This AWESOME QUOTE ISN'T MINE-BUT I LIKE IT."If you're gonna do something, then go out there and do it and don't complain. Do the right thing and do what you believe in no matter what the cost. Whatever anyone has to say about your beliefs or your approach is absolutely IRRELEVANT. Choose a path and stick to it. When the road gets rough, find a way to keep going. When you feel like you cant do that, keep moving forward even if you dont know where youre going. Hang in there long enough to figure it out and learn from what's happening. Walk like you talk. DO NOT COMPROMISE ON PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. When you fuck up -- and you will -- admit it and correct it. Move on. The point: to succeed in anything, you have to be absolutely willing to go out there and get your nose brokenrepeatedly. And in order to take the beatings and LEARN from them and come out on the other side STRONGER, you have to have a positively UNWAVERING belief in what youre doing and why youre doing it. There are two roads in business and in life, the easy one and the hard one. Only one of the two is really worth taking. Everybody talks, but practically nobody walks. There are people who DO things and damn the torpedoes, and there are people who watch them do it from the comfort of the couch. I have always known that at some point Id have to decide which I wanted to be."-Joe/Hard Volume RecordsSusan, Emily and Jitka are my life. I'm married with two lovely daughters. I'm was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in the 'burbs. I'm the lead guitar slinger for this dynamic, ripping, hard-rock band... here in northern Virginia we call BENTT. And its all come about basically by accident. It all started in the summer 2005 when I met Tech Sergeant Henry Lopez at my apartment complex. After a few cold ones, we discovered our mutual history-deep in our past... of having both been in bands in high school. He played a mean bass. We talked about getting together and jamming if we could dig up a drummer sometime. Anyway, I'll get into that later, but I just want to stress that we didn't deliberately set out to start a band!!! If you've never heard of us... then you should go and check out our music on www.benttband.com or also our myspace page. And if you're interested in checking us out live, then checkout our upcoming show dates and clear your calendar because we really KICK IT OUT AT OUR LIVE SHOWS... or so I've been told.I was in my first band at 15... we were called WINDJAMMER, and we were too young to play in clubs for many of the six years we were together. So we ended up playing parties for free beer most of the time. During my last year of high school I was fortunate enough to get into the high school's stage band... it was a unique musical experience and I learned a lot from playing strictly rhythm guitar. I've never had any serious training or taken lessons regularly, though I did take lessons for about three months initially when I started at 13.I picked up the guitar about two years ago (after many years of not even touching it) and I haven't been able to put it down since. In January of 2007, Henry (H FROM BENTT), and I decided that after kicking around with two differant drummers, to recruit a serious drummer and see if we couldn't cultivate our original musical ideas. Enter from the U.S. Marines, Ssgt Shawn Tart. Just like us, Shawn hadn't been in a band for many years. After two months of jamming out our original ideas and trying to formulate them into songs, we realised what we had to have was a singer, and to formally put together a band. Enter Johnny Hamman in March of '07... and BENTT was complete. Within 5-6 weeks, we had completed six originals. That is what ended up on the demo we recorded as BENTT, in April of 2007.I've loved music for as long as I can remember... blues, classic rock, metal, bluegrass, classical, americana, "old school" country, reggae, rockabilly, I can listen to practically anything and find something to like about it. Except for excessively pasteurized, homogenized, commercialized, sterile and over-produced junk that can't be played live without 30 musicians.I still love a lot of music I enjoyed in my teens as well as those bands, but I really like discovering new music these days. And though the "heavier the better" is what I seek out the most-it seems like it's bands I heard of for years that I never listened to to be influencing me the most these days. Honestly though... I don't have a lot of time to listen to music.We hope to go into the studio soon to record some of the newer tracks. In our live set, we're ripping through 11 or 12 originals at the moment.If it wasn't for our full time day jobs... we'd easily have twice that by now.-to be continued...
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