Exploding Danelectro Reveals Gibson Marauder In A Pile of Dirty Laundry

This took place years ago, in a southside Youngstown, Ohio basement. As an outsider, I was warned against stopping at stop signs while traveling there as that might shorten my life. That seemed ominous, but in the end I decided playing shitty original music with other human beings was probably worth dying over, even as the result of a violent random crime because otherwise I would only have my legacy of meaningless lawn mowing and incessant worrying to show I’d been on earth (and these things will not live on).

The band, which was to dissolve as quickly as pixie dust on your tongue, was three of us and then sometimes a stand-in drummer and for a while we had a singer. The singer never really sang. She gave me a huge pile of poetry to set to music.

I can’t remember what we played exactly but the house we practiced at belonged to a guitarist who didn’t seem very interested in the band. The bassist had brought us all together. The guitarist had a nice sound and feel; he played shoegazy stuff, but he mostly seemed obsessed with talking about bands he’d been in in the past and how loud they’d played. The bassist and I kept trying to parlay his enthusiastic nostalgia into energy for the new venture but it was like he couldn’t see any posibility for it and was happier living in the past, which kind of sums up most people’s general life ambition in this region of the country (northeast/midwest).