Years ago, I had a brief career as a YouTuber.
Recently I wrote about the Scarred’s infamous Mark Twain Tour. About a year after our return, the Scarred broke up and Justin wanted to build something totally new. Over the years we had become as close as brothers, Justin and I, so the prospect of following him into the darkness armed only with a blind sense of adventure was something I was willing to do without question.
In the months before I moved, I got a job at a factory and saved every penny and dime I could manage. If there’s anything about the ignorance of youth I miss, it’s believing you can move across the country on a wing and a prayer. That’s exactly what I did, though, and I made it work. I didn’t have a job lined up, family money to fall back on, or any promising connections. I just believed it would work, and somehow it did.
Of course, I hadn’t hedged my bets on becoming a YouTuber. That happened quite by accident.
California had been calling my name for years. Looking back, I think it had subconsciously been part of the plan for as long as I can remember. Seeing Almost Famous as a kid planted the seed, and going on tour with the Scarred in the summer of 2007 had sealed the deal. After my college graduation, I sent writing samples to LA Weekly, OC Weekly, and the Orange County Register. Every single one of them agreed to take me on, to varying degrees.
The following two years out West completely reshaped the rest of my life and identity. If you were to Google me, most of the results would be tied to that time. Chances are that if you’re reading these words right now, it’s because you followed the link from a post tied to a social media account you follow because of my time in California. I had set out to make the world know my name as a writer and ended up brushing up against fame as an internet personality.
Like most adventures in my life, I fell totally assbackwards into it.
Preparing for the great migration, I started listening to some of the artists who had helped make me fall in love with California. I have always been a disciple of Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers. There’s no shortage of love in my heart for the iconic Orange County punk scene. At times I’ve become nearly dangerously obsessed with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, not to mention Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Byrds.
But for me, nobody beats Warren Zevon.
…
The Review
Warren Zevon
Self-Titled
1976
Warren Zevon is one of those iconic records that instantly stitched itself into the lining of my heart.
At the time I found him, I hadn’t realized that I had spent my entire life searching for an artist like Warren Zevon. He was so cool, eccentric, and vaguely spooky. The songwriting was staggering, every single track the heartbreaking ravings of a mad genius composer translated through the lens of a ‘70’s pop rock singer-songwriter. The best part? No one seemed to know who he was, so I had this secret gift of a universe living inside of my headphones.
I’m such a fan that it’s hard to narrow down a favorite record. Sure, Excitable Boy is something of a masterpiece—the sonic equivalent of a Hunter S. Thompson tome—but the stuff he was writing at the end of his career was just as significant. There is no finer example of a dying man singing about dying than The Wind. A few short years before that record he released Life’ll Kill Ya, which must be included in the conversation for best of his entire career. Instead of choosing my pick of the litter, let’s instead focus on the foundation of it all with 1976’s self-titled release, Warren Zevon.
There’s a beautifully haunting quality to Warren Zevon at its very skeleton that dances in a breezy rhythm along side the poetry of its lyrics and its unmistakable California-in-the-70s production. It’s dark and hilarious, mesmerizing and fun, deeply moving, and soft around the edges. Listening to Warren Zevon feels like breaking up with your high school sweetheart and meeting the love of your life on the same day. It will make you hate the night for ending so soon but love the sun for shining so bright.
From the blistering, piano-driven historical epic opener of “Frank and Jesse James” to orchestral, introspective closer of “Desperados Under the Eaves,” the record is full of dreamy left turns. Its gritty and often hilarious lyrics provide an air of open rebellion, while its composition and production mask its inner darkness so well that you could put the record on during a family dinner without raising any eyebrows.
If you want straight-forward rockers, you’ll happily feast on tracks like “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” both of which carry Zevon’s trademark wink-and-nod cynicism. Then there are the songs that could be laudably argued as being the casual finest of his career, like “Backs Turned Looking Down the Path” or the aching Los Angeles folk tale of “Carmelita.” In my opinion, the shiniest moment on the no-skip release is “The French Inhaler.”
“The French Inhaler” summarizes the record’s entire theme at a glance. It has Zevon’s almost classical structure with tinges of modern rock and pop influences, but with lyrics so compelling and bizarre that any and all of its contemporary competitors sound bubblegum by comparison. My favorite line in that song—possibly of any song ever written—is “When the lights came up at two, I caught a glimpse of you, and your face looked like something death brought with him in his suitcase.”
Warren Zevon always makes me think of California because his imagery of the state was heavy on my mind when I moved there myself. I was hoping for something strange and bewitching, and for better or worse, that’s exactly what I got. The line that played repeatedly in my mind as I crossed the border was:
“And if California slides into the ocean, like the mystics and statistics say it will, I predict this motel will be standing, until I pay my bill.”
