Scott Feinstein

When I was 13 years old, I wanted to be Ace Frehley, but the one thing I lacked was the ability to play guitar. So I took guitar lessons on an Aria Pro II gold top. It was the closest thing I could afford to Ace's gold top Les Paul. I started playing in little bands in our garage for years till my brother Chris and I ventured out and found Cantrell's, a small cinderblock punk rock club where the toilets overflowed onto the dance floor every night and the rickety stage threatened to cave in. "Hey, there are other people like us." Saw tons of great punk rock shows. As D. Boon said, "Punk rock changed my life." Chris saw Barry Nelson and Shannon Ligon in a band and he said to himself, "I'm going to steal them and start my own band." And it worked. They would practice as a three piece until they said, "We need a singer." I became a singer by default. I was just upstairs. We recorded a EP for a wonderful friend Tim Lee on his "Big Monkey" record label and were on the Nashville compilation "City Without A Subway." We met and played with a lot of cool bands. Probably the highlight was opening for the Replacements. I really wanted to open for Husker Du, but they had a touring opening band with them. But boy did I try to add us to the show. Chris eventually left and went on to play with the Questionnaires and then hooked up with Jay Joyce for a bunch of different projects. Shadow 15 played a little while longer with a very good drummer, Richard Pryor. But eventually we were not having as much fun, so we did a couple of farewell shows and called it quits. I tried to start another band, but it was such a pain in the ass I gave up for a while. Then my friend Earl, who played guitar, said, "How about I play bass?" So we started jamming and it was fun again. Some friends suggested a young drummer named Brad Pemberton. We auditioned him on the stage of Elliston Square, a tiny club that Earl co-owned. Brad had never been in a band before, but he kicked serious ass. We became Sideshow, then eventually Flimsy, as we discovered there was another band called Sideshow. I eventually went on the road as a guitar tech and Brad went on to play with Jay and Chris in Iodine. I was quite disillusioned with the whole music biz, so what's the obvious thing to do? Work for a record label. I worked at Capitol Records for eight very long and painful years. Thank god for Napster helping kill the bloated, arrogant music biz, or maybe I would have died there. Now I'm happily married with a beautiful and supportive wife and have three cool dogs. Somehow after all of that music biz and not making a single dollar playing it, I now have a house a couple of cars and am relatively happy. I now have a real Gibson Les Paul gold-top. And I would love to make some music again. That's why I started this site to give myself a little kick in the ass. It's like a rock n' roll time warp. Let's see what happens. Enjoy!