In 1997 my sister, Terri Morris, called me up to see if I wanted to sit in on bass to help her band through a gig. She had been hesitant to ask me because she knew I'd hung up my bass after Haywire and The Desires broke up and hadn't played bass in 15 years. Her husband finally said, “why don't you just ask him?”. So she called me up and I said yes right away. I had to learn a bunch of songs in a couple of weeks but that was no big deal, we played the show marginally well and I stuck with the band. Until 2014.
When I joined the band they were searching for a name. I suggested Passenger, a name I’d long had in mind, but it was in use by a band in the East Bay. So I pivoted to Along For The Ride and everybody was happy with it.
The Logo: around the time I was born my dad, who was a sign painter by trade and a very talented artist, painted a scene around the section above the tub tiles in the bathroom. It depicted, in several panels, a man sleepily stepping into the tub, slipping on a bar of soap, sliding the length of the wall, slamming up against the far wall, and laying on the floor under the running shower. It was there the whole time I was growing up and it was still there when I joined the band, and because my mom was still living in the house I was able to take photos of that sequence and I used one to lay over the earth image to create the logo. In my mind the concept is simply that we awaken at some point in our early years to the fact that we’re living on this planet, though we don’t really know how we got here or why, and so in many respects we’re just along for the ride. And what a ride it is!
Tom Daggett and I were in the band from the time I joined until I had to leave in 2014. My wife and I had moved to Sonoma County in 2013 and though we made weekly visits to the Peninsula, continuing to rehearse and gig became too much and I sadly had to leave the band, and that was the end of Along For The Ride. We had stayed together through thick and thin but at last we had to call it quits.
The first configuration was Tom Daggett on guitar and vocals, Terri Morris on guitar and vocals, Adam Lynch on drums, and me on bass and vocals. Around the turn of the century Terri left the band to move to another state and Keith (Ketman) Shirasawa joined as the lead guitarist. Around the same time Adam left the band and Ken McLaren joined on drums. A short while later Susie Daines joined as singer and stayed until 2003. In late 2004 Ken blew out an elbow lifting weights and had to resign to have surgery and go through recovery, though he came back strong in a couple of years and has been drumming with eTicket Band and others ever since. So with Ken out of the picture we recruited Mike Claire to play drums.
Mike was also a keyboardist and in the spring of 2007 we brought Jamie Daggett, Tom’s son, on board as drummer and Mike switched to keys. This was a powerful configuration and we played two exciting shows with the five of us and were looking forward to some great things. Alas, two weeks after we played that second show Keith was gone. He’d been on vacation in New York, rode the Cyclone roller coaster on Coney Island, and his neck broke in three places just as the ride entered the first drop, and he had to finish the rest of the ride knowing that something was terribly wrong. When he got off the ride he staggered to the bench where his girlfriend was waiting and she called 911. They operated on him that night and he seemed good to go the next day. He called me from the hospital to apologize for “really screwing up” and to say he was going to have to miss the next rehearsal. That night he coded. They revived him, he coded again, and he was gone. What a tragedy!
So we needed to find a new guitarist. Jordon Stone jammed and rehearsed with us several times as did Mark Fassett. The 2008 recording on this page features Jordon in the first half and Mark in the second. We ultimately chose Mark over Jordan because he and Mike had played together a lot and had that silent communication that you get when you become accustomed to playing together. Then in 2009 Jamie left us to pursue his filmmaking ventures and we brought Roman Sochan aboard, and that was the final configuration that brought us all the way to the end of the long, long ride.
