In Grade 10 (somewhere around 12 years ago now), some buddies of mine, and myself, decided we were going to start a band. There was really nothing to qualify us as a band, as none of us had any experience or training on any sort of instrument, aside from one of us (still my best friend) who was a conservatory trained pianist, and just happened to have recently been bought a nice Roland Keyboard. The one thing we all had in common, which fueled our desire to form a band, was our love for U2.
The "band" consisted of Nathan (who decided he would be a good "singer"), Aaron (who was going to play guitar, because he and Nathan had rented one, and he knew 2 or 3 chords), Richard (the aforementioned keyboardist), and myself. I decided to play bass because, after watching copious amounts of U2 videos, and the Rattle & Hum documentary, "bass looks easy". Aaron decided to recruit his friend Ted (a rather decent guitar player) to play drums, which he didn't have.
We recorded a few (very rough) songs, using the magic of a ghetto-blaster condenser mic, which mostly consisted of a LOT of piano and keyboard, and the "vocals", with very little else, until our "drummer" decided that it was a stupid idea to make him play drums when he had been learning guitar for the past 4 years, and Aaron should learn how to play drums instead. So Aaron rented a drum kit, and we finally had a "5-piece "band", with at least 2 decent musicians in it.
Until Ted quit a few months later. Nathan then decided to take over the guitar-playing duties, although his singing (which was already questionable) suffered from attempting to play at the same time.
We practiced a bunch over the summer and came back to school in grade 11, all ready to play our first gig, at our high-school's talent assembly. Being the dedicated U2 tribute band that we essentially were, despite playing all original songs, we spent so much time trying to make the stage look impressive that we had no time to do anything resembling a soundcheck before students began streaming into the gymnasium, nor, as a I found upon listening to the recording later on, to tune up our instruments.
Of course we had no idea what we were doing - none of us had amps to speak of, nor had any of us ever played live before, so everyone just plugged directly into the mixer (for some reason the sound guys opted to setup their gear directly BEHIND us??!?!?!), miced the crap out of the drums and set to it.
We started out behind the closed curtain, with an inspiring keyboard-pad intro, accompanied by a muted guitar "riff" and said overly-miced drums, and then, when this was over, the curtains parted and we proceeded to "rock out". Oh God.. I still have trouble watching the video of this.
To start with, the guitar was wildly out of tune, which was VERY audible once the keyboard started playing along. Fortunately, as soon as I started playing, half the mixing board apparently died, taking both myseld and the keyboardist with it. You can actually see on the video exactly when the crap hit the fan, sound guys are running around trying in vain to fix the problem. Of course we really had no monitor mix on-stage whatsoever, so we really couldn't hear what was going on - I just kept playing, unable to tell whether I was on or not. Rich knew there was a problem when the power on his keyboard went out, and you can see him in the video attempting to figure out what is going on, and then just carrying on, pretending to play.
What you end up hearing is a LOT of drums (the beat didn't change the entire time, from beginning to end), and occasionally the guitar playing (sounding very twangy and countryish, which was not at all what we were going for), and also the singer attempting to sing, but barely, while me and Rich are just kinda like "What the hell??!"
Funny thing is, I was REAL proud of that video - our first gig ever.. ran around showing it to everyone I knew. I now understand the patronizing looks I got and the attempts at not saying anything mean about it. Oh man.
Strangely enough, a few years (and several band lineup changes later, including the departure of everyone save me and the "singer", and the re-joining of Ted, our lost guitarist, and addition of another "drummer" who didn't suck quite as much as Aaron had) .. my mom invited us to play at an outdoor park festival thing that she was helping organize.
I had some major deja vu that day as the sound system completely flaked leaving nothing powered except me on the bass for some odd reason. Nathan ended up taking off his electro-acoustic and giving it to the guitar player, after which the drummer took the snare off of his kit and we all walked out into the grass and played some kind of wacky acoustic set, with me standing back as far as my cable would reach, looking like I wanted to die.
We got more compliments about that set than any other, save our last (with another different guitarist and drummer).
If I can figure out how to convert VHS to a video file maybe I'll post the video of that first gig on here for a laugh
