The Apocalypse That Wasn’t

First of all, the title I have given this could have a number of meanings in the context of a blog about life as a missionary. I don’t have any statistics about this, but I’m confident the most common connotation of the word “apocalypse” in today’s world has to do with the cataclysmic end of the world. That is the meaning the word has taken, but the origin of the word, in particular having to do with this specific definition, comes from the title of a book in the New Testament. That book? Revelation, the book that is commonly referred to when discussing prophecies of the cataclysmic end of the world (most often erroneously referred to, by the way). Where did the book of Revelation get its name? It is the English translation of the Greek title, loosely transliterated as Apocalypse. So, yeah, an apocalypse is a revelation, and in a story about missionary work, the concept of revelation might just play a crucial role.

But not necessarily in this story. No, this time the word does indeed refer to that most common usage in our contemporary world. For this is the story of the last day of the last millennium: December 31st, 1999, a day many thought might be an apocalyptic day.

But it wasn’t. Not that I was aware of, anyway. Nothing cataclysmic happened, but I do have one very vivid memory of the day.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this vivid memory of which I write has to do with lunch. Elder Staker and I traded off with our zone leader, Elder Adcox, and his companion, Elder Hartung. I was working with Elder Hartung during lunchtime, and we decided to go eat at a little diner down the street from Elder Staker’s and my apartment. The place was called The Great Lakes Diner, and it was a 50’s style place with a juke box that played a collection of oldies (but not all from the 50’s, as we shall see).

I don’t remember what I ate, what Elder Hartung and I talked about, or really anything other than one brief period of about two and a half minutes. As we sat and talked, suddenly a familiar sound entered my ears. At first I couldn’t believe it, but I focused on the sound and sure enough, it was the unmistakable rhythms, melodies, and voice of the one and only Desmond Dekker singing his song from 1968 about being a poor Israelite.

This was significant to me for a number of reasons. First of all, I had never heard Desmond Dekker’s music from any source other than my own CD player. I’d never heard any of his songs on the radio (in spite of what Rancid sings in “Roots Radicals,” though, the radio stations I grew up listening to in Utah were likely not as cool as those that Tim Armstrong grew up listening to in East Bay). I’d never heard his music on television or in a restaurant or in any other setting. For that matter, I still have not heard Desmond Dekker from any other source beside my own choosing. So this experience of hearing Israelite at The Great Lakes Diner in Lansing, Michigan stands apart in my life as being very unique.

Second, this experience was significant because I was able to hear the music of my former life while serving as a missionary. Missionaries typically have strict rules about what kinds of music are appropriate for their listening pleasure, and most of the music I favored was firmly on the list of UNAPPROVED. I had expected this, and so I did not struggle with the rule in the sense that I never sought to listen to anything other than what was allowed by the rules of the mission. However, if as a part of our daily activities, we happened to be in a place where music was playing, that was perfectly allowable. 99% of the time in situations like this I didn’t recognize the music being played, but every once in a while (in fact, so rarely I could probably count the number of times on one hand), I would hear “my” kind of music, and those were good times.

Finally, hearing this song on the last day of 1999 was, in a lot of ways, an ideal summation of the year. All of the experiences, all of the friendships, all of the music, all of the fun, all of it, was wrapped up in hearing this one song. One year earlier, when I contemplated the possibilities of what life would have in store for me that year, and wondered where I would be at the end of the year, I could not have anticipated everything that happened. At that moment, I had my answer. I knew where I was and what I was doing. I was in Lansing, Michigan, serving with the greatest training companion the world had ever known, learning new things every day, and, at that moment, listening to a song that captured EVERYTHING about that year of my life.

That night, when we went to bed, we didn’t know whether or not the world would change that night. Would the beginning of Y2K really cause major problems with everything? Would stuff explode? Would computers crash (not that we  would have known if they did)? Would extra terrestrials riding unicorns invade the earth? Would the kitchen faucet turn on and off inexplicably?

