Watkins Memorial graduates use music, band to deal with band member's cancer diagnosis
Pataskala natives Max Reichert and twins Ari and Zak Blumer have been friends since they met at an elementary Watkins Memorial wrestling camp. But the three realized they had a different passion in common.
"We didn’t stick with the wrestling very long — like two days — and then decided music was maybe more fitting," Zak said.
The trio of Watkins Memorial High School graduates spent their middle and high school years playing music together and eventually formed their band, Clubhouse, while at Ohio University, where Reichert headed after graduating from Watkins Memorial in 2013. The Blumers followed the next year after graduating themselves.
Their friendship and music have been a key emotional support as Reichert, 28, has dealt with cancer over the past five years. Just months after graduating college, he was diagnosed, in August 2018, with bone cancer in one of his legs. He went through a year of chemotherapy, had the bottom half of his femur removed and also had his knee replaced. He moved to Los Angeles to pursue a music career in May 2019, shortly after finishing treatment. The cancer came back in 2020, this time in his lungs, and he has been undergoing treatment since then. The Blumers joined him in California in 2021.
Reichert, who plays guitar and is the band's lead singer, has had parts of his lungs removed after surgeries to rid his body of the cancer. After an upcoming surgery, Reichert said he'll have half of each lung remaining.
Through it all, Reichert has still been making music with his two best friends.
"It's like my little sense of normalcy that I still have. ... It just helped me feel like a normal person," he said. "It’s been like a lifeline for sure.”
Ari and Zak, 27, would visit during hospital stays, and the three would make beats together. It was all an effort to control what they could, Zak said.
"He’d be able to come home for a day or two and we would just go hang out and make music because, you know, what else can you do but try to keep doing the stuff that you love?" Zak said.
The bandmates said they are open about Reichert's cancer experience because they know they aren't alone.
"We think it is something that we have been through, that unfortunately other people may be currently going through or will go through in the future," Ari said. "If there's anything that we've learned from this, it's being able to connect with people on that level and sharing that story is something that can be helpful."
Reichert’s treatment is hopefully coming to end soon and the band preparing to release the music they’ve created, including their song "Ohio," which was released earlier this month, that details their feelings of being torn between pursuing their dreams in Los Angeles and being in their home state.
The single is available on online music platforms, along with other releases, including their 2021 album "Are We Going Too Slow?"
After living in LA for a few years, Reichert said the bandmates were inspired to write about their homesickness for quiet nights, driving down back roads and the changing seasons.
They come home a few times a year to see family, but Zak, who plays drums, said their time in Licking County "never feels like quite enough."
"There's just something about being back home and the pace of life," he said.
His brother Ari, who plays guitar, chimed in, "You never get enough Dairy Hut before you have to leave."
The band members did come back recently to film the music video for "Ohio," because Reichert said it didn't make sense to film it anywhere else.
Due to the availability of the Cleveland-based film crew, the video was shot in the Cuyahoga County village of Chagrin Falls instead of Licking County. But Zak said the band wanted the video to feel like you were driving down Blacks Road or any other back road in the Pataskala area.
"We wanted it to just romanticize Ohio in general and make it kind of feel nondescript like it could be kind of any part of Ohio," Reichert said.
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This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Pataskala natives use music to cope with cancer diagnosis
