On March 4, The Successful Failures celebrated their 20th anniversary together as a band.
Twenty years after their first practice, the New Jersey-based band with ties to the Mercer County community is still going strong, continuing to play original music with the passion and desire of a new band trying to make themselves known.
Nowadays, a band sticking together for as long as The Successful Failures has is almost unheard of. However, for Mick Chorba, Ron Bechamps, Rob Martin and John Williams, similar goals and a friendship that has developed over the 20 years together has kept the band intact with no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
The Successful Failures all started on the back of Chorba. Chorba is a current Chesterfield resident, but he grew up in Mercerville, graduating from Nottingham High School. It was there where Chorba really fell in love with music.
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 local venues like City Gardens 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,” said Chorba. “[The Successful Failures] started as a side project for material I wanted to try out with different people.”
Chorba reached out to Bechamps, whom he had met through the music scene online; 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,” Bechamps, the band’s bassist, said. “I didn’t really know anybody before I joined.”
Bechamps, who grew up in Jackson, lives today with his family in Robbinsville. He and his wife met at TCNJ, though, 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, Williams replaced Potter on the guitar. The group of four has been together ever since.
One thing 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 name of the band itself 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 another studio in Red Bank in the past.
However, topping all of those studios is Sun Studios, the studio in Memphis, Tennessee where Elvis Presley recorded his music. The group will be in Memphis in May to record some songs there.
They will not just be recording music during their Tennessee trip, though. They will also be playing shows in Bristol, Memphis, Knoxville and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, really making the most of their trip. For The Successful Failures, this excursion is 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.
On Saturday, May 10, they will be playing at the Chesterfield Porchfest at 2 p.m. Then, on Saturday, May 31, they will be playing the Needle Creek Brewery in Pennington at 1 p.m. Following up that gig, they will be at Bent Iron Brewing in Hamilton on Saturday, June 7 at 5 p.m.
