The Killers signed to British indie label Lizard King barely six months after forming, and to Island Records shortly thereafter. Panic! At the Disco signed to Decaydence, run by Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz, after posting two songs to Wentz's LiveJournal. They had never played live. Escape the Fate signed to influential punk label Epitaph less than a year after forming. All three are, to varying degrees, among the hottest rock bands in America right now.
Meanwhile, Isaac Campa is busy planning the 10th anniversary show for his band the Happy Campers.
On August 3 at Jillian's, Campa will celebrate a decade of playing music locally, along with band mates Jay Losey and Gene Boothe. Although Losey and Boothe have both been in the Happy Campers for about five years, only Campa remains from the original lineup. He estimates that at least 17 people have passed through the band in the last decade.
The Campers aren't the only band that's been plugging away locally for a long time. The scene is peppered with acts that have been around for nearly as long or even longer, many without the lineup changes of the Happy Campers. While some bands play for a short time before going on to greater success, and others drift apart, these musicians consistently perform and record for their Vegas fans even as success seems to have passed many of them by.
Not that they see it that way, of course. "We had a lot of success, but we didn't really have any label success," says Campa, whose band has toured the country and once spent two weeks on the Warped Tour. Other veteran bands have had closer brushes with fame that, for various reasons, didn't work out. Rockers Big Bad Zero, who formed in 1996 and have all their original members (bassist Dan Gauthier left for three years, returning in 2004), signed to indie label Eureka in 1999 and had their self-titled debut album distributed nationally by Polygram. Magna-Fi, which began as the Szuters when brothers Mike and CJ Szuter moved to Vegas in 1997, released the album Burn Out the Stars nationally on indie label Aezra in 2004 and toured on Ozzfest and as an opening act for Fuel and Sevendust. Big Bad Zero and Magna-Fi each had singles that charted in the 30s and 40s on Billboard's rock charts.
Yet both are still considered Vegas bands, having lost their label contracts years ago. "I definitely don't mind it when people say we're a local Las Vegas band," says Magna-Fi singer-guitarist Mike Szuter, whose brother left the band earlier this year (the rest of the original members remain). Magna-Fi play LA once a month and Vegas once every two months and are about to self-release their second album, Verse Chorus Kill Me, digitally through website Burn Lounge. Big Bad Zero released its third album (and second self-released effort), Imagination America, about six months ago and play regular local gigs in addition to occasional weekend jaunts out of town.
"You get to that point when you're like, okay, well, we can still make our own records and tour and do not a full-on two-month tour, but go out and do weekend gigs and stuff like that and still have a great fan base," says Big Bad Zero guitarist Dave Meeks, who joined the band in 1998. For him and his band mates, the desire for success has been tempered by real world concerns. "We're shopping it, and we're hoping somebody will pick it up," he says about Imagination America. "It's a good record to not waste. But we're also happy with what we're doing now. They'd have to offer us a lot of money for us to quit our jobs. Because everybody's life has changed in the last five years."
Life getting in the way is a common theme among local music veterans. "We would love to be signed, we would love to tour, we still wish we could do it," says singer Brandon Kiser of Cherry Hill, which formed in 1995 as Copperpot and still has four of its original five members. "It's just that reality kind of sets your own mind at ease. You've got to come up with some other ways to make yourself happy." The pressures of family, jobs and mortgages weigh ever-heavier as musicians get older, and deals with fledgling labels (like the ones Big Bad Zero and Magna-Fi made) look less and less appealing. "The way we look at it with labels is, we're eight years. Nobody's going to break us," says singer Danny Pino of Left Standing, which formed in 1998 and has had the same lineup for five years. He asks a question that encapsulates how many of his peers feel: "Why take a little deal when we're doing it on our own?"
But bassist KC Wells of The Day After, which formed in 1999 but didn't begin playing in earnest until 2001, still sees a record deal, even on a small label, as a definite goal. "We couldn't really even fathom being around for another five years and still being on the local arena and still doing it around town," he says. Magna-Fi's Mike Szuter sees his band's next album as a crucial turning point. "Because we believe in the album so much that if it actually doesn't take off in a year, it's possible the band could not exist anymore," he says. "It's not a negative thing for us. It's just that it would be a reality: Hey, this is what we love to do, and the public doesn't pick up on it and say that they love it, then there'd really be no sense in doing it anymore."
At the same time, Szuter, who makes a living playing in various cover bands around town, doesn't ever see himself giving up music. "If I ended up playing cover music for the rest of my life," he says, "I'd probably still be pretty happy, as long as I made good money at it." And Big Bad Zero singer-guitarist Nick Mattera doesn't see a reason to ever give up on his band. "After being together so long, I don't know if we'd ever say, 'It's over, we quit,'" he says. For Cherry Hill, music is something that will always be part of their lives. "My drummer has two kids, a wife, he's a corrections officer, and he calls me constantly asking when we're going to practice and when we're going to play next," says Brandon Kiser. "To hear that from him is great, because I know it's still one of the things he thinks about a lot."
