When I was little I went to a school that had a music teacher that came to our room to teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mrs. Anderson was the spitting image of Robin Williams’ Mrs. Doubtfire, if Mrs. Doubtfire had been a bitch. She put me off of music lessons and almost put me off of English women, almost. When our neighbor heard from my mother how much I disliked this teacher, I actually feared her rather than disliked her, our neighbor commented on how that explained why her own child always seemed to get sick on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so it wasn’t just me. This teacher once told me I had a good enough voice to join the choir she was putting together which forced me to instantly give up singing. Never underestimate the influence of a teacher, good or bad.
Naturally, I became such a hard core rock addict that I tried taking up singing again for my first band and learned another valuable lesson. My band consisted of me and two of my friends with whom I was taking guitar lessons. We learned and rehearsed three Beach Boy tunes, Hawaii, Be True To Your School and I can’t remember the third one. We tried to sing them using Beach Boy style harmonies and playing our acoustic guitars and debuted our act at the Christmas party for our fifth grade class. We went over very well and had we stopped there I may have continued as a singer but we made a common and costly mistake. Instead of taking our well deserved bows after our third song and sitting back down with our classmates we bowed instead to the pressure and praise of our classmates' call for an encore and attempted to do a couple more songs. We hadn’t rehearsed anything other than the three and I attempted to sing lead as we fumbled for a couple more minutes that seemed like hours. We left our former fans with the impression that we really weren’t so good after all. I never sang again but I learned my lesson.
We became an instrumental band by the next year when we traded in our acoustic guitars for electric guitars and added a drummer. Attaining a public address system and microphones was a bit beyond our sixth grade capabilities. We played again for all the graduating sixth grade classes at the end of the school year, did our rehearsed set of Ventures surf songs and instrumental Beatles songs ala the B side of the Hard Day’s Night and Help! albums and were smart enough to save a couple tunes for an encore.
Many years later my New Wave band, Womanizer, gave a premier performance at a bar for our friends before soliciting the rock clubs and again the band members who were novices, insisted on returning to the stage in response to the enthusiastic audience reaction to our set even though we had already played everything we had rehearsed. I absolutely refused which made me seem like a dick but we didn’t ruin our good first impression.
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