the music was pushed as far as it could go, since nobody had written it off as just a temporary band.

And it wasn’t. Nick graduated high school and didn’t leap straight into a university, rather, he stayed in town and took a few community college classes as a backup while his bandmates finished their basic education. They played gigs every few nights at whatever local venue would have them, even if they had to wear Xs on their hands due to their age. They’d record music in one of their garages and put it on their Puresound page in hopes of getting fans, and they even gained a bit of a local following, mostly from their parents and a few peers.

It wasn’t long until it paid off. It was 2004 when the Howard brothers in Fire Motion (Johnny and Sam) had dragged Raimundo Asbury all the way up to Tallahassee to check out the little ska band they stumbled upon on the wonderful Internet. Rai had initially protested, saying a several-hour drive to the panhandle would be a waste of gas and that they might not be any good. Then, Rai’s better judgment – the judgment that sometimes told him to be spontaneous and sometimes told him to jump off buildings while screaming “Nixon was innocent” (he ignored those thoughts) – got the best of him.

And ultimately, it was the best thing to do, to take a road trip with Johnny and Sam on the slight chance that this ska band would exceed his expectations. The Max didn’t know that a punk legend and record label owner was in the crowd that night, but man, when the gig was over and Rai snuck backstage to meet up with them, the looks on their faces were telltale signs that they’d just gotten the shock of a lifetime. He was captivated by the sheer energy that they put into their performance, the passion they had for a dying genre. They took something that had been beaten into the ground and gave it a new life – one that could appeal to anybody with a soul.

Thus, The Max became the second band signed to Not Listening Records, and until 2009, they were the youngest band on the label before another band took that place. Big things were happening to them, and even though the prospect of making music forever was alluring, it’s always daunting, staring at the road ahead.