The path leading to the formation of Losers Beat Winners is a crooked one, strewn with beer bottles and empty pizza boxes and a fair dose of stubborn optimism that finally melded into the musical equivalent of a jackhammer root canal. I just made that up. Seriously. You can blame too many Beyond The Music episodes if you like.
It's me! I'm the drummer, Mark Pavlack, and I moved to Nashville in August of 2000 in search of more playing opportunities than what I could find in my home state of Indiana. I played in a number of bands throughout the 90s, most notably Elephanthead, a kinda progressive-rock power trio that thundered across many festival and club stages all over the Hoosier state during our 5 year beer bash. That band eventually split up just for the heck of it and I decided to follow the beat to Nashville, TN with a simple desire to play more frequently in a bigger pool of musicians. 
I started jamming right away with a bunch of local country, bluegrass and blues dudes, but none of the band want ads I pursued lasted too long. The realization that Nashville is half Hollywood bullshit and half real music was a sad but true moment for me. Some people watch too much damn TV! I continued to accept pick-up gigs when I could and spent some time in the Nashville jam rock band Wayward Legs towards the end of their run. Our most fun gig for me with those guys was playing on the Ernie Ball Guitar Stage at Riverfront Park in the spring of 2001. Three percussionists! It was like playing in Santana or something-- very wild.
The guy responsible for playing guitar and shoutin' stuff in our band is Bob Grant and he moved to Nashville in January of 2000 from New York City with the intention of finding work as a country musician. Bob played mandolin for alt-country progenitors The Bad Livers in the 90s had three goals in mind upon moving to Nashville: to play in a working bluegrass band, to play the Grand Ol’ Opry and to write country songs. As it turned out, he got picked up to work in a bluegrass band within a few months and his first performing gig in Nashville was as a sideman for country artist Gail Davies on the Grand Ol’ Opry.
Bob eventually found himself getting restless for something a lot harder-sounding and more in step with the music of his youth than just the country and bluegrass he’d been playing since moving to Nashville. That something was punk rock and for Bob it meant the music of classic bands like The Germs,
Black Flag, and Husker Du destroyed and recombined in a blender with the guitar experimentalism of Mission of Burma and Big Black tempered with the fine pop songcraft of bands like XTC and Steely Dan for melody. He placed an ad in the local weekly looking for a bass player and drummer interested in starting a hardcore band that remembered and expanded upon the bedrock founded by the great SST Records bands of the early to mid-1980s. I saw that ad and waited about a day before I called the number. I thought, "Shit, I grew up listening to Black Flag! I can do this!"
Bob and I got along great from the start and talked about our similar ideas as well as our record collections. We both missed the great bands that MTV forgot or had always ignored and we wanted to get away from the growing crop of bedroom mirror bands who were more concerned with how they looked jumping up and down onstage than with writing and performing well-crafted MUSIC. In short, we were grumpy old fucks who wanted to make some eardrums bleed across America!
Time went on and we still could not find a bass player. Our calls became less frequent. Eventually Bob lost my number. Our idea seemed doomed until the day he remembered his buddy Scott McEwan had also relocated to Nashville from NYC. They had played together in a couple of country bands and since Bob knew that Scott had a decent rock n' roll pedigree (he was a member of the classic New York
noisepunk band Live Skull) the idea of a buzzsaw punk rock power trio was presented to him. Scott had moved to Nashville with a country band that he’d been playing with in and around the New York City area but was also gigging regularly with many other bands including appearances on the Opry with rockabilly artist Rosie Flores and tours with Hank Williams III. He was a fan of the same kind of punk that we liked and with this miraculous re-connection of two old musical comrades came another bolt of lightning-- Bob found my lost phone number! We rented a practice space and prepared to work on four tunes he had demoed on a cassette tape for us.
We taped that first practice and shared a lot of big stupid grins around the room after discovering the HIGH FUCKING VOLUME we were able to achieve in our sweatbox practice room. My teeth rattled and it felt like my chest was going to cave in, but you know-- in a good way! After a brief discussion it was decided to start a band. It went something like:
"Hey, that was pretty damn loud."
