Jason Groth lay awake, staring at the ceiling. "What could I have done better?" he asked himself. "What could I have done to make this band stay together?"\nIt was late at night in the middle of July, and Cadmium Orange had just played its final Bloomington show at Second Story. By all standards, the show had been a success: easily a hundred fans had packed the house, dancing, drinking, having a good time.\nBut like Groth, other members of the band weren't having a particularly good night. Lee Mantle booked out of Second Story the minute he loaded up the band's gear, Chris Reinhart was tired and just wanted crash and Jim May felt incredibly guilty, that this whole thing was his fault.\nTheir final show was the next day -- the last time they would perform together before their band officially broke up.\nWhen you're barely 23, six years is a lifetime, more than a fourth of your life. This summer, the members of Cadmium Orange ended a six-year relationship with Bloomington, IU and, most importantly, each other. They had rocked the Bluebird and Second Story, Culture Shock and Live From Bloomington and most often their own basement at 718 E. Hunter St., entertaining hundreds of IU students.\nBreaking up with a band is a lot like breaking up with a girlfriend or boyfriend. There are hurt feelings, hard feelings, awkward silences and awkward goodbyes. Everyone says they still want to be friends, and yet it feels weird, and when you see each other you try to pretend nothing happened, but a big part of you is missing. You go through a mourning period, and then you move on.\nYou try to, anyway.
§ § § \nOn the first day of Groth's creative writing course this semester, members of the class introduced themselves and described their aspirations.\n"I want to make music," one student said.\n"I want to be a rock 'n roll star," Groth said, and later explained: "I want to make music, but I want to do it in front of a whole lot of people."\nIn the beginning, Cadmium Orange was Groth and Reinhart's dream. As sophomores at Lafayette Jefferson High School in 1994, they talked about starting a rock 'n' roll band, throwing around names like Wicker Basket and The Dust Bunnies before deciding on Cadmium Orange, after a friend had mentioned the color in passing.\nAfter they found a drummer, Cadmium Orange began as a three-piece set, with Groth on guitar and vocals and Reinhart on bass. Their early sound could be described as a cross between the modern rock/pop of the Lemonheads and Pavement.\nFrom the beginning, Groth was always the group's unofficial leader: the songwriter, lyricist, public relations manager and motivator. The first song he wrote, "Big Metal Box in My Living Room," was not about television but literally a big metal box his sister had left in the the living room after moving to college.\nIn the first year, Cadmium Orange enjoyed an instant success, partly because of the novelty of a high school band and also their hit "Lump on My Nut," a song about testicular cancer.\n"We were always big on parody," says Groth, who loved Weird Al Yankovic as a child.\nIn the early days, Cadmium Orange went through several drummers, sometimes having more than one at a time: "We were cheating on our drummer," Reinhart says.\nBy the time they graduated high school and came to IU as freshmen in 1996, Cadmium Orange had produced four albums. Groth and Reinhart were the only members left, and they saw graduation as the perfect opportunity to redevelop the band.\nAfter recruiting then-junior Lee Mantle as the drummer and lead vocalist Jim May, a high school friend who attended Milliken College in Decatur, Ill., Cadmium Orange evolved into a four-piece set and drastically changed their sound to an edgier, louder rock.\n"In high school, we felt that we had to play for the audience," Groth says. "By the time we got to college, we decided that we were tired of it. We went from a wimpy high school outfit to a balls-out rock band."\nFrom the first time they played at IU in the Teter-Boisen 3 lounge (after stuffing 1,110 orange handbills in resident mailboxes) to the day they performed on the 1997 Live From Bloomington CD, the band steadily gained momentum in Bloomington, especially from their popular house shows. They played at WIUS events and were invited to an event hosted by the Citizen's Alliance for the Legalization of Marijuana when May told the audience, "It's a fine day to legalize cocaine."\nThe organizers of the event pointedly asked them not to come back the following year. They were invited anyway.\n"They must have been so stoned they forgot they told us not to come," May says.\nFor two years, May had been commuting from Milliken to IU, and after he graduated from Milliken in 1998, he moved to Bloomington, to be in Cadmium Orange. With May permanently in town, the band was a cohesive unit and soon they had regular gigs at The Bluebird and Second Story, becoming known as the loudest band in Bloomington. Some fans came not for the music, but for the chance to watch May and Groth onstage, jamming wildly and jumping all over the place.\nEach band member had his own onstage personality. May was the charming singer with the silky voice, the "conduit" to the audience; Groth the wild child with the stud in his chin, the one who often turned his back during a guitar riff to better connect with the band; Mantle the intense one whose curly brown hair swayed as he pounded his drums and Reinhart, the quiet, thoughtful one, always intent on his playing.\nThey were there to have a good time, and they sometimes weren't taken seriously because they had so much fun.\n"In our version of rock 'n' roll, you had to be free enough, and if that included some shattered mic stands or busted sound systems or broken guitars, then that worked," May says.\nDuring their last song at Culture Shock of 1998, in a burst of adrenaline Groth smashed a guitar on the stage.\nAnd they could get away with it. Because for Cadmium Orange, it wasn't about getting big or making people like them. People liked them because they were so good at being themselves.
