In 2009, Doog and I found ourselves together once again. This time, we had been invited to rejoin the band Everything, Now. Until that point, Everything, Now had been a changing musical cast revolving around the singer and songwriter Crafty aka Jon Rogers. Everything, Now is a psychedelic pop band that we had both played with at various times before. The band had just released a new album that we were all really, really excited about. Ahead of us, we had lined up a year of constant practicing, touring, music videos and in general, doing all things rock and roll!

The band existed in Indianapolis, so when I got into town, I found Doog living at a house with a large collection of infamous Indianapolis artists and musicians. The house, known as The Berkeley House, was a wild place. It sat on a street made of grass. The house hosted about ten people plus a revolving cast of guests, friends, and party goers. The doors were never locked. There were always people there to visit. We had informal parties almost every night but we still managed to keep the house clean and presentable. Non of us had much money so we made a lot of communal meals: pizzas, beans and rice with kale, smoothies.

Doog and I had previously been living at the Omega Institute, a spiritual retreat center in upstate New York, so our spiritual practice was on the forefront of our experience. We were meditating on a daily basis. We were doing energy healing work on each other and the band. We had dedicated our lives to the pursuit of truth and we were achieving it through the function of music. We had no jobs for the entire year so we were living on very little and we paid nothing to our friends for letting us live in their house.

There had been more than a dozen different people that had comprised Everything, Now over the many years of it’s existence. Not all of these people completely loved each other so there was always an interesting dynamic going on. When Doog and I came back to Everything, Now, it seemed like a spiritual dream team had been assembled. We had Dave Carter who we had lovingly dubbed The Cobain Christ, Dan the drummer who was a sort of gnostic Christian in his own way, and Crafty aka Jon who was a wise, cynical agnostic with a clever tongue.

We were dedicated to achieving something great that year. We had a fire in our hearts and we would not be stopped. We practiced all the time and quickly got very tight sounding. We were going on tour every other month so there was always a constant goal that we were working towards. We were all competent and talented musicians in our own ways and we were sounding better than the band ever had before. We were telling people that we played Space Gospel music.

While on tour, we had long hours in the van to have spiritually focused conversations. Spiritually stimulated, we would go on for hours. During these talks, we started to think of the band as a magical healing force organized around the five elements. We would try to figure out who was representing each element based on their personality traits and their role in the band.

During one tour, we were in New York City at our friend Karens house. We were going to do a photo shoot one morning. We woke up and started talking about what we should do for the shoot. We had no idea. Dan was on his way to the apartment from somewhere else, so we sat around and got high, trying to think of good ideas. Crafty took a shower and while he was gone, the idea of the elements popped into our heads. Like a hazy dream, we reached around and starting pulling items from the apartment that became our perfect props. The blankets and sheets that we were using to sleep were transformed into robes of the perfect colors and there were all kinds of things that we seemed to need around us already. Crafty got out of the shower and we excitedly told him “THE FOUR ELEMENTS!!” Dave Carter wasn’t on that tour, but since he was representing the fifth element of Spirit, we decided that it wasn’t terrible that his element wasn’t visible in the photo.

As we all got dressed up, Dan walked in. We threw a blue blanket at him and said “You are the element of water, put this blue thing on!” There was a giant water barrel, a potted plant, the fiery apple that we had been smoking our weed out of, and a duck cookie jar top. With a little bit of photoshop work, the photo was out-of-this-world and would become our main band photo for the next year. We were the five elements and we were on a secret, spiritual mission.

In the world, we merely played our brand of gospel tinged psychedelic pop rock, but internally, we had dedicated the band to saving the world. Or doing our part at least. We meditated together as a band during long drives in the van and before we played. We would do energy work on the spaces we played in and we intended healing energies to descend upon the audience as we played. We wanted our band to be a full blown, transcendental, positive, light-filled experience. I think we did it well, too. We were spiritual warriors doing battle against the darkness of the cities of the world.

Aside from this, we had our resident mystic, Doog, who would regularly report to me about his nighttime voyages into the astral plane. The Sufi texts that we had studied the previous summer had given Doog a context for the spiritual experiences he was having. In his unconscious states, he was exploring other worlds, doing battle with dark magicians, and having an astral love affair with a songwriter magician woman from New York.

