martes, 2 de enero de 2007

MXPX mike herrera



MIKE - BASS, VOCALS

Hi. My name is Mike. I play bass in a band called MXPX, and I sing too. I grew up in a blue-collar town called Bremerton, WA. It's a pretty good place to grow up I guess. I was always the one half Mexican kid in school and I thought I was the only one, until one year my family went on vacation to visit family in Tijuana. So anyway back to music.

This guy I knew played guitar in a local punk band and they just happened to practice down the street from my house, just a bike ride away. So in Jr. High I would show up there after school and climb down the stairs into the dark basement where they had all these amps, drums and guitars. This was the greatest thing ever and I felt like a small part of it. I started going to see them play at parties where crowds of older cool kids were skating on ramps and roaming free, just having a great time. This was the Punk Scene in Kitsap County around 89 or 90. They started promoting their own shows in community halls and I was equally enthralled to be a part of it. As I looked at this new world with wide-eyed wonder I knew what I had to do. I had to start my own punk band. And I did.

It didn't happen over night like in the movies. Like on the A-team when they build some big machine with chemical waste, a barrel of monkeys, and duct tape then lay in wait to defeat the bad guys. This was me sitting in my bedroom wondering why it was so hard to make my fingers move in weird positions. I started playing bass in early 1991 and guitar about six months later. As soon as I could make a note on the bass, I started writing my own songs. Most of them had two chords in them and really bad lyrics about all my teenage problems. I would sit in my sister's bedroom and record into her stereo, then play it back on a boom box. Then re-record the songs playing through the boom box while also singing backing vocals and guitar. You get the idea right? I had a cassette tape full of these little songs. So naturally the next step was to play the songs live in front of real people. Okay, this isn't a book so I'll just say MXPX was then born... July 6 th , 1992, the rest is history (sort of). Our first show was terrible; the last show we just played was pretty good. See you out there.

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