The anticipated private rebellion came on schedule. It was borne of the not-so-strange but uniquely teen combination of a near mature body, almost mature mind, wide mood swings and erratic hormone levels. I don't think my dad and mom understood me. I know that it is the mantra of all teen angst, but my parents REALLY did not understand me.
I saved some money from my allowance and from helping my dad on the farm. I borrowed some from my sister and a few bucks from Mom. There was a bass guitar and amplifier offered for sale in the want ads of the Springfield Sun. Mom drove me there.
The guy who was selling the equipment lived a few blocks from a Baptist church my family used to attend. We learned from talking to the man that the Fender Precision Bass guitar and Univox amplifier and speaker cabinets were only a few months old. He'd been the bassist for a Gospel band that played at the church we used to attend but the band broke up and he could no longer afford to make the payments ont he equipment. So he was selling them for what he still owed. It was perfect.
First, I learned whatever I could from musicians, kids I knew who played in the high school orchestra. Mike, a friend I made the first day I transferred to the high school, played bass in the school's string ensemble. He also knew piano and a couple of other instruments. I had some experience playing alto saxophone when I was in junior high. I already knew the principal difference of a bass guitar was that it had frets on the neck, which would make it easier to make notes.
As a member of my school's a'capella choir, I was accustomed to reading sheel music. During one of my study hall periods, my instructor, Miss Grimes was teaching me how to compose music, something I really wanted to do. In addition to this sort of instant immersion method of learning music, I suffered through several bass guitar lessons in a music store at the Upper Valley Mall in Springfield.
In time, word got out that I was a bass guitarist. A small garage band that two brothers formed asked me if I would audition for them. Borrowing my dad's pick-up, I loaded my equipment and went over to their house. Along with Chris, the band's rhythm guitarist and personal friend of both brothers, we jammed as a quartet. We played some songs that each of us knew. In the course of the audition, they learned that not only could I play bass well enough to be in the band, but also I could sing while playing. When you are playing from the bass clef, singing lead vocals from the treble clef is a bit of a challenge.
Afterwards, every weekend we would practiced, whether it was at Dave and Rick's house, Chris' garage or the vacant house that we were restoring on my dad's farm. As I was the only one in the bad with a driver's licence and a car, I was often the transportation between houses. Whenever the guys came over to my place, I had to borrow my dad's pick-up to haul all of our equipment. The guys brought changes and clothes and sleeping bags and spent the weekend. If we weren't rehearsing, we did a lot of things farm kids do that boys from the suburbs know little or nothing about, like skinny-dipping in a deep pool of the creek that ran through my dad's farm. Sometimes we'd climb up into the haymow and use a rope to swing down from stacks of hay, pretending to be Tarzan. Other times, we took turns riding my horse. When the need arose, we peed on trees and bushes. Over the course of a Spring and Summer, we bonded as a band and as friends.
Anytime we practicing at Chris' place, it was a drag. After a while, the neighbors would complain and we would have to move all of our equipment down to the basement. What was nice about play in the garage was all the neighborhood's girls that were our ages or a little younger were dancing in the driveway as we attempted to play some of their favorite songs.
Mainly, we practiced at Dave and Rick's house. It was where Rick had his drum kit set up nearly all the time. Rick hated tearing the kit down just to take it somewhere to practice for an afternoon, but it couldn't always be avoided. Dave and Rick's mom didn't mind if we practiced at the house as long as she wasn't home. Chris' mom was even less tolerant. That was one of the reasons we used the vacant house on my dad's farm.
Dave and Rick shared that room with all the amplifiers and the drums. After the first time auditioning there, I never again hauled my bass amplifier and cabinet to Dave and Rick's for a practice. There was no room. I plugged my bass into Dave's amp. Even though it was less than ideal, it worked well enough for practice. The only time we ever played with my amp was in the house on my dad's farm, or on the rare occasion that we performed some live venue.
Early in the fall of my junior year, my sister, who was the president of her sorority, hired us to play for a party. We got paid, which technically made us professional musicians. We set up outside in a garage next to the chapter house. With garage door open wide, played for about three hours. We played everything we knew, even some things I had written but we had never really practiced all that much. We played several requested songs, most of them numbers The Beatles or the Rolling Stones recorded. We continued practicing and performing whenever we could arrange for a gig. All the while we were not only improving as individual musicians, but also in tightness of our synchroniation. Sometimes we would pool our resources and purchase something to improve the band's public address system. Other times we'd upgrade out ownindividual equipment.
