<strong>L</strong>ife came full circle at Round Table Recording Co. last weekend.
A decade ago, when Steve Spinks was an assistant football coach at Whiteland, Tyler Weaver was one of the young players taking his direction. But on a fall Saturday afternoon at the pristine new $2 million multi-studio recording complex in Broad Ripple, it was Weaver helping to guide Spinks.
Now in his first season as the head coach at Indian Creek, Spinks used to perform regularly as a rapper under the stage name of Zoso Conway. Roughly six years removed from setting foot in the vocal booth, he was lured back in through a deal he made with his current players during a preseason fundraising drive.
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Click here to purchase photos from this gallery“By this time, they now know that I rap,” Spinks said. “I don’t know how — I think my prinicipal knew and started showing them. So I said, ‘I will make you a personal rap song for this school if you raise $10,000.’ So they did it, and I’m a man of my word.”
Putting a “Creek Anthem” together wasn’t quite as simple as just cutting any old hip-hop record. Indian Creek is far more rural than the area that Spinks — a two-way lineman on the 1999 state championship team at Ben Davis — grew up in, so he had to make his lyrics more relatable to them.
And that’s exactly what he did, referencing pickup trucks and George Strait in his verses. Spinks’ gritty voice proves the perfect complement to the blue-collar Indian Creek ethos that he describes in the hook:
<em>Welcome to the Creek/in the sticks deep</em>
<em>Never bow down, stand tall on our feet</em>
<em>Through the rain and sleet/all Braves compete</em>
<em>Gravel on our streets, but it’s where our hearts beat</em>
“A lot of the lines pertain more to heart, overcoming stuff, fighting, so that was kind of the focus of it there,” Spinks said. “And also mentioning some small things about the country — my dad’s from West Virginia, so I understand some of that; I get it. So like mud bogging and square-body Chevys and stuff like that, that’s just things that are near and dear to them that I wanted to meld in. … That’s how I started it, just making a list.”
Once Spinks had the song written, the next step was getting in the studio and making it sound good — and his first call on that front was Weaver, who has built up a nice résumé working as an engineer for a number of established artists across several genres.
Fittingly enough, it was Spinks that got Weaver into the music business in the first place; when he was coaching at Whiteland, he started a hip-hop club at the high school, and Weaver was one of the 30 or so students who joined.
He loved rap music and wanted to find a way to be a part of it, but he knew that performing wasn’t the way.
“There was a few of us that came and wanted to explore it a little deeper,” Weaver recalled, “and that’s when I told him, ‘Look, I have no business rapping; that’s just not who I am.’ I wanted to be on the production side, behind the boards, if you will.”
Spinks took Weaver to shows and studio sessions to help him make some connections, and after graduating from Whiteland, Weaver wound up attending the Azmyth School of Music Technology in Indianapolis, where he learned the ins and outs of sound engineering. Round Table now offers similar classes at its studios for others looking to break in to the industry.
Weaver’s job last weekend was to take the raw materials that Spinks brought in — a beat and some rhymes — and play with levels, make edits and add effects until a fully polished product emerged.
“Tyler’s going to make it sound good,” Spinks said confidently.
This time around, it was Spinks on the field running the plays while Weaver was coordinating it all from the other side of the glass.
“I see what the end picture is supposed to look like, and I’ve got to help lead to that end picture, in a sense,” Weaver said.
Indian Creek will never be mistaken as a hotbed for hip-hop, but most of the self-described country boys on the team still warmed to Spinks’ old music pretty quickly when they found out about it.
After all, not too many high school football players get a chance to hear their coach dropping rhymes.
“It went over well with the team,” senior lineman Zach Kaufman said. “It’s different music; not a lot of the kids here listen to music like that. But they listened to it and gave it a try.”
“Ain’t none of y’all got a coach like mine,” junior receiver Sam Creek tweeted while Spinks was at Round Table putting the song together.
Whether the “Creek Anthem” ends up becoming a one-season novelty that bonds the Braves together for a little while or becomes a timeless banger that plays at Indian Creek sporting events for years, Spinks was just happy to have an excuse to dust off the microphone and get back to doing something he’s been passionate about for much of his life.
“It felt fantastic getting into the chorus — that part was great,” he said. “There’s just some things, like my breathing, I was off.
“(But) getting back in there, I felt really good.”
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Franklin at Whiteland, 7 p.m.
Center Grove at Ben Davis, 7 p.m.
Greenwood at Mooresville, 7 p.m.
Brown County at Indian Creek, 7 p.m.
Roncalli at Columbus North, 7 p.m.
Switzerland County at Edinburgh, 6 p.m. Saturday
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