I won’t claim it’s a new thing for me, especially when it comes to linguistic conventions - the way we abuse words infuriates me. Nothings means anything anymore, because so many words are interchangeable.

Calling something “awesome” used to mean it was extraordinary and truly great in a way one couldn’t hope to encounter every day. I just unfollowed someone on Twitter who insists on using the word to describe almost everything anyone in his online clique does. It made me feel sick. Can they really all be so enormously talented as to create awesomeness at such an unbelievable rate, or has “awesome” gotten watered down somehow?

Why do we find it all too easy to believe the “unbelievable” things our friends tell us.

Because we’re all too used to the perversion of our most powerful words to add interest to uninteresting situations.

I’m not going to go on some kind of rant about how language is a static. It’s not. I’m glad it’s not. I think language has to change with culture and society, because it serves enormously important roles in cognition and in holding society together in the first place. What I don’t like is when language gets weakened by ignorant usage.

I do it too. I say “crazy” to mean fantastic when I’m talking about Bill Frissel’s solo on “Monica Jane” (in which there is very little that meets the traditional definition of the word - it’s just really, really fantastic). Yet, I do draw some lines.

Which brings me to…

Real Rock Stars

Some people - it’s true - are genuine rock stars. David Lee Roth comes to mind. Matthew Bellamy from Muse is a more current example.

In 2008, Rolling Stone said Lil Wayne was “Rock Star of the Year,” but I think calling what he does “rock” might be a little bit of a stretch.

Still others used to be rock stars, but are no longer. Krist Novoselic was a rock star when he played bass for Nirvanna, but nobody knows who he is anymore, which pretty much removes the “star” part, even if he continues to rock (which, for the record, I have no idea whether he does or not). Though Slash and Axl will probably always be rock stars, nobody else from any GNR lineup to day makes the cut anymore.

Keith Richards, make no mistake, is still a rock star.

But what about all those ass-kicking, third-tribing, guest-post-writing, web entrepreneurs?

I’m sorry. No.

Why Everybody Needs To Quick Calling All These Lame People Rock Stars

1. There is nothing sexy about social media. Think what you like, but while you’re clicking like buttons, adding links to Digg, and RTing that “awesome” blog post somebody wrote about how to hack (another often misappropriated word) your inner game for more ebook sales, I’m going to be doing shots behind the bar with that barista that always gives you the fake smile when she hands you your nonfat latte.
2. Consistently doing the thing people expect you to do in a professional manner is great, but it’s not what makes a rock star. Rock stars surprise and often offend us. That’s what makes rock so rocky - you can’t always predict where it’s going, and that makes it more fun than your next email campaign.
3. Web-business-types are always going on about life balance and trying to optimize the perfect proportion of writing blog posts and watching Hulu shows with their real-job-having spouses. Rock stars don’t care about balance - they care about rocking, even if it means they spend half the year in rehab.
4. While most web entrepreneurs obsess over their number of Twitter followers, rock stars are busy fucking so many models, strippers, and random groupies that they don’t bother counting at all.
5. Rock stars don’t wear khakis or Polos. Um… ‘nuff said.

Look, I’m all for giving praise when people do things well. That’s great. It builds relationships and keeps the web turning.

But I know actual rock stars. Some of them are famous now. Some used to be but aren’t any more. None of them look anything like the people I see be called rock stars online lately.

• This guy says that an “entrepreneurial rockstar” has a holistic approach and values wealth “from a lifestyle perspective,” whatever the fuck that means.
• These people seem to have confused the band with a brand and offer to teach you, among other things, “Rock Star SEO.”
• This place holder site describes a rockstar entrepreneur as “the type of person who spends their day playing while everyone else works in a cubicle!” Does that include children?
• Don’t even get me started on all the things wrong with these jackasses.

I Don’t Really Have A Point

I think the correct formula is to write a post about something like this, be a little controversial, say “fuck” a few times while challenging a common practice, and then tie it all together at the end with a pithy lesson that people can go out an apply immediately to get more newsletter subscribers.

That’s bullshit.

I didn’t write this for you to write more effective Google ads or blog post headlines. I wrote this to make you a more effective communicator by using the right word for the job.

