A Kansas hotel lobby is not the typical place to start a Sacramento-based alternative rock band. In the case of Headrush, which performed Oct. 17 during the Rock the Vote event at Sacramento State, that is exactly where the foundation was laid.

Mike Johnston and Waymon Boone were touring with their bands Simon Says and Splender, respectively. The drummer for Splender introduced Johnston to Boone. The two of them, in a business where artists are surrounded by drugs and alcohol, bonded over the fact that neither had knocked back a beer.

“We kind of just became instant best friends,” the 29-year-old Johnston said. “We talked, literally like little schoolgirls, until our busses left the next morning and our tour managers grabbed us.”

The parallels continue. They were both only children and began their music careers at the same age. Boone’s mother was a disco singer during the 1970s and when he was 5 years old, she recorded vocals for a Fame Jeans advertisement.

Someone was out of tune during the production, so the young Boone stood up and pointed out the third guy in the back. He said he knew at that moment that he was going to be a musician. Johnston began playing drums at 5 years old.

From that point on, the two of them kept in touch through e-mail and by phone. The day Boone left Splender, he called Johnston, who was no longer with Simon Says, and told him what was up. He then picked up his guitar, worked on two songs and Fed-Exed Johnston the tracks. He dug them, and called Boone to tell him so. “The band was hatched that day on the phone,” the 31-year-old Boone said.

Headrush, consisting of Johnston on drums, Allison Johnson on bass and Boone on guitar as the primary singer, have fine-tuned a melodic rock sound during their nearly three years together. The first full-length release, “Weight of the Water,” is complete and the band is in the process of speaking with labels for distribution.

But back then, about three years ago, Boone was a man on a mission. He got directions from New York to Johnston’s Sacramento home through MapQuest, packed a U-Haul and then set off across the country. He arrived at Johnston’s front door with a guitar in hand.

“He showed up with a moving truck that had motorcycles and treadmills and washing machines and driers in it,” Johnston said. “I was like, ‘OK, I guess you’re moving into my house.'”

The next step was roping in a bass player. Johnston, who played in the Latin Jazz Ensemble for two years at Sac State, found out about a jazz bass player named Allison Johnson through some friends.

Johnston called her first. She was suspicious. Then Boone called. She was still suspicious. Bands had called her to play with them in the past. They didn’t so much care about her abilities, she said, as they wanted the novelty of having a woman on bass. These guys, for all she knew, could have been looking for a new girlfriend.

She decided to check them out anyway. When Johnson showed up at the rehearsal spot, guitars were lying on the ground, papers with lyrics were strewn about and the light was dim. It wasn’t the best place to convince someone who was already skeptical.

“I’ve never been in a band with a girl before, so it’s kind of the joke of being a little apprehensive of her not thinking we’re two rapists,” Boone said, laughing a bit as he recalls that night. “We were really about her music and her abilities.”

Waymon and Johnston played a couple of demos, including a track called “Suffocate Me with Love.” The three of them connected. Boone was deep and introspective and Johnston was the resident funny man, she remembered. The bassist was in.

“I felt really comfortable there,” said the 23-year-old Johnson, who has played the bass since she was 12 years old. “Once they started playing the music, it was like, ‘Oh my gosh. You know? This is definitely somewhere I want to be.’ From that point, I kind of let my guard down, stopped being the bitchy, bruised female. It was tough to do, but I couldn’t just say, ‘No.’ I heard their music and I was like, ‘Wow.'”

“I knew that I wanted a female bass player; for no reason other than one song that we had I just thought would be great with a girl. I’m not sure why,” Boone said. “Unfortunately, there are very few bass players in the world, and there are almost no female bass players in the world. So it was just by a stroke of luck that we actually got her to be available at the time, and wanting to be into what we were trying to do.”

And what they’re trying to do is slowly coming to a head. The band recorded between 35 and 40 tracks in Johnson’s bedroom using a Pro Tools machine.

“We decided the second we write a song, let’s record it and then we can hear back and get some feedback from our friends,” Johnston said. “It was really up until only about six months ago when we finally narrowed everything down to CD that we eventually want to put out.”

“When we’re developing a song, Waymon will usually write the skeleton of the song, including the lyrics,” said Johnson, who has a business administration bachelor’s degree from Sac State with a concentration in marketing. “We’ll jam on it and then I’ll just come up with the bass line and we’ll collectively input things.”

Boone, jokingly described by Johnston as the “the every-once-in-a-while genius,” does it all on the album. Not only does he play guitar and is the primary singer, he also wrote and produced the songs. Mike Shipley, who has worked with Aerosmith and Green Day, mixed the album.

“It’s definitely harder and more in-your-face,” Boone said, even using the rarely used phase “squeeze-bottle” to describe the sound. “It’s definitely a deeper record, personally. … It’s a very reactionary record.”

Headrush continues to make stops at local spots, including the Boardwalk and last month’s visit to Sac State. Although the crowd in Serna Plaza was small, no more than a handful of close listeners, Boone played as if it was his last performance while Johnson and Johnston fed off each other’s energy.

The trio ended the six-song session with the single-worthy “Less Than Beautiful.” In the chorus, Boone sings “I hate to disappoint you/I’m doing fine without you/I’m sorry that I made you feel less than beautiful.”

Nate Miller can be reached at [email protected].