Chapter 3: 1991

If you’re from New Jersey (as I am), and it’s 1991, and you’re 17 years old (as I was), and you’re into alternative music and wish to start a band (as I did), but your instrumental aptitude has not yet blossomed (as mine had not), what do you do? Sing. Vocals: The great equalizer. Everyone has a voice, and we all know how to use this voice, basically, even if it’s just to bitch and moan. And who is to say you cannot bitch into a microphone, on a stage, to a crowd, with a band, with green eggs and ham? Such an exploit may lead to notoriety, and girls, and money, and elaborate tattoos, and childhood reconciliation with a side order of vengeance. Rock stardom! Singing I can do, I think, I have natural tone and pitch, so my guitar-handed friend, Mike, with whom I occasionally croon through Descendent’s covers in a cement-pillared basement, tells me. Tone I understand. Tone, or toning, is to neutralize the off-colored pigmentation in one’s hair or skin. Mike is correct, I do have natural tone: porcelain pale and silky brunette, both important vocal qualities, apparently. Pitch, obviously bares some relation to baseball (I don’t follow baseball), or sales (I worked in a record store once). I do not understand how either of these activities relates to music, but, of course, I am just the singer. The singer is allowed to be clueless as long as he is energetic. He’s allowed to be obnoxious as long as he looks cool (tone and pitch recommended). He’s allowed to flake-out, do drugs, drink excessively, and refer to the other guys as “my band” as long as he remembers the words and shows up to perform. And perform I do, in 1991, at age seventeen, in a series of brazenly named bands (my bands): The Big Idea, Overdrive, Ruthless Neighbor, etc. And lead to rock stardom it might have, and almost does, because there is that one show, singing for that one band, at that place near that farm outside New Hope, and Ted Galaxy is in the audience, Ted Galaxy of underground Princeton lore, Ted Galaxy of CBGB’s fame, Ted Galaxy who plays City Gardens alone. And Ted likes my voice, tone and pitch at their peak that evening, and says he is forming a band, and do I want to sing for them. And I do.

My bandmates are much older than I am, six, eight, and ten years older. They have experience and can play, for real. They have PRS guitars, Marshall stacks, leather pants, and nameplated guitar picks. They know things that I do not, otherworldly things like the proper tap of a warm heroin needle and/or which wine goes with which pill. They have favorite beers and stubbled faces and sexual histories about which they speak openly. I am still in high school, a minor, a dreamer of silly adolescent fantasies, a child of dysfunction, a writer of trite notebook poetry, an imposter in their world of amplified vice. “I don’t care how young you are,” Ted told me when we met, “we’re looking for a male soprano.” Right, I thought, a “soprano” sure, isn’t that a spicy type of Italian sausage? Hey, my mother is Italian, another well illustrated characteristic. That’s right; I’m a spicy Italian singer with good skin tone and a mean fastball.

At first, there is band practice at Ted’s house. Ted owns a home, a nice two-story, four bedroom home where he lives with his girlfriend. I sleep in the corner room of my parent’s house, atop a single-bed-combo-bookshelf with BMX trophies on the ledge and a pullout toy storage drawer underneath. My girlfriend does not live with me; she is sixteen and fond of bubblegum and multicolored pens. Beyond deviant social maturity, band practice is a musical education in timing, chord progression, soft pallet discipline, and breathing technique. The guys play, with Ted on lead guitar, I sing, reluctantly, and after a few dozen blushing rehearsals and a few less than unanimous votes to keep me in the band, I finally drop my inhibitions and learn to belt it out. Six months later, we have an eight song set of original tunes and one cover (Rolling Stones, Paint it Black). And it’s 1991, and Heavy Metal has just died, and Nirvana is playing in a dimly lit gymnasium to a squad of slow motion cheerleaders, and Desert Storm is in effect, and our band (my band) plays our first gig at the Roxy in New Brunswick.

It is not the biggest of shows: A Saturday, early evening show, local bands between 5 and 8pm, 16 and up, $5 admission, but it’s the Roxy, not a basement full of girlfriends and drunken party goers. The Roxy is where, in 1991, you go to see The Bouncing Souls or Lucy Brown or Ween or Mars Needs Women, bands with t-shirts and logos and groupies and albums on shelves in record stores, bands that will someday grow to be huge, date gothic vixens of the entertainment world, and appear on reality television, bands that do not live with their parents nor have girlfriends with brightly colored knapsacks. I quiver, ruminate, flood my brain with negative reinforcement, regurgitate in the club’s back alley, and come to realize, with life changing clarity, that this will be my dying moment, the imposter revealed, my death-bed regret, the embarrassment of all embarrassments, I will forget the words, my voice will crack, tone and pitch unable to rescue, and the crowd will laugh and spit and throw sharp objects and tell friends who will tell other friends and so on until my humiliation is spread internationally and the phrase “pulling a McDermott” is synonymous with all failure. I throw-up again. Ted appears. “You feelin ok, man?” he says, to the kid kneeling in a 36-inch wide alley with viscous, orange-speckled vomit dripping from his hair. Our exchange is brief. I proclaim that under no circumstance will I set foot on that stage. He demands that I do. I plead sickness. He laughs. I curse. He encourages. I threaten to leave. He threatens to kill. And somehow, someway, against my will, I manage to stand, and breathe, and spit putrid residue from my mouth, and slick back my foul-smelling hair with a palm full of gutter water, and shamble to the stage, and bark through twenty minutes and six songs. And then it’s over. The crowd cheers. Ted grins. And it’s 1991, the Chinese year of the Sheep, and I am seventeen, and Saddam Hussein puts the ist back in terror, and Magic Johnson has Aids, and a portly governor from Arkansas who sleeps with fat women announces he will seek the Democratic nomination, and I return to my single bed and BMX trophies, and I dream of tour buses and swooning fans and Rolling Stone and MTV. And for the first time I feel like I can accomplish anything. Imagine what I’ll do in ’92

Contact Daniel McDermott: danmcdermott@hotmail.com

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Rock N Roll Addiction, Chapter Two

Rock N Roll Addiction, Chapter One

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