Three years ago, David Terrana was living in a group house with his band, a slammin' quartet that went by the name of pete. He practiced with them every day, except when they all piled into their van and hauled off for clubs they'd never seen, hundreds of miles or more from their home base in Newark, New Jersey. In those faraway venues, facing audiences that had never heard of them, they played original material with all the passion they could muster after all-day drives and interstate cuisine. Only after a show ended did they start thinking about where they were going to crash that night, before hitting the road again early the following day.
What's Terrana doing these days? Pretty much the same thing — living with the same guys, driving down those same highways, pouring his heart into performances night after night. But there are differences. Today pete travels with the blessings of Warner Brothers, which signed the band and put out their debut album, the predictably titled but roof-rattling pete. Now when they get to their distant destinations, pete plays to bigger rooms, and their audiences suddenly know all their songs.
Lots of young musicians chase that dream. Only a few make it as far as Terrana, guitarist Rich Andruska, bassist Lars Alverson, and drummer Scott Anderson. Fewer still make it to the higher planes of stardom. Even so, innumerable bands want that recognition, and they want it now.
Terrana always stood out from that crowd. He wanted the goodies as much as any other tattooed, shock-haired, foot-stomping lead singer, but he knew that his odds for getting them improved if he and his colleagues took their time. It was important that they held off making their move until they knew they deserved to succeed.
For Pete, the first step was getting out of New Jersey.
ROCKIN' THE HEARTLAND
“Honestly? New Jersey is not the best place for an original band,” Terrana says. “If you're a cover band, you're embraced really quickly. But if you're a true original band that plays no covers, it's very hard to get a following. We used to play at times with this cover band on the Jersey circuit. They would always pack the house, year after year. But they started getting discouraged because they wanted to play more of their own music. So one day they said, ‘Guys, we're not going to play any more covers. From this night on, we're only going to do our original thing.’ That was the end of that band. About three months later they fell apart, because no one was coming to shows anymore.
“Now, we never, ever wanted to be a cover band. So our drummer, Scott, who comes from Minnesota, convinced us to get out to the Midwest and start touring. In the Midwest, people are more open to original music; Scott knew that from living there so many years. We bought an old piece-of-crap van; it was completely rusted out, but it ran pretty decently. Then, we got our gear together and started honing down the live show.”
Pete was already putting on a solid show, but Terrana realized that it still wasn't good enough. So with their manager playing the tough-love role by tearing apart their performances night after night, they stepped up their efforts to become as hot onstage as any band could be. “For me, there's nothing more disappointing than going to see a band you really love and being let down by the live show,” Terrana says. “We knew that the live show is what would take us to another level. The most important thing any band can do is to pay attention to what happens onstage. You make sure that every moment of the show is important, not just the opening song and the ending song.”
The key turned out to be Terrana's decision to put down the acoustic guitar he usually played for rhythm parts and concentrate solely on singing. “I wasn't putting 100 percent into the vocals, because I was worrying too much about hitting the pedals and all that,” he says. “It's worked out much better for the live show, because I can dig deeper into what I'm doing. We've become tighter as a unit as a three-piece with a vocalist.”
With a leaner sound and a jacked-up stage presence, pete embarked on a graduated tour strategy. First, they went out for just a week. The second tour ran for two weeks, followed by longer hauls of three weeks to a month. Each road trip thereafter was a mix of winning over new crowds and firming an expanding fan base — good for keeping the act on its toes and gratifying as well. Even more important, the ups and downs brought the guys closer than ever, which sharpened their act even more.
“That's when we started moving forward by leaps and bounds,” Terrana says. “We lived with each other for four weeks at a time on the road with very little money in our pockets. Every night we either slept in the van or somebody from the nightclub was nice enough to give us the floor space in their living room, and we slept in sleeping bags. We did that for years and years, building and building. It's what a band needs to do if they're going to become a true band. If you can't live together like that, how are you going to make it when you're a big band and you're touring for six, seven, or eight months at a time?”
What did all that mean back in Newark? Well, nothing, really. With the cover bands still packing the shoreline clubs, pete realized that it would take more than a Midwestern mailing list to succeed in their hometown. Playing clubs wasn't enough; they needed to be heard through another medium. That's where radio came in.
THE RADIO CONNECTION
The band already had a self-produced CD, which they packaged themselves and sold at gigs. It was already a matter of habit to carry copies of the album with them at all times, and that included one night when they went to hear one of their favorite bands, Live, playing in town. A local radio station, the Rat at 95.9, was the show's sponsor. Impulsively, members of pete made their way to one of the radio crew and gave him their CD with a request just to give it a listen.
“They started playing it!” Terrana says laughing, as if he still doesn't quite believe his good fortune. “Chris Craft, the director of the station, put it into rotation, even though we weren't signed. He started getting phone calls, and after a few weeks, it was the most requested song on their list. So Chris, very unselfishly, went to the labels himself and said, ‘Look, I have a band here that's not signed. I think you should check them out.’ A lot of those labels had rejected us six months earlier, but now that we were getting played on the Rat, those labels turned around and reconsidered. That showed us that radio is what breaks the new acts; that's what radio is all about.”
SHOWCASING: THE FINAL HURDLE
A series of showcases for major labels followed. For a band that built its performance on the energy of interacting with the crowd, those were surreal events. Typically, they took place in a rented rehearsal studio with a group of 20 to 30 label executives taking critical notes as the band went through their set. “They don't clap that much, and they don't get excited, and they don't jump around,” Terrana says. “But you have to put 100 percent into your show. Sometimes they'll make you repeat a song two or three times. It's really nerve-racking.”
Several labels, including Universal, ran pete through the wringer only to pass on them. Several industry people told the band that they couldn't gamble on signing them because electronica was clearly replacing rock as the music du jour. As close as they had come, after years of grinding it out on the road and handing out demo CDs to strangers, those dismissals were almost too much to take.
“This isn't a charmed band,” Terrana says. “We didn't have tons of luck. We've always struggled tooth and nail for everything we've gotten. When our manager was trying to shop that little CD that we made ourselves, and he wasn't getting a reaction, and we were living on nothing, you could see our morale going lower and lower. It was like, ‘Are we doing the right thing? Are we as good as we want to be? What's wrong?’ But no one ever said, ‘I'm walking.’”
Pete kept at it, and that was a key factor in getting them to where they are today. “I think it's survival of the fittest,” Terrana says. “If a band doesn't want to persevere through those times, they may never get to the other side. If we had quit six months earlier, we would never have made it to where we are now.”
