Hustle The Most

Ep1 - What Does It Mean To Hustle The Most?
At 10 years old, I spent my weekends running wild through a giant flea market my uncle ran. It’s where I first learned what it meant to hustle—how to talk to people, make quick deals, avoid getting hustled myself, and turn $2 into $10 and a bag of candy. In this first episode, I share stories from those early days, lessons about creativity, resilience, and listening, and a little background on who I am as your host.

Greg and I have been friends for over 25 years and every time we catch up we it takes hours and hours. We jumped on the podcast and did what we always do which is talk about everything you can imagine! We talk about everything from playing in bands to things that our parents do or have done that shaped us to into the people that we are today. Check out Parts 1-4 of my conversation with Greg Bennick.

Greg and I have been friends for over 25 years and every time we catch up we it takes hours and hours. We jumped on the podcast and did what we always do which is talk about everything you can imagine! We talk about everything from playing in bands to things that our parents do or have done that shaped us to into the people that we are today. Check out Parts 1-4 of my conversation with Greg Bennick.

Greg and I have been friends for over 25 years and every time we catch up we it takes hours and hours. We jumped on the podcast and did what we always do which is talk about everything you can imagine! We talk about everything from playing in bands to things that our parents do or have done that shaped us to into the people that we are today. Check out Parts 1-4 of my conversation with Greg Bennick.

Greg and I have been friends for over 25 years and every time we catch up we it takes hours and hours. We jumped on the podcast and did what we always do which is talk about everything you can imagine! We talk about everything from playing in bands to things that our parents do or have done that shaped us to into the people that we are today. Check out Parts 1-4 of my conversation with Greg Bennick.

So not too long after moving into my apartment in downtown Seattle I started trying to figure out what was next for me. I was working at Urban but the paint started to dry pretty quickly. I was looking for something different. Like always I needed to make more money so I started looking for another job. I kept working at Urban but just needed something else. I needed another job, a side hustle, something. Let me ask this before I jump into this. Have you ever had a conversation with someone that completely changed your perspective on everything? A conversation that inspires you or gets you pumped to start a personal revolution? I had one of these conversations with one of my favorite humans in the world while sitting in a vegan thai food restaurant in the University District of Seattle. The restaurant we were sitting in was called Arrays and I gotta give a shout out to them because I used to crush their buffet on the regular and it was always amazing! For those of you that know this place this was when it was located in the old location on university across from Thai Toms

In the last episode we talked a little about how sometimes things don’t work out. I was on an amazing tour playing the drums on stage every night to tons of people and I was somewhat miserable. I was in limbo. I understand limbo but I have never been comfortable in that space. I think looking back it was just wrong place and wrong time. So when the tour was over I had the choice to pretty much move anywhere in the world. There was a brief time where I was entertaining the idea of going back to Prague to live for a bit. That thought only lasted a few days then I decided to move back to Seattle. I had a lot of great friends there and I fell in love with that city a long time ago so I was going back. It just made sense to regroup in a place that I was familiar with and a place that I felt had some opportunities to do something musically and Seattle had a good job market. I changed my flight from LAX to flying into Vegas. My older sister lived there so I decided to go hang with her for a bit. I think I flew out of Heathrow in London. Ya know it’s always a little weird flying internationally because the flights are always such a melting pot of people. I mean everyone is flying to the states but they are all coming from different places and sometimes just connecting through airports in Europe and the UK. The flight back was pretty uneventful. Flying 10 hour by yourself across the Atlantic is always something. It wasn’t the first time I had done it so I guess you just roll with it.   When I got to Vegas I still had my drums in Orange County so I borrowed my sister’s car and drove over to pick up my drums. They were at Tommy’s house in Costa Mesa and it was kind of weird meeting up with him to get them. Not because we didn’t like each other it was just one of those “we tried and failed and now here we are” kind of moments. After a short residence in Vegas I had to go back to Michigan and get my car and drive the 35 hour back to Seattle. This trip out I had my friend Hizzy roll out with me. He was a dude I always hung out when I was back in Flint. He worked as a piercer in this tattoo shop that I used to hang out at. My boy Joe Harris was a tattooer there as well. I always loved coming back to hang with those dudes.  Joe and Hizzy were best friends for years and years! Everytime I came home to visit I would head to the shop and just hang out. Hanging out at that shop was always fun. They did a lot of walk-ins and they would have some of the craziest people coming in there wanting some of the worst tattoo ideas you could imagine. I remember sitting in this chair behind the counter and this big dude rolled in with his shirt all unbuttoned and he looked at me and was like “how much it cost me to get Sweet N Low across my chest”. No size, no font, no artwork. My man just wanted a price and his shirt was already half off and he was ready to go. There were so many of those stories. Every time I was there I would have to restrain myself from face palming myself when people would pitch their crazy tattoo ideas. That’s probably not right and I shouldn’t judge but some of the ideas were just ludacris.

