When Joe Oestreich (pronounced A-STRIKE) was in seventh grade, his whole life was music. He listened to Q-FM-96, "Ohio's Best Rock!," debated the merits of Kiss, the Kinks and Cheap Trick and persuaded his mom to buy him a bass for Christmas. He and his two best friends in Worthington, a Columbus, Ohio, suburb, formed a garage band and played at parties and school functions, anywhere they could get up in front of kids and play their original music.

"I loved those big rock bands so much I just wanted to be like them," says Oestreich, an assistant English professor who teaches creative writing at Coastal Carolina University. "Meeting girls was never our motivation—we weren't very good at it anyway—but we did want to be on the radio."

When the rock 'n' rollers graduated high school, they all went to Ohio State University (OSU) together and kept playing. "You know how most high school bands break up after high school? Like that Bryan Adams song, ‘Summer of '69'—‘Jimmy quit and Jody got married'? Well, we didn't quit, didn't break up. We kept playing."

Twenty-four years later, they're still playing together as "Watershed," which Oestreich describes as "a post-punk pop band." The group has only faltered once—quite a feat in the annals of American rock music—with the replacement of one original member and the addition of a fourth musician. The other band members are Colin Gawel (guitar, vocals and harp), who owns and operates Colin's Coffee in Upper Arlington, Ohio; Dave Masica (drums), kitchen manager at a golf club; and Mark "Poochie" Borror (guitar), who works at an architectural firm.

Oestreich is still the bass player, songwriter and lead singer. Watershed is still recording and touring around the country, though less frequently and more selectively with the arrival of wives and careers and children.

The Watershed boys dropped out of college their junior year to follow their rock 'n' roll dream. They bought the proverbial broken-down van and hit the road to play in beer-soaked bars in the worst parts of town. They went on tour, playing in cities like Indianapolis, Louisville, New York. Sometimes the clubs were small, with only seven people in the audience. But the Watershed guys were doing what they loved to do—making music.

Then came the Cinderella moment: one night in 1993, their manager told them that the president of Epic Records had been in the audience and offered them a contract. "Epic represented the Spin Doctors, Michael Jackson, Oasis," says Oestreich. "We were going to be the next big band after the Spin Doctors!"
Three months later, they recorded their first album. It was a heady experience for four 20-something, self-taught musicians from the Midwest. But Twister, the debut album, bombed. They were unknowns, the label didn't give the album much support, so Epic dropped the band.

"Epic was telling us, at the ripe old age of 25, ‘your career is over, you're finished,'" says Oestreich. "But we're still playing today, 15 years after we were dropped. Clearly they were wrong; our career was just over for them."
Watershed is still going strong with indie label Idol Records, with Facebook and MySpace fan groups, a Web site, and a cult following centered mostly in Columbus, Ohio, that packs their shows.

In between making music, Oestreich went back to OSU, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science—he was planning on becoming a lawyer—and met his wife Kate, a Watershed fan. She encouraged him to enter the graduate program there and earn a Master of Fine Arts degree.
"I was looking for a day job I didn't hate," says Oestreich, who has had an array of jobs including driving a forklift, washing dishes and working with disabled people in a shelter workshop.

He taught a year in graduate school at Pacific Lutheran University in northwest Washington and discovered he liked it and was good at it. "In the meantime, I had applied to a lot of really good law schools," he says. "Fortunately, I didn't get into any of them."

Today, the band has eight albums to its name, has garnered national radio and MTV airplay, has been featured in Billboard and other trade magazines, and has performed in 35 states with bands such as Cheap Trick (whom Oestreich once idolized), The Smithereens, Ben Folds Five, Collective Soul and Seven Mary Three.

They've only played five concerts this year despite the clamoring of avid fans. There's just too much going on with jobs, new babies and completion of Oestreich's project of nearly two years now—a book about the long and strange journey of Watershed the band.

An accomplished writer, Oestreich has had essays and nonfiction work published in national magazines such as Esquire and Sports Illustrated, as well as in esoteric literary publications like Barrelhouse, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre and others. He has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and his essay "Tricoter" was named a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2008.
"Writing prose is much more difficult [than writing music]," Oestreich says. "With music, you get to coast on the drums and the sheer rockingness and volume of the song. On the page, you have to create rhythm and melody from your words. You can't rely on the music to hold you up. They [prose and music] both feed a creative impulse. I just like to create things; whether it's a song or an essay doesn't really matter.

"The ironic thing about playing music when you're considerably older than when you started is that, at this point, we realize that the whole idea of becoming a rock star is completely unrealistic. So we're just playing for fun now, which is why we started in the first place. It's almost like being 16 again. We have some good songs and some fans who want to hear those songs. There are worse things you can do on a Friday or Saturday night than just get together with your friends and play some loud rock 'n' roll music."