A BRIEF LOTUS HISTORY
1997 to 04-17-04
By Luke Miller
1997
Jesse, Steve, and I first met at Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp in Divide, CO on the Pike’s Peak massif during the summer of 1997 where we were working for the summer. We would jam at night in the cabins where we were living, or haul the instruments up on the hillside under the stars. Steve had some congas and we some guitars, a harmonica, and maybe a bass.
1998
Then the winter of 1998 Mike, Jesse, and I were at a snow camp there and spent a lot of time jamming, talking about music, and even writing some material. Mike and I formed a plan to live together when we went to Goshen College the following fall.
That summer Jesse and I went out to Kansas where Mike was living and went to a couple Phish shows together and hung out for a week. Mike and I tossed around some ideas on how we’d like to form a band once we got out to school.
Jesse headed out to St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM in the fall and Mike and I went to Goshen. Steve was already in school at Goshen.
Mike and I started at Goshen and began looking around for people to start a band with. One of the first days when people were moving in we saw this mini-van with a Phish sticker on it. Andy Parada was moving into the same floor we were, and he was a drummer. We thought it was destiny.
Andy played in a couple of Latin bands with Joel Jimenez who was pretty much the go-to-bassist on campus. So Mike, Steve, Joel, Andy and myself started jamming. Steve and Andy would both play drum kits, we had some congas and other random percussion around that sometimes got used, Joel played bass, Mike played guitar, and I played guitar and also some harmonica, and mandolin.
We were having a good time jamming and thought we should get something together and do a performance. There were these “Coffee House” things the Campus Activity Council would do 3 times or so a semester where people would put on a show. Andy and Joel checked into it and the entire year was already filled up except the first one, which was only about 10 days away. So we decided to go for it. We learned some songs and wrote a few originals practiced like mad. We needed a name. Andy suggested Lotus and the Grand Funk Finale. I said, “how about just Lotus.” So we went with it. We kept the name later because we wanted something organic sounding and liked the spiritual significance the lotus holds.
Sept. 25, 1998 was the date of that coffee house. We played Get On Up (like a sex machine) by James Brown, A Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song, Bathtub Gin, Oye Como Va, Jessica by the Allman Bros., originals Umbilical Moonrise, Lazy Summer Groove, I Wish My Skin Were Electric, and Jonas. I’m not sure if there were more or not.
The show went well so we wanted to keep the band going and do other performances. That whole year of college we did scattered performances and jammed a lot.
The place where we practiced was underneath the snack bar in the Union building on campus. It was this tiny room with some acoustic paneling up. We squeezed in there and had to load and unload our stuff up this narrow stairway. Mike actually lived down there for a little while when he was between housing, sleeping in the “closet” under the stairs. That was in 2000 though.
1999
-Jesse Joins -
Then that summer Mike, Steve, and I went to live in Denver, where Jesse and I are from. Jesse was back for the summer as well and he started playing bass with us. We set up in a small side bedroom area of the house Mike, Steve, and some others were living in. We kept the windows shut because the noise was too much for the neighbors. It got super hot; we always called practices sweat-fests. We played the first show with Jesse at the Lo Do Music Fest in downtown Denver that June, 1999. One night Steve went to a rave outside of Boulder. He came back and said we should play stuff like that. The whole band had been listening to the Orb a lot and starting to open up more to electronic music. So we tried playing some trance beats and played some riffs more electronically oriented. Umbilical Moonset came out of that experience. Previously, we had mostly been into jam and funk stuff. This is when I came up with the Organic-Ambient-Trance-Funk moniker. By the mid-point of the summer Jesse decided he wanted to get more serious about music, so he enrolled at Goshen. Mike wrote the Opus at the tail end of the summer. Jesse contributed several songs, Liquid Meat, and Foam Annihilation. We learned some more covers, and I wrote some songs.
One show we did was at the old Quixote’s which was then located in Aurora, on Colfax in Denver, not one of the best area’s of town. We were playing and a small group of older guys walked in. Someone told us, “that’s Ekoostik Hookah and their percussionist wants to jam.” We invited him up and later talked to the guys and they invited us down to their shows at the Fox and Bluebird. We were chilling back stage with them at the Fox and Ed, the rhythm guitarist said, “I wish I had had something going like you guys when I was that young.” That gave us some inspiration to keep working on what we had started with the band.
That fall we tried to get more serious about Lotus, write more originals and play more shows. The group was Mike, Steve, Jesse, and myself. We all sang, but Steve and Mike did the majority of the scattered vocals. We played about half covers of Phish, the Grateful Dead, the Allan Bros., Medeski, Martin, and Wood, Ween, Beck, etc. and half originals. We recorded a 3-song demo CD with Umbilical Moonrise, Continental Drift, and Savage Dance on it. Other originals around this time were Dali, Lonely Wind, Exit 317, Sir Rubic, Tarragon, Vinegrette, Spaghetti, Stall, Nutella Banana, etc.