And by all means, as someone who has rocked a few screaming fans back in my day, I beg you: please stop insulting the great and glorious history of rock music by referring to your dorky web friends as rock stars. Unless they are.

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How do I get a fighter’s body?

What kind of workout should I do to look like a gymnast?

My answers are usually very simple. If you want to be a fighter, train to fight. A gymnast? Take up gymnastics. Olympic sprinter? Lace ‘em up tight and get to work.

There are no secret techniques for looking as if you’ve done something when you haven’t done it. You can approximate, and you can cheat. You can even fake a few people (most notably, yourself) out a certain percentage of the time. But if you really want something, the path to getting it is most likely direct and well-known.

The Law of Doing the Fucking Work

This is important. So important, it gets a fancy box around it:

It seems pretty obvious when we’re talking about athletes, but obvious logic can escape us when the conversation turns to other personal goals.

How can I afford a nicer car? Make more money or spend less money on non-car things.

The Law of Doing the Fucking Work is a reminder that, though shortcuts may exist in some cases, most worthy goals require consistent and deliberate work. Perhaps even more importantly: doing the work is often faster and easier in the long run than searching for shortcuts or waiting for a new method to appear.

This brings us to Corollary A…

Corollary A: The shortest path between two points is a straight line.

• If you want pecs, bench.
• If you want bad breath, eat garlic.
• If you want a girlfriend, be nice to girls.
• If you want more money, do more valuable work.

Sure, there may be other ways to get similar results, but the simple answer is almost always the most direct.

Corollary B: Choosing anything always means giving up something else.

• If you want pecs, be prepared for shoulder pain.
• If you want bad breath, please prepare a breath mint.
• If you want a girlfriend, be prepared to not date other girls.
• If you want more money, be prepared to have less time or energy for things you do now.

If you want something, be sure you also want to side effects of having it and doing what it takes to get it. This is what choice is.

Option A or Option B.

Tastes Great or Less Filling.

Chicken or Fish.

In a perfect world, we would never have to choose, and we could always get the best of all possible options. This world is not perfect - it’s a world driven by decision.

Decide what you want your world to look like, then do the fucking work by making those decisions (even the hard ones) which will create that world for you.

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Screenshot from The Interactive Offer training video

It says:

The greatest skill in business is the ability to feel into a situation and do what needs to be done to make the sale; and you might need to modify/adapt this for your business.

Clay’s point absolutely hits the bulls-eye as to why many people get stuck in business.

I’m pretty crazy about process. Maybe it’s my martial arts training, but I value the ‘path’ in everything I do. In many ways, the journey really is the true destination. Yet, it’s easy to get mired in processes when you’re learning something new. More so, it’s easy to get stuck in the processes we learn from others (in online courses, etc.) to the point that we think we’re applying them, when in reality, we’re merely copying them.

To truly apply, you have to make adjustments. You’ll have to adjust the process to your own circumstance and situation. You’ll have to sense what’s going to work for your business and do that thing instead of blindly following someone else’s “blueprint” for success.

Of course, this isn’t just true in business; it works for everything. Process is always going to be a personal thing - a thing you create for yourself. My process will never suit you perfectly (though it may have limited effectiveness in the short term).

Creating processes to match a desired outcome is a sign that you’ve mastered a principle. And how do you master principles? By practicing creating processes that get closer and closer to creating the outcome you desire.

If you’re interested in the whole principle/practice/process idea and how it’s the only real Path to mastery (in business or milkshake making), you might be interested in this thing I’ve got going on over here.

At the very least, give it some thought and see if you can identify the processes you’ve created in your successes and the adopted (yet, not adapted) processes that aren’t working for you in other areas (there will probably be A LOT of these). I’d love to hear your ideas.

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If you aren’t hip to sales speak, you might not be familiar this this expression, so here’s a really quick explanation:

Hypothetical Dude has $500 burning a hole in his pocket. He goes someplace where people sell stuff. He doesn’t tell anyone about the money in his pocket, but they can see the hole and the smoke. They know the money is there, but they don’t know how much of it there it. Crazy Eddy loves the smell of pocket smoke, so he approaches Hypothetical Dude and prepares to make a deal.