Joe had a hoop in the back behind the shop so we used to go back there and shoot around if he didn’t have any appointments. When I say behind the shop what I really mean is a super dirty alley that sometimes had homeless people living in it. I’m sure we woke up people in that alley when we were screaming about making dope trick shorts. It was fun and we just rolled with it. This was the shop where I got my first tattoo in. It wasn’t the best set up but we made it work. I remember getting tattooed and I had to lay on a weight bench because he didn’t have a proper table. I mean it worked but it was awful. I was basically laying with my stomach on the bench and my head between the rack of the bench and Joe would be hunched way over trying to tattoo my back. We still laugh about that to this day. I was working at FedEx at the time so I would get tattooed for like 3 hours then go unload trucks in like 110º trailers in pontiac. That’s not the best way to heal tattoos if anyone is wondering. I think I did that about 5 or 6 times before we finally finished. It’s crazy this was in his very early days of tattooing. You know how it goes, everyone wants a tattoo from their friend because their friend now does tattoos but they are of course just starting so their tattoos probably aren’t the best. Joe was the same. This dude has been crushing it for the last 10/15 years but this was well over 20 years ago and he had been tattooing or about 5 minutes so ya get what ya get! 

I gotta take a minute out to tell this story about hanging at the tattoo shop and how for like 2 days I was the most famous dude in Flint! This was like 2004 and Myspace was in full swing. I brought my computer to the shop at one point and hooked up to their phone line so I could get online. There was no WIFI happening for sure. I was showing Joe and Hizzy my Myspace page and there were like 4 dudes in the front that were kind of in earshot to us and I was just showing Joe and Hizzy things on my page and this dude was like “yo that’s you” ? And of course I was like, yeah. And he looked at his other dudes and was like “Yo this dudes on the internet!” I laughed it off and just kind of carried on and a few days later I was back at the shop and one of those dudes walked in with like 6 other dudes and was like “yo that’s the dude from the internet” and they thought I was way famous. I finally broke down and was like no it’s a website called Myspace and you can have a profile too, you just need an email address. I told them how it worked and they all went home and created profiles. They also figured out how to edit the HTML which was a hot thing at the time. They all requested me and after about 5 days their pages were so full of coding that they would barely load. When you clicked on it there was money raining down and booties bouncing around the page along with these crazy bass hogging songs playing in the background and like lasers and stuff shooting everywhere. It was completely insane. The pages would barely load! 

