We were this newly-formed rock band and there were so many things we had to do, from picking the songs we wanted to perform to learning them, buying equipment, coming up with the band name, getting our look together…there was so much work to do before we could even consider ourselves gig worthy.
This group of guys that picked me to be their lead singer were from the ‘louder is better’ school of rock – they took pride in their arsenal. Jon Warwick, the lead guitarist, was the perfect dude for an 80’s rock band. He looked like the young version of Leif Garrett and he could sing AND play the guitar. I soon learned this was the winning formula for maximizing the groupie following. He had four guitars on hand, including a Gibson Les Paul Custom, a Gibson Les Paul Deluxe, an Ibanez Explorer and an Ibanez Flying V. His setup included two Marshall 4-12 cabinets, one Marshall 50 watt head and one Marshall 100 watt head…. all code for ‘you’re going to be deaf one day.’ Our other guitar player (apparently we couldn’t have just one), was Kirk Marsh, with classic long-hair hippie druggie looks; he had a great voice and like Jon, worshipped the Marshall Stack. His guitars included a couple of Les Pauls and a Stratocaster. Zak Swift was on bass. A real cosmic curly-haired cut up (he showed up late for everything, saying ‘don’t bring me down from my high, man’), he played a Peavey T-40 bass guitar with a Peavey Mark IV bass amp and Black Widow speakers. Then there was the drummer, Tony Jones: tall, handsome, and scary – he always looked like he was ready to kill somebody. He had drums everywhere –tom toms, double kicks, snares, surrounded by cymbals big and small, he was engulfed by his kit – you’d just see his eyes peering through and it was never a happy look. He had these evil little cymbals called ‘China Boys’ he liked to smash; literally ear splitting—positioned conveniently at ear level to ensure maximum eardrum penetration. I can STILL hear them.
Speaking of hearing, we acquired several pieces of equipment to enhance our future live performances. There was a Yamaha 16 channel mixing board, MXR 31 band EQ, MXR flanger/doubler, Roland space echo, Furman Sound 3-way crossover, DBX compressor, 16 channel whirlwind snake, three Peavey CS 800 power amplifiers, one Peavey CS 400 power amp, one Peavey CS 200 power amp, two North 90 degree horns, two JBL 2040 horn drivers, two 15’s Perkin’s mid-range cabinets, two double 15 inch Phillips ‘W’ bass bins, four EV 15 inch speakers, two Pro-custom 2-way monitors (side-fills), two 2-10 monitors, 14 Shure SM57 microphones …..this was our equipment list – in the beginning. It was apparent these guys were into nauseating volume – literally. If you stood in front of our PA system, you’d feel sound waves in your stomach and your hair moved. How I can still hear anything at all is incredible.
We practiced every night in their basement to work up a repertoire of at least 40 songs. To get a real (paying) gig, the average band at that point did four 40 minute sets, so depending on how long the solos were, you needed about ten songs a set. Judas Priest, Benatar, Heart, Rush, Ozzy – we chose our ass-kicking favorites and learned them inside out. This was way before the day of the download and most of the time we learned songs by ear alone – we weren’t about to buy an entire record to learn one song! Someone would have a tape of it from somewhere, or we’d get lucky by taping it when the song came on the radio – whatever – we managed to figure them out for the most part. Lyrics – not so much. To this day there are song lyrics that make no sense to me. And I like it that way. I know I don’t know – and frankly I don’t care. I was close enough: “Exit the warrior today’s Tom Sawyer he gets high on you and the energy he invades he gets right on through the friction of the day.”
Huh?
I volunteered to play keyboards to help fill out the sound. (That’s kind of funny – fill out the sound!) A lot of rock bands had keyboards so it seemed like I better get with it. I decided on a Moog Rogue synthesizer as my first ‘stage keyboard’ –back in the day, lots of bands had one of these. I’m pretty sure it made me look cool, but I really struggled with it… it was a machine. The keys was there, but when I pressed them, no sound came out. All those knobs, sliders and whirligigs had to be adjusted – you needed to know Algebra to figure this thing out. The instruction booklet contained pages and pages of graphs, sign waves, algorithms – this was more like a scientific instrument. I gave up on the booklet and started to just fiddle with it. I thought I had found a couple of reasonable sounding noises and put pieces of masking tape all over it with codes for the settings.
With all that practicing, we felt we were almost ready to break out. We decided on the band’s name, ‘The Edge’, and one night spent several exhausting hours recording our entire set list. We named our taped session, ‘On The Edge’ …assuming we’d all be signing our autographs within the year. We thought it was a good idea if we critiqued our creative genius early on to work out any kinks– plus, we had no work lined up. We listened to the tape over and over again, with eight zillion decibels coursing through us, along with other consciousness-altering enhancements, and we thought we were AWESOME, man.
Our volume was so intense no one really noticed my dazzling keyboard work. Upon closer review, perhaps after the 30th listen, my synthesizer riffs on Rush’s ‘Tom Sawyer’ were discovered – they were hilarious. The sounds I formulated with my scientific algorithmic machine belonged in the Star Wars soundtrack or in Pac Man … it was pathetic. The jig was up – now everyone knew I didn’t know what the hell I was doing with that thing. I managed to fake it since everyone was so damned loud during practice…. Geez, now I had to spend more time on this thing. Over the next several days, I worked on the Pac Man machine, fumbling with the knobs and sliders until finally I had a couple of sounds that didn’t belong in a video game. Well, sort of.
After weeks and weeks of practicing and ear splitting nightly jam sessions, we had a solid night’s worth of music – from Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen to Ozzy, Aerosmith and Heart. We had a truckload of equipment and we even bought a big light set. We were ready to rock and roll. Now if only we had a gig…
theclubsinger 