[…fast forward through a lot of boring dialogue…]

HD decides to buy because he’s worried about scarring from the 3rd degree burn on his thigh. CE can tell the time is right, so he names a price - $100. When HD reaches in his pocket to pay, CE can see that HD was clearly prepared to pay more. If CE had named a higher price - $200, $300, maybe even up to the full $500 - HD would have paid up with no hesitation.

Crazy Eddy has just left money on the table. Money was available, but he didn’t take it.

I’m sure you can find a more sophisticated and thorough explanation of the concept somewhere else, but as I noted above, this post isn’t about marketing. It’s about leaving money on the table.

You see, marketers (some of them anyway) are pretty clever, and the good ones are all about getting a maximum ROI on CPC (Return On Investment on the Cost Per Customer). Leaving money on the table means that you’ve failed to maximize your ROI. This is a sin.

But this isn’t about marketing.

I find the notion that leaving money on the table is a sin very interesting. The fact is, when money gets left on a table, it makes people uncomfortable.

To continue the example above,

Hypothetical Dude, though happy to get a bargain, probably left Crazy Eddy’s shop slightly uncomfortable. Sure, the burning in his pocket has subsided (mind you, this is only temporary, because he’s still got $400 in there that he knows is going to start burning again soon). But he might doubt his purchase - did he get scammed? He was prepared to pay more, but the low price caught him off guard, and now he worries that he might have bought an inferior product. You can bet he’s going to keep that receipt and won’t hesitate to return the stuff if he suspects there’s something wrong with it. That’s not good for CE either.

Also, keep in mind that he knows the rest of the money is going to start burning again soon. His so-very-recent stuff purchase is already unsatisfying simply because it only offers temporary relief. The dissatisfaction is compounded by the fact that he’ll have $100 less to work with on his next stuff-buying expedition. He might find some certifiably primo stuff at $401, and be unable to afford it. He’s screwed, and it’s all because Crazy Eddy left the money on the table by quoting a too-low price.

Again, this isn’t about marketing, and it’s not about pricing either, because that’s a very complicated science and art that I’m not very knowledgeable about.

This post is about the phenomenon.

Leaving Money on the Table

Try this experiment: leave some money on a table.

Just try it and see what happens. Go to the local food court a little before the lunch rush and leave some money on a table in plain sight. It doesn’t really matter how much. A few cents, a dollar, whatever. It you’re feeling adventurous and can stand losing it, try a few times with varying amounts.

[If you can’t stand the thought of giving money to total strangers, try it at a party or in your office. You can learn a lot about your coworkers for sure.]

Watch people. See how they react.

Notice how people react differently to seeing coins left unattended versus paper money. Paper money is serious!

If you can spare it, try with a twenty versus a pile of singles. When I did this, the singles went untouched in plain sight for quite a while - probably because a pile of money is conspicuous, and people start looking around for a hidden camera or something.

I find this experiment endlessly fascinating. Unfortunately, my budget is un-endless, so I could only spare about $100.

A Cheaper Version of the Experiment

Even if you’re a total cheapskate, you can try this out without having to actually waive goodbye to any cash.

Put together a wad of cash. You can use any denomination you like, but don’t take a pile of singles and wrap them in a couple of twenties, because that just looks suspicious, and your friends will know something is up. I usually just grab whatever I happen to have in my wallet and then put the cash in my pocket. Sometimes it’s a lot, sometimes not, but the effect is still interesting.

Go out to eat or drink. When you sit down, take your wad out of your pocket and nonchalantly place it on the table. Then just leave it there.

This drives people fucking crazy!

Different people have a variety of responses, but you’ll notice that having money on the table makes your friends, passersby (if they notice), your server (if you’re at a restaurant), and anyone else who can see it mildly to extremely uncomfortable.

They might wonder if you are trying to send them a signal of some sort.

Perhaps they’ll be afraid of somebody stealing it.

They probably won’t be sure if you put it there intentionally or just forgot to return it to its proper location in your pocket.

Whatever they’re actually thinking at this point, you can count on one thing: when you finally move to pick it up after a few minutes, everyone will breathe a collective sigh of relief.

The Lesson

Even though money left on the table (whether by pricing something too low, failing to upsell or follow up, or whatever) is a sin, you can learn a lot from it.