Our performance schedule schedule the summer before my senior year was busy. My sister got us into an arts festival at Wittenberg University, where she attended college. We performed two songs, our best, before an audience of perhaps a hundred, no one out ages. They didn't seem to be there to hear our musical 'combo' - as they called us.
Later we performed at the Clark County Fair. It was free, outdoor concert. Still, it gave us a lot of necessary exposure. It was also the very first time I wore a white satin suit my mother had made for me. My parents, friends, one of my sisters and my nephew were there to witness the performance. I personally felt that we sucked horribly, but everyone in the audience was polite. We couldn't have been that bad. A few people asked for our contact numbers and we got a few gigs playing at parties.
There is a monumental difference for a live band performing outdoors as opposed to performing indoors. If you think about it, the acoustics are completely different. The ambiance is strange. Even though we were technically outside whenever we were performing in a garage, the building behind us lent some support to the sound. Any musician who has ever performed outdoors can tell you it just sounds weird. The feedback of the echoes is missing. Everything about the music feels flat and dead.
During my senior year, Chris' mother got us a gig at the Clark County Children's Home. I considered my sister paying us for the gig at her sorority as charity, the Children's Home was really our first paying gig. It was a very big deal for the band.
We played two hours and every one of us performed a solo piece. Mine was a bluesy riff I was working on for a rock opera called One Thane. I was composing it for my Senior English class. Why Senior English? The composition was based on the epic poem, Beowulf. A portion of the finished rock opera was to be sung in the original Old English, as I had set the lyric to music.
When we played out our scheduled time and exhausted most of the songs we knew, the children cheered for us to return to play something else. We gave them two more songs. Then the home's administrators took charge. It was getting late and, anyway, we needed to be on our way.
It was a strange evening for us as a band, in a good sort of way. We really clicked, perhaps for the first time. We sounded damned good. It was almost as if we awakened in a future time when we were seasoned veterans of the road.
The children were incredibly appreciative of our music. They were dancing, singing along, cheering - some of them were even hovering close to the stage watching our every move, as if we were stars. I have to admit, at first that felt creepy, but when I realized the kids were into us, it felt great. That sensation could become addicting enough for someone to leave home, friends and family for months at a time to continue feeding the need. Before that concert, I didn't understand the motivation of stars to perform live.
For the first time ever, some of the audience asked us for autographs! We signed a couple dozen. Maybe they were just an overly appreciative audience. Regardless, it was a night of many firsts for the band.
From that point on, I believed we were destined for greatness. We began rehearsing the songs I had written for One Thane. It was hard at first. The arrangements were strange for Dave and Rick. The beat was clearly not typical of Rock and Roll. It was more like Jazz with a smattering of Blues.
I was doing the project with my friend, Brice. He wrote the percussion portions of the pieces. I did the lyrics, the bass lines and the lead guitar. The rhythm guitar played off the lead lines for the most part, with some room for the rythm to become a counter to the lead guitar work at times. There was a place that could have used keyboards, but we didn't have a piano though we probably could have persuaded a friend to play the piano pieces separately and overdubbed it later.
Throughout the winter, the rehearsals continued, every Saturday afternoon and sometimes Sunday as well. A few times we huddled in a room in a very large and nearly restored farmhouse on my dad's property to play it with every instrument cranked up to be louder than everything else. The resulting cacophony was nearly ear splitting. But it was fun to see how loud we could be with every potentiometer on our amplifiers and public address turned to 'ten''
Then, in the last throes of winter, on the second weekend of March, we holed-up in the house where we had often practiced. The purpose was to record at least a portion of One Thane.
From a few friends and some fellow musicians I met over the previous couple of years, I borrowed some state of the art equipment. We had a mixer board and a four- channel, multi-sync reel to reel that was capable of recording overdubs, effectively making it like a sixteen-track recorder. We already owned some very sensitive microphones, most of them picked up in a cardioid pattern. We borrowed one with a very narrow directional pattern and two others that were were bi-directional. We experimented with the use and placement of the microphones in recording different takes of the songs.
