We were backstage mingling around with our peers and our gear, our stomachs in knots as a result of the anticipation and excitement. We had never done this before. How was it going to play out? Exactly how many people are out there? Do we have any clue what we’re doing?
The auditorium backstage I am speaking of belonged to my middle school. The people “out there” were our classmates. It was the 8th-grade talent show. This was my first gig. It was 1988.
My first band was called High Voltage (don’t laugh, at the time we thought it was “cool” in an AC/DC kinda way). I will say this about us: we were so green that we thought the difference between guitars was how they were tuned. In other words, we didn’t even realize you had to tune your guitars together. This led to a classmates father (who “produced” our demo in our drummers’ basement) to inform us that we sounded like “Sonic Youth.” We were Iron Maiden/Judas Priest/Kiss-loving teenagers, we had no fuckin’ clue who this “Sonic Youth” he referred to was (the ultimate irony being that they are now one of my all-time favorite bands). Another thing I will say about High Voltage is that we wrote our own songs, no covers. “Danger In The Night”, “Living In A Nightmare” were a few titles, so you get the gist of what we were shooting for at the time. With lyrics like, “he’s out in the night, looking for a fight, danger in the night, danger in the night” no one was mistaking us for Dylan.
BUMS LOGIC 