…
The Tale
If there were a documentary about my life, this would be the period with a slideshow of sepia-toned photographs as “Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie played underneath.
Being in California is the only era of my life I can vividly remember knowing was special while it was actively happening. Even though I had left home at 18, migrating west was the first time that it truly felt like I had gone anywhere. My hometown is relatively small, but by no means tiny. It isn’t a place where everyone knows your name, but it is a place where everyone has a cousin who does. As the old saying goes, though, there are no cousins in California.
That feeling of real independence was the strange and wonderful truth carrying me across the desert on our weeklong drive. I had no one waiting to greet me on the other side but my friends from the Scarred. Astonishingly, that fact never gave me pause. It was as if that chapter in my life had already been written, and I just had to show up and say my lines.
The house I moved into was a ramshackle structure that had been moved there by a truck from the Midwest decades before my arrival. Justin and I often joked that all it would take was a random city inspection for us to be homeless. I didn’t care—To me, it was palatial. On my darker days in the present, I close my eyes and put myself back on our poured concrete, cracked red porch to relax. We were in our 20s, hungry for the world to know our names, mad men drunk on wild passion.
I began writing immediately.
The Orange County Register allowed me a regular column focused on my transition from Deep South nobody to California nobody. Between those columns, I was given a man-on-the-street beat, pounding the pavement and harassing locals to give me their takes on community happenings. I was also writing for LA Weekly and OC Weekly, although most of my pitches to those organizations went unsold. I did get to write a long diatribe opining my frustration that Warren Zevon remained yet un inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which I think they ultimately regretted running.
My sparse, white-walled bedroom was barely big enough for my single mattress on the floor and a small television I kept propped atop one of my suitcases. I was paying $700 a month for the privilege, which at the time was a steal. My meager earnings as a freelancer weren’t going to pay for it, though, so I worked any job I could find.
For a stretch I worked as a barista and at a Hot Topic simultaneously. I was such a bad barista that after a few days, I was only allowed to sweep the floors and refill the milk. They gave me a shot at working the drive-thru, but I was quickly removed after getting into a dull but heated exchange with the manager.
“What did you learn about that customer?” she had asked me.
“That they like coffee,” I flatly replied.
The coffee gig ultimately only lasted a few weeks. The only thing we could ever agree on was how bad I was at the job. One morning I threw my green apron on the manager’s desk and gave the middle finger to the building as I jetted off to my other job at Hot Topic, where I was almost immediately fired for accidentally breaking a display case.
My next job was an ill-defined sales position at what turned out to be a pyramid scheme. I should have been tipped off by getting an interview the same day I applied, going through the onboarding process with a room full of other new hires, or how every employee kept talking about how this job was a step towards running their own business. In my heart, I think I always knew it was a scam, but I was so hungry and desperate that I stuck it out for another week. In the end I made no sales, wasted a lot of money on gas and sandwiches, and got a check for $300.
Finally, a friend of a friend got me a copywriting job for a local marketing company. It came with a grey-walled cubicle, a dress code, pointless strategy meetings, and inner-office drama, but it paid $20 an hour (a king’s ransom in those days) and it was full-time. I also genuinely enjoyed my coworkers, and it was only one town over, which on California freeways meant my commute was a brisk 45 minutes.
As all of this was happening, Justin and I were spending nights and weekends working on a new project. We had the same sense of humor, the same misguided idealism, and the same yearning to collaborate and create. There was this website called YouTube that had been around for a while but was still in its relative infancy. This was around the end of 2013, beginning of 2014. YouTube was well established but being what would become known as a YouTuber was still a brand-new concept. What attracted us to the platform was that punk rock, DIY spirit of it all. We could make our own television show, essentially, with no budget or oversight, and then throw it online for an audience to find.
We spent weeks hammering out the concept on that red porch.
Back then, the landscape was oversaturated with mean-spirited, sardonic content. The standard was to pick something and make fun of it, punch down. Most of what we were finding was unnecessarily crass, too, working blue and hard-leaning into shock value. It’s not that we were above that kind of humor, I would go so far as to say we both enjoyed some of it, but it left a hole in the market. Justin and I were both genuinely into things, not ironically into them. We knew there had to be people out there like us who would enjoy content that celebrated niche and nerdy interests, their histories and our goofy humor.