Brice was supposed to perform a couple of the songs on Rick's drum kit. One of the lessons I learned in producing One Thane was it not wise to ask a drummer to let another drummer play his kit. Rick was not happy with the arrangement. We discussed it in private for several minutes. Despite his personal feelings, it was a senior English project and Brice needed to be a part of it. After some initial sniping at one another, Rick and Brice actually started working together and eventually became friends out of some level of mutual respect. Rick was more seasoned at playing in a band and maintaining the beat while interspersing rolls and such. Brice seemed to best Rick at counter rhythm. What Brice could do drew immediate attention to the percussive element in the music.
After a good deal of discussion, Brice and I agreed that he should bring his drum kit from home to the house and we record his parts that way. What resulted were really two drummers trying to one up one another at times. It was interesting, perhaps, but much of it was eventually removed in edits to the master recording.
When we had finished the recording most of the raw material for the project, we all listened to the tracks. Each one of us thought we could do better. After some rest, we decided to play the entire work through live from start to finish. What emerged was a reference track that Brice's friend, also named Rick but we all called him Flea Head, would use to make the best possible recording of each song, then record the final mix to a cassette tape.
In early April, the culmination of hours of practice and work was ready to be presented to my senior English class. Brice and I set up the tape deck, speakers and amplifier for the performance. We used a little ZZ Top track at the intro to get the sound balance right for everything. Then the rock opera began.
It was an amateur production from the outset, but we had used some pretty good equipment to capture the recording. In the process of post-production, Flea Head mastered a fine sample of what we intended to do. It was far from perfect. Perhaps if we were working with people more professional than us, more experienced than high school students, we could have pulled that miracle off as well. Still, everyone was impressed. It wasn't that Brice and I had created a rock opera. We performed it and it was actually something that you could listen to and find things in it that you liked.
Does that tape still exist? My mother had a copy of it somewhere in her things. If it still exists, it was so long ago that I doubt it is even playable. Flea Head kept the master, and Mrs. Hiles, my Senior English teacher received a copy of the tape as well. So who knows?
As hard as Brice and I worked on that project, I'd like to think that there is still some evidence.
I saved some money from my allowance and from helping my dad on the farm. I borrowed some from my sister and a few bucks from Mom. There was a bass guitar and amplifier offered for sale in the want ads of the Springfield Sun. Mom drove me there.
The guy who was selling the equipment lived a few blocks from a Baptist church my family used to attend. We learned from talking to the man that the Fender Precision Bass guitar and Univox amplifier and speaker cabinets were only a few months old. He'd been the bassist for a Gospel band that played at the church we used to attend but the band broke up and he could no longer afford to make the payments ont he equipment. So he was selling them for what he still owed. It was perfect.
First, I learned whatever I could from musicians, kids I knew who played in the high school orchestra. Mike, a friend I made the first day I transferred to the high school, played bass in the school's string ensemble. He also knew piano and a couple of other instruments. I had some experience playing alto saxophone when I was in junior high. I already knew the principal difference of a bass guitar was that it had frets on the neck, which would make it easier to make notes.
As a member of my school's a'capella choir, I was accustomed to reading sheel music. During one of my study hall periods, my instructor, Miss Grimes was teaching me how to compose music, something I really wanted to do. In addition to this sort of instant immersion method of learning music, I suffered through several bass guitar lessons in a music store at the Upper Valley Mall in Springfield.
In time, word got out that I was a bass guitarist. A small garage band that two brothers formed asked me if I would audition for them. Borrowing my dad's pick-up, I loaded my equipment and went over to their house. Along with Chris, the band's rhythm guitarist and personal friend of both brothers, we jammed as a quartet. We played some songs that each of us knew. In the course of the audition, they learned that not only could I play bass well enough to be in the band, but also I could sing while playing. When you are playing from the bass clef, singing lead vocals from the treble clef is a bit of a challenge.
