You can buy the two releases by Terry Walsh and 2 A.M. at CD Baby!
Somewhere around the Summer of Love, two Irish-American brothers from South Minneapolis started a band called The Two Tornados. Early songwriting attempts featured lyrics that were mostly based on bodily functions. The band spent little time practicing music, preferring to practice signing their autographs.
The band broke up due to the usual artistic differences. Jimmy wanted to concentrate on writing about burps, while I preferred to explore the lyrical potential in gassers. We went our separate ways, but continued to be thrown together in years to come, due either to fate, or to the fact that we shared the same room.
When we pooled our money together to buy a tape recorder with a radio built right in it was a major turning point. We got quite good at hitting Play and Record simultaneously right after the DJ stopped talking, and hitting Stop right before he started blahblahblahing again. We tried to get perfect recordings, and it could be really difficult. I never got a complete version of American Pie or Sugar Sugar, but I did capture I Think I Love You once I think.
I started playing piano, mostly Elton John songs, and played at the De La Salle high school talent show freshman year with my leg shaking so much I couldn't hold down the damper pedal. I joined a band as a singer after graduation in 1980, and we practiced regularly for months, perfecting our forty song set list complete with a handful of originals. The band, after much fruitless debate and one almost physical confrontation, was called The Exceptions. We played one show, at our old high school, and I totaled my Mom and Dad's Chevette driving to the post-gig party.
After that The Altered Boys were born, a trio constantly in search of a fourth member. I tried to play guitar and sing, Jim Hanneman played guitar, and Jim Meyer played drums until we found a drummer, then switched to bass. After the drummer left, we somehow found bassist Amy McCumber, and Meyer switched back to drums. We practiced for months to play one gig, usually opening for REMs or The Neglecters (bands featuring brother Jimmy or brother Jay), then stop for six months before repeating the process. Meyer's critical ear knew exactly how the drumming should sound, and he became discouraged when he realized how long it would take him to reach that level. Hanneman went to law school, and I started playing solo at the Uptown Bar. I also played a couple of shows in cover bands with two friends of Amy's: Bart Bakker and Joe Loskota. There were about 4.3 seconds when I was wrongly considered the next big thing, or maybe just as a guy who knew someone who worked with the next big thing's cousin. In the mid-eighties the cool indie labels would have none of my Sugar Sugar inspired writing. It was the era of Loud Fast Rules and Loud Loud Loud Loud Guitars. Daunted, but still stupidly ambitious, I moved to New York, and played in the clubs of Greenwich Village while trying to pay rent by working selling cassettes at Tower Records. Four months later I was back home in Minneapolis, my tail firmly between my legs.
I took a job at a record store one door down from the Uptown Bar called (yecch) Great American Music. They made us wear ties and take orders from a shoe salesman who prefaced every lecture with the word "basically...". But I decided to work there and delve into the extensive catalogs of two artists I admired very much, but who were so prolific that it was overwhelming to think of trying to purchase all of their music: Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. People would come into the store and smile when they heard Blonde on Blonde or Saint Dominic's Preview coming out of the speakers instead of the GAMCO PlayTapes Mr. Basically tried to force us to put on. They were awful! Short slices of crappy songs with some shill D.J. between cuts telling us "what's Hot and what's Now!" But after working there for a year, Dylan and Van were like old friends. I also met a couple other real life life-long friends at this stupid corporate record store (see Craig Planting's perspective in our blog).
One day in 1989, I was dressed in my tie behind the counter of the store, and Bart Bakker walked in specifically to talk to me. He wanted to start a band. Joe Loskota was reportedly on board, so we only needed a drummer. I immediately thought of the best....uh, and only....drummer I knew: Jim Meyer. But Meyer couldn't/didn't want to spend the time, and Bart suggested we ask a friend of his from a cover band. Dave Haugen was a nice guy who owned a van, and he fit in like the missing puzzle piece.
The band needed a name, and several spectacular choices were whittled away until we were left with two incredible candidates: Endless Tongue, and 2 A.M. Ralph. Incredible.
And so 2 A.M. Ralph was born. Or "2 A.M. Stupid Ralph" as Steve McClellan used to call us. I don't think he liked our choice. But he did give us a few gigs. Gigs were few and far between, and rarely profitable. It became very clear that I would have to come up with all of the dough myself if we were ever to make a record. We flip flopped on the band name, doing shows as Terry's Tiny Town and Terry Walsh's 3D House of Pancakes before reclaiming half of 2 A.M. Ralph's name.
We began recording tracks for our first CD. I scraped money together slowly for the sessions (with engineer/producer Tom Herbers). After five years and seven studios, Harriet was finally finished. It came out in 1995 and sold somewhere close to fifty copies. We've sold a few hundred over the years, and gave away many more. The used record stores used to be very well stocked with copies of Harriet.
Bart moved on to play with another band. Joe got married and had a son. Dave and I kept playing and writing together. Bassist Jeff Litke joined up and we played some pretty good gigs as a trio, thanks to booking agent Brian Swanson. I started accepting credit card offers and we went back to Tom Herbers' studio to record what would become Work and Hope, a nice CD full of songs I 'm still proud of, but no one else cared much about. It was doomed from the start. The cover was designed by Jeff's roommate, and the band name is hidden in a way that would make Nigel Tufnel proud. The date on the back of the CD says 1996, but it was released in January of 1997. It was old before it was even released. Cripes.
After going on tour (pretending to play bass) in Slim Dunlap's band, then playing a couple more shows with Bart back on bass, I quit playing music. I tried not to think about what a fool I was for trying so hard to succeed in music. It was the saddest time of my life. I thought I just needed to grow up and put those childish guitars away forever. I took a job at Hello! Booking with the aforementioned Brian S, and before long realized that I couldn't work in or around the industry without becoming seriously depressed.
I told Brian I needed to move on.
I was dispatching limousines while listening to a Vikings' preseason game when the radio station went to a commercial. They played the usual quick blast of bumper music. Only this time it wasn't the usual music: it was my harmonica coming out of the radio. I flew out of my chair in the little office and shouted "They're playing my song!!" It was a song called "Your Way Out" from Work and Hope, and it sounded good, or at least as good as a lot of other bumper music you might hear. An old friend from childhood, and then again in high school - a guy named Pat Swift - had tossed me a lifeline. WCCO-AM wound up using 2 A.M. songs on all of their sports broadcasts for the next five years. It made me feel like a real musician again. I had a new injection of the music biz poison in my veins.
A while after that, Brian called me and invited me to join him and two other guys - bassist Rodney Toogood (who I knew from Brian's old band The Idlewilds) and drummer Dave Kirby - in a "go nowhere, do nothing little rock and roll band". He said it was really just an excuse to go out once a week and drink beer. It was a great deal. We only played songs we wanted to play, and we had no intentions of gigging. We did wind up playing a couple of weddings. And we did open for Cheap Trick once. In the summer of 2001, we began learning a pile of Van Morrison songs, laying the foundation for what would become The Belfast Cowboys.
The original cast of 2 A.M. was soon recruited to play with the Cowboys, and we've been playing together steadily for five years. We play shows as 2 A.M. every once in a great while, and it's more fun now than it ever was.
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