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Rock On, Part 1: The Early Years

I once had a band. No, I had several bands. More to the point, I was
in several bands. Let me clarify.

I wanted to start posting some of the songs from the various bands I’ve been in. I realized to do so it would make sense to include a history of said bands. This history turned out to be a bit longer then I thought so it is broken into two installments. Here’s Part 1.

My first band was a high school band. My sister Kia and her friend Tania decided to write some songs. Punk songs if my memory serves me. My sister played guitar and Tania played keyboard and they both sang. Our neighbor down the hill, Benjy hosted the band and played the drums. I was drafted to play the bass guitar (which Benjy also had). Until then, I don’t think I ever consciously thought of the bass as an instrument. I may have been able to tell you someone was a bass player, but didn’t think of it’s sound as something distinct and not just part of the overall sound of the band. My first bass part was all whole notes, which in punk music is kind of slow. Not bad considering I had never really played a stringed instrument until that point. They told me it was played using the index and middle finger of the right hand, no pick. I gave it my all and during the first few practices played those whole notes hard enough to get blisters.

The band was called “Have a Nice Day” and our logo was a smiley face crossed out with a bloody slash (this was before “Watchmen”). The band was the first of many I have been in that never performed anywhere. It was also one of the most successful bands I’ve ever been in. We wrote or learned somewhere between five and ten songs. We would record ourselves playing in Benjy’s basement on a single microphone to a cassette tape. Then make copies of the tapes for each other to listen to. Needless to say, the audio quality was often substandard.

So, how was this a successful band? I guess you could say it was the precursor to viral marketing, it was 1983 after all. We would play the tapes for our friends or tell other people we were in a band. Pretty soon, people I hardly knew would comment about the band or somehow had heard one of the songs. We had a buzz. And that was that. My sister and Tania both graduated high school in 1984, and thus ended the band.

I didn’t really play anything else through high school. When my sister would come home from college, she would borrow a friends bass for me and we would write some songs during summer vacation. I’m afraid nothing has really survived from that era.

While I was in college (my sister had graduated from her college) we formed another band called “Zod.” We recruited my friend Curtis to be the drummer. He said he knew how to play and that was good enough. We played all cover songs from bands like “The Dead Kennedys,” “Flipper,” and the “Sexpistols.” This band even performed once at some late night college party in some dark room where beer was being served. We sucked. Our friends were nice enough to cheer us on. Really – they were being nice. Our drummer got drunk to calm his nerves which didn’t help his performance or song retention. Kia’s underpowered practice amp screamed through the performance whether or not she was playing. I can’t even remember my own performance, I’m pretty sure it’s because it wasn’t memorable.

Post college, we still had “Zod,” but it again was just for our own pleasure. Kia, Curtis, my brother Yani and some other various friends rented a house together where we had a permeant band setup in the basement garage. By this time our friend Tom, who was a real guitarist, was playing with us. My bass playing had been improving and we were moving on from the three chord punk and playing harder songs like “Thin Lizzy’s” “The Boys are Backin Town.” My friend Paul (whose bass amp I used for the “Zod” gig and used for practice) would occasionally join in with us as well. Even though he was a bassist first, he played guitar as I was playing bass.

Somehow, Paul, Curtis, and I wound up playing alone and started writing our own songs. We had worked up enough songs for a set and Paul scheduled us for our first gig at The Beat in Port Chester as “The Gilberts” (named after comedian Gilbrt Gottfried). The same The beat where Moby had DJed early in his career. We were practicing hard and perfecting our songs for the upcoming first performance. Somewhere around a week before the gig, my sister and curtis had a large fight which not only resulted in the end of the rented house, but the band and ultimately my friendship with Curtis. Looking back, I feel terrible for Paul. We tried to stay together for the gig and even practiced again but ultimately it was too uncomfortable. I think Paul got another bass player and drummer together to play the gig. I don’t really remember as I was distracted at the time.

Interestingly enough, The recording of the last practice survived. It had some great fights and arguments on it. A couple years ago my friend Dave (who I didn’t know in the time of The Gilberts) was looking for an argument to put in the background of one of the songs his band “Copperman” was recording. I mentioned the tape and he went with it. So, somehow without ever performing, the music, or more to the point the arguments of “The Gilberts,” lives on.

In part two I will cover everything post Gilberts to today.

(Continued in “Rock On, Part 2: The Later Years.”)

April 9th, 2009 Posted by Karl | Friends, Music, Non-Fiction | 12 comments