E12 - Alex Fabio

Alex Fabio is an Audio Engineer, Producer, Artist, and the Associate Director & Co-Producer of the Core Energy Experience.

Prepare to experience a first-hand account of life on the road as a DIY rocker in the modern era, Alex's background as a 1st-Generation American, why it's always important to have a reliable tour van, and so much more.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, and comment. We love hearing your thoughts. 

Host: Kurt Bruckmann
Co-Producer, Associate Director: Alex Fabio

Transcript

Hey, Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Core Energy Experience. I'm your host, Kurt Bruckmann. I hold my mastery in Core Energy Dynamics.

I'm a certified global coach. I write for Brainz Magazine, and I am an internationally acclaimed best selling author. Today, we have a very special guest. You hear me speak of our associate director and co producer, Alex Fabio. Today, we are so fortunate to have Alex doing solo.

So enjoy it all with Alex, and take it away, Alex. Hey, Hey, everybody. It's Alex. I am the man behind the camera, typically, on the Core Energy Experience.

Kurt and I thought it would be interesting to, bring me to the front of the camera so that, we can learn a little bit about me and the other half of the team here. So, yeah. Should be interesting. This feels kinda like a confessional, which is which is kinda weird because it's just me. It's, like, not even a podcast, so we're gonna do our best here.

But yeah. So my name's Alex. I've been making this podcast with Kurt. We're now filming our twelfth, thirteenth episode at this point. So, things are going swimmingly.

If you've checked it out, thank you. We appreciate it. Yeah. Just a little bit about me. My name is Alex, like I said, for the millionth time.

I'm the child of, immigrants. My dad's from Colombia. My mother's from Greece. I think that informed a lot of my upbringing, and I think a lot of people can relate to that. But growing up, I really didn't know that many other people that were first generation American.

And it kinda showed me that there are many different ways to live life, not just one set way. And I think that really opened my mind to a lot of different possibilities of what makes, like, a good life for myself. I fell into music when I was a teenager, and it was the true love of my life and still is. I was in bands for a long time. I'll dive dive into that a little bit.

And I'm now a music producer and audio engineer at a studio. Shout out DIMM Studios. What up? Gonna be there after this working on a session. But, yeah, it's kind of music has really kinda led me into all the different avenues of my life, which has been nice.

It's taken me places that I never really thought were possible. Even when it was really, really difficult, I've learned life lessons. Like, it's like I feel like I went to the school of life. I only went to two year school. I went to Brookdale.

It took me four years to finish. School was never my jam. And I was touring in bands in between always. When I was 17, me and seven of my friends hopped in a Honda Odyssey from 02/2003, and we jumped, in that thing with a U Haul attached to the back. And we drove all over the country playing shows that myself and one other friend of ours booked on Facebook, in just the most random obscure places that you could imagine.

And, honestly, we never looked back. Since then, of course, everybody has gone a million different directions individually, but me personally, you know, that really sparked a feeling in me that we can do things ourselves. You know, we have agency in life. I learned that, you know, the DIY do it yourself ethics, you know, really resonate with me, and I carry that through everything that I do up to this point. I toured pretty much nonstop from then until just last year.

Actually, yesterday, I was talking to someone about it, and I couldn't believe that my last tour was last year. It already feels like years ago, and that's probably because I'm so used to going on and off the road. But some of the hardest parts about touring in a band, and anyone who's watching this who's in a band, who's from my circle, whatever, I'm sure you understand, you're you're driving around, you're making no money. You're making just enough money to keep on going. It's like black flag in the eighties.

It's just like the normal touring space now. And, you know, you're connecting with other artists, maybe you're doing show trades, whatever it may be. But it's it's really hard. One of the hardest summers that I ever had was, I think it was, like, 2015 or something like that. We called it the hell tour.

So we had two tours booked back to back. This is in my old band called On Your Marks, just out of high school. And, the first tour, we went out there. Day one day zero, actually, because the show was the next day in North Carolina. We were supposed to play at a pizza place on a college campus in, North Carolina.

On our way down, we left the night before. We broke down in Delaware. By the way, if you're enjoying the show, don't forget to like and subscribe right now. We appreciate your support. Now back to the show.

So this was a van that we got from some guy in Philly. We called this van. It was all blacked out and had a skull, like, shift thing, and, we called it the King. And it was apparently, it worked, we thought, but we broke down in Delaware. Right?

So four in the morning, I'm awake. Everyone else is sleeping. I call triple a. We're at a gas station, and we're waiting for hours for this AAA guy to come. Somebody comes.

They jump the van. They're like, I don't know if you're gonna make it to North Carolina, but, you know, if you're gonna try, I wouldn't shut it off. So for the next ten hours of the drive, we didn't shut off the van once, filling up with gas, whatever. We just kept it on. And lo and behold, we made it to the venue, turned off the van, and it died right there in front of the pizza place.

So then the goal was the band will go set up and do our thing. We had one roadie at the time was our our homie, Joey, who's still a road warrior to this day. In fact, he was just overseas doing some gigs, front of house for some artists. And he was like, alright. I'm gonna get a battery from the only auto parts store, which is, like, three miles from here.

I have a skateboard. I'm gonna go do it. So he skateboards away. We're setting up. Later in the day, we play our set.

Right? It was a great time. It was a college gig. It was so much fun. Everyone had a blast.

At the end of the show, Joey and our drummer, Matty, were, like, putting in the battery, and all of a sudden, we start hearing these sirens. And it's like they're all around us and all coming right towards us. And we're like, what the fuck is that? And all of a sudden these guys these guys in a college house that's right next to where our van is, like, they come running out, and they're like, oh my god, fire. There's a fire.

Call 911. Right? And so we're like, what? We're we're parked right there. And, so all of a sudden, all these fire trucks and police start coming.

The house starts lighting on fire. There's smoke everywhere. There's crowds forming around, and we're stuck there. And we're like, if we can't get this battery in right now, we're gonna be stuck here all night. We have a gig to get to the next day.

And, man, it was crazy. We ended up getting the van stuck in the middle of all the fire trucks. They were running by us with hoses, and, there was nothing we could do. But the silver lining here was that one of our bandmates had a friend that was going to that school from New Jersey, and they were staying in an like, a parent or an aunt or uncle's mansion not far away from there, and she was like, I'll take you over there. And so we ended up amidst all that chaos, we ended up sleeping in, like, this gorgeous mansion and swimming in a pool and having the time of our lives and partying that night.

And that was night one of Hell Tour. So goes to show that, DIY touring is not for the faint of heart, but that little microcosm of just one day on the road showed us so much about if you just keep going and and and persevere through the ridiculousness of life, you know, sometimes you get a little reward. And touring for me was always feeding me just enough to keep going. And I think that taught me some really valuable life lessons, and there's nothing quite like the hard knocks school of life. You know?

And touring really gave that to me, and music gave that to me. So, I'm really thankful for that. And if it wasn't for my past and music in general, I would have probably never met Kurt. And so I just wanna say that I'm really grateful to be here. And for anybody who, like I said, has tuned into the podcast, we appreciate you.

We're starting a totally new endeavor with this, and we're spreading a message of core energy that we feel like is a new language to help people grow. So we hope that you appreciate it. And, yeah, this is about it. But I hope that you watch, and maybe you'll see me on this side of the camera again sometime. But for now, see ya.