Nope. No apocalypse. Well, except for the one received while sitting in The Great Lakes Diner the day before.

The Story of the MTC in Pictures

Not long into my stay at Ye ol’ Missionary Training Center, I received a package in the mail from my friends. Among the many things in this package was this inflatable banana. This picture was intended for none other than SG, the author of the greatest song ever written, “The Banana Song.”

One of the elders in my district, Elder Stone, was originally from Hawaii. He told us all that it is customary in Hawaii to eat bananas with the peal intact. I can neither confirm nor deny this claim, since I have never been to Hawaii. However, the making of this claim led to a number of elders from the district, including Elder Stone himself, eating bananas without first pealing them. I decided not to try, because I am a coward.

This is Elder Allen. He was in our branch. He had been in the MTC for nearly two months at this point, and he was learning Russian. Elder Allen was much taller than me, and he could fit ten quarters (five in each nostril) in his nose. This is the photographic proof of this remarkable talent. I think Elder Allen was the inspiration for my writing in my journal that I was glad I was only in the MTC for three weeks.

Among the many things we learned in the MTC, we learned how to do service. Our district’s service included cleaning the bathrooms in a residence hall that was much nicer than ours (they even had private showers!). I questioned the wisdom in having us do this, unless it was to teach us greater humility.

More goodies from the package from my friends. Cookies, mini wooden shoes and googly eye glasses. Those glasses went with me through my entire mission.

The obligatory MTC map picture.

Followed by the obligatory MTC “Tree of Life” shower picture.

Followed by … wait! Something is different about these last three pictures. Hm, let’s see, the map, the showers, Aaron, Spencer, and I giving a thumbs up while Mikey strikes a GQ pose … hm. Oh! That’s it.

In an earlier story I mentioned that Mikey worked in the cafeteria at the MTC. Somehow that led to us planning this most unusual of evenings. Two days before I left for Michigan, Mikey brought Aaron and Spencer, all three of them dressed in suits and sporting missionary appropriate hair cuts, into the MTC. I don’t remember how long we hung out, probably less than an hour, but in that time we hung out in my residence room and laughed and hugged a lot. My companion, Elder Hall, must have thought that this was outrageous, but he took some of the pictures of us anyway.

Atypical

One of the main premises for writing this series of stories is the idea that no one experiences life exactly the same way as anybody else. We can relate with each other to an extent, but there are limits to just how much we can really understand each other. Thus it has been my attempt to try and explain what living life as a graduating high school senior, member of two different bands, and a new missionary, was like in 1999, because even though there were always others who were sharing these experiences with me, my interpretation of what it all meant is at least partially different from anyone else. Therefore, by this token, to use a word like “typical” to describe something is problematic. Just know that I am aware of this.

The typical first two days in the Missionary Training Center in Provo play out something like this:

Day 1: Arrival Day. Usually a Wednesday. New missionaries are dropped off at the MTC campus (when I entered they still did the thing where families would go into an auditorium with the new missionaries and everyone would watch “Called to Serve,” after which the families would leave through the same doors they entered, but the missionaries would exit through doors on the opposite side of the room; these days they do more of a curbside drop off thing), and they are led through a maze of buildings as they meet their companions, get any necessary immunizations, find their resident rooms, meet their branch presidencies, and otherwise try to get acclimated to their new temporary home.

Day 2: The First Full Day. Classroom, breakfast, classroom, lunch, classroom, dinner, classroom. From the early hours of the morning, missionaries spend their time in the classroom studying, being instructed, role playing, bearing testimony, etc. When I worked as a teacher at the MTC, this day was crucial for us, because it set the precedent for the missionaries’ entire stay. It had to be just right.