We did shows around the Goshen area. On our fall break we drove out to Missouri and Kansas and played some shows. Several kids from Goshen, Shorty included hit several shows on the break. They even made up Lotus Tour T-shirt and made all of us sign them. We did one trip to Madison later that Fall as well. Over the beginning of our Christmas break we went into a studio in Goshen and recorded for about 5 days. We recorded the instrumental parts of what we thought would be our first studio album. Then we all took off to go home for the holiday and we’re planning on putting the finishing touches on the album and recording the vocal. But the engineer went through a divorce, sold his mixing board, and we ended up not being able to finish the project. We had recorded Umbilical Moonrise, The Opus, Spaghetti, Wandering Home, Umbilical Moonset, and were planning on recording The Lonely Wind as well. We still have the unmixed tapes of these sessions.
2000
That summer, 2000, we all went to Colorado again. Not too long before we left we had been having Dave Guevara sit in on some shows playing percussion. We asked if he wanted to come out to Colorado with us, and he yes. So the five of us practiced a good deal and played a handful of shows that summer. We all lived in a house with Mike brother, Jeff. We practiced in the basement, which had plenty of space for a change. We all took a trip to a side part of the Grand Canyon at one point. During the drive there was this crazy thunder storm/sunset/rainbow thing happing in the desert. We were listening to this album, Speedy J – G-spot. It was a lasting experience and we kind of took it as a cue to start exploring more ambient electronic stuff live.
We started school again in the fall and Dave started having other obligations, so it slipped back to the four of us again. When we wanted to do stuff with more percussion we would have Chuck sit in. He was playing drums in several bands in Goshen at the time For our fall break the four of us went out and played some shows in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Spring Break we did a run that went from Ann Arbor to Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado. We continued playing shows around the area the rest of the school year. At the end of the year we took some improvisations for a couple of shows and put together a little CD that we called “Moments.” It didn’t have any “songs” on it, just the points after we’d finish a composed section and start jamming. We made some copies ourselves and sold some of them. Songs added during this period included Floating Amidst (w/lyrics), Space in Between, and Sunrain (w/lyrics).
2001
-Lotus Turns Instrumental, Chuck Joins-
That summer 2001 Jesse went to Mali, I went to Guatemala, Steve took a motorcycle trip across the country, and Mike drove across the country and did song playing on the street. We were all having fairly formative experiences and we wrote some emails and sent some letters to each other. And we decided that we wanted to take Lotus in a different direction. So when we came back to Goshen in the Fall we decided to drop the vocals, add Chuck as a full-time member of the band, stop playing covers, and go in a more electronic direction. We dropped most of our repertoire and so we did a lot more improvising to fill in because we didn’t have that many songs. New originals from around this time included Intro to a Cell, Spiraling Line of Light, It’s All Clear to Me Now, Moss Shoes and L’immueble. Joel Jimenez started running sound for us, and we recorded most of the shows that Fall. At the end of the semester we took the jams we liked the best and made “Vibes.” The first three songs were parts of compositions with jams, but the rest was all improvised material. We printed somewhere around 1500 copies of it released it in March 2002. Jesse did the artwork.
In December Chuck got a Roland Hand Sonic percussion unit. We were trying to get more gear to enable us to go in a more electronic direction. This was one of the first electronic elements. He first used it at a show in Grand Rapids in January. This show became one that was on many people’s “best of” list around Goshen. It had a lot of improvisations on it and Chuck was doing a lot of experimenting with the Hand Sonic.
That Spring Semester we did monthly shows in Goshen and in Grand Rapids, MI as well as play other shows around the region and prepared to move out to Philadelphia. We bought this old Chevy Van with a turtle top to get ready for some touring. I bought a synth before we left and start integrating it throughout the summer. Songs such as Sift, Continuum, Suspended Reason, In the Bliss, Shimmer and Out, and Nematode were added around this time.
2002
-Philly Summer-
Jesse and I graduated from Goshen College in May 2002 after finishing up our senior music recitals. Jesse was a composition major and did a concert of the pieces he had written. I was a classical guitar major and did a formal classical guitar recital. Two days after the commencement Jesse, Steve, and I headed out to Philly to find a place to live. We looked around for a week, found a place and headed back to Goshen. And then Mike, Chuck, and Todd Hershberger (who was going to start as our sound engineer) moved out about a week later.
Jesse and I were driving Lotus’s beater van with a turtle top out and it was packed to the ceiling with everyone’s stuff and pulling the trailer. Todd was driving his old Thunderbird in a similar condition. Steve, Chuck, and Mike had taken other vehicles and driven separately. Well, there was too much weight for the van and after a couple hundred miles we blew a tire. We put on the spare, drove about 30 more miles and blew another. We had to tow the van to a truck stop, and everything was closed. So we slept in the van after carving out little niches amidst all the stuff. The next morning we put on heavier gauge tire and continued driving. When we were nearing Philly a huge thunder storm hit and Todd blew a tire on his car. We finally limped into Philly with all the stuff.
I think it was one day after we all arrived in Philly that we had our first show there. June 7, 2002 at Nostradamus. I remember telling the crowd about how we blew 3 tires while moving out and were on the edge of death getting out there. It seemed like a historic show to me because it was the first in Philly. It wasn’t that great or anything, but of the handful of people that were there, most are still coming to the Philly Lotus shows.
