Weirdest place your band has practiced...

[bound'n'blocked]

Thought this might be a neat thread...

What is the weirdest rehersal space your band/bands ever used?

For me, it was my first band. I was still living with my folks, and behind our house was an old storage building my mom always called "The snake house", I guess to keep me out of it when I was a little kid. Inside this place was about 100 years of CRAP. Litterally. My grandmother had stuff stored in there from when she was young. It was two stories tall, about 20 feet by 15, and as soon as you opened the door there was a set of steps that went to the upper floor. Upstairs, the hole for the stairs was in the middle of the room, not the side of the room, so if you were hammered you needed to be careful. There was a hinged covering that folded over it to cover it if you didnt need to go up and down alot. The downstairs was two seperate rooms with no windows. The whole building was made of rough cut oak wood, and the building was seriously probably 85-90 years old and dusty as hell. The splinters were vicious. There was no electricity, and you could see the vinyl siding on the outside downstairs thru the spaces between the wood. Driving a nail in the wood was next to impossible unless you used a masonry nail. We cleaned all the junk out of it, and ran a couple of extension cords from the outside outlets to the building, then ran one upstairs and one for downstairs. The neighbor man gave me some old carpet he had replaced and we put it on the floor upstairs. The downstairs room was about 16 feet by 10 feet and we put styrofoam on the walls and ceiling. This turned out to be a mistake because in the summer, if it was 80 degrees outside, it was 125 in the building. We called it "The toaster" and would have to stop every few songs just to cool off. The PA board was upstairs, and then we put one speaker upstairs and one speaker downstairs. The singer and the guitar players were upstairs, and the drummer and bass player were downstairs because there wasnt enough room for all of us in the same place. Practicing in two different rooms was strange, but it made us tighter because we couldnt count on seeing each other for the changes!!

Over time, we made some changes to the place. We replaced the clip on light at the door shining into the downstairs room with a bare bulb hanging from the center and carpeted the walls upstairs. I came home one day and found the guitar player had taken a chainsaw and cut the stairs out, turned them 180 degrees, cut a new hole in the floor upstairs and moved the stairs to the side of the building from the middle of the room, basically making one large room downstars that we all could fit in, and one large room upstairs. We practiced there for about a year, but also just hung out and drank beer and tried to score....LOL, hey, we were young!

Sadly, we broke up and it became a storage building again. I still wont let my mom go in there. Some of the posters are more than she could handle. This all happened abut 22 years ago, and I think every beer can we ever drank is still piled up in there!

Ah, the good ol' days!


BnB

[mildbill]

My old band used to have practice space in an old Masonic Temple. Had secret passages, a hand with an eye in the palm on the ceiling. Lots of that secret society stuff. Also had a broken window which let pigeons come in and fly around from time to time. Overall pretty cool!

[bobalu]

Our Guitar player owns a (family) furniture store and we practice in the warehouse out back. We have to wheel our gear through the showroom though and I'm so paranoid that I'm going to ding some expensive chair. We have to go around and straighten all the display pictures/paintings before we leave at night, 'cause the bass just rocks them crooked!!

[bound'n'blocked]

LOL

We practice in an unused office in the singers place of business now. A bird somehow got in once in between practices and when we came in there was bird $hit all over the drums.

The bass player in a band I played guitar in was a Mason. Usually you couldnt get him to shut up, but ask him what the initiation was and he'd go totally silent.

BnB

[Ric5]

The best weird place was an old barn ... great acoustics.

The worst weird place a huge empty warehouse. Lots of bad echoes.

[Herrlster]

Maybe not the strangest to Canadians but it might be considered strange to other people. My old band auditioned a drummer in the winter so we went to his place since drummers prefer not to haul their gear. So we get there and knock on the door and he tells us to come around the back. So go and a find an old shoddy shed. We go in there and jam in the freezing cold for about an hour. The place was horrid, the door didn't shut all the way, the roof and walls had some holes so the cold breeze blew right through. The next week we auditioned another drummer and he tells us we'll jam in his garage. Thinking it would be the same situation we dreaded the audition. We showed up and discovered his garage was fully finished, insulated, heated and juiced up with tons of power. It was like heaven.

[ScreaminSGs]

The first band I was in was two brothers, their cousin, and myself. Their fathers jointly owned an old blacksmith shop out in the country. We walled off one section and made a studio.
We didn't have any gear to speak of. We used Model T axel housing halves with a stick of anle iron stuck in the end and tape recorded mic duc taped to the end. The keyboard player had a Fender Contempo. That was the only good piece of gear between us!

[Kwin Smith]

One place was an old dentist's office. We put the drum set where the guy shot himself in the head about two years beforehand. We had NO idea.

Another spot was a place where someone used to film porn flicks. Several rooms, and each had a different backdrop. Really.

