Tom worked a full time job. I worked part time. When I worked at all. At the hospital doing an admin job. But we did the band full time. I called him 5-10 times a day to discuss the band. We would talk about how to break through every day. Fine tuning our marketing. Discussing what the marketing looked like. Tom did a lot of the execution, I designed.
I was careful about how we came across. I had stacks and stacks of music mags in my eaves. I knew the importance of marketing. It was the lens through which people heard your music. I wanted us to own the lens.
Tom contacted everyone. He made connections. He build a database of people to speak with. Tom was a workhorse. We had never worked so hard before on anything and we loved it.
But I pushed him… too hard. In my head we were running out of time and it was never good enough. I probably had a lot to do with him walking away when he did.
It’s hard to describe Tom’s role. He wasn’t just our guitarist. He was our glue. Our facilitator. The band manager in some respect. Our biggest fan. It’s telling that me and Sarb created magic when he left, but without Tom, we didn’t know how to to move forward.