§ § § \nThey were popular, they were comfortable in their success, and it didn't seem like it would end any time soon.\nBut by last January, after nearly four years of fronting Cadmium Orange, Jim May was getting antsy, claustrophobic. He had already done the whole college thing, and then he had come to Bloomington to be a rock 'n' roll star. He loved the band, yet something wasn't right.\nThe feeling heightened when he went apartment hunting for the following year with Groth.\nThe next day, he was working at BloomingFoods when he made an important, sudden decision. He called Groth and left a message on his machine: "We need to talk."\nGroth was alarmed. He assumed May had decided to live with his girlfriend the following year.\nTwo hours later, they faced each other in a corner booth at Bear's Place.\n"I'm moving to New York," May blurted out.\nGroth was stunned, and thought, I've wasted six years of my life. After a silence, he told May, "I hope you know that the band will not continue after you leave. But if you feel like this is something you have to do..."\nLater, after the news settled in, Groth acknowledged that his first thoughts were irrational. He knew that he would continue to play music for the rest of his life, regardless of being in Cadmium Orange. But he couldn't help but think that something was being taken from him.\nA few weeks later, at the Video Saloon, May broke the news to Reinhart and Mantle, who were just as shocked.\n"I did not see it coming," Mantle says. "And for me, after that, it was swallowing a big heap of denial. Like, my girlfriend is leaving in six months, what do I do?"\nIt was understood that the band would break up after May left, as opposed to returning to the three-piece set. And even though May had commuted before, this time 800 miles would split them.\n"Long distance relationships don't work," Reinhart says.\nThe following months were laced with tension as all of the guys faced the inevitability of the breakup, but no one really talked about it. They kept busy with schoolwork and their jobs and their girlfriends. And they kept performing. The first show after everyone knew May was leaving is the one they remember as the worst.\n"We were drunk, and we knew we were breaking up," Groth says. "I apologized after each song and I cried at the end of the show."\nFor the rest of the shows, they avoided dwelling on the future. The Second Story show was their final hurrah in Bloomington, and at the end, May smashed his guitar, breaking it cleanly at the neck.\n"The Bloomington last show was kind of like, 'This is the last time I'll be having sex with this person,'" Mantle says.\nTheir grand finale took place in Indianapolis at a '50s diner, where, ironically, they opened for another band. While it was somewhat anti-climactic, it also provided a far less stressful environment than the Second Story show. Groth's parents even came.\nSeveral weeks later, May packed up his belongings and left Bloomington for New York. He never had a chance to say goodbye to Mantle and Reinhart. For May, leaving wasn't an easy decision.\n"You couldn't have had a soul and not felt guilty about it," May says.
§ § §\nFor a while after they broke up, when they were together, they wouldn't mention the band, like a relative who had died.\n"This year has been kind of a somber experience," Groth says. "Every time I go to a show I want to be the next band going on stage."\nIn fact, it wasn't until late September that Groth, Mantle and Reinhart actually got together. Mantle hadn't touched his drum set until September, a good two months later. Though Cadmium Orange is over, each member is still involved in music. May brought his acoustic guitar with him to New York. Groth plays in a band called the John Wilkes Booze Explosion, and Reinhart has been toying with the idea of a solo career and is considering the name Whiskey Bitch.\n"Whiskey Bitch," Reinhart says, "it just sounds so ... raw."\nCadmium Orange broke up barely five months ago, and now each member finally has the opportunity to focus on himself. Groth is looking forward to graduating with a degree in English and history in May and still wants to be a rock 'n' roll star. And if that doesn't pan out, he can always be a teacher. May is living in a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn and working in a Manhattan Tile Company as a sales associate. He really wants to be an actor, or maybe a rock star. Mantle is working in the music facilities department of the School of Music, building on his audio technology major. Reinhart recently finished a year-long massage school and is working as an assistant at the Indiana College of Body Modalities in Bloomington. He hopes to open his own massage studio in the near future.\nThe three members remaining in Bloomington have played together informally and have talked about starting a new band, but everything is still under wraps.\n"We all have the feeling that we want to keep going and playing, but I don't want to push anything," Reinhart says. "I want to let it happen organically and let it grow"
