ok,
todays musical remembrance is of my first ever band…
i was in 9th grade and i had been playing guitar for about 2 or 3 years. i had a cheap little electric guitar and a tiny little guitar amp both of which my mom had bought for me at a rummage sale. and i had two friends who were learning how to play bass and guitar respectively, so we decided to start a band.
our first rehearsal was on a saturday in early spring, and it lasted 12 hours and was almost narcotic, even thought we only knew 2 or 3 songs. actually, we only knew little bits of 2 or 3 songs.
we knew a bit of ‘birthday’ by the beatles, and anthony the bass player knew the bassline from ‘money’ by pink floyd and i think that we knew a snippet from some other classic rock song, as well, maybe ‘cocaine’ by eric clapton. so we stayed in the basement for 12 hours and played these snippets over and over and over again because none of us had ever been in a band before and we were in love with the fact that we were actually playing music with other people.
we were all too shy to sing, even though we had a microphone plugged into my guitar amp. i think that we all desperately wanted to sing, but we were all too shy. so we played our instrumental versions of snippets of classic rock songs and dreamed about how good we would sound if we actually knew a complete song and had a singer. we never actually found a singer and we never performed for other people and eventually we disbanded when summer rolled around and i discovered punk rock, which the other 2 people in the band (which never had a name) refused to play. i tried to get them to do a cover of ‘planet claire’ by the b-52’s (well, the snippet of ‘planet claire’ that i had learned), but they had no interest in the non-classic rock end of the musical spectrum.
which in turn led me to start ‘vatican commandos’ with my friends john farnsworth, jim spaddaccini, and chip moody, although at first we weren’t called ‘vatican commandos’, we were called ‘the banned’, ‘uxb’, ‘dicky hell and the redbeats’, ‘brave education’, ‘scott staff and the aryans’ (scott staff being the leader of our high school’s “”young republicans club””), and so on and so on.
more later.
thanks
moby
