This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 19, 2010 - The members of Black Market Peace are several things. They're good friends. They're experienced musicians. And they're not going to be stressed out by the same things that may have driven them crazy earlier in life.
Sure, they'd still love people to hear their music, but they're going to play it with each other because it's a rewarding pursuit, done for themselves, for their core fans, and anyone else who'd like to come across it. If the world catches on, great -- and they're going to work hard to make that happen. If not, they're going to continue creating because they feel the need, even as they balance the group alongside spouses, kids, businesses and even a few other, outside musical outlets.
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Chris Sauer, the group's bassist, and a veteran of A Perfect Fit and Kristeen Young, had essentially stopped playing for a decade, when this project began to start coming together. It now includes Sauer, guitarist John Consiglio (A Perfect Fit, the Oozkicks), drummer Jeff Herschel (Urge, Ulcer Inc.) and guitarist/vocalist Eric Svoboda (Big Joe Scientist). Combined, that means decades of experience, in musical forms from ska and funk to progressive metal.
"The genesis of the band was with Jeff, in March 2008," Sauer says. "He had some demos of songs in the can and tricked me and John into signing on with a different cat on guitar/vocals fronting the band. After a few month's that dude flaked and Jeff re-upped with Eric from a previous Craigslist meeting. Eric showed up for an audition, didn't hold anything back and went for it. We then tricked Eric into joining and immediately started writing songs in the fall of 2008.
"BMP was formed by four guys who really, really love writing, playing, performing and engaging the audience," he continues. "Hopefully, we can deliver on a level that encourages folks to come out to see us and do so often. On a personal note, I basically took 10 years off to focus on my wife and three kids. I missed playing so incredibly much that I needed to get that back into my life. My wife knew that I needed to do it, as well. When Jeff approached me to do this he suggested John and I said 'if John is in I am in.' We were having a hell of a lot of fun immediately. Once Eric was in and we got to know him better I knew we were off to the races."
Herschel adds that, "The melding of each of us and literally growing together into a band while writing and recording simultaneously was crazy, totally bass-akwards, and at times very challenging, but we just did it that way. Somehow, it had a comfort that was the most easy going experience writing or playing I have ever had. We worked together so well, not a single fight over eight months of writing/recording and three-and-a-half months of overdubs and mixing. There was only personal frustrations, occasional exhaustion, our recording Mac hard drive blowing up at one point, etc. Chris and I have always had the necessary symbiosis a bass player and drummer have to have if you don't suck, but it's also brand new because this project had no direction save for my desire to have an edgy punk underpinning; my example (that I've driven into the ground) being that we go for The Clash on 'Sandinista.'"
Content to come together at their own pace, the group was out of the public eye for a well over a year, focusing on writing material, changing up personnel in one case, and proceeding at a clip that made sense.
Along the way came the biggest question a band can face: Who are we?
"Jeff has written the bulk so far but we have all contributed parts and arrangements," says Consiglio. "I have written a few things and the guys have helped me see them through to fruition. Both Eric and Chris have offered up parts, ideas, etc. We're just finding our sound. I thought that I was finished with rock music, having spent the last several years studying modern classical and experimental music, but when Jeff and Chris approached me I just thought, 'Why not?' I've never stopped playing electric so I just thought, 'Why not?' We've just barely scratched the surface so we're still learning to be a band. But the comfort level is there and I think the sky is the limit."
Sauer add that he's still trying to pin the group's sound and fanbase, saying, "To be honest, I'm still not sure who we are as a band, I don't know what songs are going over and what songs are not. At this point, the response has been so damn positive that I'm thinking every song is going over! We are definitely putting on a show that is not a 'shoe-gazer' festival. It's our mission to explode off the stage, offer something different, and really engage the audience. I hope we deliver. It will never be a lame effort on our part."
The same is true for Black Market Peace and recording.
Unlike the the '80s and '90s, when the BMP would've needed to book studio time for recording and mixing, a sometimes-expensive and usually time-consuming task, the band opted for the self-starter method this time out. As tracks were coming together, mics were on and, in time, a debut album "Thanksgiving" came at the same time as their initial live date.
"We moved to a warehouse space in winter 2008 and Jeff brought a Mac G4 with an Alesis firewire interface and fired up GarageBand," says Sauer. "We had some mics and started recording literally everything as we wrote. Write song, get it close, record it, move on. As we were moving forward, we blew up the G4 once or twice. Jeff managed emergency repairs and we just kept at it. Over time we improved the recordings as we went. We generally got together once a week during this time frame and we finished recording of 12 songs be the end of September 2009. We mixed, did some overdubs at Jeff's and completed it for release by our first gig on Dec. 12."
To this point, the group has only played two shows, at smaller music venues like Felix's and Lemmon's, allowing them to break in relatively pressure-free environments. The band hope to up the ante in the remainder of 2010, playing one to two shows monthly.
And despite the fact that the members of Black Market Peace have hit their 40s, they're not giving in to the notion that the shows will lack for energy. As all the players came from bands with a high-level of intensity, they say fans can only expect more of the same.
"We are going to work aggressively to connect to younger, as well as our older friends," Herschel says. "We have to. Younger people get out more. We all followed our favorite local bands when we were younger. Now that I've seen the reaction, we have the energy, freshness, wilder, fun and danceable music and aren't too old and crusty and gross to look at, I think we can become a real 'go-to' band for cutting loose, dancing and a really happening show/night out.
"In a perfect world I'd love to have everyone, but it's tougher for a lot of our friends as we've all gotten older, kids, 'serious' responsibilities. You just are in a different place than you were when you were 19-25 years old. And it ain't exactly energetic or liberating. However, we provide a means to forget that for an hour-and-seven minutes."
The band's next two shows are: Tuesday, Feb. 23 at the Old Rock House with Steve Ewing; and Sunday, March 7 at Cicero's with Thirst&Howl4th, which will include the group's video shoot.
Thomas Crone is a freelance writer.