These stories were fueling our fire to do good and bring light to the world. The climax of that year was when we did a month long west coast tour, opening for our friends Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s. The tour was a big deal for us. All the shows were sold out. We had guaranteed money every night and we got to use all of Margot’s awesome musical gear. That tour was a blast and we were able to play for a ton of people. We had never sounded better and we were all in good spirits.

That was the beginning of the end. Coming home, we felt invincible. We felt that we were following the divine path that was set before us and we would just keep going up and up until we finally entered into the source of light that we were dedicated to. But that’s not how the path was actually to go. Dan quit the band as soon as we got home. Financial strain from a year of touring and driving to and from band practices and not working enough hours had caught up with him.

We took this blow optimistically. Instead of finding a new drummer for our next tour that was only a month away, we decided to rotate Doog and Dave Carter between drums and bass. Neither one of those guys was a drummer, so this new hurdle broke our spirits a bit. After a few weeks of practicing every day and still not sounding even close to as good as we had on our last tour, we started to mutiny.

Doog, Dave and I started conspiring behind Crafty’s back. We didn’t want to go on tour and we tried to convince him to cancel it. As a testament to Crafty’s strong character and willpower, he wouldn’t hear it. This band was Crafty’s baby and he wouldn’t give it up easily. So despite our grumpy band practices and bad moods, we kept on. By the time we left for tour we didn’t sound half bad, but I felt spiritually sure that this tour wasn’t supposed to happen.

A week before we left, Crafty hit a deer with the band van, so we couldn’t take it on tour. We were going have to take two vehicles and separate the band members for the daily long drives. I pleaded with Crafty to cancel the tour. I knew this was going to be bad. Also, if I remember correctly, Dave Carter had to quit his long time job to be able to make it one tour. It was a scary decision for him and we basically had to peer pressure him to do it.

Musically, the tour was terrible. We didn’t necessarily sound that bad, but we played about 29 shows to empty clubs. We were on tour with another band that didn’t really have the fan following that we had hoped for. Our spirits got lower and lower. We were spending our own money on gas, we weren’t selling merchandise and we weren’t fulfilling our spiritual mission because we weren’t playing to anyone.

Doog was riding with Crafty for the tour and they were having shouting matches at each other everyday in the car. I think this extended period of violent aggression set the stage the mental breakdown that Doog was about to have. Dave and I would talk about how to get the band back on track or where it all went wrong during our daily drives.

Halfway through the tour, my wife who had been living alone in Chicago this whole time got hit by a car. She wasn’t badly hurt but she was limping around and needed emotional support. I was really hating the tour at this point and I told Crafty that I was going to quit the band and take a bus home to Chicago. This started a bad fight between us. I didn’t go home but I acted like a grumpy asshole for the next two weeks. I didn’t say much but I brooded in the back seat.

Eventually, back at home, the band van was fixed and Crafty’s wife drove it to us in Georgia. She and her parents took our two vehicles home and the four of us were once again united on our long drives. This wasn’t necessarily a good thing considering the moods that everyone was in. We fought a lot, we stayed silent a lot. We weren’t meditating anymore. We weren’t doing much energy work. We were just biding our time, doing our duties each night to play the shows but we were all unhappy.

The tour finally took us back to Indiana and ended. The last few days were the most tense. Dave Carter had witnessed a shooting in Chicago and when he was hesitant to call the police to give details, the tension that had been building in Doog during the entire tour started to erupt out of him. He berated and insulted Dave for his fear and meekness. Doog, like all of us, had been in a bad mood for a long time. He was the first one to let it take hold of his emotions.

I was the next one to turn toward the dark side. While in Chicago, I took all my musical gear out of the van and left it with my wife. I was so mad at the band and at the situation that I didn’t care what would happen. When we arrived at our last show in Indiana, we didn’t have one of the guitars or my trumpet. I didn’t tell anyone until we started setting up. Needless to say that everyone was very mad at me for it.

The tour ended and went our separate ways. Doog went back to Omega for the season and I moved to Chicago to be with my wife. Crafty and Dave continued on with Everything, Now for a little bit longer before the band went on an extended hiatus.

This final tour was the beginning of a dark period in Doog’s life. During the last few months of our Everything, Now experience, he had become convinced that he was in contact with an ascended tantric buddhist master called Luipa. This contact started to unravel his mind and turned into a two year long nightmare but that is another story…





Everything, Now! as the Four Elements in 2009.