What do you get when you mix six grown men from the suburbs with a mountain of musical equipment and a generous dash of good old-fashioned fun? In this case, you get The Dain Bramage Band, a band that plays Top hits from the 1960s through 2007, with a few originals thrown in.

The band takes its name from a spoonerism of brain damage, which gives you the first clue about the players' state of mind. "One way to explain it would be to say we're kind of a strange conglomeration of everybody's musical interests and tastes," said drummer Brad Binks.

"Actually, it all started when Brad and I got together with Bruce Palmer, a Guitar player, to jam," said Rick Schmid, Keyboardist. "We had all been in separate bands, but had known each other since high school."

We quickly realized that a dedicated lead singer was required and additonal muscians would improve our performances. We recruited Bill Nicholson to handle the lead vocals. Bill knew of a Sax Player, Tom Doyle, from a networking event he attended and Rick had a friend who was a great Jazz Keyboard player, Casey Dodge.

We bought them in and started to work on our music. It quickly became evident that Casey was not a good fit, he left. Rick had played bass but switched to Keyboards when Tom Doyle recruited a solid Bass player John Hauge. He joined the band in February 1992.

We played our first Taste of Glen Ellyn in May of that year. Rick was the only one who knew how to set up the PA and Mic the instruments so it took a bit of time to get going but our performance was ok.

We then went back into "the Bunker" to expand our musical repertoire. ( the Bunker is where we practice and write our music) Dain Bramage performed about twice a month in bars, clubs, festivals, at parties and corporate gigs over the next few years.

It was at one of those corporate gigs in 1999, Bruce informed us he had decided to leave the band.

Fortunately, Bill knew a guitarist who had come to see us a couple of times so we invited him for a tryout. John Hughes came in and played Black Magic Woman perfectly so he got the spot. He had to get up to speed quickly because we were playing a fundraiser about three weeks after he joined. He did a solid job and we had our lead guitar.

Our lineup was complete. We have been playing and expanding our repertoire ever since. The band also took time to write and develop a few original songs. We added them to a number of live recordings from one of our Taste of Glen Ellyn performances for our first CD, “Who Moved The Door?” You can rock to these live and studio recordings on the music page of this site.

We will expand this at a later time. All of us have been other bands and have playing since at least high school.