The Last Party At The Band House

It wasn’t until I drove the motorcycle through the front door and into the living room, on the way to the kitchen to get some beers, that I realized that the party was out of control.

 

How to explain this lunacy? Was it a plot by nefarious players? Had there been a gas leak?

 

Did someone spike my Corn Flakes?

 

All I know is this: in the Spring of my nineteenth year, I formed a band specifically for the purpose of recording and performing my own music. I had just completed a tour of the East Coast playing with a prominent blues band and met the person who would become my first manager; we’ll call him “Don”, largely because that was his name. At about the same time, I had also come across a short, red-headed force of nature named Jim, who looked like a psychedelic bridge troll and who also had a compelling and powerful voice. Jim also would take a piece of PVC pipe, cut a series of holes in it, and play it as a flute.

 

Jim and I met at a party I attended on my first night back in town after the tour ended. He was hard to miss in the crowd; he was thin, freckled, and had an explosion of long red curls falling all over the place. He was barefoot, wearing jeans and a multi-colored vest so loud I am sure he was being picked up by satellites. He had just ended a trip hitch-hiking around the country carrying everything he owned in a small duffle-bag with his guitar case.

 

It wasn’t but an hour or so there at the party that Jim and I found a quiet room, smoked some weed, and started to jam. In no time, we were writing songs.

 

The next day, I called a friend of mine, someone I had not long ago graduated high school with, a fantastic bassist called Clark, who in turn recommended a drummer named Mark, who was a year younger than Clark and I and who could play really good Keith Moon-style drums. By the weekend, we found ourselves set up in the living room of the house Jim was renting; four extremely angry young men with access to a dangerous amount of amplification.

 

The first song we tried was a composition that Jim and I wrote together. The verse was a basic two-chord vamp and the chorus had four chord changes. Mark got the beat, we counted it in, and in the onslaught of sound that engulfed the room (and most of the county), and we became a band.

 

We had a few rehearsals and played a few club dates to try out the new material. Though we were getting good responses, the general reaction was one of amused confusion; our music was too fast and raw and thus too Punk for most Rock fans, and the fact that our songs were a little more complex and performed with more skill meant we were too Rock for the emerging Punk audience.

 

I didn’t care about any of that; I just wanted to document it.

 

I took all the money I had made from the tour, plus money I had saved, and plowed it into studio time. I was nineteen years old recording and producing MY band playing MY music. No matter how much I love playing in front of an audience, I became addicted to the recording studio and the whole process of recording music.

 

Nevertheless, I didn’t have a LOT of money, so we weren’t in the studio long; about eight hours of combined studio time spread out over two weeks. The engineer and I mixed and mastered the whole album over a weekend.

 

While all of this was going on, our manager Don (or, as he was sometimes known, “Chuckles”) rented us a farm just outside of a college town in the Upper Mid-West. It was a wonderful place far enough away from the complaints of neighbors with a barn in which we constructed a rough, elevated stage. We could play to our hearts desire, as loud as we wanted, any time we wanted.

 

Perfect.

 

When the band and I, and Don, and the engineer (Steve? Ralph? Eldor the Humorless? I can’t remember…) heard the playbacks of the final masters, we were understandably BURSTING for other people to hear it…so we decided to throw a big party at the farm.

 

Now, when I say a ‘Big Party’, I was thinking in small town, Mid-Western terms. We had invited some of the local music press and other musician friends, other friends and family, and Jim had announced the party two nights previous from the stage of a local club during one of our shows. I was thinking, all told, maybe fifty or sixty people show up.

 

Instead, the best estimates gleaned from the post disaster testimony of the survivors, about 375 to 450 people were there. It was like a mini-Woodstock. Complete and Total Chaos. The road in front of the band house was jammed with cars for at least a half-mile in each direction and people milled around through the house, out into the yard, and into the barn where we were blasting the master of our new album through huge P.A. speakers.

 

I was sitting right in the middle of the room with my eyes closed, listening…I had smoked a joint or two and had taken a tab of blotter acid especially made for the event by a chemistry student friend of ours who made his own extremely powerful and very clean LSD-25. We called him ‘Kaleidoscope Ken”. He once accidentally spilled some of the hallucinogenic liquid on a table and absentmindedly swept it up with his arm. He spent 72 teeth-grinding hours watching shadows on a wall and muttering about ‘tentacles’, existential meaning, and the magnificence of his own fingerprints.

 

After we debuted our album, we set up on the stage we had constructed and played for about two hours before our drummer, who could not hold his liquor, became unable to keep a beat. Some of our fellow musicians on the scene were invited up for a jam, which lasted for another three hours.

 

When the jam finally broke up, I made sure that the instruments and amps had been safely locked away in the trailer we used to carry our equipment to gigs in. It was then I saw just how big the crowd was; by this time, I was floating over the mob of people streaming in and out of the house and the barn and through the yard like ants crawling over dropped food on a patio.

 

There was much degeneracy going on in the house and spilling out into the yard, so much so that I knew I was going to have to use some sort of caustic cleaning agent and hose down my bedroom with it if I was ever going to be able to sleep soundly in there ever again. Forget about the other poor bastards living there; my room was my sanctuary. If someone had broken the lock on my door, there was going to be hell to pay.