"Yeah it was."
"So when do you want to get together again?"
"How about Monday?"
"Monday is no good-- I go drinking then."
"How about Tuesday?"
"Ummm...that'll work."
And so it went. My hearing has steadily gotten worse from that day on, praise Ozzy!
We started working up Bob's vast collection of bluegrass tunes, putting our own spin on them with loud, fast guitars with the mids cut and the trebles boosted to a hornet's nest hum, melodic bass runs thumped on the BEST sounding Fender bass I have ever heard (no kidding), and the two-beat stomp of bluegrass mercilessly tattooed on the drums like a (subway) train. Or should that be an 'El' train? I DID grow up near Chicago! Nevermind that, we were onto something big here! Within a month we were in Scott's studio and the '5 Second Rule' e.p. was recorded and mixed during a particularly fruitful 14 hour session. I suppose some of it still sounds vaguely country-ish, but you can't deny the NYC brashness of the guitar and bass sizzle and crunch or the Chicago-style punch of the kick drum. This is visceral music, but Bob (mercifully) sings his words instead of screaming them. Why? Because INTENSITY IN MUSIC doesn't mean ATONAL SHRIEKING or OFF-KEY PUBESCENT WARBLING. Plus, he wants his mama to come to our shows.
In November of 2001 we began actively playing shows around the southeast U.S. Stops in Birmingham, Knoxville, and Atlanta were on our routes as well as trips west to St. Louis. We gigged sporadically however, because other musical commitments (i.e. those that PAID) had to take precedence. We were really enjoying ourselves though, even if we baffled every soundman we encountered with Bob's refusal to put any mids or lows in his amp mix. Fuck 'em. We had our sound, daddy!
Things get interesting right about winter of '01-02. I am quite a music fan, as you might reckon. Love the stuff, bathe in it daily and so forth. When I'm not playing, I listen to as many rekkids as I can in my waking hours. I am in love with music. When I was about 15 I heard a feller named Bill Stevenson beat the drums on a Black Flag record called 'My War'. The fast rolls on the rack tom were what really grabbed me, and I also really liked the sound of his hi-hats. Not so much the cymbals themselves, but the way they sounded on the recording.
Okay, whatever, I like this band, I listened to 'em from then on, as I did the entire SST Records catalog, except...how did I miss Bill's own band, The Descendents? STOOPID! Long story short, I got into 'em in college when I discovered ALL's second full-length album 'Allroy's Revenge' while working at my dorm radio station. "Hey! I like the sound of these drums and guit-fiddles!" I hollered. "Shut up you idiot, the mic is open!" countered my brother Matt from the other side of the booth. What the heck?! ALL? Descendents? It's the same band with different singers! I bought every ALL album I could find that week, then got the Descendents stuff. Yeah! I REALLY like this production style. It's squished, yet big. Weird. And cool!
So alright, here's the interesting part I promised: I found myself to be a rather rabid fan of ALL years after I had discovered 'em and started hanging around on their message board in about '99. One thing leads to another...I meet people and chitchat...I stumble into some hot chatroom action with one of them...they reveal that they are actually another dude...we both scurry to cover our e-nudity...something is hastily blurted out about a summer camp experience and scrambled cable blahblahblah...he sez he works for ALL, I say, "Please delete those art photos I sent you. Maybe you should knock it off with the kissy-face emoticon too." Then-- BAM!!! He asks if my band and the bands of other ALL messageboard dwellers would think it cool to play a big festival with ALL and their fans in the band's homebase of Ft. Collins, CO. I said, "Okay, but only if you stop calling me Sweettooth." He reluctantly agreed to the court order and I was soon was in Fort Fun shaking the surprisingly non-hairy palm of one Jeff Hagedorn, entrepreneur to fetishist whims the world over and now lead hoss at ALL's Owned & Operated Recordings.
