My experience with Midnight Rose is personal, obviously because my oldest brother Rob was the lead singer and a major creative force in the band. At the time, I was in 4th or 5th grade and wanted nothing to do with rock music. I somehow had subscribed to the idea that rock was just a bunch of noise, and I wasn't interested in any music at all-- except perhaps for the theme songs to TV shows and movies that I watched. When Rob's band rehearsed in back of our house, I paid very little attention, and when they went to play the music-store concert at the Valley Fair Mall, I chose to stay home and play outside with my friends
My parents, on the other hand, were proud of Rob, my Dad especially. Dad had played Conrad in a high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, and he knew early on that some of his kids were gifted musicians, and he wanted so bad for one of his kids to be famous, I suppose since his health problems had kept him from finding his own fame and fortune. .
After Midnight Rose broke up, Rob graduated from high school and went to Mexico in 1990 for a 2-year church mission, and during that time we all missed him. Mom and Dad would sometimes play tapes of Midnight Rose for visitors, and my sister Bonnie was busy working on her own musical skills. I myself played trumpet for awhile in junior high and had an amazing band teacher named Brad Hagen, but it would be years before I took up the guitar.
The music of Midnight Rose (and rock music in general) entered into my life through a little handheld tape recorder. This was about 1991. You know the usual thing that a 6th grader does with a tape recorder-- running around the house recording stuff like "Hi, I'm Mike, I'm here in my house, hmm, let's go upstairs and see Grandpa... Hi Grandpa!" etc. But one of the things that I did with that tape recorder was that I got ahold of Rob's Midnight Rose tape and I decided to experiment with making tape copies. I held up the microphone to the stereo as it played and hit record. The resulting copy was terrible quality, but my interest in recording music was piqued.
After Rob came home from Mexico, we shared a room for awhile in the cramped basement of my grandparents' house that our family called home. Rob was the family's hero at the time-- the oldest son, our Mormon family's first missionary "returned with honor", telling us loads of stories about the mean streets of Mexico City and wowing us with his fluent Spanish. Since he was my role model I followed him around and was interested in everything he did. I started listening to the Midnight Rose tape regularly, and when Rob started writing and recording new songs, I watched him every step of the way. I also started listening to the 80's and early '90s hair band music during it's last glorious months of popularity on the radio before grunge came along and killed it.
Well, it wasn't long before I started a new hobby that year-- designing cassette tape covers for a Midnight Rose "album". I named my "record company" "A.M.R. (amateur) Records" and set about working to perfect a professional-looking tape and tape cover, and spent countless hours over the next couple of years working with a typewriter and xerox machine and a cheap little 110 camera, making and re-making a better and better version of album art and "remastering" a cassette tape for "The Best of Midnight Rose". Since Mom and Dad were not well off, we didn't have a computer, and desktop publishing was nothing but a vague concept I'd heard about at school, so I just made do with the analog technology at hand. By the time Rob got married, I had just finished 9th grade, and I proudly delivered the finished product to him as a wedding present, complete with saran-wrap shrinkwrapping.
But for some reason, it didn't end there.
In 1995, I had learned about this amazing new thing called the Internet, and by the fall of '96 I had bought my own computer. That computer and it's successive upgrades was the key to my next big projects: a Midnight Rose CD and the Midnight Rose website. For that I would need some decent band pictures. The lousy photos I'd taken of the lousy xeroxes of Buddy's old polaroid band photos just weren't good enough for me, and since Rob had lost contact with Buddy, there was no way of copying the originals. I tried my hand at drawing pictures, with varying results. I finally was able to capture some decent stills off of the videos in 2001.
By my senior year of high school I had learned about recording wave files onto the computer using Creative Labs' Wavestudio (tm) (which is still my software of choice for editing wave files) and experimented with MIDI files and then these newfangled compressed audio files called mpeg-3 (or mp3 for short.) But the real accomplishment at that time was the Midnight Rose website. I was an HTML newbie and needed some help, but after I learned some coding and started working on my personal site, The Midnight Rose Tribute page went live on the internet in the spring of 1997. Initially it was hosted on Xmission.com, but I moved it to Geocities when I had to drop my internet access.
The CD project proved elusive, as there was only one kid at school I knew who had a CD burner and he had lent it to someone else, so we never got together. My cousin Tim had a good computer and a scanner, and he helped me put a version of the CD artwork together (but alas, Tim didn't have a burner either), as well as the graphics for the website, and using photoshop we polished up my crude Midnight Rose logo graphic (based on Rob's original design) into the one you see on the website today.
I graduated from high school in '97, and when I left for my own mission in Peru, the website remained online while I was gone and has stayed online at Geocities ever since. I don't know if any band members other than Rob ever saw the original website during those first 8 or 9 years, and if they did I sure hope they weren't offended by my amateurish reporting on the history of the band! I wasn't that good at telling the story, and my writing, based on one or two brief, unplanned interviews with Rob sounded something like a bad script for VH1's behind the music, complete with unflattering secondhand details like who drank too much beer, who got mad at who, and whatever lousy jobs band members had in the years afterward. Since then I've rewritten and revised that history page several times, but sometimes I still think it sounds like a bad TV script. But isn't it always that way for rock bands?
Anyway, by 2000 I finally got a CD burner, and in 2001 I got a really good tape deck and borrowed Rob's original tapes to do a decent digital remaster. I digitized all of the Midnight Rose songs that had survived on tape- both the studio demos and the other assorted tracks from videos and home recordings. Unfortunately, Dave Jolley (the recording engineer) had thrown out the original reel-to-reels of the three best demos a decade before, but I did what I could with Rob's cassettes and got what you hear today on the mp3s. By then I had renamed my "record company" Gobie Records, and gone beyond my little Midnight Rose projects. With my Mom's help I had actually printed up several batches of professional looking CD-R's of Bonnie's music for her gigs, and so you might say it felt like I did run a real record company for a while, though I did all the work for free.
With the advance in computer technology, I turned my attention to the next medium: video. In 2003 and '04 I experimented with my roommates' computers, and using video capture cards and Windows Movie Maker, I learned how to make music videos by synchronizing audio with video, and out of that came the music video for Little Runaway, which has been online at YouTube since '06 and had thousands of views. My roommates moved out and I never could afford a better computer of my own until late in '07, when I immediately started on the video for Small Town Dreams.
Right about that time Rob got back into contact with Dan Muhlestein, and another former band member was finally able to see my work and realize that Midnight Rose has had a small but loyal cult following all these years. I put the mp3s online at Soundclick in the spring of '05, but I found out that any musician who is anyone puts his music up on MySpace. Now in '08 I've set up the MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/midnightrose1989. Hopefully this original website, the Soundclick music site, and the MySpace page together will all help that cult following to continue to grow and properly pay tribute to the memory of the greatest rock and roll band that ever came out of Magna, Utah.
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