It was 4:47 am on Saturday morning, August the Seventh, the year Two Thousand Ten.  I was on 278 East in New York, having just left LaGuardia Airport, dropping off my brother and friends who were about to board a flight to Aruba.  It was at this instant I realized that this was the first time in what must have been months that I had a peaceful moment to myself.  There would be no talking heads, no phone calls, no emails, nothing but me and the road for another good hour and a quarter until I reached home in East Haven.  My brother may have been on his way to a foreign land for a few days of rest and relaxation, but it was I that felt like I was on vacation.

At first that may sound odd, but a feeling of nostalgia had taken me over.  I was reminded of what I was doing exactly one year ago – driving across the country with two of my best friends, laying down thick layers of funk and soul music to unsuspecting ears, and winning over the hearts of everyone who happened to cross our path.  When you’re a band on tour, the highway is your home as much as the stage.  With the road as empty as it was at such an early hour, I reminisced about the interstates of the Midwest – never nearly as crowded as the 95 corridor between central Jersey and New Haven during daytime hours to which I had become so accustomed.  This early morning one year later, I would once again be driving into the sunrise, something I had not done since the Bad Apples were in full swing.

Things are much different than they were a year ago, however.  The Apples no longer live under the same roof – 175 miles lie between us.  Our Chevy work van, ye ole reliable, has left us for the repo man.  Our gigs are few and far between – a sharp decline from a band that played 250 shows in their first two years (an average of over 10 per month).  And this was the first summer in two years that I did not shave my head in preparation for a heavy travel schedule and no guarantee of a shower in the morning.

Things really started to go downhill for us when, during our 2009 summer tour, we had to make repeated decisions on which bills we were going to skip each month.  Our LLC credit card was over the limit.  The monthly payments were too much to handle, and we couldn’t keep up with the accruing interest.  We had moved to Philadelphia in April 2009 to save money – we cut our rent and utilities nearly in half.  But still, that wasn’t enough.  The job market was so bad none of us could find jobs with any sort of regularity before hitting the road.  I sold my Hyundai Elantra for $5,000 in July, and within days every last penny had been dispersed to our landlord and various banks to which I owed money – and I still wasn’t up to date on all my bills.

This is no way to live, even if you’re living the dream.  So upon returning to the east coast in September, Dave and I moved back in with our families in Connecticut.  Eliminating our living expenses was the only way we were going to avoid bankruptcy and drive ourselves much deeper in the hole.

Over the next few months we tried to keep up our gigging, but it became more difficult, more stressful, and less fun.  It was the organizational factor that became the most stressful.  Travel arrangements became a huge ordeal, now involving multiple vehicles and meeting points.  Trying to rearrange work schedules, something we had minimal dealings with in the past, was not as easy as we initially thought it would be.  And the addition of a horn section, which was so crucial and so dynamic, added another layer of organization that I was not fully prepared for.  Less people were coming to our shows, and many of those who were there were not paying attention.  What’s the point of playing if you go through all this hassle to be there in the first place and then you have to play to a non-responsive crowd?  I was deeply depressed – in my heart I knew we had passed our prime.  I felt like I was pouring water on a dead flower, knowing that it will never again be alive, but trying to convince myself that with enough water it may one day spring up, pointing its petals toward the sun.

But finally, the stress got the best of me.  For those who know me to any extent, you know that I never show even an ounce of stress.  That’s because I never have any.  One morning on the road I found a random gray hair on my head and pointed it out to BJ.  “I must be real stressed out,” I said sarcastically, smiling.  BJ came back quickly – “Is that why you have that stupid grin on your face all the time?”  Though I might not have that grin literally every breathing moment, his point was there – I am not one to be overly worried about anything.  But now the stress had begun to pile up, and I was trying to hide it – from my friends, my family, and myself – and the more I tried to hide it, the more it reared its ugly head.

And so, on this unexceptional, unsuspecting morning driving home from the airport, I breathed a sigh of relief, and all those debilitating emotions I had been building up steadily for the past year left my body, billowing out of my soul in a sooty cloud of purple and black, and vanished into the early morning air.  Less than a week had passed since I told BJ and Dave that my last show with Bad Apples would be at the East Haven Fall Festival on September 11, 2010.  This, to me, was the only way to have peace of mind – and after reflecting on that decision and on everything that has happened since we made the conscious choice to quit our jobs and join a band, finally, I had achieved it.

I slipped a copy of our album Today Begins at Night into my car’s CD player and cruised along the drive I knew so well from my frequent trips to New Jersey and back.  The Honda Odyssey minivan (the Space Odyssey, as Dave affectionately calls it) seemed to float along the road.  Or maybe that was me.  I couldn’t tell.

Now, I don’t want to say that Bad Apples will never play again.  I do not believe that is our destiny.  For now, however, it was what had to be done.  If I were you, though, I would check back with us periodically.  In fact, you should plan on buying our 2018 comeback album, Back and Bitter than Ever, and our epic follow-up album in 2020, Hindsight.  Just wait, I’m telling you.  At least right now, we’ll be exiting the scene with class, playing to a packed crowd on our home turf, the East Haven Town Green, and with full horn section, and guests on guitar and percussion, the performance will be superb.

And so I thank all of you who have supported us in any way – came to our shows, bought our albums, housed us, cooked us meals, and befriended us, even all of you who yelled “FREEBIRD” at us to no avail.  Well, actually, on second thought, fuck you Freebird yellers, you guys are dicks.

At 6:01 am I pulled into my driveway, and the outro to the title track blared through the car speakers – “At the end of the day / is another setting sun” – as I watched the sun rise in front of me.  What a delightful contradiction, I thought, as the sun sets on one chapter of my life, and rises on another.

-Albis