Garage Band

Having been granted a respite by the distance of time, I've been writting a bit of my recollections from my garage bands. While being primarily self glorifying, I think they give a nice glimpse on the larval stages of a band.

Let’s start with Pack. Patrick Foley. The rock star.

Of course, he was the guitar player. Guitar is the quintessential instrument of rock. It screams, it howls, it can sound like a machine, a mountain lion, but mostly it sounds like unadulterated rock and roll. From the pre-Hendrix Telecaster scratching over booming stand-up bass, to the plastic soprano of an over-produced Boston album, the guitar is the sword in the stone of the rock band, and whoever wields it is the king.

Pack may have read Nietzsche, I wouldn’t have doubted it. Occasionally he would ramble incoherently about relativity and string theory; apparently he was a big fan of the Nova specials physics teachers routinely recommend to cure insomniac students. In any case, he possessed a relaxed will to power that would have both baffled and pleased Nietzche’s syphilis perforated waffle brain.

His Fender DeVille was more effective than any venereal disease in making my brain look like Swiss cheese, its amplifying tubes red hot in the rear, spitting licks and riffs out the front that sounded like an airplane careening wildly out of control. His blues lines smelled like the proverbial crossroads bar; you could almost see the smoke wafting off of the musical lines in the air. Actually, you could see smoke. It was from the curtains the amp was burning in the back.

Stevie Ray Vaughn acted as the holy force sanctifying endless solos at chest-crunching volumes. “That’s how Stevie did it,” was a common response to complaints of guitar rifts treading over horns, vocals, and pretty much every sound source in a two mile radius. In many ways Pack was less a musician than a weapon of mass destruction, illustrating the power of man aided by his industrial creations.