[Shakin-Slim]

The guitarist from the band I used to play in had a farm out on the Waikato River here in the Bay of Plenty. Out on the farm was a hut. Originally "Jack's Hut", then "The Band Hut". We tried to insulate it with carpet and mattresses along the walls. Hot as hell in summer, colder than cold in winter. Brilliant. Anyway, we had all the gear set up in there. It was originally built for the guitarists older brother to live in. A lot of beers and a lot of other substances had been consumed in that hut. You could smell it when you came in, you could find it when you thought "if I were a stash, where would I hide?". The band moved in, we added posters to the walls, added to the smell, covered the bare wall space with psychedelic pictures, using paint and permanent marker, and other graffiti to remember good times. The windows were smashed, so they were covered in cardboard and thus, covered in more psychedelic pictures. Eventually the power source became unreliable, so we called it quits. Although, as I sit here typing this in a university lecture theatre, I miss those simple times when life was hanging at the farm, making music, not caring about the crazy Zimbabwean neighbours peace, spending the day up in the hills, having good laughs, aided with good grass, kayaking up the Waikato river with acoustics, finding quiet spots on other farms to land and make more music. Spending the nights making quiet music that vibrated more inside us than the loudest music we played could, with girls laughing on the couch and the dog laying around (who has since died of lung cancer), having good beers (actually not so good. If you ever come to NZ, drink Waikato Draught or Bushman's Beer and you'll know what I mean, seriously Waikato Draught must be just water taken straight from the Waikato River). Good times, and a strange time. A strange place.

[jive1]

We once used to rehearse in the basement of a Mexican Video store after hours. Yes, we checked out the adult section.

Wierdest though was rehearsing in the car on the way to an open mic in college. Drummer banged out the beat on a book, while the bassist and I played through the changes.

[T-Bird]

Hi.

Back in the day we rehearsed in an old boiler room of the citys sports hall my father worked in.

A LOT of weird, spooky resonations and howls from the ducts and pipes. It was also crammed as hell.

Regards
Sam

[rosanne]

Shakin-Slim that was a great post! It made me nostalgic for the place and I wasn't even there......

[bound'n'blocked]

Some good ones here guys....

Slim, that pretty much sums up the situation at our old practice pad. The neighbors used to all sit on their porches in the summer all over the neighborhood and listen. If we didnt practice for a night or two, they would call and ask why. It didnt matter that, as a band, we sucked. We were having fun. I guess you could say they were the first crowd I ever played in front of.

If I think about it, I'll run by my folks one day and take a picture of the place as it looks now.

Keep 'em coming!

BnB

[Shakin-Slim]

Originally Posted by rosanne

Shakin-Slim that was a great post! It made me nostalgic for the place and I wasn't even there......

To help with the nostalgia, here are some pictures. I'm the one with the red shirt and all the hair Good times.
Attachment 162119

Attachment 162120

The other guy with me is Tsunami, clearly channeling Jim Morrison in one of those photos.

[Shakin-Slim]

Attachment 162121

[jgsbass]

I used to rehearse with a band in the basement of a Carvel ice cream store during the hours it was open to the public. And we weren't the only ones. The owner of the store loved music and made 2 rehearsal rooms in the basement. He used to charge for this service but no one ever paid and the owner just wanted to be attached somehow to music. Big problem if you had a gig and it ended after the stores closing time.
Also, one of my first bands used to rehearse in the lunchroom of a Catholic school. The room had so much echo, we could end a tune, go out for pizza, and then come back and still hear the last song.

[Rip Topaz]

One of my former bands used to rehearse in what was called the "Ice Box". It was actually a walk-in cooler from a former beer distributor. Smelled like crap and was impossible to get a comfortable temp, cold n winter, steaming in the summer.

Good times.

[tom once dead]

Not really that weird... But one place I always used to jam was at a guitards place. A steel shed, that his family lived in when the main house was being built about 500m from the house. So we had good power, fridge running water toilet and the rest.

The weird part is; many years ago a guy died in a tractor acident right next to where the shed is now. So many unexplainable things have happened that all of us or one of us has whitnessed. Sounds of someones hand dragging along the corrigated iron as they walked past, when everyone was inside. Wierd bangs, walking sounds outside. One time the guitard was on the computer and saw a reflection of a person in the screen, when he looked back there was no one (and he checked everywhere).


Once again many good nights there, many beers consumed, many games of pool, many movies and more games of counterstrick 1.6.

[rosanne]

Originally Posted by Shakin-Slim

To help with the nostalgia, here are some pictures. I'm the one with the red shirt and all the hair Good times.
Attachment 162119

Attachment 162120

The other guy with me is Tsunami, clearly channeling Jim Morrison in one of those photos.

Good photos, and good times indeed!

[rosanne]

A fellow in Oakland took over a meat packing plant and converted it to rehearsal rooms, sort of. I never played in there but heard about it. Evidently he didn't get rid of all the hardware and accouterments - at least not at first.