School and I hadn't been on speaking terms for over a year. One day early in the year these two older kids from a grade above me walk up and ask me to join their band. I didn't know them and right off my brain kicks into overdrive: How do they know who I am? How do they know I play the guitar? (because as far as I can remember I never talked about it). If I join their band, being younger than them it can only go bad. etc... etc... So I say no thanks and walk away. The next day they come up and ask me again. I so nope. This goes on for the entire week and I keep telling them no. I find out that their names are Les Korcamp (drummer) and David Highwart (mediocre guitar player). On Friday they ask me yet again and I say "Why do you keep asking me? I'm just gonna say no". They say well we'll just keep asking you.
Later that night while my dad and I were on the way to one of the last motorcycle races of that year at Ascot I tell him about this. He says: "Why don't you just give it a try"? I say: 1. I don't know them. 2. They'll want to play at school and I'm NOT doing that and 3. I'm a year younger than them and you know at some point they're going to resent me and do something lousy to me. He says "Why not just try it. You can always quit if it's not any fun".
I come back to school on Monday and sure enough they're bugging me again, I say "I'll think about it. and Then on Tuesday I say O.K.
At first it was really fun. Les was actually a pretty good little drummer. David not so much on the guitar and he NEVER practiced which was irritating but we had fun hanging out together and so it was cool. At one point we went to the Rolling Hills theater on a Saturday to take part in their "Battle of the Bands". There were five bands that day, all of them older than us and we won.
Then one day they wanted to do a concert at School. I said we don't know enough songs (we had 4) but they really wanted to do the thing so I said well, if you can get enough classes that would want to come (figuring none would) o.k. Well dammit a bunch did. Then they wanted us all to dress alike but the only clothes we had that matched were big ol yellow bell bottom pants (my mother used to buy me all that crap and I'd REFUSE to wear them). white long sleeve ruffely shirts and black shoes. I said NO WAY. I've always been a jeans and tee shirt kind of guy. But they were just on one about it. The day of our little concert I showed up in jeans and they got mad. Eventually I wnet home and put those gawd-awful clothes on. So much for my dignity. Thankfully no one took pictures.
Eventually we had about 14 songs in our list and then we did a 2nd concert which went much better and they didn't try to dress alike again. This made me popular around school for about 22 minutes.
Things started to go bad when they asked me to teach David to play lead on two songs. That seemed fair to me so I did. From then on they only wanted to play those two songs because, as I'd first thought, they were resenting me for playing all the lead guitar. My position was that I was the guy doing ALL the work learning all the songs and then teaching them why would I then want to take a back seat and play the rhythm so they could be "ricky rockstar"?
Finally the school had asked us to play a song for a morning assembly. I asked them what song they wanted to play? One of the two David could play lead on. I said have a good time, I'm out. Then they were just ON ME about doing the assembly. I kept saying no. NO. I QUIT, NO. Eventually someone from the school came and talked to me about it and because I was a DUMB little kid I gave in. During the song however I kept getting more and more angry. Finally I just blew and I reached down, grabbed the volume knob and cranked it wide open and just strummed the damn chords. Song ended I grabbed my gear and walked off. To me this was me QUITTING! Later in the day those two came up to me on the playground and told me they were kicking me out of the band. ARE YOU STUPID? I asked. I quit this morning DUMB ASS.
We never spoke again and while I played in a number of bands through high school, my #1 rule in any band I played in was: I will NEVER play any show at any school I am forced to attend.
...And I never did.
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