We had a fucking blast that weekend (The festival was dubbed 'STOCKAGE. Clever, eh? Woodstock + the Descendents' famous penchant for adding the -age suffix to everyday words = 'STOCKAGE. Har!) As luck would have it for us, Herr Hagedorn and ALL's Motor Division, Bill Stevenson, liked what we were doing and expressed interest in pressing our little tunes onto some magnetic tape to see what kind of hearing damage might be capable of being inflicted on the teenagers of America. We agreed to their nefarious plan to help the fiends in the hearing aid industry bring America to it's knees by deafening our nation's children and we sealed our evil pact with a delightful Chianti and some smelly cheese. Bon appetit, fuckers!
We recorded our basic tracks and vocals at Bill's Blasting Room in December of 2002 with our new best friend in life Jason Livermore and Bill splitting recording and control room farting duties. Bill won, natch. Overdubbed guitars, backing vocals, and the light tinkle of brass tambourine jingles were added in Nashville at Scott and his lovely wife Claire's new home in East Nashville, now dubbed 2 Tapedecks and a Microphone. We then returned to Colorado to mix at The Blasting Room after 'STOCKAGE '03 in June of 2003. All told, recording and mixing took about 7 days. On the 8th day we all bought mink coats and small impractical foreign cars and began clearing room in our homes for the piles of money we'd soon be raking in from soda commercials and pimply nerds' chain wallets. Take that, Blink!
Okay, that didn't happen... instead, I went back to my other bands and Bob and Scott continued playing the country circuit. We kept doing as many shows as we could in places like New York City and Washington D.C. and at home in Nashville until we heard the fate of our recording. Then one day came some interesting news...Hey! A new Descendents album is coming! *schoolgirl titter*
And so 2004 arrived. The Descendents DID release a new CD and our own was also finally completed, so we began the long process of pitching it to as many record labels as we could reasonably assume would understand what we were doing. And then we waited.
By this time, Scott was really busy touring and working in his studio. He got an opportunity to join his favorite band, the Tarbox Ramblers, and they kept him extremely busy. Meanwhile Bob was still doing bluegrass gigs and began teaching a variety of guitar and fiddle students as well as writing mandolin and guitar instructional books. I helped form a hard rock power trio called One Sexy Bitch and played in a variety of rock and country bands around Nashville and the southeastern US. Gigs with Losers Beat Winners were infrequent during this time, but Bob kept writing songs as we inched closer to a record deal.
Finally, in the spring of 2005 we signed on with Nashville’s Spat Records, a small label that appreciated our affinity for SST Records and good songwriting. The CD was quickly available worldwide and our first commercial hurdle was finally behind us! We received reviews from Maximum R n’ R, The Big Takeover, Punk Planet, Razorcake and other large publications, most of it favorable, more of it too concerned with the sound of Bill Stevenson attached to the recording. All I can say about that is: every producer has his own sound, man!
With the CD finally available, we hit the road more heavily. The Flying Potato Wagon was replaced by The Boogie Van and we managed to make it safely to our rapidly growing number of road gigs in between watching concert films and comedies on the DVD player. Scott and the Tarbox Ramblers began achieving greater success as well, and they ended up backing Robert Plant at the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame tribute to Leadbelly in the fall of 2005. Eventually Scott was able to move his studio to an old pharmacy building outside of Nashville and made the decision to shift from active membership in the Losers to becoming our George Martin when we recorded our albums. We wished him well and plotted our next studio assault for sometime in 2006. First we needed a lowender who could fill Scott’s position as well as take part in our juvenile behavior. I knew just the right guy!
Travis Collinsworth moved to Nashville from Miami in 2002. He was friends with a previous roommate of mine and we began playing together in a variety of bands immediately. Travis played saxophone in high school and is a self-taught bassist with a voracious appetite for variety in music. By this time we were nearly four years into our professional friendship and we had provided the rhythmic foundation for at least 3 different singer-songwriter bands, Bob Marley, Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan tribute bands, an original blues rock band, our hard rock band One Sexy Bitch and the country punk band Porter Hall TN. We’re the Carlton and Family Man of Nashville, mon! He was a natural choice for the spot and since he lived in the room directly above my kitchen I didn’t have too travel far to ask him if he’d like to join up with us. He WAS in the bathroom at the time though, so I had to let the air clear first before we could discuss business. Phew!