My arrival day was, I think I could say, rather typical. I said goodbye to my family in that auditorium, walked through those doors, and then waited in a number of lines to get my name tags, get immunized, find my luggage, and then my resident room and my companion, Elder Hall. We ate dinner and then attended a meeting with our district (consisting of ten elders, Elder Hall and I were the only ones assigned to go to Michigan) and our branch presidency. We each had a chance to introduce ourselves and bear our testimonies. Just before going to bed, our branch president stopped by our room and asked to talk to me. He called me as district leader. I had no clue what that would mean.

Day 2 was not typical. Not in any way, because it was Thanksgiving Day. MTC teachers do not work on Thanksgiving, and so we did not have any classroom time on our schedule. Instead, we had two devotionals in the morning/early afternoon. The second of these was with George Durrant, perhaps the most funny Mormon on the planet. He had the entire MTC in stitches. I wasn’t smart enough then to write anything down that he said, except to mention in my journal that he was hilarious. Interestingly, though, years later when my younger brother, Mark, was getting married, Brother Durrant performed the marriage in the temple, and he was just as funny then as he was at the MTC. That sealing room was a jovial place.

We were served an early dinner, a Thanksgiving feast of sorts. I was amazed at how many people that I knew from high school worked in the MTC cafeteria. It felt strange to see these familiar faces in such an unfamiliar environment, except for Mikey. I knew before I entered the MTC that Mikey worked there, and so I was excited to be able to see him. And I saw him often, which will be an important part of a later story.

Following dinner we attended another large meeting, this one a musical fireside followed by the movie Legacy. I questioned then, and still do, the wisdom in showing this movie to a bunch of brand new missionaries, many of whom left significant others at home, what with all the melodramatic love story elements to Legacy. I wonder what percentage of missionaries cried themselves to sleep that night.

Two other notable things from Day 2. In the morning, Elder Hall shut the door to our room and told me that he had something he needed to tell me. I feared the worst, though I didn’t know what that could be, but I was afraid he was going to confess something terrible to me. Instead, he explained that he was dyslexic, and that this would make it difficult for him to study an learn, and it could be a frustration for me. He had talked with the branch president about it, and I would be allowed to request a change in companions if I felt this would be too big of an issue. I was so relieved that he didn’t unload some deep dark confession, and I told him I wouldn’t ask for a new companion. Elder Hall taught me about humility.

The other notable was that in the evening we were supposed to gather, as a district, in our classroom for a meeting. Elder Hall and I went to room number 311, the room indicated on our materials as our classroom, but the rest of the district went to the same room that we had met with the branch presidency the night before, a room in a completely different building. When we finally discovered what had happened, the other missionaries gave us a bad time for not going to the right place, and I felt awful. I wrote in my journal that I was the most inadequate district leader I could imagine for making such a silly blunder.

(In the end, it turned out that Elder Hall and I had gone to the right room, but that’s not important, except that I mentioned it, so … yeah.)

And here is a picture of 8 of the 10 missionaries from my district.

How Do You Spell Gellie (Jellie)?

It has been very irresponsible of me to neglect to mention, even in passing, one of the defining characteristics of Cute Band Alert! I’m speaking of gellie bracelets. The kind that you could get at Claire’s. The three of us each wore a single pink bracelet during the months of CBA!, and that set us apart, in a way, as the pseudo-teeny-bopper-magazine-joke-band that we were. 

I eventually wound up with a lot more than just one of those bracelets, and I packed them around with me in my mission luggage for the two years I was in Michigan. But that first bracelet was always distinguishable from the others, a reminder of the brief, yet eternal, period from May 31st to November 20th, 1999.

November 21st was a Sunday. I spoke in sacrament meeting that day, and after speaking the youth in the ward sang the “We’ll Bring the World His Truth/As Sisters in Zion” medley, and I sat there on the stand bawling my eyes out. Following church a bunch of people came over to my house and we kind of more reverently re-did the party from the night before. 

That night I went tunnel singing and met some people from Michigan, one of them named Eric Otto. I had forgotten this fact when some time later I served in a ward and the bishop’s name was Otto. Even though it’s been over a decade, that’s still a cool thing to put together now.