I’ve recently had some marketing success and wrote about it here. Word got around, and a lot of people visited this site. I had nothing to sell them. Several well-intentioned friends warned me that I was leaving money on the table and that I had better get something going fast - at the very least I should have turned my last blog post into a FREE REPORT to give people for opting in to my email list. But I didn’t even have a list!

What was I thinking leaving all that money on the table!?!

It’s cool. I got to see what happens, and now I now something that no other internet marketer on the planet knows - what precisely happens when you are positioned in every way to sell something, but make no move to do so. I now know exactly how several hundred people in my sphere of influence react to seeing money left on the table.

Epilogue

I’m still not selling anything (not here, at least), but I’ve decided to go ahead and set up a list in case I someday decide to sell something. If you sign up, you won’t get a free video or PDF. You won’t get much of anything really. You will get at least one email and maybe more in the future.

If you’d like to get one or more emails from me, you can sign up for my list here. But I’m not promising anything, and it may very well just be a social experiment.

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With that caveat, I’m still happy to consider myself a success and be counted among that elusive ~1% of people who somehow manage to make the transition from learning about online business to actually making a pretty good living online.

Let’s Define Our Terms

Of course, ye olde Internet is a great place to anonymously claim just about anything you want. Just visit any popular forum, and you’ll meet plenty of poseurs who will jump at the chance to give you unsolicited advice, yet have very little to show for their hot air. You probably want to see something more tangible before you’ll trust me.

That’s cool. Let’s talk metrics for a minute or two.

Online Activity / Posting Frequency

With regard to the my dig on keyboard cowboys above, I’ll first mention that my forum usage, blog posting, and YouTube commenting over the past three months or so have been scant at best. These are activities in which most online type people engage regularly, and they can all be used for business development in one form or another.

I like connecting with people on YouTube (I’ve gotten to help several people fulfill their dreams of living and working in Japan there) and on forums. If I spent more time updating this site and posting about web development and small business instead of beer, I could probably have a thriving WordPress tweaking enterprise going. I love building websites, but I love beer more. Besides that, I get more referrals for WordPress work than I can handle anyway.

No, social networking isn’t a strategy for me. It’s just something I do to kill time, and I kill much less of it now than I used to.

So that’s metric number one: I haven’t been visibly active in many of the places I normally would have been. Not convincing? Let’s look at metric number two.

Prasara Primer

My first major project release, the Prasara Yoga Primer, grossed $25k in sales in its first week on the market. Did I get to keep all of that? Hell no. I have two partners, and we had a lot of help from some awesome affiliates. But I did deposit a very large (by my standards) check into my account last week, and we’re still selling more every day.

Of course, of course, of course, that week of awesome sales required about six weeks of hard work to set up and pull off effectively. Still, it was probably the most profitable six weeks of work I’ve ever done, and the lessons it taught me are going to be priceless as I correct many of the simple mistakes I made next time.

I can’t prove to you that I made this money, but if you’re so inclined, you can check the Primer’s stats out on ClickBank, where we became the best-selling yoga product in our debut month. While you’re at it, tell your fitness-obsessed friends about it and make a nice commission in the process.

A Small Empire

Metric number three is that I took my friend’s business from a solitary yoga studio that was barely breaking even to a successful online venture with products and courses at a variety of price points in just a little over six months. Our list grew by over 1000%, and our income has exceeded all expectation.

We have a “staff” of people with varying levels of involvement making varying levels of income from our combined efforts. It’s like a cottage industry we’ve build together, and I really love being part of a creative family working as a team.

“Overnight Success”

We’ve all heard before that it takes years of planning and practice to become an overnight success. In my case, it was just a little over a year.

It was April of 2009 when I found out the hard way that I was no longer employed. No notice. No job. No anything really.

I did some random part time gigs to pay the bills, but I also found this great course by Clay Collins called Project Mojave that promised to teach me how to create a “freedom business” in a few months. I lucked out and snagged a lifetime membership to Mojave for about $100 before most people really found out about it. What can I say? It felt right. And it was. It was one of the best investments I’ve ever made, and I wouldn’t be here without it.

