When our brothers-in-rock Fooled by April packed it in in 2005, guitarist Joe used his diary to sing the praises of his fellow bandmates. What with my feeling nostalgic and more than a little melancholy with the impending demise of Scamper, I've decided to take a break from using this space to plug local shows and hot tunes, and instead give a little to love to my band -- my best friends, my surrogate family, and the most successful relationship I've ever managed to maintain.

This will be a snark-free zone this week, so if you can't handle a little sappy, heartfelt stuff, you'd best get yourself back to Brendan's Journal.

Keith

Keith and I have been playing music together since January 1994, which is really the entirety of my adult life. While I can acknowledge the legitimate reasons for pulling the plug here in 2008, it's hard for me to imagine a life where Keith and I aren't sitting in a basement somewhere with acoustic guitars, working out harmonies and cute solos, feeling the excitement of a killer new chorus, and -- perhaps my favorite part of the Scamper creative process -- correcting those bizarre rhythms that really only make sense in Keith's head. The hardest thing for me this coming Saturday is going to be looking to my left and seeing Keith by my side -- where he has stood unwaveringly for fourteen years, from a garage in suburban Clifton Park, NY, to the big stage at a sold-out Avalon -- for the last time. I'll keep playing music, of course, but every stage on which I set foot, whether I be a sideman in Brendan's project or fronting my own, is going to feel a little bit empty. Already, in writing new material for whatever it is I end up doing down the road, it feels more than a little bizarre to debut new songs to anyone other than Keith. He's always been the first pair of ears other than my own to hear my songs, and there's a lot of comfort there.

Scamper owes our every success to Keith's diligence, his persistence, and his never-ending faith in this band. Keith constantly pushed us -- sometimes against our will -- to achieve more and aim higher. To say he poured his heart and soul into the band sounds trite, so let me be a bit more concrete: he spent, literally, hundreds of man-hours assembling CDs, doing the graphic design for our records, getting t-shirts, stickers, and buttons made, obsessively building bigger and better websites, and managing the band's finances (imagine if Mike or I had been in charge of the money! "Another round for everyone, on Scamper!"). And, of course, he also wrote a bunch of tunes that people seemed to like. And he did it all while juggling a career (the rest of us merely have jobs) and a family! It's really rather mind-boggling; I get overwhelmed by the "About Me" section of my MySpace, for heaven's sake.

It's a little known fact that Scamper almost disbanded in 2003, over personal and monetary issues, prior to recording Leave Your Glasses On. But I sat in Keith's car and told him, "No. You're not done. You can't walk away from this band without having something you're proud of. Can you?" In response, he single-handedly devised a scheme by which we could record a major-label-quality album without bankrupting ourselves and without exploding the band as we knew it. He got Tom Polce on board to produce us, and got the tunes licensed. He wooed Kay Hanley to sing on our EP. And those moves right there are what propelled us from being a mediocre band playing mediocre shows to being a damn fine band that comes in third in a lot of contests. And we did it with our personal bank accounts intact. Now that's a fucking band manager.

Keith and I always had a little trouble thinking of ourselves as musicians; we've been saddled with the self-image of a couple of hacks, by virtue of our truly ugly (and grunge-y) musical beginnings. But over the last few years in particular, Keith really learned how to be a fucking performer. He learned solos that I thought he had no shot of learning. And he sang his damn balls off. Keith became a musician simply because he refuses to do anything halfway. And, by standing by his side, it forced me to do the same.

Keith has been our focus, our center, and our motivator. If he were ever late to rehearsal, the remaining three of us would literally stand around, shuffling our feet, not knowing what in the world to do. Anyone who heard us on WFNX the other night can see just how directionless we our without our leader. Over the second half of 2007, when Keith began, for lack of a better term, "checking out," it was like helplessly watching the air go out of a tire. Without Keith... well, we're just the Brendan Boogie Band.