At that point I knew very little about Michigan. I knew where it was located, generally, and I knew that Lansing was the capitol, and that there were cities named Detroit and Flint (since Rancid sang a song about Flint). But I had not done any research beyond what I already knew when I got my call nearly four months before. I’m not sure why. I was more excited about going on my mission than I had been about anything in my life to that point, but that excitement was, I guess, lazy excitement. I had an attitude of, “I’ll figure it out when I get there.” 

I probably intended on researching about Michigan, and likely even attempted to learn about it once or twice, but got bored. Attention Deficit Disorder can do that. It was probably also ADD that was the reason for my secret pleasure in knowing that I was not going to have to learn a foreign language to serve a mission. I was terrified of that, and when I got my call to Michigan to speak English, I was thrilled, but I did not confess those feelings to anyone until recently. You know, because everyone wants to learn a language on their mission.

Monday and Tuesday were a little bizarre. Saturday and Sunday had been nicely written closing chapters in my pre-mission book, but then there were two more days sitting in between those books, an awkwardly written epilogue and prologue to the stories. We went bowling, and I took John Baird to the airport so he could go home to California. I sold my car, and I said goodbye to the same people over and over again.

I thought that it was on one of these two days that we had an early Thanksgiving Dinner at Becca’s house, but it was actually on Thursday, the 18th. That was a memorable meal, because for a few minutes this group of friends actual got a little serious as we each expressed things that we were grateful for. It was a neat experience that shortly after turned into a food fight. Mashed potatoes were the easiest and most effective weapon.

Lifetime in One Day

Remember when I wrote about Rash’s last show? The anticipation, the buildup, the expectations, and the eventual letdown? That was disappointing. In contrast, Cute Band Alert!’s last show was everything that show was not, and this is that story.

One week before we played the last ever CBA! show, I wrote in my journal the following:

So, what am I going to do to make next week’s Wrapsody show so wild, so nuts, so amazing that everyone will be just so bewildered that they won’t know what to do? I don’t know, but I do know that it will be wild and crazy and that after we finish playing we will have a nice little band hug and cry or something, but I mean, what really are we going to do to give an energy that has never been known at any show ever played? We’ll have to smash something, that’s for sure, we’ll also have to jump around, destroy our live music sign, and well, pretty much we’ll just play a show like one that has never been known unto Provo. Fire and all sorts of stuff.

As you can plainly see, I had learned from the experience of Rash’s last show not to set my expectations too high. (By the way, don’t you love how calculated I was in planning the destruction of things? Careful preparation is PUNK ROCK!)

The morning of November 20th, 1999, began early. I woke up at 5:30 to attend an early session at the Provo Temple with Mikey, who was going through for the first time. That was an amazing experience, as it had only been a couple months since I went through for the first time. We sat in a little room while a member of the temple presidency spoke to us, and it occurred to me that I would very soon be sitting and receiving instructions at the MTC in just a few days. Things were beginning to get real.

Following the temple, I went to Summerhay’s Music store and bought two pair of drumsticks. Considering how hard I was planning on playing the drums, I guess I figured there was a good chance I would need some extra ones that night. While at the store I found out that one of the employee’s sons had received his mission call to the Detroit mission. This was just another of dozens of connections to Michigan I discovered since receiving my own call.

I then drove to Manti, Utah, with my family, and we went through a temple endowment session, after which my brother David, and his wife Jessie, were sealed. I was thrilled to be one of the witnesses for the ordinance. When the sealer discovered that I was entering the MTC in less than a week, he told me to do him a favor, “Give ’em heaven!” This advice still makes me smile and feel a particular sense of elation. I’m sure this was an old favorite piece of advice from him, but that doesn’t matter, because it is wonderful advice.