Project Mojave might not open again, but Clay’s just about to release his new course, called the Interactive Offer, and I’m going to be taking advantage of all he has to teach. If you click that link, you’ll get to see Clay explain how he structures his launches to make a respectable profit before he even creates his product.  You’ll also be giving me an affiliate credit so that, should you decide to buy the course when it goes live, I’ll get a nice chunk change. If that happens, thanks in advance.

My First Business Venture

Back to Project Mojave (which was, by the way, an example of the Interactive Offer in action)… I watched the videos, took notes, did the homework, and even talked to Clay on the phone a couple of times. I chose a niche and got to work.

Then a few little things came up. I got married. I had to help plan the Taido World Championships. I got sidetracked and took forever to finish my first product.

That product, an ebook on finding work and moving to Japan, was not successful. Not because Clay’s advice was bad, but because I was way too scattered about my implementation. More recently, I seriously considered reviving the How to Get a Job in Japan project. I know it could bring me at least a few hundred dollars a month in totally passive income if I put in a few days of solid work up front. But instead, I decided to let it die because I’m having too much fun with my other projects right now and don’t need the distraction.

So I let the website expire and made the information available in hard copy at Amazon. If you’re interested, you can check it out here.

My Second Business Venture

Did I leave the ebook world and jump immediately into my current jet-setting lifestyle? Nope. Even that took some time and work.

CST101 began as an experiment. I was working out at my friend’s studio, and we were talking about wanting more out of our lives. Typical conversation for married guys in their 30s to have. His second child had just been born not long before, and he wanted to try reaching a broader audience online. It just so happened that he’s an incredibly gifted teacher and trainer.

So we created a distance fitness course together and promoted it pretty quietly through our existing networks. We had a not-bad turnout - enough to make it worth the effort for us. I taught myself how to make membership sites. He practiced making videos. We screwed up. We got better. We connected with our people and started building a posse.

When it came time to do it all again, we rebuilt the thing from the ground up with a sturdier system and a more efficient program. We got referrals. We added a Level Two course. We kicked ass as sold out our second course with 25 members.

We continue offering these courses and love interacting with our students. Sometimes, the enrollment is higher than others, but honestly there’s no way we can lose with this set-up. The courses are made. The lessons are set. The videos are shot. The forums are active, and we have a team of people that helps us manage them. People pay us, work hard, and come away feeling stronger and freer in their bodies. Wins all around.

The Tipping Point, or “Authenticity”

These online training courses are something I’m very proud of. If we hadn’t taken that leap and tried to put the first incarnation together from scratch, we would never have learned what we did, and we would never have had the success we currently enjoy. The mistakes turned out to be priceless, but even more valuable, as it turned out, was our total willingness to screw up in front of others and be genuine and real about that.

“Authenticity” is a huge buzzword in internet marketing circles. The premise is that, if you can make people believe that you are genuinely interested in them, they are more likely to give you money.

I don’t really like discussing authenticity as a marketing tactic because it can quickly cross over into con territory: creating the appearance of reality in order to sell an empty promise. That’s just plain dirty. Yet, I can’t ignore the topic because I’ve always been pretty much who I am (my mother always told me I needed to filter myself for public consumption) - to hell with anyone who doesn’t like it. In fact, I used to be a bit of an asshole about my personal right to do and think whatever the fucking hell I happened to please at any given moment.

Don’t like it? Fuck off.

Though I’m a little nicer now (is it my age showing?), I’m still just me, which means that I’m authentic. And if that makes people want to buy from me, I’m not complaining.

Back to the point though, Ryan and I made a lot of mistakes on our first course. The second one too. But for every mistake we made, we admitted it and fixed it. We told our clients things like “Yeah, sorry about that. We don’t know how that happened either - it’s the first time for everyone here, so let’s talk about how to make it better now.”

In 99% of cases that we approached our mistakes that way, our clients were totally cool and actually helped us find viable solutions. How can you beat that?

Doing What You Love

It sounds so trite to tell people to follow their passions. It’s cheesy. The thing is: cheese is delicious.

After we started making headway with our courses, we started thinking about other products. Ryan had co-produced an ebook on Prasara Yoga a few years prior with another coach named Jarlo. It was called the Prasara Primer, and I actually bought it for about $25 when it first came out.

It was fantastic, and it totally changed the way I thought about yoga and training.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t marketed with nearly the passion that went into it’s creation. So I tossed the idea out to Ryan about re-releasing it. He thought it couldn’t hurt and we began hammering out a marketing plan.

