By Eric The Red
Many people claim to have played music for most of their lives. Laramie Eve, bassist for Blasting Echo, is one of the few people who can back this up with factual information. The La Quinta native is the personification of dedication and perseverance. She started playing piano at a very young age, quickly moved on to guitar and then bass shortly after. I sat down with her and got the lowdown on how she got into music, her career and accumulated achievements, and her activity in building public awareness about endometriosis.
I started my interview by learning about Laramie’s past, and what made her decide to pursue a career in music. “When I was growing up as a kid, my parents collected antiques, and we had this antique piano in my house. There was a bench seat that had all these old school piano books. I used to sit there and read these books that I could hardly even read and sit there and play on the piano, and I was just like, ‘Oh, this is awesome.’ Just being able to make your own sounds and stuff. I’ve just always had music,” she stated. Laramie went on to explain how her musical talents evolved from there, moving on to the guitar at the age of 10, and progressing from there to the bass at 12. After that, her music career truly began, playing her first gig on her 13th birthday.
Over the years, Laramie has amassed an impressive collection of achievements. I asked her to elaborate on what she felt was her biggest. “With Jekkel, we put out quite a few albums. I think we put out 3 albums before we were even out of high school. With Blasting Echo, just recently we recorded our 16 track CD, and we did it all ourselves,” Ms. Eve stated. She went on to describe the experience, saying, “We didn’t have any help and that’s really cool when it’s just that group of people, you don’t have anybody else’s inputs or anybody else saying anything. We did all the recording at the IPAC, so we got to set up on one of the little movie theater stages, because Linda Lemke, the keyboardist, teaches music there. So we got to use that for a month or so. We recorded all the drums and most of the bass, but then we went back to my house and did all the other guitars and all the vocals. I’ve actually had to have a couple surgeries, and I had one in the middle of it, but it was a good thing because I came back and I wasn’t able to do anything. So I would just sit there in the studio room and I did all the drum editing for Blasting Echo. I did all the grunt work, on the computer where you’re fixing everything.”
We continued the dialog by talking about how she was active in our community, working to bring awareness to the women’s health issue, endometriosis. Laramie explained, “I have Endometriosis, and that’s something that needs a lot more focus out here in the desert. People hardly even know about it and it’s something that a lot of women have that goes undiagnosed for years. They didn’t know I had it for years, and they had to do an exploratory surgery to even find out that I had it.”
Endometriosis is an often painful disorder in which tissue that normally lines the inside of the uterus, the endometrium, grows outside the uterus. Laramie went on to say, “It affects so many people, and so many people don’t know. I’m trying to get something going with that. There’s a rally in March for Endometriosis. It’s on March 14th, and they’re doing it all over the world, and in every capital in the U.S. It’s to help raise awareness and get people to get the word out there. You’re in so much pain, it affects you all the time, and it gets misdiagnosed. I was told I had so many other things before I found out what it was and I was given all these other drugs and it all made me worse. So that is something that I, especially this year, will really be trying to get something going.”
