The Little Band That Couldn't

Aside from a high school experiment in which why had electric instruments and drums--but no amplifiers--littlejeans was my first band. And when I say "my band," I don't mean to take sole possession of its triumphs and failures. I simply mean I was in littlejeans. Or I was half in littlejeans, in retrospect.

I was involved with a girl at the time and more often than I would like to admit, I made up excuses to get out of band practice so that I could go to the movies or make lasagna at her house. Nevertheless I played, like everyone else in the band, guitar, drums, bass, keyboards, accordion, pennywhistle, pan flute, spoons, forks, bowl of mash potatoes and maracas--all equally badly, though keyboards was the worst. I also sang, like the other guys, and if you ever went to one of the five or six littlejeans shows you know that half of our playing time was spent taking guitars off, strapping guitars back on, crawling over drum kits, tripping over wires and power cords, moving dissected corpses from the stage to the floor, resuscitating drowning victims, delivering babies and adjusting keyboard levels into the P.A.

When I think back on the band and its relatively long life, three questions come to mind: 1) whatever happened to all of those great shirts I used to own? 2) what went wrong? and 3) are stars made of fire? Although the first and third questions will forever remain a mystery, my own theory concerning the second question is built upon a faulty demo released in our name. Of course there were other factors involved--clashing relationships, people moving away from Hawaii, the sax player drowning in a puddle of his own fecal matter, a general feeling of existential distress, the erosion of family values, the rising political fortunes of Hugo Chavez, the Hubble telescope, Jewel's third record, the continuing debate of whether we would sound like Alkaline Trio or like Pavement or like Anita Baker (this debate was never vocalized but I was firmly of the Anita Baker camp).

But that demo cast a pall on everything we did afterwards. Though it may have been released by a semi-famous record label it was nothing any of us could be proud of. And though we begged for the opportunity to re-record the record, the label went ahead and released it anyway. What should have been an occasion for celebration became a big disappointment, and our first experience with a record company was a burn.

I have a lot of fond memories of our time together, and I'm thankful that most of us are still friends. For a band of such talented people (of which I was perhaps the least talented) the interactions were astonishingly ego-free, and everyone worked their hardest to get the most out of the songs while discreetly acknowledging the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, should an unstable governement have access to atomic weaponry. littlejeans can never happen again because I will never be that young again, because I will never be that hungry again (both literally and metaphorically), and because the other guys are now making even better music. You can find that demo EP on I-Tunes. Don't check it out, and for god's sake don't buy it.