Upon returning to Provo, it was time for the show. We did play with a lot of energy and emotion. Spencer and Aaron crowd surfed, and Spencer thew bananas into the crowd during “The Banana Song.” At one point I lost a shoe (this is a recurring thing in my life, as just a few weeks ago Jessica and I went to a wedding reception and while dancing to “Cotton Eyed Joe,” I kicked my leg out and my shoe launched into the air landing on or near a young girl). We used flash paper to create pyrotechnics. We sang, we screamed, we laughed, and we cried. And all the time we thought that this was just the last time we would do this before a short break of two and a half years. It did not occur to us that things might change in that space of time.

After we played, I don’t think we hung around to watch any of the other bands that played after us. We headed over to Beto’s with a large group of friends and we hung out there until the early morning hours. I was facing an emotional paradox that was difficult to deal with. I loved the feeling of playing music, and the experience of hanging out with all these people and having the fun that we did. And there was a part of me that wanted to keep doing this indefinitely. On the other hand, I could not wait for the next Wednesday to come, so I could enter the MTC, and so I could go to Michigan and be a missionary. The irony of the situation was that a night like that one would not have happened if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was the end of something. Everybody came together like that, and we played like that, and it was all so SIGNIFICANT, because this was not going to happen anymore. We were not going to play any more shows, at least not for a long time. Had this been just another of a series of shows that would be followed by more the next week, or month, or whatever, there would not have been such a turnout and such an after party.

But this was the last show, and for all intents and purposes it was the last Cute Band Alert! show forever (at least in this reality). In retrospect, I’m glad that this is how it ended. We didn’t fizzle out, or just suddenly stop playing. We knew that something was coming that would cause an end to what we were doing, and so we said farewell to the phenomenon that was Cute Band Alert! in the most appropriate way.

Imagination’s Imprint

One of my favorite albums when I was 18/19 years old was NOFX’s live album. The first track on the album is banter between two of the band members and people in the crowd. It takes the band nearly two minutes to begin playing any songs, which is unusual for a performance. Typically, a band will play a song before they do any talking, but that was one of the things I really liked about the album. Never mind that the banter was laden with foul language and vulgarity; it was funny and Fat Mike’s voice was really likable.

The name of NOFX’s live album is “I Heard They Suck Live.”

This will be important later.

As I think I have mentioned once or twice in this series of memories, it has always felt like as soon as Cute Band Alert! formed as a band, we were playing shows every week at the very least, if not two or three shows a week. This was the narrative I would share with anybody who cared to listen to me talk about my punk rock band, “Oh yeah, we played shows all the time, and the same 8 people would show up to every show.” However, the reality was a different story. For the first three months we hardly played any shows at all, but that changed in October.

Beginning with the Sailor 9 show that we played on October 9th (the one I wrote about here) through November 13th, we played seven shows.  Since I already wrote about that first one, here is a list of the other five:

