Billy McDaniel in the News

Press Releases

Billy McDaniel has been interviewed a few times for various reasons. Here are a few of the articles and radio interviews preserved over the years.

Norm Jacques wrote a short story about some gigs I was doing last summer on the Portland Music Examiner's website titled; Billy McDaniel now playing at the Last Stop in Auburn, Maine

A Space To Jam

By SETH HARKNESS
Monday, March 20, 2006

BIDDEFORD — Behind a closed door, electric guitar riffs are followed by the crash of drums. The music is loud enough to bruise eardrums, and that's outside the practice room.

Not every landlord would rent to Billy McDaniel.

McDaniel is a friendly guy, disarmingly so for someone who dresses all in black and wears a fat silver chain around his neck. He even has a job and pays his rent on time. But McDaniel, 34, is also the lead singer and guitarist in a hard rock band, Trazom Effect. When he and his drummer and bassist start jamming, things get loud — seriously loud.

"If you're not used to hearing it, you definitely want to use ear plugs," he said.

A few months ago, McDaniel and his bandmates began looking for a new practice space. They had been playing in a back room at the guitar store on Congress Street where McDaniel works, but this arrangement wasn't working. Mistaking their practices for an open jam session, customers would sometimes grab a guitar off the wall and jump in. Neighbors said they couldn't live with the noise.

But where could three part-time rockers who make way more decibels than dollars find a place to hold their daily jam sessions? Most landlords would cringe at the sight of a drum set and amplifier. Even a spare closet in Portland was too expensive.

The answer, as it turned out, was a brick mill in Biddeford that has become home to more than 20 bands. Tucked between a trash incinerator and a working blanket factory, the rambling Riverdam Millyard now holds the largest grouping of bands north of Boston, according to its owner, Steven Sobol.

A former classical music promoter from New York City, Sobol never meant to create an incubator for rock stars. In fact, he said he ruled out renting to noisy musicians when he bought the mostly empty mill a year ago.

"I was like, 'no bands,' " he said.

McDaniel heard of the Biddeford mill through the musicians' grapevine. At least compared with anything in Portland, the price was right. A basic room, with a scuffed wooden floor, bare sheetrock walls, and sometimes a view of the Saco River, goes for $275 a month.

Now Trazom Effect occupies one of those rooms off the long hallway Sobol refers to as "band row." There is a different bunch of musicians behind nearly every door along this hall — an alternative rock group next to a cover band next to a jam band. On a busy weekend night, there are dozens of cars in an otherwise desolate parking lot and the old mill rocks.

Soundproofing helps dampen the musical cross-pollination between rooms, but doesn't begin to stop it. One of four recent University of Maine at Farmington graduates who make up another band, The Former Something, said the best solution to the loud music coming through the wall is to turn up his own volume.

"That sounds loud right now, but once you're making your own sound at show-volume level you won't hear anything," said 23-year-old Miles Levy.

For many musicians, the mill was more than a place to practice and store sound equipment. With bands from Portland to Massachusetts under one roof, musicians said they feed off each other's creativity and energy.

A band in search of a drummer can look for one on a bulletin board at one end of band row. Musicians need only wander down the hall to jam with a new group.

"It's like a community in here," McDaniel said. "It's almost like when you go camping and everybody's got that camping thing going, except around here it's music."

It was a community that Sobol was reluctant to encourage. Sobol bought the mill with plans to build a creative hive of artists and small manufacturing enterprises. His vision didn't include rock bands practicing at full volume and, he feared, partying in the halls. Though a few bands were already renting space in the building, he didn't want any more.

Sobol said the reality of maintaining a mostly vacant 600,000-square-foot building with a roof that tended to blow off in large chunks helped bring about his change of heart. Meanwhile, the bands kept calling in search of practice space, convincing him they were more serious about their music than he'd realized.

Eventually, he decided to take a chance on band row, which Sobol said has turned into the most successful venture he's done since buying the mill. Musicians keep calling and he's thinking about carving out another bunch of practice rooms.

But it hasn't been entirely harmonious renting to would-be rock stars. Just before Christmas, some of Sobol's tenants held a big party on band row. For some, the celebration included kicking down doors and vomiting in the hallways. Days afterward, city building inspectors started taking a closer look at the mill, and reports of missing guitars attracted the attention of the Biddeford Police.

The fallout from the party led to a frank talk between Sobol and his musician tenants. Sobol said he told the bands that "this little experiment" could quickly come to an end if they didn't find a way to police themselves — and, since then, they mostly have.

"I think it really surprised most of the bands here," he said. "They realized they had something good going here, and it was up to them to make it work or kill it."

McDaniel, who didn't attend the party and had the door of his practice room door knocked down, agreed the musicians have become a self-regulating bunch.

"It's sort of like that camping mentality again," he said. "Don't break that camp code."

If that balance can hold, the musical experiment in the old mill may only be getting started. One of the most recent tenants on Band Row is Adam Renny, who graduated from Berklee College of Music three years ago and is renovating two rooms into a recording studio.

