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When I was a sophmore in highschool (a little over seven years ago I guess) Me and my friends who I had known since seventh grade decided to start a band. In youthful naivety we thought we would blow everyone away. We hated all the other bands and with our superior musical taste and our combined powers (to from voltron/captain planet) how could we suck?
At first it was me and two guitar players, I was going to play drums. I'd only been playing a little over a year and obviously wasn't very good yet. One of the guitar players had been playing for several years at that point and had lessons and everything, he was the only good one in our bunch. Even though he played very generic metal riffs and solos whatever. He was really into Ozzy and AC/DC around then. And then there was the rhythm guitarist and if anyone had to be called it he was our frontman, though he wouldn't sing. He was really into ska punk at that age and was really into Lagwagon and uh, Less Than Jake.
The problems almost started immediately when we would have disscussions about the band during lunch at school. The first topic that lasted for a while was what the band should sound like. It kind of makes me woner how real bands decided what they were going to sound like because in my real band, we don't discuss anything and our music just kind of happened.
Anyway, Rhythm guitarist was the most vocal about it and thought we should be a punk band. I was fine with it (would've been fine with almost anything really, I was just happy to be in a band), but metal guitarist wasn't having it. He hated punk rock with a passion because he felt it was too simple and easy to play, and would always do air guitar power chords in jest and complain about how lame those punk bands were. I would try to comprimise and suggest we just be a rock band. But Rhythm guitarist didn't like this and mistook it as I was implying we be a 'classic rock' band, emulating the sounds of The Who or whatever. "Why would you want to do that?" he'd say "Why would you want to do stuff some guys did 30 years ago?" and I'd always have to explain what I meant. Earliest on I tried to option for indie rock like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Built to Spill or whatever. But everyone thought I was saying 'India Rock' and thought I was talking about middle eastern jams or whatever.
We never agreed on a sound much like the rest of the bands tenure of not agreeing on anything. After we had been around a couple of months and had practiced maybe twice. One of the more popular bands around the high school was doing this show at the local ampitheatre and wanted us to play. I immediately said yes even though we didn't have any material. But Rhythm guitarist was completely against it on the grounds that we weren't ready yet. What it really ended up being is that he just doesn't like to play in public, call it stage fright I guess.
The next issue with the band is what we were going to play. I can't remember Metal guitarist's stance, but Rhythm Guitarist had absolutely zero interest in writing any original material at that point. He wanted us to start out with a bunch of covers so that we would get in sync well with eachother. I thought it was a stupid idea and Metal Guitarist (who didn't really care at all about anything) didn't care either way. So the system they set up was each of us were going to pick two covers totalling up to six for us to do. Rhythm Guitarist's picks were AFI's 'Last Caress' (not the Misfits mind you), and Blink 182's 'Dammit'. Metal guitarist picked Crazy Train and nothing else. And I had to go through like twelve songs because they kept shooting down my picks. I tried to pitch Television's Friction and Ween's Cold and Wet, and Rhythm Guitarist shot both of them down violently. I amazed I got him to agree to Mildred Pierce since he hated (still hates) Sonic Youth. He might've done it out of pity since he shut down all of my other suggestions, never did get another song out there.
We mostly ended up playing Pierce at practices and Dammit/Last Caress only occasionally. We did Crazy Train once and it was so hard.
After that first while Rhythm Guitarist got a girlfriend who was a guitar player and wanted to be in the band. Neither Rhythm or Metal guitarist would switch to bass so she agreed to play bass even though she didn't really like it. Also, she wouldn't sing either. The three of us agreed that the band was pretty unfocused before and that mayber her addition would reorient us. If anything it made it worse.
She continued the two cover thing we had to do by adding some Rise Against song, and Metallica's For Whom The Bell Tolls. Bell Tolls ended up being the main song we did. I began to feel bad for the bass player because her 15 watt amp or whatever wasn't loud at all and the drums would overpower it with ease. So they asked me to play quieter, which I tried. The drums caused other problems too. Rhythm guitarist had never been around them before I guess and the snare drum was too loud for him I guess and he would blink everytime I hit it. This one practice he brought these earmuffs, you know the kind lumberjacks wear when cutting down trees. He wore those for about five minutes and then complained that he couldn't hear anything.
Speaking of practices they were severely unproductive. Almost every practice went in the vein of play for about ten minutes after arguing for twenty over which song we should play first. And then take an hour long break and watch Darkside of Oz or something.
At this point the band became pretty close to being a power couple thing between Rhythm Guitarist and his girlfriend the Bass Player. Rhythm Guitarist was controlling already but it was getting worse when he was working off his girlfriends vibes. Before then we never had a band name, just nothing came to mind. And then after Bass Player had been in the band a while, she and Rhythm Guitarist had all of these potential names for the band. And they were all horrible, and frankly kind of gay coming from him. The only two I remember out of several were Queen Arthur and Padpon (a combination of tampon and pad). Metal Guitarist and I severely hated Padpon, and he really hated Queen Arthur as well, I didn't care for it either, but if I had to call it something it would be that. I had made some counter name suggestions, the only one I can recall was The Angry Seaturtles. Rhythm Guitarist loved it, Bass Player hated it, so it went out.
The band dissolved about two or three years after inception when they FINALLY agreed to write original songs when the cover approach obviously wasn't working. I was super pumped that we were going to attempt originality. But it ended up being the worst practice (and the one that ended the band) when we went into my room and no one did anything. Rhythm Guitarist and Bass Player just rolled around on my bed, Metal Guitarist did scales in the corner and I couldn't do anything about it. I would've written the songs myself, but I'd only been playing guitar for a little while at that point and could barely make chords. Everyone once in a while someone would chime in in jest 'alright, so let's get writing.' and then silence. It's really pathetic to think about.
So yeah, probably the most indecisive band ever, can barely call it a band. But we played and spoke of it as such. I still hang out with all of those people. But yeah, I really hated being in that band. Sorry this was so long.
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