Anyway so Hizzy and I hopped in the Porsche and headed across the country. I felt bad because Hizz was like 6’3” and like 250 and we were in this little 2 seater for like 40 hours. We packed a bunch of stuff into the car so he even had stuff at his feet. It was pretty cramped but we made the best of it. He took lots of photos of the usual touristy stuff like, Wall Drug, random people on the road and lots of scenic stuff. I think I did all the driving and of course rolled into town at like 4 AM just dead tired. We were staying with one of my friends that had extra space to put us up for a while. Hizzy stayed there for about 10 days and was pretty hesitant about going back. He kept talking about not going back, I think he changed his flight once or twice because we were just having fun. We were having fun just hanging out and he was stoked to not be in Flint. I can tell you that when you live in one place for 20 or 30 years and you don’t get out of that place very often if ever, a new place seems like an entire different planet. I felt the same way when I first moved there. It just sucks you in and you never want to leave. We didn’t do anything special just just kicked it around different parts of Seattle and Tacoma. Every place was new to him so he was just taking it all in. We went to a few skateparks and hung out. He didn’t skate but he had a video camera and was always trying to get Robby and I to do tricks. We were at the park in a town called Puyallup and he kept asking if we were going to pull yal up skatepark. It was so funny.

So after Hizzy talked himself into going home it was time for me to look for a job. Remember this was starting over for me so I was just trying to figure it all out. I kind of looked around Tacoma for work but I was looking at apartments in Seattle so I thought it was best to probably look for work up there. It’s only about 30 miles from Tacoma to Seattle which in midwest miles that’s nothing. We drive that everyday for fun but in Seattle that 30 mile commute can take 2-3 hours sometimes. I did a lot of digging around looking for work and came up with nothing. I mean I say I was looking but really what that meant was that I would apply for a few things online and look on Craigslist and Monster for an hour then go skateboarding until dark! 

After some digging my friend Sarah called me and asked me if I wanted to work for a day at her store. They needed day labor. She was working at the Urban Outfitters on 5th ave in downtown Seattle. She said they needed help painting tables. She lived in Queen Anne and walked to work which was basically like a 20 minute walk down 5th avenue. For my one day of work we decided that I would drive to her house and park my car and walk downtown to the store with her. They started at 7 am. So I had to get up at 5 and drive to Tacoma and find parking in Queen Anne then walk the 20 minutes down to the store to work for the day then walk back to my car, drive back to Tacoma. This was all for like $10 an hour. But it was only for a day so that was ok. You just do it, take the pain and move on. About halfway through the day they asked me if I wanted to come back the next day and me not having a job I said of course. Then they asked about coming for the rest of the week. Then they asked me to come back for the next 2 weeks. Then for the month. I made that commute and worked in that store for 3 months before I finally found an apartment in Seattle. One of the biggest barriers for me finding a place was the fact that I wanted to live close to downtown and I had a car. Parking was a total nightmare in Seattle and most of the apartments don’t have parking and if they do it’s like a couple hundred bucks a month to park. When you are broke and barely making it the hundred bucks is food money or a phone bill or something. Luckily I found a place downtown that was only a few blocks away from one of the only hidden non zoned, non metered places in Seattle. When I moved in I would just park my car there and walk the 2 blocks to my place. I didn’t drive much so I would have to go back every few days and make sure that it was still there. The apartment I rented was a cool little 1 br downtown where I paid $650 a month which at the time was an absolute steal! It was actually nice, clean and in a great location. It was close to work which was great because I ended up working at that store for about 4 years on and off. Eventually doing all of the design and display work for 2 different stores Seattle. It’s crazy to think that this job started out as an offer to come in and paint tables for a day and I ended up there for 4 years. This job gave me a lot of flexibility which eventually came in handy when the itch came back to get back on the road. I think we will get into that in the next episode. 

 I think that there is a common theme throughout a lot of my podcasts which is all about taking a chance, rolling the dice, leap of faith of whatever you want to call it. It’s about doing something instead of doing nothing. It’s about growing and changing and just seeing what’s out there. 9 times out of 10 you can always revert and go back if you don’t like what you see but what if you do like what you see? Hizzy coming out to Seattle with me was him taking a chance and he just didn’t have the push to stay there. I think another week and he would have stayed forever. He loved it out there and I think he felt free there. Free from all his burdens, drama and anything else that was weighing him down. Everytime I would come home and see him after that trip we would always talk about the trip we made together across the country! 

