During my undergarduate college days I didn't play too much guitar. I still had my crappy Sears electric guitar and my acoustic.
I taught school for a year and lived at home, giving me enough money to buy a decent guitar and amp. When I went back to university, for law school, I joined my first band.
The Atomics was my first band, begun in the Fall of 1980. Everyone else in the band was undergrad age or younger (our drummer was about 14 or 15!). We played a bizarre batch of covers that basically just included anything we liked, from hard rock to punk to power pop to new wave.
Our first show was to have been at Lake Wauberg, a receation area for the University of Florida located just south of Gainesville. We agreed to play for free (as was true of almost all our shows) since there would be food and beer at this party hosted by some law school group. After schlepping our PA to the hall, tearing through our soundcheck ending with our deconstruction (most Atomics songs were deconstructions, as we seldom if ever attempted note-for-note covers, and hadn't any keyboards despite that numerous songs we covered did!) of Led Zep's "Rock and Roll," the noise complaints from the rich folks living on the other side of the lake began pouring in.
We were unceremoniously asked to leave, since the "guests" there had all paid a few bucks to get in and we had not. It was not even sugggested that we kick in a few bucks to stay, much less that our efforts in practicing up 4 sets of material and hauling and setting up, and then striking and loading out, our PA and backline might've been worth something. Our drummer, Chad, and our bassist Frank both wanted to commit a little mayhem in return for such shabby treatment, and in retrospect, that's exactly what we should've done. But I prevailed on them to simply eat and drink as much as we could during an extended load-out.
The Atomics' actual debut came a month or so later at another kegger, this time at an apartment complex then called Maracaibo Manor. We played 4 sets, marred only by my vocal mangling of the Records' "Starry Eyes." My brother Kerry and Kerry's friend Mike both sang leads on several songs. People danced and had a good time, and George Tabb [who has subsequently become semi-famous in punk rock circles via his column in the punk zine "MaximumRockNRoll" and his friendship with (and extremely short duration employment as a roadie by) the Ramones] and Bob Fetts of the local punk band Roach Motel slammed to our rendition of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated."
After we ran out of material, George Tabb somewhat sheepishly approached me and asked if Roach Motel could play a set on our equipment. Frank, who also played in RM as their drummer, vouched for them so we said OK. They played a short set of 5 or 6 songs including "Burger King Is Dead" and "Brooke Shields Must Die."
Here are some pics of that fateful night!
Me:
Roach Motel playing our gear:
We need more stories, people!