• October 15th, Sailor 9, with the Kindertones and Poetix. The sound was awful, we were tired and didn’t play very well, but people had fun. Notice that we played with The Kindertones; I guess whatever hard feelings were generated by the rival shows six days earlier had pretty well been resolved by this time.
• October 16th, Bethany’s birthday party in the basement of her house. Maybe our best show ever. The acoustics of the unfinished basement were very friendly to us, the people who came did a lot of dancing and moshing, and a marvelous punk rock time was had by all. As Spencer has noted more than once, there was a video made of this show that has disappeared into some void of time and space, perhaps never to be found again, but we have not lost hope.
• October 23rd, two shows, one at Veterans’ Hall in American Fork and the other I didn’t write any details about. My brain remembers the Vet Hall show as one in which I wore a 5 button suit and a pink tie, and soda got spilled all over the suit. The only thing I wrote in my journal was that there was a crack head named James who I would like to forget, but I wrote that in my journal, so I have now been reminded of him, though the memories are sketchy: a bicycle, narrow streets in American Fork, and cigarette butts …
• November 6th, Sailor 9, our CD release party. The music that we recorded way back in August was finally ready to be distributed, and distribute we did. We made copies of the CD on my dad’s computer, burning each disc (a process that, at the time, took at least ten minutes per disc), and we printed off copies of the cover and liner notes at Kinko’s. I don’t have a copy of the liner notes, but I know for certain that we thanked our parents, God, our fans, and poop. We sold quite a few copies of the CD at the show, and in a lot of ways, to me, it finally felt like we were a real band. The name of our CD was “This Music Sucks.” Hm, I wonder where that idea came from.
• November 13th, Johanna Whitehead’s house in Cedar City. Johanna was a girl I met halfway through my senior year in seminary. I noticed her on the first day of the second semester, during class assignments, and hoped that we would be in the same class, because she had short bleached hair and blue eyebrows. We did get put in the same class, and we became fast friends. She was only 14, but she had been through a lifetime of challenges already, and she had been addicted to a number of different drugs, including heroin and acid. Somehow, though, she made choices that led her to the seminary building. Sometime after the school year ended, her family moved to Cedar City, and I think that the reason we went and played the show at her house was that she had not seen us play. It was really nice of Aaron and Spencer to agree to this, especially since the show didn’t go over very well; we had to switch locations in her house two times before we found a place that wouldn’t disturb anyone too badly. We traveled to Cedar City, played the show, and traveled back to Provo all in one day.

There was one more show, but that one deserves its own post.

In addition to all the shows we played during this time, I was attempting to prepare for my mission, and I was facing some challenges. One of those challenges was that my mission president had sent me a letter months earlier with copies of the discussions. The letter instructed me to begin memorizing the discussions, as this would be something required of me in the field. I made two or three half-hearted attempts at memorizing them, but I did not even comprehend what the discussions said, so memorizing their content seemed nearly impossible.

The other big challenge I faced was that I was convinced that I was in love with Mimi. There were days when I wrote with excitement about the time we spent together and how awesome I thought she was. Then there were days that I wrote about not wanting to fall in love because I wanted to avoid that distraction as a missionary, and this was a huge deal to me. I wanted to be able to focus all of my thoughts and feelings on serving and not have to worry about what a girl was doing at home. And then there were days when I wrote thinly veiled entries of anger and jealousy, because Mimi probably flirted with some other boy that day, though I never came right out and said what made me upset.

Somehow, in the week or so before I left on my mission, I stopped writing anything about Mimi. I don’t know why this was. I think she may have gone out of town for Thanksgiving. If so, that was a fortunate thing for me, because it allowed me to begin to move on.

Competition

On September 29, 1999, I turned 19 years old. I celebrated this by going to the temple twice, working, going to dinner with my parents, and having a bunch of friends and family over. In my journal, I listed all the people who came over and conspicuously missing from the list were Aaron and Spencer. For a few minutes after reading this, I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t come, but as I thought about it, I remembered that there was a Goldfinger show in Las Vegas that they went to that day. I felt like Jake from The Blues Brothers, when he found out that Elwood had traded their Cadillac for a microphone, “Ok, I can see that.”

I made some difficult (to me) decisions at this point concerning whether or not to go to certain concerts. I didn’t go with Aaron and Spencer to Vegas, I think, because I wanted to spend this last birthday before my mission with my family. Then the next weekend was the X96 Big A** Show featuring Ben Folds, and Mimi was going. I chose not to go with her, because that was the weekend of General Conference. I felt that these were both really big deals at the time.

Around this time, some friends of ours, Nina and Roxy, were opening a retro clothing store on Center Street in Provo called Sailor 9. Their vision for this store was that it wouldn’t only be for shopping, but that they would also host concerts there, and so they scheduled a show for CBA! and a bunch of other bands to play on Saturday, October 9th. In preparation for this show, Greg Caldwell attended one of our practices and gave us suggestions. Concerning all of this, I recorded in my journal, “I’m happy.” So there’s that.