I really learned again that it’s ok to take a chance. I have this theory that when you are unemployed and have no prospects that your time is worth zero. That was the choice for me. At $10 an hour I could have said no that’s not worth my time and just kept looking. But the reality was that I would have just sat on the couch that day in an apartment that wasn’t mine while making zero. I feel like it’s an easier choice to make something over nothing but it really depends on where your pride lives in that equation. 

Looking back on this I also learned that you have to build things one piece at a time. I was rebuilding basically from scratch and that’s pretty overwhelming.Piece by piece you  I just took it piece by piece and put it together like a puzzle and eventually the outcome was a pretty picture but it all started with just a single piece.

So in the last episode we talked about making something out of nothing and then wanting to start over again. Craving instability and just being a nomad. I feel like I am always trying to make something out of nothing. When I decided to pack up and leave South Florida I was ready to hit the road. I was ready to tour and travel. I was headed back to the west coast. I shipped my drums and packed the rest of my stuff into the back of my old Porsche and was ready to hit the road. This is when the unthinkable happened. I was literally at the end of my street then my car just died. Car packed, Cat inside the car, Car dead! I pushed it back into a parking spot on the side of the road and popped the hood. This car had pretty much been completely redone under the hood so I was completely baffled. It wasn’t redone because I was like “I am fixing up this old car” it was more because stuff seemed to break on that car all the time. It was one thing after another. It’s one of those cars that when you buy one used the previous owner will give you the keys along with a huge manilla folder with all the receipts and repairs that they had done to it while they owned it. I had a similar folder. It was a giant folder just chalked full of receipts from repair after repair after repair. Anyway. I did some of the work myself so I was pretty familiar with the car. But why it was not running and just died kind of left me scratching my head. I called my buddy Danny that worked with me at Whole Foods.

He was a total gear head. He was the dude that had one of those Toyota Supra with the big wing on the back and he drove 100 miles an hour everywhere he went! When I tried to leave it was like 9am and I finally got him to my house at like 10 at night. He came over and we tried to get it started and nothing. Finally at like midnight we got it started and seemed to be running fine. We didn’t really do anything different, it just kind of started working on it’s own. I let it sit for the night and rolled back into my apartment for another night and then took off in the morning. I rolled out the next morning  and I went out and the car started right up so I took off back to Michigan. My plan was to head to Michigan and drop my car and my stuff at my parents house and fly out to Orange County to start a tour with a band called Throwdown.

Throwdown was this really heavy straightedge band out of Orange Country California that I had met while I was touring in Walls of Jericho. Meeting other bands while touring on the road was the best thing ever. It’s like a bunch of dudes that are on the same kind of journey just in a different order. It seems like touring bands always bro down when they meet up on the road. We never toured with them but we played a handful of fests and shows with them and they were awesome! Orange county was a totally different world compared to living in Detroit. I think California in general is pretty different but OC in particular was pretty cool and very band insestious. Throwdown had members of other bands like 18 Visions, Wrench, Death By Stereo, Bleeding  Through and a few more that I am probably forgetting. I guess other scenes were the same way but it seemed way more glamorous with good hair and palm trees! 

Anyway I got on the road and headed up I-75 toward Atlanta. I planned on stopping at my friend Jeff’s house. He lived in this warehouse complex where they used to have all kinds of punk and hardcore shows. I think I went through on a Friday night and there was a show happening in town. It wasn’t at the warehouse but at another club down the road. I rolled up and the band Bleeding Through was playing which was awesome! They were all friends of mine so it was awesome to catch up with them and hang out for a bit. Plus we were all staying at Jeff’s house! I remember talking to the singer Brandon and he was pretty stoked that I was going out to OC to play with Throwdown. He played guitar for them and 18 visions  for a long time before breaking off to do Bleeding Through full time.