Luckily for us, Travis is a quick study. We wasted no time jumping back on the road and plans for extensive touring and recording were assured. We returned to NYC, compiled a DVD of our first ‘STOCKAGE appearance and played a show with Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets on acoustic instruments. We were beginning to evolve into more than just a punk rock band— we had versatility! The next album was going to be incredible! But first…the road
Of course the title of this section is a nod to the first (and second best) Star Wars movie (Empire is #1, duh) but it's also reflective of our nature as a band to keep looking forward to the next new song, the next recording project and the next cute mohawked chick (okay, maybe that's just me!).
So by now we're well into 2006. We embarked on a couple of tours that led us to new places to play like Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and even a show at fucking CBGB's in NYC before they finally shut that craphole down. Man, what a dump. But we fuckin' played there, goldurnit! And we made some friends and we made some fans and even as gas prices got more and more ridiculous we made our way out to the west coast in the summer of '06 for a 3 week tour of some AWESOME clubs and some SHITTY all-ages venues. All told, we logged almost 6,500 miles on that tour and managed to come back penniless and smelly but we did it! Huzzah!
We also recorded a new album that spring at The Fry Pharmacy with Travis on bass that we worked on mixing and goofing around with for the better part of 2 years. Hey, we were busy, okay? Travis and I did a bunch of touring with Porter Hall TN, Bob eased off on the bluegrass shows but amped up his teaching practice and Scott's studio got so busy that it became difficult to find time to mix our hot new slab of wax goodness. Travis and Bob bought houses and I bought drumsets. We played as many shows as we could until Travis could no longer perform with either us or Porter Hall, y'see-- he bought a bar in our neighborhood and danged if it didn't take up all of his time! Oh lordy, it was worth it though! The 5 Spot is the coolest bar in East Nashville and the beers and cool shows and cute girls deserved the attention!
So, we were dormant for most of 2007. Bob and I still got together once or twice a week to hammer out the songs in the practice studio behind our house, basically doing whatever we could to stay focused while we looked for a new bass player. Just over a year later we found Terry Holbrook via a roundabout online musicians want ad search and he fit the suit! Affinity for high volume rock? Check! Peculiar fixation on The Big Lebowski? Check again! Ability to somewhat resemble Travis in old band photos? Checkmate! Woo!
Terry came to Nashville from Lexington, KY and outlasted both his grandfather's bluegrass lessons and his old band's frustration with the local scene. He doesn't drink alcohol so he was instantly thrust into the post-show designated driver spot-- thanks buddy! We're glad he can play a mean bass too! Terry was a very quick study and within a week he knew 10 of the 12 songs we had given him to learn. Shit, he was IN quick! He also seemed very pleased to be asked to play as loudly as possible. This stuff ain't for old ladies, y'know! Well, my mom likes the some of it I guess, but she still won't stage dive no matter how much we beg. Phooey!
So what happened next? Well, we began working on new songs with Terry and performing around Nashville and out of town as much as our gas budget would allow. In June of '08 we took part in The Spat! Records Big Bad Nashville Festival, finally playing Nashville's infamous ExitIn (Steve Martin did stand up there in the 70s, The Police played there on their first US tour, I took a picture of Chad Price from ALL's butt crack there, etc.) Another milestone accomplished!
Also in the summer of '08, the CD we recorded with Travis-- 'New Vaccine'-- was finally given a proper mix by our new buddy Andrija Tokic at his East Nashville studio, The Bomb Shelter. You want street cred? Get the guy who owns the board that EU recorded 'Da Butt' on to mix your record, foo'! Owwwww! Sex-ay! Sex-ay! We decided to go completely independent with this album and pressed it ourselves as well as focusing more on digital distribution to get it out into the world. We're no fools! We know the kids love their iPogs! Er, iPods. Seriously, it's iPOD, not POG? Fuck, I am old. Bring on the teenage girls!