We all have things in our lives that we'd like to forget - things that can only be summed up by "What was I thinking?" My contribution to this essay in life is my brief stint in an alternative music band.
It was May 1995. I was complacent with my job, and had no thoughts of going back to school. But I wanted to do something; I just didn't know what. One day I was reading the classifieds and saw an ad that read "desparetely seeking female guitar player for all-female alternative band." I thought "I'm a good guitar player - how hard can this be?" Plus the phone number in the ad was a number in my neighborhood. That clinched it. I called, got an audition, and I was in. When I arrived for our first practice, I was informed that the band already had a gig - the band leader/bass player's birthday party in August. We had our work cut out for us. So what if we weren't getting paid for this gig - I wasn't doing this for the money; I was living out a life long dream.
Let me introduce the band to you: Susie, the leader and bass player (who had only been playing bass for a month when I joined); Chip, Susie's husband and drummer (who I would later find out was manic depressive); Jan, the lead guitar player (who we would find out later had psychotic tendencies). This was originally supposed to be an all-female band, but they couldn't find a drummer, and we practiced in Susie and Chip's basement and used their equipment, so we made a concession and asked Chip to play drums.
It didn't take me long to find out that I just didn't fit in with this group. I had never heard of 90% of the songs that would become our set list. But I practiced and learned all of the songs. They even let me pick a few songs to sing, so I decided to stick with it, because ever since I was a kid, all I wanted to was to be part of a band.
A few practices later, I was informed that the band would be called "The Bobbed Tail Nags", in keeping with the quasi-all-female theme. Not my first choice of band names, but then again, it wasn't my band. Before you knew it, the end of July was here and it was time for the big birthday bash gig. Musically, it rocked. No major mistakes or screw ups. But for me, everything else was just horrid. We played in the basement where we practiced, and in the cramped area, I had to stand perfectly still or else I would crash my guitar into a support beam. I was standing there playing and thought "we can't even say we're a garage band - we're still in the friggin' basement." After we finished the last set, I packed up my guitar, grabbed a can of YooHoo and went home.
It was a blast playing, but it just wasn't "me". The did me a huge favor a few weeks later by firing me. They said I wasn't "heavy metal enough" for them. No joke. It was the best thing that they could have done. A week later, I started my own band, who played music that I actually knew and liked. Finally, a life long dream had come true.
Side note: A year after I formed my band, Exit 14, I found out that all of the equipment that the Bobbed Tail Nags used in Susie and Chip's basement was stolen. It seems that Scotty, a friend of Susie and Chip's, and an employee at the local music store, AND who was lead guitar player with my band for a few months, had "borrowed" the equipment from the store. We were all under the impression that this was Scotty's own equipment that he graciously loaned us. I hope he wiped my fingerprints off of the huge stack of Marshall ampst that they let me use.
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