“Everybody knows that we were absolutely terrible the first concert,” Graham Nickelson, the bass guitarist of Fears vs. Dreams said about his first band, “but as we kept moving forward, things started to get better.” Nickelson isn’t a normal CHS student; he plays in a metal band.

The CHS music scene is alive with student bands. These groups meet with regular practices, write their own content, and perform at professional gigs. Nickleson’s band, Fears vs. Dreams, meets one to two days as week and has played at venues such as Plush, The Crux and Fubar. As a student, Nickelson has to manage both his schoolwork, and his practice for the band.

“It’s not too much really,” Nickelson said. “I usually get my homework done in an hour or two, so it’s not too time consuming.”

Nickelson started his music career playing on his brother’s electric guitar in the sixth grade. At that point, he had “no idea” that he would ever form a band. With no formal guitar training, Nickelson built up his passion for music. By freshman year, Nickelson had joined his first band, A City Beneath. He bought his own guitar, and began writing music.

“I would pretty much write the rhythm parts, which were unbelievably easy,” Nickelson said, “so Nathan would write all of the hard parts. As it kept going further and further, I started to write more parts. Now I’m pretty much writing every single part to each song.”

Now in his Junior Year, Nickelson still writes music. He claims the most difficult part of music writing is staying original.

“You write a part and then you think, ‘Oh no, something sounds just like that in another song.” Nickelson said. “It’s really frustrating -or doing that and not knowing what song it’s from.”

Gormogon is another metal band that makes up the CHS music scene. Two of it’s members, Zach Fendelman and Cole Sandel, are current students at CHS.

Videos from Gormogon’s youtube channel, Gormogon TV, show the manic energy in the group’s stage performances. Sandel stands out first, with a wild shock of long blond hair that he flings over his furious guitar playing. Jason Thompson, the lead vocalist, screams lyrics of doom and suffering into the microphone. In one video, he grabs the head of an audience member and pulls them against his forehead, physically immersing them in the performance.

The audience fights back to meet the level of energy on stage. In the crowd, circles of listeners run amongst each other in a trance like state. Everyone else is jumping or screaming along with the song.
Gormogon’s lyrics hardly qualify as beautiful “-You will- Bleed out onto the streets of your own demise, Wishing and begging for mercy,” is just one example from their song, Bled Out. Instead, Gormogon tries to capture a sense of doom through it’s border-line inaudible lyrics. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then again, the band has formed a strong following in the St. Louis metal community.

For Fendelman, the bass guitar player, Gormogon has been one stop on a long journey of different bands. Fendelman says he has been in “somewhere between seven to nine” bands in his high school career, but who’s counting? There tends to be a high turnover rate for high school bands. Members sometimes disagree with the artistic direction, or, like most teenagers, have to put up with their parents.

“I had a different group that kind of took a hiatus because our drummer; his parents weren’t for it,” Fendelman said. “It was just a weird situation. They [his parents] kind of influenced him. It was his decision to quit, but not really.”

Despite having to switch between bands so frequently, Zach approaches this quirk of high school bands as a challenge.

“In respect to being a band, I would say it’s kind of discouraging to have to move on to all of these groups,” Fendelman said, “But it’s kind of inspired me to keep improving myself as a musician.”

Sandel, the lead guitarist for Gormogon, takes a very different approach to music than Fendelman or Nickelson. He, unlike the others, has taken extensive formal guitar training. One instructor he has learned from, Dave Black, is an adjunct professor of jazz studies at Webster University.

“He [Dave Black] has pretty much taught me the main rules and fundamentals on how to play guitar,” Sandel said. “So that way you can play any kind of music.”

All three musicians, Nickelson, Fendelman and Sandel, are at a critical point in their careers. While they each have a strong passion for their bands, they are starting to look ahead at the challenging world of being a professional musician.

“I’m actually looking to going into music as a career,” Fendelman said. “Not necessarily playing in a band, but more specifically, I’m looking to go into scoring for video games or TV shows, movies commercials ads, that sort of thing.”

Nickelson is also looking for a new direction in his music.

“I am starting to DJ and do a lot of electronic music,” Nickelson said. “So I’m not sure which one I want to definitely pursue, but I guess it will all unravel.”
Out of the three, Sandel is perhaps the most determined about his music career. He has shifted his school schedule completely to support his music pursuits.

“I’m pretty determined to become a musician, so actually the majority of the classes that I take here are music classes,” Sandel said. “I don’t take math, I don’t take language, I dropped all of that stuff this year because I just can’t stand it anymore, and I’m really just focusing on music.”

Sandel does not plan to attending college, but instead working his musical skill and experience.

“The thing is that you don’t really need a college degree to be a musician,” Sandel said. “They [the music industry] doesn’t look at a degree, they really just want ‘Are you popular? Do you sound good?’ and stuff like that. They don’t care about college degrees.”

For now, all three CHS students enjoy rocking out in their bands. They are glad they followed their passion and encourage others to do so.

“If you want to start a band, just do it,” Fendelman said. “Two guys – one guy is a band.”