Welcome to the “Dan band” hall of fame.

After college I spent a few years as a professional musician, touring with my college band Buddha's Belly. Driving around the country playing original music with my best friends was a dream come true in a lot of ways. We spent most weekends jumping around Midwest college towns and signed to a national booking agency shortly after graduating — all things considered, it was a real thing for a while.

We had our fair share of rockstar moments, and plenty of the humbling ones too: loading into a cheap motel at 3am, a thousand miles from home, after a show where the band and the bar staff outnumbered the crowd. In 2004 we were nominated for Best New Artist at the Chicago Music Awards. Nope, we didn't win — but I'm still bragging about it two decades later, so isn't that kind of still a win?

Highlights included headlining the House of Blues and sharing stages with some of our heroes — opening for Umphrey's McGee, The Average White Band, Burning Spear, Backyard Tire Fire, ALO, and a long list of other inspiring (mostly jam) bands and humans we're lucky to still call friends.

These days I've mostly traded stages for the music corner in the basement next to my work-from-home desk. As for my bandmates: Jason and Pete still play around Chicago quite a bit, and our saxophonist Evan traded the hippy bars for stadiums — he's currently on tour with Lauren Daigle and Eric Church.

When Jason from Buddha's Belly told me the Mediocre Fight needed some more hands to strum guitar strings, I said hell yes. The Mediocre Fight was a ton of fun.

Back in the day we played a bunch of great shows around Chicago and even made it out west to co-headline the legendary Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles.

In 2012 we recorded four music videos in one day. Three of them I'm proud of, and one of them — Space Caveman — is significantly cooler than you're expecting it to be.

Where are they now? We all have babies and careers and live on different coasts, but in our own minds we're still in a band and planning to “do another show” soon.

I grew up in the beautiful Pacific Northwest when grunge was the thing. Kurt Cobain's younger brother went to our school. We were issued plaid shorts as uniforms. Starting a grunge band and playing Nirvana covers was less a choice than a civic requirement.

Below is high-quality — slightly less than 4K — footage of The Snot Rockets performing our signature and, I believe, only original song at the Fairhaven Middle School talent show. OK fine, it was the Frolics. The Fairhaven Frolics.

In our minds, the performance was every bit as legendary as we were.