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I was watching this movie on HBO yesterday morning when I woke up called "Girl". It's a teen comedy romance thing. The point is, there is a scene where the girl is driving down this street and every house has a garage and each garage door is open and there is a band playing in each one.
I've been playing in bands for half of my life now. That's kind of funny. My first band was in junior highschool and we were called Secular Humanism, which we quickly changed to "The Shrugs". The shrugs was led by Herb Wang, an amazing songwriter, and we started out immediately by recording original songs on 4 track (or actually two stereo tapedecks bounced back and forth.) We were influenced by REM, The Beatles, The Police, Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, Husker Du, and Robyn Hitchcock etc. Not any different than School for the Dead.
Gary Wang played electric guitar. He was in the 6th grade when we started and he was the Ken Maiuri of the group. He could play anything, even with his tiny pre-pubescent hands (not to say that ken has tiny pre-pubescent hands, on the contrary, he has enormous pubescent hands). Gary has since gone on to play double bass for the Thelonius Monk Jr. Band and others. He travels all over the world and is, THANK GOD, living off of his talent. Our drummer was Lee Wilkinson. He was my best friend in kindergarten. He drummed in the Stewart Copland school, also influenced by U2, Dire Straits, and REM. Lee gave up the drums pretty much when he went to college I think. Haven't heard from him in a long time. I played keyboards and sometimes guitar, and I wrote a few songs.
The Shrugs recorded 5 full length albums. All on cassette. About 15 people heard them. There are some really wonderful songs trapped in those cassettes somewhere. We played exactly 4 live shows.
Herb (who reverted to his original name Han) is living in San Francisco. I talk to him once and a while, he is still writing music although its not quite as large a part of his life as it is mine. I hope he starts up again more so. What a great writer, he was always ahead of his time and I learned a lot from him.
What's my point? No point. I guess there are a lot of bands out there.
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