{"id":756,"date":"2016-07-27T10:30:44","date_gmt":"2016-07-27T10:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/?p=756"},"modified":"2016-08-03T18:42:43","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T18:42:43","slug":"dont-worry-vanilla-we-nailed-it-steve-leacocks-miscellaneous-debris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/2016\/07\/27\/dont-worry-vanilla-we-nailed-it-steve-leacocks-miscellaneous-debris\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Worry, Vanilla, We Nailed It: Steve Leacock’s Miscellaneous Debris"},"content":{"rendered":"

” If you genuinely love and believe in what you’re doing, and you’re\u00a0really good at it, then there’s a place for you, but you might not\u00a0ever get rich doing it.” -Steve Leacock<\/em><\/p>\n

by Karl Sorne<\/p>\n

\"TFM_Summer_Web_Page_18_Image_0001\"Being a musician in Tallahassee charts a strange course,\u00a0and it’s hard to find someone who better exemplifies that better\u00a0than Steve Leacock. By day he owns and operates Leacock\u00a0Design Co., and you’ve likely marveled at his work around\u00a0town without knowing it (logos for Brewed Awakening, the\u00a0Liberty Bar and Madison Social to name a few). While his\u00a0work in the design department is quite fantastic, that isn’t\u00a0where his talent ends. Throughout his life music has interwoven\u00a0itself into his fabric, starting with a definite choice by\u00a0young Steve to be a horn player. He walked the usual paths\u00a0that entailed, governed by militant band leaders who made\u00a0him afraid to not be great, until he decided he needed to\u00a0expand his talents.<\/p>\n

\"TFM_Summer_Web_Page_19_Image_0001\"From there his various musical endeavors have had levels\u00a0of notoriety involving various bands and musicians (his band\u00a0Standstill opened for Vanilla Ice in 2002) in order to pursue\u00a0that love of music. After the horn, his next instrument was a guitar that was gifted to him with the caveat that he had to\u00a0learn to play it, but along the way he has taught himself to play any instrument that needed playing. This love of playing has\u00a0dictated his entire approach to the music scene. And to life. It seems apt to attribute his incredible stories and experiences to\u00a0this attitude \u2013 not necessarily a “never say no” approach but rather the openness required to learn a new “instrument” when\u00a0life throws him a curveball. In my conversation with Steve, he told me a story about a tour with one of his bands from days\u00a0past that sums up this spirit:<\/p>\n

One Small Step for Landmines went on a bunch of small,\u00a0self-supported tours. Sometimes we borrowed an old Econoline\u00a0van nicknamed ‘Ol’ Boo’ from one of our friends, and\u00a0a couple of times we hitched a trailer to my Element which\u00a0was really “fun” to drive through Manhattan. Eventually we\u00a0started to look at options for getting our own van. Now, this\u00a0was at the height of gas prices in the 2000s. We were a threepiece\u00a0band, with me doing freelance design and the other\u00a0guys working at a pizza\u00a0joint when we were in town,\u00a0so we were not well-to-do.\u00a0Kevin, our singer, had the\u00a0idea that we should go and\u00a0get an old diesel van and\u00a0convert it to run on veggie\u00a0oil, and that way we could\u00a0avoid going into credit card\u00a0debt just trying to get from\u00a0gig to gig.<\/p>\n

Now, vegetable oil is a\u00a0cool fuel, but it has some limitations. One, you have to install\u00a0the system into a diesel engine. Two, the oil has to be\u00a0heated in order to reach the proper viscosity to run through\u00a0an engine without destroying it. Three, because of two, you\u00a0have to start the engine up on diesel, wait for the heaters in\u00a0the veggie tank to warm, then switch to the veggie oil. When\u00a0shutting down, the same is true; you have to switch back to\u00a0diesel before shutting down, so the oil doesn’t coagulate in\u00a0the engine.<\/p>\n

We found a huge shuttle bus for sale, bought it, and converted\u00a0it. It was like our new clubhouse. We built bunks in\u00a0the back, had parties in it; it was awesome. Then it was time\u00a0to take it on the road.\u00a0The first couple of outings were great. We all learned how\u00a0to pump the oil, how the onboard filtration system worked,\u00a0and how to find good oil. Chinese restaurants seemed to be\u00a0our best bet. They were almost always happy, if a little baffled,\u00a0to let us take as much oil as we wanted. Sometimes we’d hit\u00a0a dry spell and have to go guerrilla, pulling up to the oil bin\u00a0of a Red Lobster or Applebee’s and just pumping oil until\u00a0someone noticed and ran us off. We smelled like french fries\u00a0and freedom.<\/p>\n

One February, we embarked on a long tour that took us up\u00a0through Ohio, Michigan and New York. We were well-rehearsed\u00a0and ready, but our fuel system, it turns out, wasn’t. As\u00a0soon as we got out of Florida we started having weather and\u00a0mechanical trouble. There were blizzards all over the northern\u00a0half of the country. I spent an evening in white-knuckle\u00a0terror driving the bus up a steep Tennessee mountain in a\u00a0heavy snowstorm. The bus broke down multiple times, causing\u00a0us to miss gigs while we huddled in the smoky waiting\u00a0rooms of huge garages set up to repair tractor trailers. It was\u00a0so cold that the vegetable oil was coagulating in the fuel lines\u00a0that ran under the vehicle, so we wound up having to run on\u00a0diesel anyway, which was more expensive even than gasoline\u00a0at the time.<\/p>\n

The cold required us to rely on the hospitality of strangers\u00a0at night; our brilliant plans to sleep in the van did not survive\u00a0a -3\u00b0 Lansing, Michigan snowstorm. Once, in an insane\u00a0quest to make it to a gig on time, Auggie, our drummer, and\u00a0I watched silently while Kevin, our singer, drove us on I-75
\nthrough an almost total whiteout blizzard. Once in Georgia,\u00a0nearly home, the bus’s brakes went out, and we coasted to\u00a0a garage in a small town and went to sleep, waking up in\u00a0the morning to explain to the puzzled mechanics what had\u00a0happened. We eventually made it home and sold the van. In\u00a0hindsight, maybe a Michigan tour in February was a poor\u00a0move.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"TFM_Summer_Web_Page_20_Image_0001\"<\/p>\n

You can catch Steve playing his\u00a0heart out with his current band\u00a0Clever Girl. He recommends\u00a0frequenting Waterworks,\u00a0Bird’s, The Sidebar, Fire\u00a0Betty’s, Liberty and The Moon\u00a0for venues and keeping an eye\u00a0out for Chilled Monkey Brains,\u00a0Fungle Junk, Look Mexico and\u00a0Catfish Alliance for bands in\u00a0town.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

” If you genuinely love and believe in what you’re doing, and you’re\u00a0really good at it, then there’s a place for you, but you might not\u00a0ever get rich doing it.” -Steve Leacock by Karl Sorne Being a musician in Tallahassee charts a strange course,\u00a0and it’s hard to find someone who better exemplifies that better\u00a0than Steve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":775,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_cbd_carousel_blocks":"[]","footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[95,149,206],"class_list":["post-756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-local","tag-music","tag-musician"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":762,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions\/762"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tallahasseefamilymagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}