Along the way, we decided to change the layout a bit and modernize the ebook. While we were at it, we made some changes to the way the information was presented. Then we decided to include videos of the yoga flows to make it easier for people for follow along. We made sixty videos. Next came the training guide that showed people how to integrate yoga into their existing routines.

By the time we were done, we realized that we had created a whole new product using the same basic information. The Prasara Primer 2.0 was born.

Then what? Well, we did the things you usually do to sell a digital product. None of it was original or new. We created a sales page. Built a list using a sample from the actual product. We got the word out to our lists and got some help from friends with lists. We answered questions and made a launch offer.

• The cool part: we still made mistakes.
• The really cool part: we still made money.

Now That I’m a Successful Online Entrepreneur…

…I sit on the beach and drink margaritas while my third world VA haggles on my behalf for extra frequent flier miles.

Yeah, so that’s total bullshit.

As much as I love beaches and margaritas, I love getting my hands dirty building new things even more. I’ve discovered that the real reason my ebook on working in Japan wasn’t a big hit had nothing to do with the market or the information (which is still golden). It was all about my level of enthusiasm for various tasks associated with selling a product. I can’t stand doing a lot of the stuff you have to do to have an ebook consistently bring in more than a trickle. I hate article marketing and PPC campaigning. Even worse, I can’t stand outsourcing those things to people I have to manage.

That’s OK though, because I’ve discovered that I absolutely love the process of creating a product, figuring out how to get it in people’s hands, and building the systems around making it sustain itself.

So I’m doing that. Ryan and Jarlo and I are working on a new strength training product using gymnastic rings that we hope to release in early July. We’re also continuing to run courses on CST101, and I’ve got some ideas for new classes in the near future. The Prasara Primer has created a demand for us to give seminars in various countries. We’ll probably shoot a seminar DVD.

I’m also branching out in other directions. I’m talking with a few other people now about helping them create digital products and courses in their own niches. I’m collaborating with Carl Nelson, Jonathan Mead, and a few others on a new magazine site called MovementGeeks, which we’ll be launching this summer.

I’m also getting ready to move to Hawaii, where I plan to drink a few margaritas. There’s so much excitement, I can hardly stand it.

How You Can Join the Cool Winners’ Club

Not that you’re asking, but if I were to give advice on the whole online business thing, I would say it’s really just a four-step process:

1. Find a mentor and study what they do - modeling success is a terrific shortcut
2. Adapt those principles to what you’re personally great at - because, if you hate what you’re doing, you’ll stop
3. Make something and get it in people’s hands - free or paid doesn’t really even matter at first
4. When you make mistakes, be cool about it - they’re awesome opportunities to learn

And that’s it. It’s what I did, and what others I know have done.

Yes, it’s easier said than done, and no, there are no guarantees. There again, what was the last easy, guaranteed thing you did that you actually thought was worth a shit when it was over?

That’s what I thought.

P.S. - It’s a rule that, when you’re trying to show internet marketing people how cool you are, you have to include an ironic PS. This let’s the audience know that you know that they’re in on the joke, while still getting one last chance to slide in that all-important call to action.

P.P.S. - Another ironic device is the anti-call-to-action, and it looks something like this: “Whatever you do, don’t click on my services link to see how I can help you quickly find efficient, high-leverage solutions to your online business issues for as little as $20.”

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this year's card

While politicians both in the States and here in Japan spent a lot of time talking about “change,” I’ve been making some huge ones over the past several months. And they’ve mostly been for the better. Here’s a brief rundown of cool shit that went down in 2009:

• Since April, I’ve been essentially self-employed. That’s meant taking some part time gigs to pay bills while I tried to figure out what I was doing. The good news: I now know what I’m doing, and 2010 is going to be all about taking these various projects to the next level and building them into a business.
• There were also some kick ass events and visits from friends abroad. Japan hosted the 5th World Taido Championships in August. Thanks to everyone who traveled to Japan to build a better Taido. Thanks especially to those who bought me beer. We had a hell of a good time, and a not-bad competition. See you all again in Finland 2013.
• I took 5dan in Taido and certified as a Circular Strength Training instructor, both of which challenge me to learn much more all the time.
• Most importantly of all, in June, Noriko and I got married, and I’m ridiculously grateful for having her.

