My neighbor Steve lives about a mile away as the crow flies. His son Tristan and my son Spike had been practicing at our house for the high school Battle of the Bands. One day I bumped into him at the West Tisbury Post Office.
“Hey, Steve,” I said, “the boys are sounding pretty good.”
“I know. I can hear ’em.”
Testosterone is loud. When blasted through 100-watt Fender amplifiers, it’s tectonic.
The Battle of the Bands was a pretty big deal last year. It was held at the Hot Tin Roof and the judges included Kate Taylor and the legendary producer Danny Kortchmar of Chilmark. Bragging rights were definitely at stake, not to mention a thousand-dollar grand prize. When I was in high school, the Battle of the Bands was held in the auditorium and our music teacher, Mr. Willey, did the judging. To give you some idea of the musicianship in those days, David Roundy lip-synced Pat Boone’s “Love Letters in the Sand” and came in second. To qualify for the Vineyard Battle of the Bands, each group had to have at least one kid in high school. All of our guys were in the eighth grade at the time, but a teacher had heard them play in the West Tisbury cabaret and had entered them without even asking. They decided to go along with the program, not knowing exactly what they were in for.
The inspiration for the band’s name came from a kid our boys had played against in a youth-hockey tournament. The boy played for a team from Connecticut, and to put it gently, he was having his troubles out there on the ice. He had spider legs and very little skating ability and yet he managed to jet like a heat-seeking missile to wherever the action was, and at one point he nearly scored a goal. This kid had more drive and more heart than anyone else out there and he became an instant crowd favorite. Our kids seemed to identify with the underdog status of this little scrapper and decided to adopt the name the kid’s teammates had given him: Special Bus.
Normally you’d call a band like Special Bus a garage band, but we didn’t have a garage. Special Bus was a living-room band. For a month leading up to the Battle, our house was turned into Electric Ladyland. The electric piano was set up in the corner. The drum kit was over by the T.V., with the bass drum anchored to the floor with duct tape so that it wouldn’t slide. To get to the downstairs bathroom you had to weave your way around stacks of amplifiers and mike stands jury-rigged out of old broken hockey sticks. It was cool; I imagined that this must have been what it was like to live with The Band when they recorded Big Pink.
They say that one of our greatest fears is the fear of public speaking. Well, how about the fear of being fourteen years old and playing in a band that didn’t even exist three weeks before, in front of a mob of kids who are all older than you, and you haven’t even learned your songs yet? To me, that fear beats public speaking any day of the week.
But for whatever reason, Special Bus seemed unfazed. On the day of the concert I drove them out to the Roof and gave them a hand unloading their equipment for the sound check. Not to keep bringing up ancient history, but the sound check for my high school Battle of the Bands consisted of Mr. Willey tapping the microphone with his finger and saying, “Is this thing on?”
This was a whole different story. The Roof had just installed an elaborate new P.A. system and a state-of-the-art soundboard that looked like it was designed by NASA, and cords were strewn everywhere. Not only that, older kids from other bands were hanging around getting their own gear together and undoubtedly wondering who these young upstarts thought they were. When it came time to get a level on Perry, the lead singer, it may have been the first time the rest of the band had ever actually heard him sing. The band didn’t have a P.A. system of its own and Perry’s voice had always been drowned out in the thunderstorm of guitars and drums.
At first, none of this seemed to bother our kids as much as it obviously bothered me. But eventually the jitters surfaced. Spike later confided to me that the magic moment came when they were sitting in the dressing room waiting to go on while the opening act, a tight reggae/rock band called The Oreos, performed. Spike looked up and noticed that written on the dressing room walls were the signatures of many of the bands that had played the Roof over the years. In fact, there in front of him was one that he loved: P-Funk, the legendary Parliament– Funkadelic: George Clinton . . . “Bring out the Funk!” . . . the band at ground zero where rock and roll and circus collided. Seeing P-Funk scrawled up there seemed to douse Spike with a cold dose of perspective and there followed a moment or two when making a run for it wasn’t totally out of the question.
By the time Special Bus was introduced there were probably over 500 kids and a smattering of parents in the audience. The lights dimmed and they launched into their first couple of numbers, both songs they had written. The guys were a little stiff but they sounded pretty good and the crowd was warming up. Then it was time to pull out the trump card. Spike switched from piano to bass. Ryan, the drummer, came up front to sing and was replaced on drums by Sam, a kid who played in another band. (Sam played in three different bands that night. There were several kids who jumped from one group to another throughout the evening, but Sam seemed to be in particular demand.)
Sam laid down the beat and then the guitars kicked in with a riff that sent a jolt through the crowd. This was not just a song, it was an anthem: Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Arms began flailing in the air, kids pogoed up and down, bodies crowd-surfed overhead, and all I could think was, what would Mr. Willey have done? No doubt there would have been hell to pay for such madness: detention – months and months, maybe even years, of detention. But not this night. Not at the Battle of the Bands on a warm spring evening at the Hot Tin Roof. This was a Willey-free zone and the joint was rocking.