He and I always got along really well. He’s one of those dudes that I have ran into in like 15 different states just randomly. Anyway, so I hung out in Atlanta for the night then got up early and got on the road. I remember walking out into the warehouse to leave and there were band dudes on every couch in that place just crashed out! It’s so weird to say this but I was stoked because I knew that in a few weeks that was going to be me. Just a side note, who looks forward to sleeping on random couches and waking up just feeling gross and ready to do it all over again.

The trip from Atlanta to Flint was pretty uneventful just the normal passing of Krystals and Waffle Houses every other exit. I got to my parents house and hung out with my dad for about a week before I headed out to California. 

This is pretty bizarre remembering this: When I left I left my car in the driveway at my dad’s house. I parked it way up in the front by the garage so no one would have to move it until I got back. My Dad at some point was going to take it for a ride and he went to start it and it was dead again. He messed with it for a bit and couldn’t get it to start. Eventually while I was on tour he had it towed in and come to find out that it had a bad fuel relay. This meant basically that the car was not getting any gas. Apparently it was working intermittently so in reality at any time during my trip from Florida to Michigan it could have just stopped working and I would have been stranded wherever I was. 

So I flew out to OC to meet up with the Throwdown dudes and start practicing for the tour. When I got there they were in the studio finishing up the final touches on the Haymaker record.

This was their first release on Trustkill Records which was pretty cool. This was also the first record where Dave and Keith switched places. Dave was now on vocals and Keith was on guitar. Keith also played in 18 Visions. So I think we did 3 or 4 practices without Keith because he was on tour still. I think 18 visions got home form tour the night before and we literally picked him up the day after on the way to the airport. He literally went from their van then to his bed for 1 night and then back into a van with all new dudes. It was kind of weird being jumping into a whole new situation with new dudes. It’s kind of like starting a new job. But a job that you have done before just a different company but doing the same job. You have new dudes, new jokes, new personalities, the same kind of conversations and the same kind of arguments about which Hatebreed or Madball record was the best. We rolled up to LAX and we hopped a plane to Newark to get ready for a quick  East Coast run with Hatebreed, Agnostic Front and Biohazard. This was a great tour and super fun! I had done tons of shows with Hatebreed over the years so I knew those dudes but this was my first time with AF and Biohazard. Growing up I was a total Biohazard fan so this was it for me.

Every night I would stand on the side stage and watch them play hit after hit and I was just beyond stoked! Hanging with Evan and Danny and Vinnie Stigma and Roger day after day was just rad! They always had so many crazy stories. We had a rental van and Jamie from Hatebreed road with us most of the time. It’s fun to switch it up sometimes and just roll with other dudes. These shows were warm up shows for the Hatebreed / Throwdown European tour that was next! I wasn’t super stoked to go back to Europe because I was just there 6 months earlier but that’s part of the gig. 

 After the tour we had a few days off so we stayed with and hung out with Josh Trustkill at his house in NJ before flying to Europe. Josh was a dude that owned a record label called Trustkill records that Throwdown was on. I had met him a few years before this when I was in Walls of Jericho and we were looking for a label to put out our record. Walls signed with Trustkill in like 2000 and we released a full length and then they did a few more after I left the band. When we met Josh he was going to law school in Syracuse and he lived in this tiny 1 bedroom apartment not too far from campus. He ran this label and put out records pre and post law school which was pretty crazy. His label started out as a black and white Fanzine where he did interviews with bands and record reviews and eventually became a record label that did pretty well. Trustkill put out some of my favorite hardcore records so I was pretty stoked to be back on the team. Since then he’s transformed it now into a new company/label called Bullet Tooth. He and I always got along really well. I always liked catching up with him.