 

I know people who were at that party who ended up parents nine months later.

 

Equally bad was the bathroom situation: we only had two. One of them had an eight-foot live boa constrictor wrapped around the base of the toilet. The snake belonged to Jim, who had had two small garden snakes get away from him and crawl into the walls; you could hear them slithering around at night. The boa, named “Puff”, liked the cool porcelain. We were all used to it. Others weren’t.

 

The downstairs bathroom became a hazardous waste sight. It’s possible that the radiation from that room alone will last for generations.

 

 We had laid in a few hundred dollars’ worth of alcohol; much of it had been mixed with punch and/ or some kind of mixer and poured into a brand-new trash can that had been purchased for just such a use for just such an occasion. Along with the trashcan concoction, with even more alcohol brought by attendees, plus a fair amount of substances legal and not, the place had become a madhouse.

 

I, however, remained blissfully unconcerned; I was stoned out of my gourd, ridiculously happy with the way our album sounded and with the live music made by us and our friends for the past five hours. I had left one of our crew to man the party music still blasting out of our P.A. with enough drink and smoke to kill any braincells responsible for remembering the evening, and made my way through the writhing mass of drunken bodies stumbling around in the early morning.

 

In back of the house, a few people had broken down the back fence and were having motorcycle races through the cornfield. I, being of sound mind and body, thought this was a GREAT idea and, when offered a chance to participate, eagerly accepted; though I lied about actually having operated a motorcycle before. I had been on a dirt-bike many times, but a dirt-bike is to a Harley like roller skates are to a Harley. Still, I got the hang of the gear shift, I was able to keep the bike up, and I flew back and forth through the ruined corn a couple of times before offering to grab some beers for the cornfield racers.

 

In keeping with the theme of the evening, it seemed absolutely right to stay on the huge, bear of a motorcycle and drive it through the house to get the beers, which I did.

 

I drove the Harley around to the front of the house and was trying to manage the motorcycle through the door, honking the horn to get people out of my way. Fortunately, some people who were engaged in shooting off bottle rockets in the front yard had one shoot just over my right shoulder, bouncing off the living room wall in a shower of hot sparkles and the smell of gunpowder, harming no one but the wall and the carpet.

 

It was enough to get me to the kitchen.

 

I got the beers, drove the motorcycle out through the back door and delivered the beer to the thirsty corn destroyers when I had an idea: these people were going to destroy everything, and if not them, me. It was that kind of evening. The band was going to be sleeping in a pile of rubble if I didn’t act fast.

 

We should move the party.

 

But where?

 

I had the perfect place. Not far from the farm was a long-abandoned rock quarry that had, over the years, held enough water for people to swim in. In fact, the site had become an unofficial swimming hole, despite weak protests from various civic leaders and law enforcement personnel.

 

It took a bit of doing, including making announcements over our P.A. system, shooting a shotgun into some hay bales, and using the huge sparks that came from walking through the crowd touching a taser and a cattle prod together, to get the crowd to untangle the cars and meet at the quarry. I was going to make a walk through to make sure everything was closed up, all the damage contained, all of the candles doused, when Jim grabbed me by the arm and stuffed me into a car.

 

By the time I got there, it was sunrise. We were down to about fifty or sixty hard core partiers, all intoxicated beyond all reason, in about thirty cars. It was a warm morning, and the quarry eventually became a nude beach. I must confess to having a moment of conflict about this: I had been raised to be ethically and morally against the concept of pubic nudity. Then, I saw a very attractive blonde with long, straight hair and legs up to her neck take off her top, and suddenly I was naked quicker than pee freezes in the Klondike.

 

It was the perfect end to a wild night…until the Sherriff’s Deputy showed up.

 

I thought they were going to bust us for public nudity, or unauthorized swimming, or maybe the town’s fathers had gotten together a posse to locate their daughters…but no.

 

They just wanted the ‘occupants’ of the rented farm.

 

Mark, Clark, Jim, and I followed the Deputy back to the house, and that’s when we saw the fire trucks.

 

It turned out, it wasn’t a candle that burnt the farm house down; the men fighting the fire noticed the state of the old, worn-out fuse box and, after the house had been mostly destroyed, it was known then that the poor wiring had been the culprit.

 

I found it interesting that I felt…free at that moment. Though I was later glad that old pictures, memorabilia, and other stuff remained in other locations, like my parent’s house, I had, at that moment, nothing but the clothes on my back, my instruments and musical equipment, and the stage clothes that we had in our trailer, which was unharmed, as was the barn. It was like my past had been turned to ash in the fire, and now I was given free reign to invent myself anew…which I did.

 

Right after I dealt with another small problem.

 

Apparently, while we were standing on the precipice of our little disaster, all the party-goers back at the quarry had found that all of their cars had sunk into the dirt surrounding the swimming hole and had become stuck.

 

Almost irretrievably stuck.

 

I spent the rest of the afternoon, part of the evening, and a few hundred dollars on tow trucks to help get everyone out.

 

Eventually, they did close off the quarry to the public. The band eventually splintered, though I did form another band with Jim a few years later that lasted for a while and generated tons of its own stories.

 

Time Marched On.