We wanted to make something that could appeal to everyone in your family, while never compromising the integrity of the product. It could be funny and weird, but it didn’t necessarily have to be dark and edgy. At the same time, we knew we could stand out if we made the most out of our production value. If we worked hard enough on writing, learning the editing software and shooting everything just right, we could make it look like something resembling a real TV show. This was at a time when most YouTube videos were around one to three minutes long, usually no longer than five minutes. We wanted to make something closer to 10 minutes, but with quick cuts and a narrative structure.
Lucky for us, right down the street was a place called Disneyland.
Disneyland was perfect. They allowed cameras; it looked incredible on film, and there was a rich history that Justin knew intimately. He was passionate about Disney, and that passion was contagious. Better yet, theme park filmmaking hadn’t yet become a thing. YouTube was still the Wild West, and this was years before every idea had been covered to death. Most Disneyland videos were text-on-background fact sheets that got the details wrong, or POV-style walkthroughs. We were offering something completely new.
Neither Justin nor I wanted to be in front of the camera at first. I know that sounds like one of those self-effacing, humble-brag pull quotes, but it’s true. Our initial plan was to write, direct, and produce videos for our friends under an umbrella called Live Fast Die Poor. We had a website and everything. We wanted to figure out who the best on-camera personality would be, develop them, and make them the face of the operation. We hadn’t chosen anyone, but that was the general plan. We tried several experiments, but nothing felt quite right. Our friend Adam the Woo, the only full-time YouTuber we knew, suggested Justin try his hand as host.
Right away we knew we had something.
Justin had just begun the long and perilous journey of what would be become a truly awful divorce, and my writing career was stagnant at best, so our entire focus became this new show that we eventually called Randomland. In those early days, our mantra became “Every spare minute, every spare dollar.” We filmed every idea we had, good or bad. We would spend all night writing and researching, wake up and start filming, then edit all night when we got back. Each video had to be a step forward, or else what were we doing?
On the drive from Georgia to California, Justin and I had taken some time to film roadside attractions in Tennessee, Arkansas, and New Mexico. I was in those videos, basically because I was there with him at the time. My on-the-ground function in those days was to help film, carry the bag, and pitch jokes. Being behind the scenes was more than enough for me. Outside of some community theater and punk rock bands as a teenager, I didn’t care to be the center of attention. Then, slowly, I started showing up on camera more and more.
The first proper Randomland video I remember being prominently featured in was called “Calico Ghost Town – The Town That Walt Built.” Justin and I had spent hundreds of hours riding around in the van together, and we would spend most of that time riffing and doing bits. The goal was always to make the other person laugh first, and over time, we got pretty good at it. I’ve never taken an improv class, but I must imagine it wasn’t dissimilar. There was a natural chemistry, and after that year doing the morning announcements in high school, I knew how to be comfortable on film.
Not long after filming in Calico, we made a video called “International Tiki Marketplace: Going Full Tiki at Don The Beachcomber.” To me—and probably only me—that was the video where everything came together, and we started really finding our voice. It looked, sounded, and felt like a real episode of a real television show, albeit low budget and on community access. It was exactly what I wanted Randomland to be—friends having a blast and inviting the viewer along to join the party.
Making our goofy little show for a nonexistent audience was one of the happiest times of my life. We were making it up as we went along, and there were no wrong answers. Every aspect of the production was handled by the two of us. It was like being in a band with none of the negative noise that naturally accompanies that situation. When I look back now, I miss that first year most of all, Scarecrow.
I vividly remember how thrilling it was when we crossed the 1,000-subscriber threshold. We weren’t sure anyone would ever watch our stuff, and here were 1,000 strangers who had independently decided to watch everything we made. It was decided early on that we would engage with them as much as possible. We replied to every comment, answered every DM, and would even go to Disneyland to meet anyone in person if they asked. It couldn’t go on like that forever, obviously, but we were determined to make that human connection go on as long as possible.
At the same time, we started branching out. I was writing a weekly column for the website under the Tales From the Underground umbrella, and we invited our friends to begin contributing as well. Justin encouraged me to start making videos of my own, and I tried my hand at that too. We also started making merch, since Justin was a gifted graphic designer. Soon we had t-shirts, stickers, and buttons that people were actually buying. Somewhere around that same time, we also started a second video series called the Sometimes Vlog, where we would have long, unedited vlogs about whatever we wanted to discuss.
Then the snowball started picking up speed.
We were pumping out so much material so fast that we brought on a team to help us edit, and we even started hosting some of their content along with ours. Before we knew it, the team had grown from the two of us to half a dozen in no time. No money was changing hands—What little we made was going right back into the project. Everyone was there because they believed in the vision. Soon we were getting invited to events, meeting important people, and even walking across a red carpet or two.
