Early Morning, April 4...

Everytime this day comes around, I get a little restless, a little nostalgic, a little misty. Hell, everytime April 4 comes around, I feel like smashing a guitar to bloody smithereens in front of a throbbing slampit of punks!

So what's so special about today anyway? It's April 4, so what?

Well, I'll tell you.

When I was around 19 and still in college, a bunch of my friends from school invited me to join their band. Yep, a band. As in, an honest-to-goodness-true-blue-kick-ass rock n roll band.

Actually, those guys were already in a band when they invited me to join. I guess they were in the middle of a line-up revamp or something. Or maybe they wanted to go to a different musical direction. Whatever.

Anyway, one Saturday afternoon I auditioned for them, not really knowing what they were expecting, what I could actually do, what I could bring to the band, or if they would even want what I had to bring in the first place. We ran through a lot of songs that I kept losing track of what we were actually doing: were we still holding the audition or were we just already dicking around in the tiny hot-as-hell studio? Luckily, after howling through several sets (which included U2's laryngitis-inducing "Bad"), the guys let me in the band. Great.

So what's this got to do with April 4?

Well, we needed a name. So during one rehearsal session, we were asking each other: what do we call ourselves? This was during the time when U2 totally broke into the American market and the world was beginning to feel the initial reverbations of one of the biggest band in rock n roll history. We were into their songs, totally. And one song that stuck out for us was "Pride", which included the line "Early morning, April 4, a shot rings out in the Memphis sky..." So April 4 it was.

April 4 was a college band made up of five school friends who loved different kinds of rock n roll music. Bass player Kenneth (to protect their privacy, I will not be giving you their last names; you'll have to pay us some kind of royalty for that! Hah!)grew up on a diet of hard rock with a little bit of pop-rock thrown in. Semi-anti-guitar hero Bobby was raised on heavy metal. Drummer Pong's (who also did back-up vocals and some songwriting) taste spanned hard rock, pop-rock, a little bit of punk, and underground music (it wasn't called "alternative" then - thank God). Keyboard player Toy (also the youngest in the band) leaned towards The Beatles and the whole gamut of British acts polluting the airwaves then. As for me, well I was (and still am) partial to punk, hardcore, Brit rock, and left-of-center acts. And I was sort of the unofficial rock trivia prince, a kind of rock snob: I'd tell the other guys that, before Generation X, Billy Idol was part of a gang called The Bromley Contingent. Stuff like that. I guess they didn't give a hoot where the hell Billy Idol buys his underwear either.

Those different musical influences helped make April 4 a very interesting combo. We could play punk or hard rock or any kind of earsplitting cacophony if we felt like it; but a lot of times we played a lot of U2, some Cactus World News, Translator, and a whole lot of bands that the frickin' mainstream were (and still are) blissfully ignorant of. We learned a lot from each other (I learned a lot of chords from Bobby)and taught each other a lot, too. We also learned how to --- using this fucking word is so shitty --- "multi-task". It was during my time with the band that I actually got to touch and play a real electric six string (Bobby used to have this awesome Aria Pro guitar), to sit in on Pong's drums when we were just dicking around, learn a couple of keyboard riffs from Toy (I learned the intro to The Colourfield's "Confessions" from him), or pinch hit on bass while Kenneth took five.

We got into a fair number of gigs, too. Some of them were good (we played well, had a good time, got warm reception from the crowd). Others, not too good - fuck, they were even downright depressing (example: the police had to stop the gig using fucking machine guns because the crowd was getting unruly)! But some of them have been so frickin' great that they're burned to permanency on my brain (people went crazy and took to calling our names out in the streets a couple of weeks after the gig)!

We met a lot of great people from other upcoming bands. We would be regularly bumping into bands like In The Dark, Stampinground, Major Minor, Child Flesh, and Temper of The Times while gigging around town. We became friends with a DJ from a popular radio station - he liked us so much that he would refer to us as "his band".
We had something that resembled a sort of a fan base (which included Mom, Dad, the neighbor's dog).

Yeah, those were the days, man. When did all that happen? What, between 1987 to 1989? It was that long ago, huh? Guess nothing that good can last forever.

Anyway, to the guys who were a big part of some of the best days of my life --- Pong, Kenneth, Toy, and Bobby --- Happy Band Day, guys! Rock n Roll!

I'll end this post with a video of the song from whence April 4 took its name: U2's "Pride". Enjoy