My friend and I went to see the movie Tell No One tonight. It was a really good murder mystery, clear up until the ending, when it suddenly turned into a Scooby Doo episode. One of the characters started doing that thing where he points a gun at the main character and starts talking at him and revealing everything. You know; ‘I did it. It was ME. That’s right, ME. I’m gonna spell out exactly how and why I did it, too, because I love the sound of my own voice.’ Yawn.
The real event of the night happened after we left, and I turned my phone back on. I had a text message waiting for me, saying that the community access TV station in Yakima had just played a concert video of my old band. And by ‘old’ I mean twenty years old.  The person who texted me was another member of the band, who lives here in the Portland area now. I called him right away, and we laughed about the whole thing. Turns out that his brother, who still lives in Yakima, saw the video and called my bandmate to tell him about it. I’m amazed that the station even has any of those old tapes anymore, let alone still plays them. Pretty hilarious, although we WERE described as a ‘juggernaut’, and ‘Central Washington’s rockin’ machine.’ So there.
This is another one of those times when I wish I had a way to get videos onto my computer, because I’d love to be able to share some of that stuff with you, but I have no way to copy VHS tapes to video files.  Argh. Well, I may not be able to share that particular video, but I can share a picture from our very first show. I was about seventeen in this picture, working on Mullet Number One.
You’re welcome.
I really wish I still had that guitar, by the way. That was my first one, and it turned out to be pretty decent, although I didn’t know it at the time. One of my friends joined the Navy and bought it from me. That was the idea, anyway, because he never did send me the check. Thanks, David Lowry. Two hundred bucks down the crapper.  Hope you had a good time with my guitar.
Actually, y’know what? I should probably go easy on him. For all I know, he always meant to send the money, but got deployed overseas and lost my address or something.  It’s all water under the metaphorical bridge, anyway, but it would sure be great to get an out-of-the-blue check for two hundred dollars one of these days, especially with times being the way they are.
There’ll be plenty more to come on this subject, because this is the twentieth anniversary of our band’s rise to the heights, and our plunge to the depths. Okay, I may be exaggerating just a little bit, but I CAN promise that there are good stories to come about the band.
I was going to say ‘stay tuned’, but A) that’s cheesy, and B) that’s the name of one of our songs, the lyrics for which were written by my high school Spanish teacher, who had some music written and actually asked me if we’d be interested in collaborating on a song with him. We agreed, because he was the cool teacher, and the group of us created a pretty dang catchy song. In retrospect, it’s very reminiscent of Bon Jovi. We played it twice; once at a school assembly, and once at one of our regular shows, too, which was a lame ‘battle of the bands’ with a forgettable rival band, which I’m gonna go ahead and say that we won, even though it wasn’t a big deal at all, but this is my blog, dang it, and history is told by the winners, as Howard Zinn would say.
Wow. Nothing like using Howard Zinn to bolster the reputation of the band you were in twenty years ago. If HZ was dead, I’m sure he’d be rolling over in his grave right about now.
