One Way Ticket

Ah graduate school.  Ask most any professional in the sciences about it and they will recount stories of living off of ramen, a painfully atrophied social life, tap-dancing to the ridiculous beat of a professor's expectations, and long hours in a lab stacking atoms with tweezers.

Luckily, my grad school experience was nothing like that.  My wife and kids were marvelous, classes and research were engaging, my major professor was a marvelous mentor, and I even got play in a rock cover band (I did eat more than my share of ramen, though).  Our band was called One Way Ticket, and we played at church dances and wedding receptions for a few years.  We had the distinction of being the only band (that I know of...) consisting of a lawyer, a graduate student, an engineer, a hotel executive, and a steel worker.  Here's the band roll:

David Stevenson - piano, keyboards, lead vocals, melodica virtuoso
Monte Hansen - drums, vocals, attitude
Jeff Beeler - guitar, vocals
Ruth Stevenson - vocals, keyboard
Lee Davies - vocals, tambourine
Jonathan Laman - guitar wizard
Richard Moore - bass guitar, keyboard, definitely no vocals

Everyone was pretty busy, but we managed to get together and practice every week or two.  Through Monte's hotel and DJ connections, we even had a rather elaborate PA system.  I don't have a picture, but it pretty much looked like this:

Except in blue sparkle.  With our band name airbrushed on the side.  Being carried by Mr. T (our roadie).

We didn't record much of our playing, and we never really played original stuff while I was in the group, but we did record out of the mixer at a couple of the dances that we played.  Recently I dusted off a couple of the recordings and found one to share.  This is us playing Coldplay's "Yellow" back in 2007 or so.

OneWayTicket-Yellow by are.kay.more