Renny said he is open to recording everything from "hip hop to country punk to alternative rock to R and B to soul" on his label and hopes to be working with in-house musicians.

Sobol, meanwhile, is looking at his building's possibilities a little differently these days. Out behind the mill, there is a small courtyard and a loading dock surrounded on three sides by brick walls. Recently, Sobol said he'd been thinking it could be a perfect place for a concert.

Gaming Into The Abyss

Gaming Into The Abyss
Portland Press Herald (iHerald) Article
Monday September 11, 2006
Article by Anna Fiorentino (Staff Writer)

Dark Age of Camelot is a seemingly harmless virtual-fantasy battle that takes place after the death of King Arthur. But when Billy McDaniel began playing the never ending computer game 10 hours a day, it became a dangerous real-life battle that helped to destroy his marriage.

"I was spending all my time playing." said McDaniel, of Biddeford.

Fifty percent of all Americans play video games, for an average of 7.5 hours a week, according to the Entertainment Software Association. The pursuit fuels a market that saw $15 billion in retail sales in 2005.

Gaming also consumes the attention of players, sometimes alienating the friends and loved ones who plead with them to put down their controllers. With the advent of MMORPG - "Massively Multi-player Online Role-playing Games", which allow thousands of players to interact with one another in a virtual world - gaming can cross the line from devotion to addiction.

In July, the world's first video game detox center, called Wild Horses, opened in Amsterdam. The founders, Smith and Jones Addiction Consultants, report on their website that 20 percent of online roleplaying gamers develop a dependency on gaming. A recent Stanford University study found that 50 percent of roleplaying gamers consider themselves addicted.

The symptoms mirror those associated with addiction to alcohol or drugs: obsessive thinking, health problems and long-term damage to personal relationships, education and careers.

Experts say online roleplaying games may be seductive because they relieve many common psychological stresses.

"Players with low self-esteem gain a tangible sense of power in these environments," said Nick Yee, a doctoral student at Stanford University and the author of a recent study on roleplaying games. "Players who feel they are undervalued or have no control in the real world can take on valuable instrumental roles. It is in fact the ability of roleplaying games to empower users through its mechanisms that drive problematic usage."

Yee surveyed 40,000 roleplaying gamers over a four-year period. Seventy percent said they spend at least 10 continuous hours playing games, such as Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies, and World of Warcraft.

Users have actually nicknamed the latter two games "Evercrack" and "World of Warcrack", reflecting an awareness of the games' power to absorb players.

Yee reported that 27 percent of respondents said their most rewarding experience in a given month occurred in a roleplaying game. These players concluded that their "true self" was both more accessible and better expressed in Internet settings that in real life, face to face settings.

Some players are keenly aware of the potential for getting hooked on gaming.

Ted Warner, 36, of Portland, said he plays "as an excuse to get together with the guys (a few hours) every other week." He said he knows others who play until they're "pale, skinny or overweight, with blacked-out eyes, and withering social skills." Warner also said he limits his 11-year old son's video game playing.

McDaniel, the player from Biddeford, said he loved playing Atari as a child and never imagined where it would take him.

In his 20's he became so engrossed with playing Dark Age of Camelot that he lost his job as an Internet Service Provider.

His fellow players began paying him $20 to $50 to increase their level of play, and a "Camelot" business emerged.

He advertised his services on eBay. His best customers were men in their mid-20's and 30's, married with full time jobs, who hired him to give them an advantage in game play.

"They wanted to go into a game not feel like they were the weakest link." he said.

Finally, when Camelot's popularity began to fade and McDaniel began to lose his clients, he realized the extend of what it had done to his life and found it within himself to pull the plug on his obsession.

"I haven't played in two years," said McDaniel, now 35 and divorced.

Maressa Hecht Orzack, director of Boston-based Computer Addiction Services and a Harvard University psychologist, councels addicts like McDaniel from around the country.

She said the hardest part about counseling video game addicts is getting them to admit they have a problem - much like substance abuse addicts. Most of her clients - she sees about five patients a month who escape into roleplaying games - are referred by parents or spouses.

"It becomes an addiction when they're playing to the point of flunking out of school or not getting to work on time - if at all. It's happening partly because they're not satisfied with their lives, " said Orzack.

She urges gamers who believe they may have a problem to seek professional help.

WMPG Radio Interview

Massively Multiple Online Roleplaying Games
WMPG (Blunt Youth Radio) Radio Interview
Monday, October 9th, 2006
Interview by Sam Knowles & Kayla Artenion

I was interviewed by WMPG radio for my experience playing and making money in the game; Dark Age of Camelot.

DAOC is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. Similar to Everquest or World of Warcraft. The game is now fairly outdated, but back when it was new, I had become an avid player and in my adventures I even started a full business of helping other players level up their own characters.

If you wanna hear the Interview, I've gone and archived it on MP3 and am storing it on my webserver so that you can check it out. (see audio link below)

It's kind of interesting if you know me personally, and fairly amusing if you were there with me in the game, either as a friend or even a customer.

WMPG Radio Interview - [27:22] 25MB