Tangential note: When I had been on my mission for about 20 months I became companions with a guy who was good friends with Greg Caldwell. They were both artists and used to skate together a lot. My mind was blown.

The big deal about this Sailor 9 show was that we scheduled it for the same night as a show at Wrapsody that featured The Kindertones, Froglick, and Chump. There were some contentious feelings among a few members of some of these bands because of the scheduling. It might be a false memory, but I remember that we skate boarded over to Wrapsody with fliers advertising our show and handed them out to people outside. My dad had recently printed a number of bumper stickers for CBA!, so we handed those out as well. The show went over really well, and we were really excited to be a part of the new venue.

It seems like there were some hard feelings that were created during this whole Wrapsody vs. Sailor 9 thing, in particular between us and The Kindertones. These hard feelings would eventually be overcome, as will be seen in a later installment, but I think it’s funny to note that this happened. I guess because it feels really silly that this would have happened. But as this was the height of the music scene in Provo, these kinds of things were bound to happen, especially as competing venues tried to get something going.

Introductions

Memory is a weird thing. We experience all of the waking events of our lives, and those events are probably recorded somewhere in our brains, but our brains trick us (so say psychologists, though I’m too lazy to site any one psychologist in particular) when it comes to memory, and we often times, maybe most of the time, mis-remember exactly the way things happened in our lives. Our own lives, that, like I said, we live. We choose to do things and so do other people, and these choices lead to events, that we inevitably confuse as we recount them, and … thus history.

A great example of this is how my brain has been telling me for over a decade that from the time The Rasta Smurfs first practiced through the third weekend in November, we were playing shows on average once a week. It seemed like we were playing a different house party, or even a show at a venue, all the time. But as I have been reading through my journal, it turns out that this was not the case at all, especially during the summer. In fact, after playing for Aaron’s two friends in Arizona, we did not play another show until September 6th. Three full weeks had passed between those shows, which may not seem like a very long time, but we were living at a point in which we were trying to do as much as possible before November 24th, the day I was to become a missionary.

There were things that happened in those three weeks that were significant, though. For one, I received my temple endowments on August 26th, which was a really big deal to me, and something I was eager to do so I could go back to the temple as often as possible in the months before I left. As a tangential note, one of the ways I straddled the LDS/punk rock mix was by dying my hair black. I wanted to dye my hair, because that was a punk rock thing to do, but I wanted it to be a color that I felt comfortable going to them temple with, and black worked because that was a “natural” color. Although, I remember when I dyed it, which was not long before getting my mission call, my mom was concerned that, depending on when I entered the MTC, my hair may not have grown back enough to get it back to its natural color. Fortunately, I had a nearly four month wait, plenty of time for all the black to grow out of my hair.

The other thing that happened during this time was that we decided to change the name of our band. This is another event that I’m certain I don’t remember accurately. Did we decide to change the name because we didn’t like The Rasta Smurfs anymore? And if so, why didn’t we like that name? Is it because we didn’t want to be another theme-based band with nicknames (Skippy Smurf, Supah Geek Smurf, and Sumo Smurf)? Is it because three Mormon kids referring to themselves as Rastafarians was a little weird? I really don’t know. And as for the new name, Cute Band Alert!, I seem to remember that it was from a teen bop magazine, and that one of Spencer’s friends had suggested that it be a band name. Or something like that.

In any case, it was on August 21st that we began to throw around the idea of changing our name to Cute Band Alert!. Within the next few days we had made a firm decision that we would do this, and I recorded that this was the first band name, of any band that I had ever been in, that I was completely satisfied with.

Which brings us to Cute Band Alert!’s first show, which, as I mentioned above, was played on September 6th. We played at Becca Smith’s birthday party in her back yard. This show marked a significant moment. There had been a few events before this in which my new group of friends and my friends from high school had been in the same place at the same time, but as far as I can remember, this was the first time that the two groups of friends really interacted very much with each other. I wrote in my journal that by the end of the night, Aaron and Becca had become “good friends,” and that I thought that was awesome.

