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“We were ready to take Chicago by storm!” says Bill. “We didn’t even consider that a bigger city might not only have more fans and more clubs, but it would probably also have more bands to compete with. Fortunately for us, our demo must have had a cool sound because we got gigs immediately.”
In fact, Emmett Brown’s first gig in Chicago was at the legendary Double Door club. Gigs at other clubs including Lounge Ax and Elbow Room quickly followed, and the band started to build a small but loyal fan base. But just as the band was breaking into the Chicago scene, tragedy struck the bass guitar company the brothers had been so patiently building during the daytime.
“A large percentage of our basses were being purchased by a distributor in Japan, and when the yen crashed, they had to cancel their orders. That’s when we knew we had to close up the shop,” says Charles.
But even though the bass building business folded, the Chicago experience showed the members of the group that people dug their music, and they could hang in even the biggest and most competitive of scenes. The band decided to return to Tampa for personal and economic reasons.
In August 2000, the band purchased a 16-track digital recorder and began recording and mixing music at their home studio. Three more songs were recorded and added to the original EP, creating the debut full-length CD.
The band didn’t pursue a record deal, opting instead to try and get their music heard via the Internet. Daniel took control of uploading songs to every mp3 music site he could find. Before long, the band was making some waves on mp3.com’s charts. The brooding goth-rock song “Cover Girl” became the sleeper hit of the album, skyrocketing to #1 on MP3.com’s Experimental/Post Rock chart, and rising all the way to #11 on their massive Global Alternative chart which contained thousands of songs.
Garageband.com was also becoming a valuable source of Internet exposure for the group. Cover Girl and Relax were both featured as Track of the Day on Garageband.com on 11/19/00 and 11/24/00. Relax made it all the way to #17 in Garageband’s Final Countdown competition.
Jumping on the Internet bandwagon early proved to be a successful approach for the group. To date, the trio’s music has been downloaded well over 20,000 times from over 30 Internet music sites.
It was gratifying for the band to get exposure via the Internet, but the brothers knew they needed to find a way to get their music heard outside of Cyberspace. So when it came time to release the single Bandwidth Conservation Society, a cool lo-fi Beatlesque track, the band got together to brainstorm some promotional concepts. In April 2001, they got the exposure they were searching for with an experiment called CyberDay.
“The lyrics to BCS poked fun at an actual movement that was started during the Internet’s infancy,” explains Charles. “Web developers were concerned that so many people were jumping on the Net that it wouldn’t be able to handle all the traffic. So a group called the Bandwidth Conservation Society was educating people on how to make sites that occupied a very small amount of cyberspace.”
“As if we didn’t have enough real ecological disasters to worry about. Now we had to even conserve cyberspace,” laughs Bill. “By the time we were ready to release BCS, the whole doomsday-Internet-collapse scenario had died down, so we sounded the alarm again.”
Within a week, the band had uploaded a site called SaveCyberspace.org that intended to educate the public on how to conserve Cyberspace, “One of nature’s most precious manmade resources.”
The site offered plenty of humorous ways to conserve bandwidth: Surfing with friends (“carpooling” on the information superhighway), printing out and mailing emails instead of forwarding them to friends, etc.
“I think what got the most attention was when we were able to logically show there was a link between excessive Internet usage and global warming,” says Bill.
“Before we knew it, we were in the local television station conducting a live global satellite interview on TechTV to announce Cyberday 1.0,” says Chuck. “We organized a worldwide Internet logoff for an hour on April 23, 2001, the day after Earthday. We called it “Spaceout”. They couldn’t quite figure out if it was all a joke or real, but at least they played the song!”
“Of course, the theme song of CyberDay was BCS by The Reverse Engineers,” adds Dan. “We claimed that it was the world’s first Cyber-conscious single. Which in a way was true – it’s only about 2:45 long instead of our normal 4:45. So it took up about half as much space.”
Once the events of CyberDay 1.0 died down, the band turned its attention to learning how to use their newly acquired studio gear so they could record their own album. Recording for the second CD, to be titled Max Q, commenced on New Years Day, 2002.
“We’re still learning how to record our own music. It’s not easy to make your home recordings sound as rocking as your hero’s recordings,” admits Bill. “Working with an experienced producer and engineer would probably make the process a whole lot easier.”
But judging from feedback from the first four tracks, the band’s doing a fine job by themselves. The band submitted a CD containing four newly recorded tracks to the B.E.A.M. (Benefiting Emerging Artists in Music) program in August of 2002. The B.E.A.M. program is sponsored by Jim Beam and it awards no-strings-attached grants to musicians to further their careers. In October 2002, the band was selected from over 600 bands and was awarded a $3,000 grant to continue production of their second CD.
“We’re very excited about finishing this record,” says Daniel. “And with the money and support of the B.E.A.M. program we can stop worrying about how to pay for everything and stay focused on writing music.”
With the new influx of cash, the band purchased a few select pieces of recording gear. “It’s not Abbey Road yet, but it’ll do for now,” says Bill who is in charge of capturing the trio’s energetic sound and recording the disc. “It’s a good thing we’ve learned to record ourselves – our songs keep getting longer and longer – I don’t think we could afford all that studio time,” laughs Bill.
While recording the second CD, the band not only got some new gear, but they decided they wanted a new name. “We got tired of people asking which member was Emmett,” says Charles. “Plus, we had heard about this other songwriter out there who was actually named Emmett Brown. He was probably quite annoyed that he was having trouble using his own name,” adds Charles.
Once again, Dan used his fertile imagination and his interest in space and UFO-related phenomenon to come up with a name that fits the band perfectly – The Reverse Engineers.
“’The Reverse Engineers’ not only sounds cool, but it fits us on so many different levels. Our logo is the transistor symbol, and there’s quite a few people in the UFO community who believe that the transistor was reverse engineered from alien spacecraft,” explains Dan. “Plus we tend to write about scientific stuff a lot – while other bands are singing about how their chick did them wrong, we’re writing about space shuttle launches, and meteorologists.”
“Plus, musicians are really reverse engineers in the truest sense,” adds Bill. “You sit down with a record, put it under the microscope and try to pull it apart to find out what makes it so cool sounding, what makes it so magical. We’ve put so much time and energy into Max Q that we’re hopeful it might inspire other musicians to try and reverse engineer our music.”
