Shameless Plugfest: "The Lounge Axe"

Here we continue a feature at Michael O'Blogger that highlights content over on my main site, michaeloconnell.com. These items may be something you've never read/seen before, or something you just haven't checked out in a long time (if you're one of our long-time readers).

This time around, the Plugfest shines its shameless spotlight on something called "The Lounge Axe". The idea for this story came to me one day when I was looking through some old photos I had of my friends from back in the 80s/early 90s. As I browsed, I found myself thinking, "Say, if you put some of these together in a certain order, it almost looks like we're all in a band." And the minute I thought that, the Lounge Axe was born.

This idea was a simple one - taking a group of otherwise unrelated photos, putting them in narrative progression, and building a story around that. The story became the tale of a fictional band that rose to amazing heights in the hair-band rocker era of American music with a unique sound that the world (briefly) fell in love with. The band - and the story's supporting cast - is made up of friends of mine, and the whole thing is written in the form of a VH1 Behind The Music retrospective. The history of these bandmates is a weird mix of fact and fiction that keeps you on your toes and wondering which parts really happened and which didn't. Apparently it was effective, because a few years back, I got an email from a random guy who stumbled upon it on the web, a guy who used to live on the same street I did (the street where the house the band shared is reported to be), and he thought it was a real band and wanted to know what years we lived there and "made our music". I consider that a high compliment.

So if it pleases you, I invite you to take a trip back to the 80s and witness the meteoric rise and epic fall of the band that introduced the world to "lounge metal". Consider this your backstage pass. The Lounge Axe awaits!