The Beginning

Reckless Deriver started in early 2008 with a phone call from Herb; "I really wanna play, and my old band isn't really into it these days..." Lenny and Herb met back in 2000 at an open jam, when Herb was playing with Luke Sikorsky and Doug Baldwin in a band called Weedless Spoon. Lenny jammed with them on the sax, and invited them to record at his project studio sometime. A couple years later, the CD "Best Lure In The Box" was recorded at Lenny's studio on East Ave. A few years after that, Wayne came to the studio with a band called From The North, playing bass for songs written by Justin Blowers, and later recording songs by Paul Kiem, with Matt Murphy. That project was halfway done when Herb called; Lenny asked Wayne if he would be interested in playing, and the first time we jammed was April 20, 2008. Lenny had finished writing the songs on his solo CD "Blondebris" in 2007, influenced by bands like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Eagles, The Gin Blossoms, Sister Hazel, and Alice In Chains; Lenny says "At first, I taught them the songs I had written exactly the way I wanted them played; after they learned the songs I already had finished, I wrote more, but I stopped telling them what to play, 'cause we had jelled to the point where I showed them what I was playing and they wrote better parts than I could have come up with..."the band performed several times as "The Lenny Long Band" starting in 2010 at The Red Cross Benefit for Haiti in March, as a six member group. The lineup at that time included studio partner and Mumbo Jumbo keyboardist Jeremy Egglefield, and varied between three and six players over the next two years; currently Reckless Deriver performs as a quartet with keyboardist/flautist/singer Anneke Long from May to September, and as a 5 member group adding guitarist John Pedrow from October through April

The Name

The search for a name went on forever, it seemed - Herb and Wayne didn't mind using "TLLB" but Lenny wanted a real band name, and came up with at least a hundred, some good...during a break in practice one night, while commenting on how a little piece of one of the songs was "derived" from a popular cover tune, Lenny made the joke that "if this were a reggae band, we could call it Haile* (pronounced "highly") Derivitive and the Dead Horse Beaters..." and Wayne quipped "We could call it Drunk Deriver", and Lenny said "No, nobody here gets drunk...but how about... Reckless Deriver?" - and we all looked at each other, and it was almost like a TV moment...

  * a reference to Haile Selassie, former King of Ethiopia and major figure in the Jamaican-based Rasta religion