The house lights dim. The soundcheck ends. My guitar is plugged into a Marshall half stack with the volume cranked up to 11. The crowd roar dulls to a mumble as the first notes of our song hit their ears. The room smells of cheap beer and cigarettes. The audience is a mix of aging wannabe rock stars and pop punk teens who are ready to perform songs about their deep emotional feelings and their parents not understanding them.
Our first song's notes hit like a boxing glove to the face. Our little 100 dollar keyboard is on the strings setting and it's plugged into a giant amp. The beginning of the song is so loud it makes my organs rattle inside my body. To me it sounds like a mix between Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. To the crowd it sounds like one long droning sound because their ear drums have just ruptured. It doesn't matter. I'm a fucking artist. I'm a fucking rock star. I'm also 13.
This is our first show at the now closed, Century Lounge in Providence, RI sometime in the fall of 2006. We had gotten the show through some sorta sketchy company on MySpace who said it was a battle of the bands. Essentially this company would give us a bunch of tickets to sell and then they would let us play at a small club in Providence in what they called a, "talent conquest." The winner of this talent conquest always seemed to be the band that sold the most tickets. I wonder why?
The song I was describing at the beginning of this article was titled "Let it Go." It was written in Jack's bedroom on a notebook after school one day. Who or what needed to "let it go" still remains a mystery to me, even as the song's writer.
I wasn't kidding when I thought the song sounded like Pink Floyd. Spoiler alert...it didn't. In fact the opening notes were so loud that upon watching the video tape back of our performance all we can hear is straight distortion over an out of tune guitar riff.
The kicker of our first set though was that we closed with Baba O'Riley by The Who. That's right, a bunch of 13 year olds closed their first show with a cover of an extremely famous rock song. You can probably imagine how it sounded.
To us our first show was a rousing success. We thought this because our friends had told us how great we sounded. They too were 13 so their judgment of great live music might be a little suspect. But who cares? We played a show at a nightclub in Providence before we were even in high school.
Fast forward a few months later.
Our second gig. It's daytime for this one. In fact the show was so early that we had to leave our house in late morning. This time we were playing a legendary spot, the Living Room in Providence. The club has since been closed because it was a disgusting fire hazard.
We were the first band to play a three day music "festival" at the Living Room. The same MySpace company that had booked us for the first gig decided to give us another shot, probably because they were having trouble filling three days of live music.
The place was once again packed with preteens and our parents who were about to hear us open with a song about my 8th grade math teacher and how she was a raging bitch. I couldn't say it to her at the time but I'm an adult now so on the off chance she reads this article someday I hope she knows that she was an awful teacher.
Upon finishing our three minute, two chord song, about my Algebra teacher, we immediately jumped into a five minute instrumental "blues song" that went on for so long that I actually bored myself playing it. You see when we wrote songs we didn't really know how to end them so we kinda just kept playing until our drummer (Jack) decided that it was probably time to wrap it up.
We may have lost the crowd during this song so we needed something to bring them back. Our answer? A cover of Jimmy Eat World's emotional hit, Hear You Me. We had decided to cover it because it was super easy to play. This whole set is available to see on YouTube by the way...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e7yT81Oc5Q
The Living Room show ended our run at Providence night clubs, probably because the MySpace company that kept booking us went out of business. The Perks, as we were called back then were forced to play a series of shows at Church Festivals, Craft Fairs in the parking lot of elementary schools and basically anywhere else that people would allow us to play. We didn't care though. We had a message to send and that message was that rock wasn't dead as long as The Perks were around.
The Perks didn't end up making it past Freshmen year of High School but before the ultimate end of the band we decided that we needed to put out a record. I had bought a mini mixer at Guitar Center the previous year and had learned a thing or two about recording. The problem was that none of us had a computer to record with, other than the one that was in Jack's living room.
The way Jack's house is designed is that he has a garage which leads to his kitchen and into his living room through a door. With one mic and a long XLR cable we wired the mixer from his living room computer, through his kitchen and into his garage to record his drum tracks for our two song EP. The EP, titled Dinosaur for some reason, contained zero originals and had our rendition of 99 Red Balloons and a song called Memory by Sugarcult who not many people have listened to.
You can imagine how one mic in a non insulated garage sounds when it comes to recording drums, especially when you're 14 and don't know how to use the mixer other than turning it on and plugging it in. The EP ended up being so bad that we decided it was better if the band just disband rather than try and continue this mediocre charade of attempting to be serious musicians.
In April of 2008 we had a life altering experience when Explosions in the Sky came to Lupos and put on the best live music performance I've ever seen. To this day it remains my favorite concert. My 14 year old brain exploded when I saw them play and inspired me to come out of my four month retirement and form a band once again!
The Perks were dead and new band was about to take over. We weren't a fucking rock band. We were a post rock band. We didn't need lyrics to express our emotion, we did it through our instruments, just like Explosions in the Sky.
Despite our new found deepness we still couldn't drive and our Mom's still had to drop us off at our gigs. We didn't care though. We were reborn...we were real.
In the entire two or three year history that our new instrumental band, Any Port in the Storm, existed, we probably wrote a total of six songs. The shortest of those songs was around the four minute mark and the longest was over ten.
It's tough being an instrumental band when people don't understand what you're going for. I remember playing one show at the YMCA. We were two minutes into a cover of Explosions in the Sky's song, Yasmin the Light, our heads were down, our eyes were closed, as we descended into the emotion of the music. All of a sudden out of the darkness a girl yells out "ARE THERE WORDS?" thus removing any sorta seriousness that we were trying to display.
That set also began with these really cool wind like noises that Dan would make with his guitar peddle. We thought it added to our epic soundscape. This of course was ruined when someone uttered "either they've started or someone opened a window."
Any Port in the Storm's music wasn't appropriate for most of the shows we played. We returned to the church fair that the Perks had played two years prior. When the woman who ran the fair asked "will you be playing similar songs to the last time?" We replied with, "not exactly." Imagine trying to enjoy clam cakes and chowder with your grandmother at a church fair while some high school band plays a ten minute instrumental song at full volume 15 feet from the food services area.
The bands final show might have been the most inappropriate setting of all. We were asked to play a fundraiser at a local park near our house. The people attending were mostly older adults. During the pasta dinner we took the stage and ultimately destroyed the evening for several people.
Again, I ask you to picture yourself enjoying a nice meal with your family at a fundraiser for a good cause, when suddenly this band starts playing at an obnoxious volume, a dark satanic sounding instrumental song. We were so loud that some middle aged woman approached the stage as we were mid set to ask us to turn our amps down. It would ultimately be the last show we played.
It's tough trying to make it as a band through your awkward years of high school, especially when your parents have to drive you to every gig. When we would play shows in Providence, other bands would enjoy free beers while we were forced to drink Sprite. We once even took the stage around midnight to a mostly empty room because all of our friends were too young to stay out that late.
In the end though I wouldn't trade the memories for anything. With each gig came another fuck up and with each fuck up came another great story. Long live The Perks! Long live Any Port in the Storm!
Commentaires