I love thinking about silly, dumb things my very first band did. I also love other peoples stories about the same. If you started your own band, I'd love to read memories of embarrassing, hilarious, or awesome things. A couple of mine:

First Rig:
When I first started jamming with a drummer my Peavey practice amp was not sufficiently loud enough. Luckily drummer buddy's dad was also a hack guitarist and owned a Fender practice amp. I stacked one on top of the other and went from the output of the Peavey to the input of the Fender and dimed them both. You could kind of hear it over the drumming. Sounded like shit. Luckily I upgraded to a 50 Watt, Peavey 2x12 combo by the time we found a bass player. Using a DOD Grunge pedal and zeroing the 'Mid' knob on the amp didn't do much to help my audibility though.

Christian Punk:
When my friends and I were about 13 our parents were willing to drop us off at a church that hosted Christian shows. They (rightfully) assumed that we'd be safe with all of those squares and the shows were from like 6:30- 9:30. We knew it was training wheels, but a couple of the bands could actually play well, so we took what we could get, then smoked cigarettes in the parking lot. A while later my garage band friends and I calculated that we should play a battle of the bands the promotion company was hosting because "No one cool will be there to see us and know if we suck." So it was that Squirrel King's Revenge debuted 4 fresh hardcore/punk songs for 10 other bands and a couple dozen onlookers one Saturday afternoon. I still think this was a savvy move on our part. I remember we had one song about the problem with skinheads (having never met one at that stage we were pretty sure they were all nazis), and another which was a tribute to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

AMP - 1987 - 11 years old with friends in 6th grade. We had two rehearsals after hours in my primary school music room. This was largely a pretend band but we had a logo and everything.

I wrote pages and pages and pages of impossibly terrible lyrics inspired by early Twisted Sister and Bon Jovi. Tragically I could not find them anywhere when I cleared out my mother's house in 2016. They were so bad that we used to sit around in high school completely gourned - playing a game where the goal was for someone to get through reading a single verse out loud without exploding into laughter. My friend Chris could never get out so much as a single word before keeling over.

If memory serves the songs had awesome names such as "Hard Rock Rules", "Play the Game", "Samurai", and a hair metal ballad called "I was so Young and Stupid" - which was rather high-reaching for a three 11 year olds at the time. AMP had fluro socks and teased mullets. Christ on a stick I wish that I had photos of this shit.

EDIT - How could I forget. I played a 1969 Ibanez 2020 into 3.5 watt Onyx practice amp. I read in the intro to Heavy Metal Thunder that Link Wray made distortion by sticking a pencil through one of his amp's speakers. I slashed mine to bits with a pen knife. It sounded like Greg Ginn's rig on a lo-fi day.

Not quite a band, but in 8th grade I hung out with this hippie bass player guy several times, and eventually set up a few jams with this stoner drummer we both knew. Both of these guys were quite good for that age, and we came up with a few 'songs' (basically a riff or two, then a lot of jamming) pretty effortlessly. I wasn't into those guys sneaking around my parents' backyard getting high, but musically we got along.

The way our school district was split up meant those two went off to a different high school than me. But more importantly, I had started hanging around "punks" who thought hippies and stoners were lame, and I followed along and kind of blew those dudes off. I felt bad for that at the time and even more stupid for it later on. Even the punks later admitted our jam tape was pretty good. I went on to play in 'cooler' (but in reality: terrible) punk and hardcore bands and that was that. I ran into the bass player at a jazz fest a few years later and he had gotten really fuckin' good. Makes me wonder what could have been had I stayed on that path..

Experimental Homecooking - a band I started when I was a senior in high school.

Was so exciting yet also a complete disaster at the same time. Extremely embarrassing original songs. Three of the five members (including me) didn't really know how to play.

The high school talent show was a personal triumph, though. Me, a totally unpopular school band nerd, getting up on stage with the band and singing "Take the Skinheads Bowling" and "Cut Your Hair" to an audience of my peers, almost all of whom didn't know a thing about indie rock. I think I wound up getting a girlfriend out of it... so there's that.

