Home Team Manifesto

How did Home Team Start?

HOME TEAM: A Hazy Recollection... ( courtesy of JT Lucchesi )

This tale begins around 1995 with two best friends, EROK173 and MeanGene13 who were on the road recording the music of great bands around the country. Even though they were the best of friends sometimes they would argue about who was the best touring band at that time. From slighted jokes to full on arguments armed with charts and graphs they continued this argument until a helpful soul settled it by stating that it doesn’t matter what you think about another persons joy, you just need to pull for your own Home Team, thusly an inside joke was born amongst a small group of tapers and their friends/family.

Shirts, stickers, postcards, hats as well as other homemade gifts were given back and forth to people as tokens of support and friendship. As time went on a connection was made to how it was really the road crews of all these bands that were unsung heroes of our collective travels, they were a Home Team worth supporting. So randomly, road crews (and sometimes band members) were gifted Home Team stickers and shirts in whatever town by anyone who could afford to have these gifts made for them to show that we support the ENTIRE band. The beast grew larger…We had a mobile pirate radio station that would play our recordings from the nights before for people in the lot to tune into. We awarded HT Player of the Year awards to people that bettered the world around them and all of us in some way. We would give away boxes of shirts and stickers at our own expense at random shows, selling stuff was never an option as it was all about community.

In 2000, when one of the founders was battling cancer for his second time, he penned the Home Team Mainfesto before an expected death that never came for him (EROK still lives strong today). An out pouring of love and support from people known and unknown in the form of Home Team propaganda floored all of us especially him. Flags were made and flown on stages, other countries and from mountain tops. Strangers were producing their own propaganda and circulating it without our involvement, someone even climbed high upon the CNN building and tagged ‘Home Team 173 Forever’ for the whole city to see. It was breath taking to see an inside joke blow up in the way it did and mutate into what it is now…

We got older. We fell off the road. We lost bands and band members. We got married. We had kids but we never stopped living the Home Team life.