‘The whole time we were chasing our dreams, we were actually living the dream’

Revisiting his debut memoir, Hitless Wonder, proved to be a sometimes-disorienting experience for Joe Oestreich, requiring the Watershed singer/bassist to exist in several eras at once, like a Midwestern rock ‘n roll twist on the Marvel multiverse.

“And it’s strange, because there are so many versions of me that appear in the book,” Oestreich said. “There is me at the time of writing, which was 15 years ago, writing about me at the time of [Watershed forming], which was 40 years ago. And then there’s me, who’s now in his 50s, evaluating those other two selves. And the thing I try to do, I think, is to be kind to all those different versions of me.”

Published in 2011, Hitless Wonder vividly traces Watershed’s path from obscurity to the major labels and back again, Oestreich grappling throughout with the question of what keeps a band going once it becomes clear that a certain kind of fame has eluded it. At one point, he writes that it involves a certain amount of stubbornness, comparing the band with “an old battleship that doesn’t easily change course.” The truest reasons emerge in some of the book’s quieter scenes, however, including one in which the band members cram together in an NYC hotel room while recording their major label debut, idling away the hours while sipping tallboys and playing euchre. “We’d never had so much fun,” Oestreich writes.

“And, honestly, that’s the stuff you remember, because that’s the stuff that matters,” said Oestreich, who will appear in conversation with Rob Harvilla at Used Kids Records from 6-8 p.m. on Thursday, July 30, before joining with Watershed bandmates Colin Gawel (guitar, vocals), Rick Kinsinger (guitar), and Herb Schupp for a sold-out concert at Natalie’s Grandview on Friday, July 31. (Harvilla, a Columbus-based music critic and podcast host, penned a new foreword for the 15th anniversary edition of Hitless Wonder, which you can read now at Matter News by clicking here.) “Some random gig on a Tuesday? I mean, okay, whatever. One of the things I capture in the book, I think, is that I would go out on the road with these guys and not play any gigs at all. Just driving around in a van, playing some cards, drinking a couple beers, and hanging out going city to city, that would be great.”

Of course, this wasn’t the mindset when Oestreich was first roped into joining Watershed by his teenage friend Gawel, who Oestreich described both then and now as endlessly energetic and excitable, and whose vision, persuasiveness, and boundless enthusiasm for music enabled him to become “the glue that has held this whole thing together.”

“Sometimes I laugh at us, like, what were we thinking? We were trying to be rock stars, and we were 18 years old making these cocky statements about how we really want to be big and do this for our whole lives,” said Oestreich, who shared that the music took on greater resonance once the band got dropped by Epic Records in the mid-1990s and these spotlight-fueled ambitions began to fade. “And starting around that time, it was like, okay, we’ve been dropped and rock stardom isn’t in the picture. Now what? And that’s when we, I think, started doing it for the right reasons, which is just to write good songs, have fun together, and use our precious time on this Earth doing something we love.”

Gawel echoed these sentiments in a 2024 Matter News interview, saying that in those post-Epic years he began to internalize the advice given to him by the late musician Slim Dunlap, who told him to “look for the gifts.” “And you start realizing, if even one person is singing your song, that’s a gift,” Gawel said at the time. “You have to look for things that keep you going. And we got good at that.” 

Indeed, the band has shown little sign of slowdown, releasing the excellent Blow It Up Before It Breaks in 2024. And Oestreich, who works as a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University and recently announced the release of his debut novel, Southbound, arriving in the fall of 2027 via Baobab Press, acknowledged that none of the Watershed bandmates wants to be the one to pull the plug. “There’s no way I would do that to my friends. And I don’t know why we would ever have to make that decision, because we’ve figured out a way to make it work as we age,” he said. “We’re kind of set up at this point to keep going as long as we stay healthy.”

It helps, of course, that the musicians have persevered long enough to have gained some perspective. And given time and distance, Oestreich said that some scenes in the book that once felt impossibly heavy now feel significantly less so, pointing as one example to the tensions he documented between he and his then girlfriend (and now wife) Kate as the band prepared to set off on a 2008 tour.

“Leaving my wife at home on that tour was stressful at the time, but we didn’t have kids, right? Now we’ve got two, so looking back at those days, it was nothing. And my wife would say the same thing,” Oestreich said. “But one of the themes of the book is when you have to leave your family at home to go on the road. And it’s not like you’re playing for thousands of people and making thousands of dollars. And leaving your wife at home to play to 12 people in Detroit on a Tuesday, is that admirable or is that pathetic? And are you a success or a failure? … And what I realized in the revision of the book, and I know this sounds cheesy, is that the whole time we were chasing our dreams we were actually living the dream. That was the dream, and we just weren’t sophisticated enough then to know it.”