Justin and I took the show on the road to Missouri, where we filmed several videos centered around the childhood homes of Mark Twain and Walt Disney. This little project that started on the red porch had taken us all the way across the country, staying in motels and keeping us in the finest bags of Doritos money could buy. I remember sitting on the banks of the Mississippi feeling invincible, like the best was yet to come.
Adam the Woo—our friend and budding celebrity—moved to California, and he and I got a place together in the city of Orange. It was a neat little house hidden in the back corner of an apartment complex, and to this day, it’s probably my favorite spot I’ve ever lived. It was walking distance to the Orange Circle, close to my job, and close to Disneyland. My girlfriend at the time lived with us, and her job was practically within walking distance. Naturally, Justin and I started showing up in Adam’s videos more frequently as well. That cross-pollination was huge for us.
Justin and I even started a podcast, the short-lived Live Fast Die Pod. With all the unexpected momentum, we were throwing ourselves full-bore into every avenue we could imagine. We wanted to seize the moment because we could tell we had something, and this would probably be our last shot at making something great. I’m proud to say it worked.
I don’t know when it happened, but at some point, the show was popular enough that people on the street started asking for pictures with us. One day people were giving us bizarre looks because we were walking around talking into a camera, and the next they were stopping us for selfies. At first it was once every couple of weeks, then every couple of days, then every day, then several times a day. One time I went to Nashville on a visit home, and I got recognized at a record store on Broadway.
For me personally, that’s when things started getting heavy.
Earlier I mentioned that my goal was always to be behind the scenes, never an on-camera personality, and that was true. There’s something alluring about the attention, though. It becomes an addiction. I was always a chubby kid with low self-esteem from the Georgia woods who masked his insecurities with sarcasm, and then suddenly people wanted to take their picture with me, and there was an Instagram fan page called “Tyler Evans Is Handsome.” I wanted to chase that feeling, at first, but then one day I woke up and realized it wasn’t for me.
When we started, there wasn’t yet a roadmap for a YouTube career. We weren’t the first to do it, but the landscape was nothing like it is today. The rules were still unwritten enough that we felt like pioneers. What they don’t tell you is that, to do it successfully, your online presence must become a full-time job. I was always posting something, livestreaming, or engaging with the audience in whatever capacity was needed. No one was forcing me to do it; it was just the nature of feeding the beast. Over time, participating in the madness started taking its toll. What used to feel like a great adventure had been replaced by stress and anxiety.
One time I got into a funny exchange with my friend Lizz from back home via a social media comment section. It was nothing scandalous; we were just literally going back and forth making jokes about our hometown. That started speculations of an affair, which got back to my girlfriend. It couldn’t have been more innocuous, but it was grinded into something salacious. I hated that feeling so much that it made my stomach burn.
From that moment on, I started feeling uneasy about my online presence. I was worried that if I said the wrong thing, or even appeared to say the wrong thing, Justin would have to answer for it. That’s a lot of pressure, especially for someone who has always seen himself as just some guy. Some folks have the constitution necessary to weather situations like that with ease, but not me. Justin was great at it, as if born to it, or at least he always appeared to be. For all I know he could have been like a duck, appearing to sail smooth across the water while his feet were kicking up a ruckus underneath.
At first, I put a bit of distance between myself and Randomland, just to figure things out. I began doing regular standup spots at this club called the Anchor Bar in Costa Mesa, just to try something new and get away from everything else. As much fun as it was, I wasn’t very good at it, and it didn’t help anything. I hated my day job so much I could barely stand it, and although my girlfriend and I had recently gotten engaged, we did it for the wrong reasons, and the relationship was slowly becoming toxic.
I wanted to go home.
That thought kept lingering in the back of my brain no matter what I did to try and ignore it. Things could be peachy as pie, then randomly my brain would scream, “I want to go home.” The thing is, I was home. California was my home. I had a California residence, paid California taxes, and was under the rule of Governor Jerry Brown just like everyone else.
The best way I know how to explain the disorienting feeling growing louder every day is to use a ham-fisted analogy. Imagine getting a small apartment with someone, going to sleep one night, and waking up the next morning in a two-story house filled with strangers who are acting as if everything is business as usual. That’s not a perfect one-to-one—I wasn’t hoodwinked_but I still felt displaced. It was too much too soon, and I wanted to leave the circus before we reached the next town.
What I really wanted was Georgia. I missed Southern accents, the slow pace, and my family. A therapist would probably tell me that what I missed was my anonymity, and Georgia was the last place I had it, but that wouldn’t have changed my mind. Let the viewers think I hopped a train and got eaten by the Resaca Swamp Monster; I didn’t care. It was time to say goodbye and good luck to the California dream.
