The Transition: Garage Bands

Sometime during 6th grade, I was invited over to a young Rudy Schieder's house for an "exclusive" Silver Creek band practice. I remember there being Rudy, Dylan Phelps, Emmett Sweet, Ryan Siudzinski, and myself. We tried to play Hotel California; who were those guys kidding? No one could actually play the song or their instruments. I think there was a total 5 minutes of "music playing", which ended up in a "Who Can Play Smoke On the Water or Iron Man Better? Competition". 


Long story short, Rudy met Jeff Crawford in the Alden Middle School jazz band. Jeff had been playing drums and the two would get together and to my knowledge, play Big Machine by the Goo Goo Dolls at least 50 times a night. When Rudy decided he couldn't sing that well and decided they would need another guitar player, they wrote up a very official contract, asking me to join the band. I signed with "Silver Creek" and joined. To this day I remember writing our first song with Rudy entitled "Rip Tide"; "I'm on a Rip Tide, rollin' from side to side". It was never finished, practiced, or performed by any means.  I'm pretty sure we could still sell it to John Fogerty and make a quick million, though... 


We mainly focused on learning Goo Goo Dolls songs. I started showing them a lot of music that they had never heard of, and a passion for the bands that they still love to this day was born. We practiced in either my basement (for a short while), Jeff's basement, but mainly Rudy's garage. You could easily drive anywhere down the Two Rod Road neighbourhood and ask the residents how many times they've heard and "appreciated" a band playing, blaring away, for all the world to hear. 


We had been doing all of this practicing and learning covers without any plans of performing until one afternoon, Rudy's family friend Bo was having a very Polish going away party out in Cheektowaga. Rudy's dad had mentioned that we were practicing in the garage at the time and they suggested that we pack up our tiny practice amps, poorly strung guitars, and head over to play: this was our first gig. We were beyond ecstatic.