Before I picked up a camera professionally, before I built my first lamp, before I ever restored a piece of furniture — I was standing on a stage at The Door in Dallas with a guitar in my hands and three guys I'd go to war with.
The band was called Hey Hollywood.
Alex Dean sang. Brandon Deck played bass. Justin Allen was on drums. I played lead guitar and brought the ambient stuff — the Coldplay pads, the U2 delays, the textures that made our pop-rock sound feel bigger than four guys in a room.
We were in our early twenties. We'd all been in other bands that didn't work out. This one was different. This one was supposed to be the one.
The music
We put out two records. A self-titled EP in 2006 — five tracks, including "Fight For What You Know" and "Too Much Too Soon." Then Giants in 2007 — three tracks that we thought were the best things we'd ever written. "Inside Your Room." "Seeing Is Believing." The title track.
The Dallas Observer nominated us for best act in town that year. We played the CD release show at The Door with Ivoryline, packed the place, charged ten bucks at the door. We were shopping for record deals and planning a tour through Texas and Florida.
Brandon had a line I'll never forget: "No backup plan. It's do or die. We are not planning on failing."
We all got "love" tattoos. We meant it.
The grind
We didn't just play Dallas. We did four, maybe five full tours — six weeks at a time up the West Coast. Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, every small town in between that had a stage and a sound system.
Six weeks. Two nights off. That's not a typo.
We slept in the van. Starbucks parking lots were the move because you could use the bathroom in the morning and grab coffee before the next six-hour drive. We played festivals. We played rooms with three hundred people and rooms with eleven. We played every single one like it was the last show we'd ever get.
That's where I learned what work actually means. Not the romantic version — the real one. The one where you wake up in a parking lot in Bakersfield and your back hurts and you haven't showered and you play the best set of your life that night anyway.
I run five businesses now. People ask me how. I don't know how to explain it except: I slept in a van for six weeks at a time in my twenties. Everything after that is comfortable.
What happened
What happens to most bands. Life. The thing about being twenty-two with no backup plan is that eventually the math catches up with the dream. We didn't break up in some dramatic way. We just ran out of runway.
But I never stopped making things.
The guitar became a camera. The stage became a wedding venue, then a conference floor, then a workshop in Oak Cliff. The instinct — that need to create something and put it in front of people — never went away. It just changed instruments.
Why I'm writing this now
Because everydayerick.com isn't just the photography or the woodworking or the lamps. It's everything I've ever built. And Hey Hollywood was one of the first things I built that mattered to me.
The songs are still on Apple Music if you want to hear them. They sound exactly like 2007 sounds — in the best way.
I don't play live anymore. But I still pick up the guitar most nights after the shop closes. Some things you don't quit. You just stop performing them for other people.
If you were at any of those shows — The Door, the house parties, the terrible Wednesday-night slots at venues that don't exist anymore — I remember. Those were good nights.
— Erick
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