Is playing a guitar still considered cool in high school? I have no idea in the age of Tik Tok.

In high school, I replied to some dudes in the classifieds who wanted to start a band. They were all 10 years older than me. They also were never in a band before, but all friends from college who moved to Chicago together. I guess they had a hard time finding a bass player, because they were happy to let me join the band. We played for maybe a year, until they asked me to put together a show. At age 17, I didn't really have much of a connection or an ability to book a show at a venue (there were no all-ages venues in the city). So, I booked a show at my girlfriend's highschool and we played a very awkward show at the school gymnasium. That was a lightbulb moment for the other guys, realizing they have a highschooler in their band and we all parted ways. Those guys didn't really continue playing together, but they all went out and did their own things. Every once and awhile, in my adult life, I would come across one of them. They were super cool guys, and I really appreciated them giving me a chance, no hard feelings whatsoever. The music was pretty bad, since none of us knew what we were doing, except maybe the two guitar players who were just budding in their skills. The drummer was just learning drums, too. It was rough, but an interesting time for me in my music-making journey.

My amp at the time was probably the most awesome amp I could have had, though I was too dumb to realize it. I got it for pennies off of the classifieds: a Peavey 180 combo bass amp. Loud, tons of options for EQ, 15" speaker.

jfv wrote: Mon Jun 30, 2025 8:14 am The high school talent show was a personal triumph, though.

It was as close as we could get to being a football player at the Homecoming game. One sudden intersection of our interests and school sanctioned activities.

My band developed a fierce rivalry with an older ska band at our school's battle of the bands that escalated from TP'ing each other's houses to when they got drunk one night and threw a boulder through the windshield of my car. We had the last laugh when I endeared myself to actual scene bands through my guileless fanboy ways and got to open for local legends. Years later we made amends and they hired me to engineer their comedy band's album.

My eventual "punk" band played the high school Battle of the Bands when we were freshmen. Very cheesy: we had to pre-submit lyrics as evidence that there wouldn't be swearing (though of course you could always do it on the spot). We threw in a silly cover of Rapper's Delight as a "crowd pleaser" and finished second place. Whoopee.

This lead to getting more school gigs like playing a pregame set in the stadium parking lot, and eventually even an offer to play a school winter dance I think (if we agreed to fill it out with some covers). This lead to a rift in the band between members (backed up by some friends) who thought school gigs were lame (true), and those who just saw it as fun and even a modest paycheck (also true). I leaned towards the former, though admittedly having the popular girls sort of notice you in a different light didn't feel terrible. Didn't matter, the band broke up over it.

My first “band” was in sixth or seventh grade: Strange Cow Molesters. We were two guitarists and a drummer (just like Pussy Galore!), and none of us knew how to play our instruments (just like Pussy Galore!). We wrote songs about stuff like syphilis (maybe like Pussy Galore? Not sure.). We also did “covers” of “Ace of Spades” and the Iggy Pop song “I’m Bored,” which we knew from some 1980s rock doc. We also sucked, but had we known who Pussy Galore was in 7th grade, perhaps we wouldn’t have.

The first real band to actually play shows was my high school band, The Pine Weasels. We also sucked but could at least make actual music. We played a couple shows at our high school. During one, I stripped down to a speedo, such that I looked naked behind my bass guitar. This was very risqué for our Catholic school. Some young lady ran onto the stage and stuffed a couple dollars down the front. That was the limit of interest from the ladies.

Honestly, none of my old bands were good. The only one to actually play a fair number of shows was my college band in Bellingham, Washington: Bunsen Honeydu. Our claim to fame is that we played a show at. a small art gallery with a band called Pinwheel, which featured a pre-Death Cab Ben Gibbard. I’m told by people who know/have met him that he actually remembers our set, because of how we did our set list: on an overhead projector. We checked off each song after we played it.

Krev wrote: Mon Jun 30, 2025 9:21 am Is playing a guitar still considered cool in high school? I have no idea in the age of Tik Tok.

IIRC, and I learned this here, if you're a teenage Korean girl playing speed-metal, it's really cool.