Afterwards, every weekend we would practiced, whether it was at Dave and Rick's house, Chris' garage or the vacant house that we were restoring on my dad's farm. As I was the only one in the bad with a driver's licence and a car, I was often the transportation between houses. Whenever the guys came over to my place, I had to borrow my dad's pick-up to haul all of our equipment. The guys brought changes and clothes and sleeping bags and spent the weekend. If we weren't rehearsing, we did a lot of things farm kids do that boys from the suburbs know little or nothing about, like skinny-dipping in a deep pool of the creek that ran through my dad's farm. Sometimes we'd climb up into the haymow and use a rope to swing down from stacks of hay, pretending to be Tarzan. Other times, we took turns riding my horse. When the need arose, we peed on trees and bushes. Over the course of a Spring and Summer, we bonded as a band and as friends.
Anytime we practicing at Chris' place, it was a drag. After a while, the neighbors would complain and we would have to move all of our equipment down to the basement. What was nice about play in the garage was all the neighborhood's girls that were our ages or a little younger were dancing in the driveway as we attempted to play some of their favorite songs.
Mainly, we practiced at Dave and Rick's house. It was where Rick had his drum kit set up nearly all the time. Rick hated tearing the kit down just to take it somewhere to practice for an afternoon, but it couldn't always be avoided. Dave and Rick's mom didn't mind if we practiced at the house as long as she wasn't home. Chris' mom was even less tolerant. That was one of the reasons we used the vacant house on my dad's farm.
Dave and Rick shared that room with all the amplifiers and the drums. After the first time auditioning there, I never again hauled my bass amplifier and cabinet to Dave and Rick's for a practice. There was no room. I plugged my bass into Dave's amp. Even though it was less than ideal, it worked well enough for practice. The only time we ever played with my amp was in the house on my dad's farm, or on the rare occasion that we performed some live venue.
Early in the fall of my junior year, my sister, who was the president of her sorority, hired us to play for a party. We got paid, which technically made us professional musicians. We set up outside in a garage next to the chapter house. With garage door open wide, played for about three hours. We played everything we knew, even some things I had written but we had never really practiced all that much. We played several requested songs, most of them numbers The Beatles or the Rolling Stones recorded. We continued practicing and performing whenever we could arrange for a gig. All the while we were not only improving as individual musicians, but also in tightness of our synchroniation. Sometimes we would pool our resources and purchase something to improve the band's public address system. Other times we'd upgrade out ownindividual equipment.
Our performance schedule schedule the summer before my senior year was busy. My sister got us into an arts festival at Wittenberg University, where she attended college. We performed two songs, our best, before an audience of perhaps a hundred, no one out ages. They didn't seem to be there to hear our musical 'combo' - as they called us.
Later we performed at the Clark County Fair. It was free, outdoor concert. Still, it gave us a lot of necessary exposure. It was also the very first time I wore a white satin suit my mother had made for me. My parents, friends, one of my sisters and my nephew were there to witness the performance. I personally felt that we sucked horribly, but everyone in the audience was polite. We couldn't have been that bad. A few people asked for our contact numbers and we got a few gigs playing at parties.
There is a monumental difference for a live band performing outdoors as opposed to performing indoors. If you think about it, the acoustics are completely different. The ambiance is strange. Even though we were technically outside whenever we were performing in a garage, the building behind us lent some support to the sound. Any musician who has ever performed outdoors can tell you it just sounds weird. The feedback of the echoes is missing. Everything about the music feels flat and dead.
During my senior year, Chris' mother got us a gig at the Clark County Children's Home. I considered my sister paying us for the gig at her sorority as charity, the Children's Home was really our first paying gig. It was a very big deal for the band.
We played two hours and every one of us performed a solo piece. Mine was a bluesy riff I was working on for a rock opera called One Thane. I was composing it for my Senior English class. Why Senior English? The composition was based on the epic poem, Beowulf. A portion of the finished rock opera was to be sung in the original Old English, as I had set the lyric to music.
When we played out our scheduled time and exhausted most of the songs we knew, the children cheered for us to return to play something else. We gave them two more songs. Then the home's administrators took charge. It was getting late and, anyway, we needed to be on our way.
It was a strange evening for us as a band, in a good sort of way. We really clicked, perhaps for the first time. We sounded damned good. It was almost as if we awakened in a future time when we were seasoned veterans of the road.