In my egocentric brain, I was solely responsible for the fusion of these groups of people, and the ensuing friendships and semi-romances that evolved from it. It was kind of bizarre for me to see this happen. For months, in my brain, my new friends and my old friends were compartmentalized into two very different places and were associated with two very different perceptions of myself. In some ways, I selfishly kind of hoped that I could keep things that way, but it didn’t take me long to get comfortable with the idea of these friends becoming friends. And many of those friendships that were created then have become strong and lasting friendships to this day.

He still Rides with Me in My Trunk

“Rudi” 14 years later.

We Three Punks

Being in a band was, in a lot of ways, like being in a romantic relationship. Some bands are more casual and short lived, some are an on-again-off-again sort of thing, and some get you so infatuated that you feel as if you could never live without it. You find yourself making irrational promises that are impossible to keep, and you even cling to these promises throughout two and a half years of separation. That’s what I did as a missionary, anyway. I held a pinky promise that Aaron and I had made in July of 1999, that we would always play in a band together, as a serious commitment. During my mission, I prided myself on telling people that I had not left a steady girlfriend at home, and therefore did not have an issue with that kind of distraction, but had I been honest with myself, I would have realized that leaving a band at home (or in that case, in Brazil and North Carolina) was pretty much the same thing.

Another way that being in a band was like being in a relationship was that breakups could be messy. When Rash finally called it quits, it was a mutual decision among the three of us, but there were some hard feelings, at least on my part (and I addressed these in an earlier post about the final days of Rash). In addition to a band breakup, though, is the potential element of a band member getting kicked out of the band.

As I noted in the story about The Rasta Smurfs’ first practice, there were four of us in the band, Aaron, Spencer, Landon, and me. For a few reasons, of which I really can’t remember any specifically, Aaron, Spencer, and I decided that Landon needed to (euphemism alert!) pursue other projects outside of The Rasta Smurfs.

Actually, I can remember a reason that I felt this way, but I don’t think I expressed it specifically at the time. To me, the ideal band consisted of three, and only three, members. One guitar, one bass, and one drummer. Vocal duties could be shared, but any more than three just wasn’t right. The reason I felt this way was that I wanted to be just like my favorite band. What band was that?

[Ahem] Green Day.

I probably didn’t admit to it, because it would have felt too mainstream, but Green Day was always my favorite, and Green Day was a three-man band: BJ, Mike, and Tre’.

It didn’t matter to me that most of the music I listened to was made by groups of four or more, Green Day was the best and that’s who I wanted to be like. It worked out really well for The Rasta Smurfs/Cute Band Alert! that we ended up with just three of us in the band. I don’t know how we would have made the trip to Arizona with any more than that crammed in the front seat of Aaron’s car. And the bond that was created among us was something pretty special.

Wait, something is interrupting me. What’s that? You say that Green Day has a second guitar player who has now officially been made a fourth member of the band?  Huh. Well, hm, I don’t know how to respond to that, so I won’t. On with the narrative!

So the decision was made to let Landon go, and Spencer remembers that he volunteered, or we voted him, as the one to do it. I imagine Landon wasn’t thrilled about the decision, it’s never nice to feel like you are not wanted. And it seems like things were a little strained between us and Landon for a little while.

Somehow, though, over the following months, we patched things up with him to the point that I felt comfortable enough to ask him for a huge favor. Landon was a DJ at a local radio station run by Orem High School, and the show Landon did was a ska/punk night show. After we recorded our CD and had some copies of it available, I made the audacious move to ask Landon if he would be willing to play some of our music on the radio, and he agreed to do it.

I can’t decide if this was just a really classy thing on his part, or more of a classless thing on my part. Either way, hearing our music played over the (admittedly very limited) radio waves was something that thrilled us to no end.