So that’s where things stand here on the cusp of the new year. It’s pretty exciting really. We’re planning some big stuff for the next twelve months, and I can’t wait to get started. Actually, I can wait. I can wait until we get back from the next few days of eating and sleeping and relaxing. But after that, I’ll be getting right back to work.

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It wasn’t for lack of trying. We practiced consistently and tried to find good gigs, but something just wasn’t there.

Our vocalist and principal songwriter was Chase Jones. He also played guitar when necessary, but preferred having a lead guitarist to handle anything serious. When we recorded our demo CD (you can hear two songs below), I played all of the lead parts in addition to bass. Harold “H Cool” (though he didn’t get that nickname until later on) Johnson handled rhythm guitar (acoustic) and backing vocals. For the majority of the Child’s existence, drums were the domain of Rick Ortiz. There is very little of consequence to say about him.

Yes, I'm playing a pink bass.

Rounding out the lineup was usually a lead guitarist. Our first lead player was a guy whose name I can’t remember. That’s OK, because I can’t remember a single note he played either. He wasn’t exactly unskilled, but he was a bit aimless on the fretboard. I tried to help him out, but at the time, the closest I was able to come to constructive criticism was the following tidbit:

If a solo doesn’t go anywhere, it’s crap.

I remember that because, for years after, other members would remind me of how tactless I had been and how it had probably been a deciding factor in Bill’s (yeah, that’s what his name was - Bill…) leaving the band. I was OK with that and suggested my friend Mike Healy to fill the role. Mike is a much better player now - better than I am - but at the time, he just wasn’t ready to play lead in a band.

In between lead players, we cut a demo. To my knowledge, only two songs from that session survive. Here they are:

1. Behind-the-Closet-Door.mp3
2. Broken-Image.mp3

Eventually, we got Nate. Nate had been in one of Chase’s old band in their hometown, and moved up to Atlanta, in part to join Surrogate Child. He was a much better player than Bill had been, and came equipped with ideas, an edgier sound (which we had much desired), and even a couple of songs. Nate fit SC pretty well, and I had a lot of fun having a guitarist who could actually handle interesting parts.

Still something was missing. Probably several somethings.

In the end, we just lost momentum. I took a trip to Japan, and when I returned to Atlanta, there wasn’t a band left. No surprise really, but it was kind of sad all the same.

Chase and I continued to be good friends and tried for some time to start a new band. We were tentatively calling ourselves Snidely Whiplash and were attempting to recreate the entire Baader Mienhoff album in a live setting. We recruited Karen Schultz for a short time to play some bass and keyboards (I was playing guitar), and we searched high and low for a drummer. There was one guy named Keith that we really liked, but we could never get enough elements happening together at the same time to really call ourselves a band.

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Today, I want to share this:

Where the 12 songs on 4.75 Inches were basically “rock,” “Pictures of You” would fall into the “soft rock classics” category. That is, of course, if it were actually a classic. Come to think of it, it’s not even really all that classy either.

I wrote this song in 2005, while I was living in Myogi, Japan. Myogi was a really small town (so small that it doesn’t even exist anymore), so I spent a lot of evenings hanging out at the Mister Donuts in nearby Tomioka. And that’s where I was when I got the idea for this song.

MisDo (as it’s called in Japan) has a monthly musical theme that is played in all of the stores nationwide, and that particular month, the theme was 80s schlock - or “soft rock classics.” I was sitting there, eating my old fashioned doughnuts and drinking my tenth or so cup of American coffee, thinking to myself that I could do better. So I pulled out the iBook and headphones and went to work with Garageband. Those built-in samples turned out to be just cheesy enough to make a really good backing track.

After writing out some quick lyrics, I went out to the car, where I recorded the vocals straight into the built-in mic on the computer. You can actually hear a couple of trucks driving by in the mix.

I actually rerecorded this song later, using a better mic and a few real instruments, but I’ve reserved that copy for the (eventual) followup to 4.75 Inches, 12 Centimeters of the Andy Fossett Soft Rock Classic.

Periodic table graphic from the TAFRS T-shirts.

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