The children were incredibly appreciative of our music. They were dancing, singing along, cheering - some of them were even hovering close to the stage watching our every move, as if we were stars. I have to admit, at first that felt creepy, but when I realized the kids were into us, it felt great. That sensation could become addicting enough for someone to leave home, friends and family for months at a time to continue feeding the need. Before that concert, I didn't understand the motivation of stars to perform live.
For the first time ever, some of the audience asked us for autographs! We signed a couple dozen. Maybe they were just an overly appreciative audience. Regardless, it was a night of many firsts for the band.
From that point on, I believed we were destined for greatness. We began rehearsing the songs I had written for One Thane. It was hard at first. The arrangements were strange for Dave and Rick. The beat was clearly not typical of Rock and Roll. It was more like Jazz with a smattering of Blues.
I was doing the project with my friend, Brice. He wrote the percussion portions of the pieces. I did the lyrics, the bass lines and the lead guitar. The rhythm guitar played off the lead lines for the most part, with some room for the rythm to become a counter to the lead guitar work at times. There was a place that could have used keyboards, but we didn't have a piano though we probably could have persuaded a friend to play the piano pieces separately and overdubbed it later.
Throughout the winter, the rehearsals continued, every Saturday afternoon and sometimes Sunday as well. A few times we huddled in a room in a very large and nearly restored farmhouse on my dad's property to play it with every instrument cranked up to be louder than everything else. The resulting cacophony was nearly ear splitting. But it was fun to see how loud we could be with every potentiometer on our amplifiers and public address turned to 'ten''
Then, in the last throes of winter, on the second weekend of March, we holed-up in the house where we had often practiced. The purpose was to record at least a portion of One Thane.
From a few friends and some fellow musicians I met over the previous couple of years, I borrowed some state of the art equipment. We had a mixer board and a four- channel, multi-sync reel to reel that was capable of recording overdubs, effectively making it like a sixteen-track recorder. We already owned some very sensitive microphones, most of them picked up in a cardioid pattern. We borrowed one with a very narrow directional pattern and two others that were were bi-directional. We experimented with the use and placement of the microphones in recording different takes of the songs.
Brice was supposed to perform a couple of the songs on Rick's drum kit. One of the lessons I learned in producing One Thane was it not wise to ask a drummer to let another drummer play his kit. Rick was not happy with the arrangement. We discussed it in private for several minutes. Despite his personal feelings, it was a senior English project and Brice needed to be a part of it. After some initial sniping at one another, Rick and Brice actually started working together and eventually became friends out of some level of mutual respect. Rick was more seasoned at playing in a band and maintaining the beat while interspersing rolls and such. Brice seemed to best Rick at counter rhythm. What Brice could do drew immediate attention to the percussive element in the music.
After a good deal of discussion, Brice and I agreed that he should bring his drum kit from home to the house and we record his parts that way. What resulted were really two drummers trying to one up one another at times. It was interesting, perhaps, but much of it was eventually removed in edits to the master recording.
When we had finished the recording most of the raw material for the project, we all listened to the tracks. Each one of us thought we could do better. After some rest, we decided to play the entire work through live from start to finish. What emerged was a reference track that Brice's friend, also named Rick but we all called him Flea Head, would use to make the best possible recording of each song, then record the final mix to a cassette tape.
In early April, the culmination of hours of practice and work was ready to be presented to my senior English class. Brice and I set up the tape deck, speakers and amplifier for the performance. We used a little ZZ Top track at the intro to get the sound balance right for everything. Then the rock opera began.
It was an amateur production from the outset, but we had used some pretty good equipment to capture the recording. In the process of post-production, Flea Head mastered a fine sample of what we intended to do. It was far from perfect. Perhaps if we were working with people more professional than us, more experienced than high school students, we could have pulled that miracle off as well. Still, everyone was impressed. It wasn't that Brice and I had created a rock opera. We performed it and it was actually something that you could listen to and find things in it that you liked.
Does that tape still exist? My mother had a copy of it somewhere in her things. If it still exists, it was so long ago that I doubt it is even playable. Flea Head kept the master, and Mrs. Hiles, my Senior English teacher received a copy of the tape as well. So who knows?
As hard as Brice and I worked on that project, I'd like to think that there is still some evidence.
Composing a rock opera as a Senior English project.
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