With more than two decades of music making under their belts, there’s not a whole lot of failure to be found in the story of the Successful Failures. The New Jersey-based band with ties to the Mercer County community celebrated its 20th anniversary in March and is still going strong.
The quartet next brings its sweet sounds of success to Needle Creek Brewery in Pennington on Saturday, May 31, at 1 p.m., followed by an appearance at Bent Iron Brewing in Hamilton on Saturday, June 7, at 5 p.m.
Twenty years after their first practice, the quartet of Mick Chorba, Ron Bechamps, Rob Martin, and John Williams continues to play original music with the passion and desire of a new band trying to make themselves known.
Band members attribute the group’s unusual longevity to having similar goals and a friendship that has developed over the 20 years together that keeps the band intact with no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
The Successful Failures started with Mick Chorba. The Chesterfield resident grew up in Mercerville, where he fell in love with music as a student at Nottingham High School.
A self-proclaimed “band kid,” Chorba learned the saxophone and the piano before eventually learning the guitar, which is his main instrument with the Successful Failures. He first joined a band as a teenager and played regional venues like City Gardens in Trenton, and The Rat at The College of New Jersey (his alma mater), and the Stone Pony in Asbury Park.
“[Music] was my identity as a kid,” Chorba said. “Everybody tries to find their drive. For me, it was playing music.”
After graduating from TCNJ, then known as Trenton State College, Chorba and a friend from high school got involved with the Dipsomaniacs, another Mercer County-based band. However, after about 10 years with them, Chorba started to look for help on another project to record some original songs he had written.
“I’m a songwriter, and I had a bunch of stuff that didn’t seem to fit into the main band,” Chorba said. “[The Successful Failures] started as a side project for material I wanted to try out with different people.”
Chorba reached out to Ron Bechamps, whom he had met through the music scene online; Rob Martin, who had played drums with the Dipsomaniacs in the past; and Greg Potter. Together, they created The Successful Failures.
“We stayed in touch, and [Chorba] called me when he was ready to put things in motion,” said Bechamps, the band’s bassist. “I didn’t really know anybody before I joined.”
Bechamps, who grew up in Jackson, now lives with his family in Robbinsville. He and his wife met at TCNJ, and they made the decision to stay in the area after graduating. He is a self-taught musician, playing the guitar, the bass, and even the mandolin, which he sometimes breaks out for The Successful Failures’ performances.
His first experience in a band came during his freshman year of college, and he started to seek out people who wanted to produce original music after he graduated, leading him to cross paths with Chorba. Bechamps was ready to go when Chorba called him about The Successful Failures, and the two have been making music from that moment.
After the band released its first, self-titled album, John Williams replaced Potter on the guitar. The group of four has been together ever since.
One factor that has made the band last so long is the fact that it has never been any of the members’ number-one priority. Everyone has a full-time job and a family, too.
“The band is the passion, and the job is the enabler,” said Bechamps, who is a mechanical engineer in the telecommunications industry. “You don’t want [the music] to turn into a job where it gets to be more of a hassle than a passion. It’s complete enjoyment rather than anything else.”
Chorba, now a retired high school English teacher, said that having a full-time job made it so that he didn’t have to rely on the music to pay the mortgage. “In some ways it frees you up to follow your muse,” he said.
Chorba’s job teaching AP English Literature and Composition at Northern Burlington High School has leaked its way into The Successful Failures many times. For starters, the band’s name is pulled from a Jack London short story, “The Minions of Midas.”
“When I was younger, I had a part of my notebook where I would jot down possible band names,” Chorba said. “The Successful Failures was one of them, and I had written a fictional story about a band with that name, so we chose it for the band.”
Chorba’s life in literature did not only affect the name of the band, though. As the band’s main lyricist, he sees the works he read as an English major and taught as an English teacher seep into his songwriting.
“A lot of my inspiration does come from literature,” Chorba said. “A lot of historical fiction, American history, Shakespeare, and I like poetry, too. It will pop up in my songwriting without me necessarily intending it to.”
The inspiration has kept on coming to Chorba over the years. The Successful Failures have released 11 studio albums during their 20 years together. Their most recent album, “Enemy Sublime,” came out in October. All told, the band has recorded well over a hundred original songs — and looks forward to making more.
“I feel like our trajectory is still on the incline,” Bechamps said. “We just keep getting better and better.”
For Chorba, songwriting is a regular activity. He is constantly jotting down ideas in notebooks, sharing unfinished songs on his Substack, and listening to other music to gain writing inspiration.
“Writing isn’t something that you can sit around and wait for,” Chorba said. “You just have to put in work, and there is a lot of satisfaction.”
He referenced a moment in Keith Richards’ memoir, “Life,” where Richards and Mick Jagger were changed people once they started writing songs for The Rolling Stones.
“Once [Richards] started writing songs, it changed the way he viewed the world,” Chorba said. “He paid attention to the way people said words, and I started doing the same thing, looking to the world for inspiration.”
Chorba has a studio in his home, which gives the band easy access to a place to record their music. They have also recorded the Gladwell House in Haddon Heights and at a studio in Red Bank.
However, topping all of those studios is Sun Studios, the studio in Memphis, Tennessee, where Elvis Presley recorded his music. The group spent time in Memphis this May to record some songs there.
Their Tennessee trip, was not just about recording, though. They also played shows in Bristol, Memphis, Knoxville, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as part of a celebration to commemorate their 20 years together.
“It’s really important to travel a couple of times a year, it keeps it fun,” Chorba said. “We do long weekend tours, play new venues, and it has helped to keep the band together.”
“It’s great to play places that haven’t seen us and heard the band before,” Bechamps said. “If we get a handful of new fans along the way, it’s worth it.”
These mini-tours are not new for The Successful Failures. Chorba estimated that they have played in 15 states over the years.
One might think that as you get older, traveling to play somewhere new might start becoming a tougher and tougher task. However, both Chorba and Bechamps felt that it was quite the opposite.
“For me, it was harder when my one son was younger,” Chorba said. “It’s getting easier now ’cause I’m not juggling as many things. Juggling your family and your job is tough.”
Bechamps agreed. “There’s less coaching involved, so we can dedicate a little bit more time to the music. And we’re doing it in such a way that it is never a drag.”
While The Successful Failures enjoy playing in other states, they are a staple of the Mercer and Burlington County music scenes. Following their trip to Tennessee, they have a few shows planned that are much closer to home. To see where you can hear them next, visit their website at thesuccessfulfailures.com.
