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.