Kings of the Basement and Nostalgia
My first band was formed in sophomore year of highschool with my three best friends. We were the kings of the basement. We played three shows in the year or so that we were around and wrote five songs together. Neither fact is particularly impressive, but nostalgia is in the air and I’ve been thinking about what makes being in a band so great, as I begin to practice with a new one now in my senior year of college.
Every Friday, we would meet at my drummer Marc’s house and play for however long until we got bored. We might run through whatever number of original songs we had at the time, which we gave the best of names: “First Song,” “Mailbox,” “Epic,” “Those Old Colors are Dead” and “New Song.” We messed around with a few Misfits, Dead Kennedys and Johnny Cash covers. Our favorite band at the time however, was The Libertines.
I previously talked about how we would drive around and blast their songs while belting out every word along with them. We even covered a few of their songs in order to pretend that we wrote them while paying homage to a group we loved.
After practice, we always partook in the exodus that we dubbed “The McMile,” where we walked an actual 1.4 miles to the nearest McDonald’s, ate and joked around as a band, and then walked back to meet our other friends. Often times, the McMile was more fun than practice.
None of us really drank or partied at the time, but one particularly fond evening had the four of us and one friend hanging out in our drummer’s basement. It was New Year’s Eve and we were crashing there. We knew we were supposed to imbibe, at least a little bit, on such an occasion. My drummer stole some of his parents’ wine and we poured it into Coca-Cola cans. The strobe light came on and our drummer became “Robot Marc” and later on we were singing “Time for Heroes” in the dark.
We spent so much time together, whether we were playing music or not, and our friend group started referring to us as one entity. Often times though, we’d want to stay just with us and do nothing together rather than face what was outside of the basement. On the verge of graduation, the idea resonates, as I don’t mind being the king of my garage.