End of the band Nov. 1, 1982

  

What happened exactly Friday night, I’m at a loss to explain.

The impact, pushing me deeper into depression, was obvious, in particular the silence – like a horrible storm cloud hanging over me – by Pauly and the band members, suggested their fear to say anything about it.

How does someone describe disaster: the end of a band that had barely gotten started.

The first moments came well before we got to the club, when Pauly, back the house he lived in up on the mountain, held up several vests, asking me to choose which one was best.

“The first half of the night I’ll wear a sweater,” he said, unveiling his white wool sweater with a six-inch blue line down each side.  “Then, when things really get cooking, I’ll need one of these.”

By which he meant once of two vests, one made of corduroy, though both had silk backing.

I picked this one since it seem better fit with Pauly’s persona.

Unlike other members of the band, Pauly tended to dress conservative from penny loafers and jeans to a jacket and tie, the vest making him look like the Sean Connery version of James Bond – at which point he ruined the whole image when he dragged out a hat from somewhere, a Dagwood kind of thing that when he put it on, made him look a little like Stan Laurel.

“Looks pretty hip, right?” he asked.

I lacked courage to dispute him, and so said, “hip, yep,” and let it go with that.

No need to burst his bubble, I thought at that time.

Getting back out with the band would be difficult enough after more than a year, and even longer considering John R, Bob, the bass player, and the drummer, were not the same people he last played with, nor was the venue the same, modified from the last few times we’d been there with the old band, changing its name from The Locker Room to the Grasshopper. But I suspected the crowd had not changed, the same collection of drunks that generally made it impossible to perform without risk of fights.

When we got there, Pauly was so nervous, he refused to go inside until the rest of the band arrived, kicking at loose gravel in the driveway.

Then, Bob (Little Bob that is) showed up with the van full of equipment and two friends.

“Nobody’s here yet,” Pauly told them.

Little Bob looked odd, sweaty and bloated, eyes red as if he’d spent a week in heavy drink.

“I’m stick” he told us. “But I’m going to play even if it kills me.”

Indeed, he looked on death’s door, shaking and weak, barely able to carry the heavier piece of equipment into the club, so left the amps and mixing board to me and his two companions, through the front door, and a screen door the squeaked annoyingly each time we passed through.

Inside, we faced the typical confusion, having not played in the place since its renovation, asking the bartenders where we should set up.

Each step exhausted me and made me realize just how old I felt, doing at 31 what at 21 I had found remarkably easy, or perhaps too inebriated to mind.

Maybe I was too distracted about working the sound board to worry to much about my age, or the age of the band, who still tried to play rock stars a decade later. While Pauly had managed to keep up, becoming a retro rock singer doing more gentle bands, the others still dressed and acted like they had back when they headlined local community centers and drew thousands.

We were just about finished setting up when the other members of the band showed up, and I realized, looking at them, Bob wasn’t sick, he was stoned, and so were they, and not on anything as simple as pot, all were buzzing on some combination of heroin and speed, chattering away at each other even after they took the stage to perform, their performance flying too high for me to completely control from behind the board. The most I could do was to keep the volumes reasonable, and even then, the manager glared at me about turning it all down – something the band was not willing to do, not even Pauly, who had caught a contact high from the rest of them.

Some of the audience got off on it, but largely people who already knew the band and had come to see them in particular. The bar regulars looked as outraged as the manager, as some of the rough crowd began to hurl insults I feared would soon evolve into bottles.

We survived the first set reasonably well – only the band members including Pauly vanished and by the time I rounded them up for the second set, they had spiked up again, and yes, Pauly as well. The volume of the second set exceeded the first set by numbers I could not control. As I turned down the volume on the board, the two guitarists, cranked up their amps. I had to boost Pauly’s vocal or no one would hear him.

The manager came over to me, yelling over the volume. The rowdies who had been drunk during the first set, got louder and more obnoxious by the second set, drowned out only by the volume of the music.

I was deaf by the time the second set ceased, but I could near the stern warnings of the manager, saying if I didn’t control the volume better, he would shut the whole thing down and he would not pay the band.

The band members, just then retreating out to the parking lot again, caught the tail end of this, so by the time they reported back for the third set, they were not merely hyped up, they were angry, telling me to keep the volume up when they resumed playing.

They roared so much the walls rocked. The thugs began to hurl more insults, and the band hurled them back. But when the manager came over to pull the plug, the band when crazy, knocking down their own equipment, smashing guitars and drums.

The silence that followed this wreckage was more deafening even than the music.

The crowd – including the drunk thugs – stared in disbelief as did the manager. The crowd that had thinned after the second set, vanished quickly, leaving me, the band and the manager alone in an empty room.

“What’s this about our not getting paid?” Pauly asked the manager, thumbs hooked into the tiny pockets of his vest, making him look like a gun fighter.

Perhaps, the wreckage had intimidated the manager. He motioned for the bartender to issue us the cash we had agreed on, although not likely to cover the cost of the broken equipment.

Outside, after loading the remains of the equipment into the van, I told Pauly I quit.

“You’ll have to find someone else to do sound,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Pauly said. “I doubt very much we’ll ever play again – here or anywhere else.”

 

 

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