So we hung there at his house for a few days and then headed for Europe. I talked a little about this earlier but It’s always interesting playing with an entire new group of people. I think this is something that only musicians think about. It’s almost like you have to learn a new language. I mean everyone is speaking english but a lot of the key words are different. Once you adapt it’s great but there is always this short transition period where you are both saying the same thing about a song but calling it 2 different things. There are these terms that band members use and depending on the band they mean different things. When someone says “yeah it’s a rock beat for 4 then and choke then it plays out with a punk beat into the outro”. Same words just different meanings from band to band. 

This tour was about 4 weeks long which is just about the right amount of time for a European tour. It’s about a week in that you are stoked to be out. Then, the second week it gets a little draining. The next week, week 3 it’s like I’m over it. Then, the last week you are pumped because you are going home. I think it’s about the same way when you get home. You are stoked to be home for about 10 days then you are ready to go back out again. I think it was about halfway through the second week of the Europe tour and things just weren’t clicking. I got along with everyone ok but I just didn’t fit in with them. Those dudes had been friends for all of their lives and I was just this dude kind of filling the space. I was just a cog in the wheel that allowed those dudes to continue to play in a band with their friends. It’s not a whoa is me thing. I signed up for it. That was a pretty lonely tour for me actually. I did a lot of soul searching on that trip. Those dudes kind of went off and did their own thing and I would wake up on the bus and everyone would be gone. I remember waking up at this festival in Belgium and coming downstairs to a laminate for the day and my per diem. I walked off and out bus was parked on the side of the road in a row of busses that stretched for about a mile heading down the road toward the festival. I followed the busses and eventually met up with everyone backstage.

Eventually we talked about the future of the band and the next tours and I decided that after the tour I would part ways with them when we got back to the states. We didn’t dislike each other, it just wasn’t the right fit. I know they blew through a handful of drummers after me as well so I didn’t feel so bad. There is something about a core group that writes good records and holds it all together. Once the core group is broken and someone leaves it’s only a matter of time until the wheels fall off. This happens to bands all the time. The rest of the tour I spent trying to figure out my next move. I basically had 2 weeks in Europe to figure out where I was going to go and what I was going to do. I remember being at the Full Force Festival in German and they had these huge catering tents and in the back of the tents they had 2 random computers for bands to check their email and correspond with their agents and labels. I had all day to do nothing that day so I just sat at the computer and talked to my friends on AIM Express.

I was just trying to sort out what the heck I was going to do. Since there were 2 computers and I was sitting on one of them people kept sitting down on the one next to me and they would get up and leave then someone else would come and sit down. At one point Scott Ian from Anthrax was sitting next to me and I was typing to my friend “DUDE SCOTT IAN IS SITTING NEXT TO ME”. then I would delete the window so he didn’t look over and think I was weird or some superfan ! I sat there just thinking to myself: where am I going to live and what I was going to do. I could go anywhere in the world. It was wide open. I had a totally blank canvas.

I learned that sometimes things don’t work. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes the puzzle pieces just don’t fit together. I learned that you can be at a festival with 65,000 people and feel completely alone. Don’t get me wrong there was 45 minutes on stage where I felt at peace with the world and all was right but the rest of the day I was dead inside. When things don’t work you can’t lay in the wake and let it take you over you just have to dust yourself off and move along. I was so excited to get back on the road and when it didn’t work out for me I was crushed. But again, I signed up for it. The grass isn’t always softer on the other side but if you don’t jump the fence you will never know for sure. 

Top 3 things I learned from all this:

The first thing I learned looking back at this is that sometimes you have to chase your dreams at any cost and if the wheels fall off then you can say that you tried. You gave it a shot! You will never have to sit there in your golden years wondering what would have happened if…

I think I really learned that being alone isn’t always a bad thing. Being alone gives you time to reflect and time to plan. It’s a good time to be really truly objective with yourself and with your future plans and goals.

Lastly I learned that starting over can be liberating. Having no bounds and no agenda gives you the ability to think creatively about what you want to do and where you want to focus. Imagine if you could start over tomorrow. What would you do? Where would you go? What would you be?