Clearly none of these bands lack enthusiasm, but something is holding them back from greater success and recognition. "I'd like to think that the bands that work the hardest would get there, but we all know that's just not how the world works," says the Happy Campers' Isaac Campa. "It's the right sound at the right time and the right person to hear you." Left Standing's Danny Pino has a similar take. "People don't like to put their necks out like they used to back in the day and believe in a band," he says. "They want to make sure they can make multimillion dollars right away."
Jeff Higgenbotham of www.yourlocalscene.com agrees that the fickle industry is at least partly to blame. "I think the industry's really weird, and it's really, really small," he says. "If you get a band like Magna-Fi, say, that's been signed twice, to two different labels, and haven't had the luck on their side to get good marketing money, to get good distribution or anything like that, but are a solid band, I think that people might not give them a second chance in the industry."
Others are not so charitable. "A lot of bands, they only focus really on the local market, and they need to look at bigger options," says a local concert promoter who asked not to be named. "They need to look at worldwide. A lot of bands don't tour. So when you're not working, and you're not trying to expose the world to your music, how are you going to break?" Even Higgenbotham doesn't see success in the cards for all of the veteran local acts. Of Cherry Hill, he says, "I love to go watch them, but do I think that people would go out in droves to see them? I don't."
People aren't going out in droves to see any of these bands, but they've got steady, reliable fans who come see them at show after show. "Maybe it's not 500 people that come out to see us anymore, but we just had a show last week and there was probably 150, so that's still good," says the Happy Campers' Isaac Campa. Bill Gerski, who owns east-side bar the Hurricane, books Cherry Hill, Big Bad Zero and another local stalwart, Slow to Surface (whose members declined to be interviewed for this story), on a regular basis. "When you look at Cherry Hill or Big Bad Zero, they draw from across the entire Valley," he says. "They come from Summerlin all the way over to where we are over by Henderson." Gerski recently organized a bus trip of 70 bar patrons to go see Big Bad Zero play at the Viper Room in LA.
But 70 dedicated fans aren't always enough. "It's never made money with any of the bands that you mentioned," says the local concert promoter when asked about veteran acts. Although he's had some success with Left Standing and the Happy Campers, overall he doesn't see longstanding bands as viable booking options. "Their fans aren't at a point where I think they're still willing to pay to go see them," he says. "Plus, the bands play out so damn much that they're oversaturating the market, making it hard for guys like me to help sell tickets for them." The Day After recently parted ways with guitarist Shaun Dougherty in part over a dispute about how often to play shows.
The longer bands play locally, then, the more obstacles they seemingly face. So to watch acts like the Killers, Panic! At the Disco and Escape the Fate break out with comparatively little effort can be upsetting. "It's just frustrating to see that nowadays we're in an era where you don't even have to work anymore," says The Day After's KC Wells. "You don't have to play shows. When we were coming up, there was no MySpace. The fact that we've had to fight and claw and struggle throughout our own scene just to get to a point where we are now, and just to see these kids literally not have to do anything, it's just like, 'Shit.'" To Higgenbotham, it's just a matter of changing with the times. "I don't think that it's important to go to LA and play a show anymore. I don't see the importance of it," he says. "People are going to hear your music via your push on the Internet and your friends on the Internet."
After years of building a following one fan at a time at shows, Magna-Fi's Mike Szuter is also heading online. His band has more than 7,000 friends on MySpace—"Which was something we hadn't even looked into until recently, and started to cultivate a page there"—and he sees the site as a major tool in pushing the band's new album. He also has no problem with the rapid success of other bands. "I've even suggested to my cover band that we should cover a Killers song," he says. For Left Standing's Danny Pino, those other bands are opening doors. "It actually gives opportunity to all of us that aren't signed," he says. "How can you hate on someone for that?" asks Cherry Hill's Brandon Kiser about bands who've achieved national success. "That's exactly the opportunity I'm looking for."
While he's looking, though, Kiser works as a server at the Original Sunrise Café. All of the veteran bands are financially self-sustaining, using their revenue to pay for touring, merchandise and recording costs, but their members still hold down day jobs. They are bartenders, real-estate agents, garage-door installers, construction workers. Big Bad Zero's Nick Mattera owns the Shampoo Salon in Henderson. At a recent Thursday night show at the Rainbow Bar & Grill, Mattera dedicated a song to all those who had to work the next day. "Who has to go to work tomorrow?" he asked the crowd, which was too inebriated or lethargic to respond. "Well, I have to go to work tomorrow," he said. And then he turned up his guitar, and his band did what they've been doing for the last 10 years: They rocked.