The members of Back for More have been playing music together in some fashion since high school.
That's more than 20 years by lead guitarist Jose Luis Toledo's estimate.
"The drummer, bass player and I played in another band," the 38-year-old Toledo says, referring, respectively, to Steve Holmes and his brother Carlos Toledo. "All of us together have been playing since '02."
The band members — the others are lead singer Brian Barbeau and Marco Dominguez on rhythm guitar — are all in their late 30s or early 40s. They are childhood friends who've seen one another through high school at Cholla, Sunnyside and Desert View, college, marriages and families.
Before their careers steamrolled their rock 'n' roll fantasies, they imagined turning their music into their mission.
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"We used to have a lot of original music. We even had some of our songs played on radio," says Toledo, whose wife, Maria Camou de Toledo, is a page designer for the Arizona Daily Star. "We used to do recordings."
In their 20s, they let their hair grow 6 or 7 inches below their shoulders — "big Bon Jovi hair," Toledo recalled.
Then they all settled into time- and energy-draining careers: Toledo is the new-car manager at Watson Chevrolet; his brother is the business agent for the local Teamsters Union; Holmes is a Tucson Unified School District chief academic officer; Dominguez is an assistant principal at Amphitheater High School; and Barbeau owns a welding business with his dad.
"We're all clean-cut and choke ourselves wearing ties to work," Toledo adds with a chuckle.
Music is now their weekend distraction. They rehearse once a week, or once every other week if their family lives conflict. Most of the time, they practice at Toledo's home, where he has a nearly soundproof rehearsal room.
Once a month, they play at O'Malleys on Fourth. It's all for the love of the music from their youth — jukebox-friendly heavy-metal rock songs, much of it from the 1970s and '80s, with a little 1990s thrown in to jog their college memories.
"It's fun, and we all love the music," Toledo says. "And it's a good way to blow off steam."
The band will appear later this month at the annual Great Tucson Beer Festival. The set list could include such gems as Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine," AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" and Judas Priest's "You've Got Another Thing Coming."
"We have 40-some songs, and every gig we have we trim it down to 25 or 28 songs," Toledo says.
"We want the audience to sing along and have a good time."
