The band officially got started with a sort of rough jam at Kerwin's house, where we still are practicing even today.

Our first gig was at Hayahay, a great local bar in Dumaguete by the sea. There are local musicians playing live music most nights during the week (extra thanks to Sande Fuentes for asking us to play at his place every week!).

Here's a photo from our first gig in July 2005. The name we came up at first was "The Cool Dudes". The performance itself was pretty rough since we hadn't all practiced together very much, I actually felt a little queasy after getting off the stage at first because I messed up a lot. The crowd at Hayahay was a lot more forgiving of our musical mistakes, but some commented that maybe we should get a new name for the band!

After a week we were back on the stage at Hayahay with a new name and a smoking jam written by Raul Limbaga (on the saxophone in this photo). I have to say that coming up with a good name for a band is harder than most people might think. We tossed around several ideas for new names for the band including Pisang Goreng, which means "fried banana" in Indonesian. The name sounded good, but nobody outside of Indonesia would have understood what it meant, so the name "Frying Nemo" was tossed out as kind of a play on the title of the movie and the original "fried banana" idea. Frying Nemo stuck and it's the name we've had since the second week (don't worry, there's no harmful intent for the clown fish, just visit my underwater photo sections here to see for yourself!).

Here's another shot from our second performance at Hayahay.

To get in some practice we sometimes rent out the Inwire Studio in Dumaguete near Foundation University. In this photo we're waiting for the studio to open up and Nowell Teves (bass) was playing some unplugged Mariah Carey songs.

Here's the inside of Inwire Studio. They have a good setup with a drum set, mikes and amps for the instruments.

The room is kind of small, but I guess that just makes it easier for everyone to communicate while we're playing.

Here's a shot from our third gig. We started opening up our Hayahay performances with a jam called "Pisang Goreng" in honor of one of the first ideas for the name of the band. Raul really gets to rock out on the saxophone during that song, as you can see in this photo.

Here's a shot of Nowell on the bass, his main band is Dumaguete's reggae band Enchi.

Kerwin "funky beats" Elman here. Notice that the drum sticks are a little frayed from the pounding Kerwin delivers to hold down the Frying Nemo rhythm section.

Here's Ramon on the percussion, he and Kerwin are a good team.

This shot of guitarist Steve De neef is from Rock Boo, another live music venue in Dumaguete where we have played a few times. Steve is back in Amsterdam now studying jazz guitar.

Here's the main stage at Rock Boo. Kerwin couldn't make it to this one, but Ramon took over on the drums for him.

Kerwin taped one of our early performances from July on a video camera, so in this photo we're "taking the medicine" and finding out how we really sound. We all watched this video recently again, and it was sort of painful to see how rough it was. I guess the good news is that we've gotten better since then!

A lot of people ask me about why I started wearing a knit cap when playing. Usually the question goes "the tropics too cold for you, eh?". Mainly I wear it because the Nemos pointed out that I need to wear a hat or something else like it to look more like a musician. The other option would be to get a top hat or a fedora or something I guess.

Here's another shot from our third performance at Hayahay.

This photo is a long exposure, so the red stage lights really dominate. Kerwin couldn't make it to play drums at Hayahay for this performance so Ramon held down the rhythm section again.

Our first setlists were pretty short since we didn't have a lot of time to practice new songs. This photo is from the Inwire Studio at another one of our practice sessions.

We were also writing some original songs in the first few weeks of the band. We developed them also during these practices at Inwire.

Here's Kerwin out from behind the drum set and being the band photographer while we worked on new songs.

Now he's back behind the drums again.

Here's Frying Nemo back at Hayahay on a Wednesday night. At this point we had a pretty solid set of original songs and cover songs. Our typical set went something like this: Pisang Goreng (fried banana) to open up and let Raul warm up his sax, then "Common Name", a song written by Raul, "Wind Singing Over Our Song", a country influenced original that I wrote with my brother Preston and Matt Armstrong in our Coach Allen Band back home, then we would play Dave Matthews Band's "Ants Marching" and "Grey Street", after that usually was Jack Johnson's "Dreams Be Dreams" or "Taylor", followed by Coldplay's "Yellow", but I had a lot of trouble singing the falsetto on that one. To close it was sometimes "Awaits", another one written by Raul and "83" written by Kerwin.

From left: Steve De neef (lead guitar), Raul Limbaga (saxophone), Ramon Laruan (percussion), Kerwin Elman (drums), Nowell Teves (bass), me (rhythm guitar, vocals).

Here's another shot of us playing at Rock Boo on a Saturday night.

When we started recording some original songs we figured we'd need some artwork for a cd demo, so we went down to Dumaguete's Rizal Boulevard waterfront to shoot a few staged band photos for the album art.