That summer we did our longest tour to date going through the Midwest and up into upstate New York from August 15th to Sept 7th. Todd Hershberger did soundboard recordings of almost every show on this tour. Songs added around then included Greet the Mind, Countless Dimensions, Philly Hit, My Own Personal 3-Letter Word, Soma, Suitcases and Sandwiches, Livingston Storm, Caywood, and Flower Sermon.
2003
-Mike’s Hiatus-
Through the Fall we played around the East Coast. We had been going hard on the road since we moved out to Philly. Mike wanted to take a break, but the rest of us wanted to keep going. We had a little Mid-West run planned in Jan./Feb. 2003. So Mike thought long and hard and eventually decided he’d take off. Mike did the run with us, which finished up in Chicago on Feb. 8th 2003, then took off for Colorado and Oregon. This last show on Feb. 8th was also a widely circulated one that made some folks “best of” lists.
We took recordings from this tour, all done on our cheap Philips CD Burner straight from the soundboard with no mixing, and picked out the best material and made Germination. We sped through production and released the album in May on Harmonized Records. It was our first CD on the label. We had this loosely defined concept that we had attempted on our first scrapped studio project of having the album progress through the night from Moonrise to Moonset. We picked this up on Germination and mixed it with the concept of a seed starting to grow. Vibes had sold out a couple months before that and we decided not to re-press it because the quality seemed not quite up to par to us.
We had made arrangements for Michael Christie to step in for Mike. He was a keyboardist from Lancaster, PA who played in the band Second Sky. We played from Feb. 14th to April 10th with Christie. We added the songs Juggernaut, Freezebox, Los Angeles, Latin House Jam, and Transfer Consciousness. Then Mike Rempel rejoined at a show in Pittsburgh on April 12th. Todd left the sound engineering post in March and headed back to Indiana.
At the beginning of the summer our old van was pretty much functionless. Our trailer had gone the wayside as well. We were driving up to a show in Buffalo and the trailer started swaying back and forth. After a monstrous downhill curvy section we stopped. The trailer wheels were smoking. The ball bearings on both sides were totally gone and you could push the trailer from side to side with your foot very easily. We were lucky the whole thing hadn’t come apart and smashed all the equipment inside. We ditched the trailer in someone’s yard, jammed everything into the van, and kept rolling to Buffalo. We bought a newer van a few weeks later and had the old one towed away, and got a brand new trailer.
We did a big summer tour from June 25th to July 31st through the Southeast, Mid-west, and up to Maine, calling it the Summer Meltdown Tour. Here songs such as Did Fatt, Jump Off, and Mikesnack came out. We finished up the summer by playing some regional shows and three shows with the Disco Biscuits. Jesse brought the sampler into the mix at some point here. I think the first song with it was Ball of Energy. Lucid Awakening was added as well, and it seemed to be “The Song” for the Fall run.
At this point we started working with Opus One Productions to do our booking and management. They are Mike Sanders, who does the booking, and Brendan Pester who does publicity and promo. Opus One is based out of Pittsburgh and also work with Jazz Mandolin Project. We had been playing shows in Pittsburgh on a fairly regular basis. Brendan and his crew had been at most of them. And I think it was the fourth one we did I was talking to him and I mentioned we were looking around at different booking agencies. He said he worked for Opus and they were actually looking to add someone and Lotus would be perfect. I kind of dismissed it at the time, but several weeks later we worked out the details and started working with Opus.
In the Fall we did another tour through the Southeast and Midwest that included a short show with John Scofield. This tour was the first booked entirely by Opus One. We wanted to play with Scofield, but the routing nearly killed us. We played in Virginia Beach, then drove straight through the night to Pittsburgh, then straight through the night again to get to Raleigh. We played Halloween in NYC, some more area shows, and we finished off the year with our first NYE show in Greensboro, NC. We chose the theme, “The Future Is Now,” and attempted to work in elements that reflected different view of what the future would look like from their perspective of time and outlook. Songs added around this time included Spiritualize, Slow Cookin’, Plant Your Root, and Seen From Out Here, Gemini Conspiracy, Dark Brown Earth, Opo, and Colorado.
2004
We started our first national tour in Jan. 16 and it went to March 7th. Steve bought an auxiliary e-drum percussion pad and started using it throughout the run. Scott Huston did the whole run with us running lights and helping with tour management.
We heard that Germination was nominated for a Jammy while on tour for best cover art. Carl Bender who does our web design and other art for us had done the cover. He had since moved from Goshen, out to Philly and was living with us.
After we returned from that we took 10 days or so to do pre-production for a studio album. Then we headed to Pittsburgh to record for a week. We laid everything down in 9 days, returned to Philly to do some editing for a week and a half, then went back into the studio for 6 days to do the mix down.
We finished the mix down, and drove through the night to make it back to Philly for a show at the Trocadero. This was our biggest show yet in Philly, with about 600 in attendance.
(through 04-17-04 Trocadero Philadelphia, PA)