Honestly, if anyone had been taking notes, my itchy feet wouldn’t have been a surprise. I had moved to California to be a writer, and that dream wasn’t going anywhere after two full years of beating my head against the wall. Instead, I was working endless hours at a dead-end job for a company so vaguely defined that, to this day, I couldn’t tell you with any confidence what we did. In my off time I was having panic attacks from the stress of a YouTube show that had the unfortunate luck of becoming more successful than I could handle and was only getting bigger.
It feels ridiculous to claim I was famous, so I’ll use the word notoriety. The idea of having a name people recognize is something I think most of us fantasize about at some point in our lives, but the reality of it is vastly different. I thought it would make me happy, but it didn’t change anything. Perhaps I got too big for my britches for a spell, but that was it. There were still all the same racing thoughts when I went to bed at night, but now, they were multiplied. The worst part of notoriety, in my opinion, is that there are no days off.
You’re the guy from that thing when you’re online, sure, but you’re also the guy from that thing when you’re buying groceries or having dinner with your girlfriend. I’m not from the generation of dreamers who held fame as the goal. Getting a taste for it made me realize that I wanted to be back in the mountains living a quiet life. I wanted to watch my nieces grow up, be able to have lunch with my Dad and brother on only 10 minutes notice, meet someone, and settle down.
So, I blew everything up.
I remember the night I told Justin I was leaving. We went to Tortilla Jo’s in Downtown Disney, where I had the tacos de pollo. Justin knew something was up; it was obvious. We’ve been thick as thieves for the entirety of our friendship, but I had been keeping him at arm’s length for weeks. I knew that if I told him I was thinking about leaving before I made up my mind, he would have convinced me to stay. The idea of leaving felt right, even if it broke my heart, and I knew I had to figure that out for myself. In the end I couldn’t stand the tension anymore and just blurted it out.
Even though I was walking away from this thing we had painstakingly built together over the course of multiple years, he was never anything but supportive. There wasn’t one single instance where he made me feel guilty, tried to talk me out of it, or anything like that. Instead, he just listened while everything came pouring out. I knew he was disappointed, but he never made me feel like I let him down. It just felt like he was sad because he was going to miss his friend, which is exactly how I was feeling. In that moment we ceased being business partners and co-stars and returned to being best friends again. I could have cried, and you would have to ask Justin to be sure, but I probably did.
That November, two years to the day after my arrival, I was back in my truck headed for Georgia.
…
The Aftermath
It’s been 10 years since I left California.
Justin and I still talk nearly every single day, but believe it or not, I’ve never been back. I want to visit, even spend a week or two, but it hasn’t worked out that way yet. Life has a way of getting in the way of your plans. It’s not that I don’t miss California, or that I have never thought about moving back, but for the most part, I’m completely content with haunting the streets of my small town.
I’ve never regretted walking away, not for a second. As a matter of fact, right after I left, the show started exploding in popularity. I snuck out through the bathroom window at the exact right time. It’s been an honor and a privilege watching it grow from a distance. I’m incredibly proud of what it has become. There’s always been a lingering thought in the deep recesses of my brain that maybe one day I’ll jump back in if Justin would have me, but for now, I’m happy to be a regular fan like everyone else.
Sometimes I’ll secretly surf the reddit threads and comment sections to see what people are saying. My favorite thing I’ve read so far was that I went to Georgia, disappeared, and was never heard from again. One of you should probably contact Unsolved Mysteries after reading this to let everyone know I’m OK. In all fairness to that redditor, I did go back to Georgia and disappear. That was the whole point, after all. I’m no recluse; you just have to know where to look.
The question of the hour, I suppose, is what have I been doing for the last decade in my relative anonymity? I want to tell you everything, but it deserves more than a few summarized paragraphs. For now, suffice to say, I embarked on a long and beautiful lost weekend. I’ve fallen in and out of love, survived a global pandemic, and gone on countless adventures. I’m the same old Tyler Evans, save for the cameras documenting the journey.
Justin famously went on the Quest for Positivity, and for years, I’ve joked that mine was a quest for authenticity. I wanted to know who I was, what I believed in, what kind of man I wanted to be when left to my own devices. I’m happy to say that, now, I’ve found the answers to most of those questions. Although, truly, are we ever done learning?
Still, one of these days, don’t be surprised if I get a wild hair to shoot past the second star to the right, straight on ‘til morning, and visit my lost boys in Randomland again.
