At the time of their farewell show in October 2015, Bad Cactus Brass Band were playing 150 shows a year in metro Phoenix, from rock clubs to RV parks, farms, parades and public pools.
“It was nuts,” Benjie Messer, who founded the group in 2009, recalls. “That’s part of why I had to stop doing it. I was like, ‘I can’t keep up this schedule.'”
He also couldn’t shake the feeling that he and his bandmates had done all they could do in Phoenix, where less than six months after forming, they were hired for a 20-date engagement at Desert Botanical Garden’s annual Las Noches de las Luminarias, playing to 10,000 people.
‘Our thing was being the New Orleans band of Phoenix’
“Our thing was being the New Orleans band of Phoenix, the brass band of Phoenix,” Messer says.
“We were playing mostly tunes New Orleans brass bands played in the versions they played them. And I was still trying to grow the thing, so I took us on a few little tours and realized, ‘Why would anybody come see us when they could see Rebirth (Brass Band) when they tour? What are we offering that’s new?’”