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| The Nobodies, spring 1981 |
40 years ago this month, sometime early in January, 1981, I attended my first musical jam session with some high school friends. This was the first time I ever seriously attempted to play with other people and put my foot on the path of pursuing my creative passions in earnest. It was a day I’d been building towards for a few years beforehand, gradually developing my abilities and putting together a little arsenal of gear as a foundation for such activities.
It all started in grade 8 music class in 1976-1977. That class started playing ukelele because it had only 8 pupils and the teacher didn’t want to do a standard curriculum with such a small group, so he taught us all to play stuff like KISS songs. This got me wanting to play electric guitar, so I started taking private lessons in the autumn of 1977. My folks bought me a budget Gibson’s Les Paul copy and Canadian made RAM practice amp to facilitate my interest. I then switched to a Fender Precision bass copy in the spring of 1978, but I got bored with scales and folk standards and gave up playing both after a couple more months and quit taking lessons. My guitar and bass then sat abandoned in a corner of my bedroom for over a year until I started listening to a lot of punk and new wave music throughout 1979, cumulating in March of 1980 with the purchase of Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition. That album lit a fire in me to want to play music for real. The tunes on it were simple to learn and it’s unconventional structure showed me that I could compose in any manner I preferred and I had no need to adhere to traditional, formal musical techniques. As such, I started to “unlearn” what I’d been taught by my music lessons and reimagined what it meant to play guitar and bass. This also got me wanting to get a synthesizer, which I put together a downpayment for by selling my half of the used junker car my brother and I had picked up earlier that year for $400. The $200 I got from that was enough to get me a Roland SH-1 mono-synth and a BOSS DR-55 Rhythm Composer. I also picked up a Traynor guitar amp, which was a step up from the RAM. My gear collection was rounded out by a little portable cassette recorder that had a built in condenser mic. This was all in place by the end of 1980.
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| Playing Mike's drums at Mark's place, January 1981 |
As 1981 kicked off, the times, people and place were all in alignment and we got together at my friend Marks’s place, in the basement game room of his parent’s house. It was a classic wood paneling finished basement with a long shuffleboard table along one wall. Along with my gear, another kid, Mike, brought his drum kit, someone had a microphone and there was probably another amp and guitar lingering around, but I can’t recall. It was a meager setup to be sure, but it was enough to make a glorious noise. Aside from myself, Mark and Mike, there was Rob, who tried to play bass, and Dan, who did vocals. There may have been one or two others coming and going, but I can’t recall. We were all about 17-18 and in our senior year of high school and we fancied ourselves as Thunder Bay’s only legitimate “punks”. As for the music we made, it was a shambles of mostly Sex Pistols covers like God Save the Queen, Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle and some piss-take rip-offs of Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust. An eleven minute cassette recording of our sloppy mess survives to this day.
I remember taking that recording home that night, playing it and being in wonder over the fact that we’d actually managed to almost sound like we were somewhat competent. As sloppy as it was, the energy of it was palpable and the rush of endorphins from doing it was enough that it became an instant addiction. This one day kicked off a flurry of jam sessions which would dominate the rest of the year. After we’d worn out our welcome at Mark’s basement, it was on to my place to do more recording. First we jammed in my bedroom, but soon we relocated to a corner of the unfinished basement in my folks house for the remainder of the year. We also quickly abandoned doing cover versions of songs in favour of making up our own tunes, mostly improvised on the spot.
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| The Nobodies go to prom, June 1981 |
The “group” quickly solidified around myself, Mark and Rob, though we did recruit a girl from school named Debbie to do vocals on occasion. We called ourselves The Nobodies and, as we gradually settled into a routine, we started to add more bits and pieces of gear to the arsenal. Mark and Rob started to pick up gear for themselves such as guitars and amps and I managed to snag a cheap drum kit from my cousin to replace the “trash kit” I’d made out of buckets and tin trays. By the end of the summer, thanks to our part time jobs after school, the three of us had saved enough money to upgrade our recording facilities from the cassette recorder to a lovely Akai GX-4000-D reel to reel deck. It had “sound on sound” functionality, so we could do primitive multi-tracking by bouncing recordings back and forth from the left to right tracks and back again. We found we could get away with 3 or 4 bounces before the sound got too murky. We didn’t do any live gigs that year, but we recorded like mad and quickly amassed an impressive collection of original works.
Looking back on this first year of intense activity, I can still feel the buzz of it in my soul like a distant electrical hum. There was so much momentum kicked off at that time that it kept me pursuing my muses in the arts throughout most of the rest of my life until the present day. It’s only in the last 5 years that it feels like the gas has been running on empty for me as I rarely find myself inspired to want to create anything. Only writing now regularly attracts my efforts, for the most part. I’ve had to come to terms with the reality that all the work I did over those four decades doesn’t really matter to anyone. The few who care are certainly appreciated, but my shelves of tapes, hard drives and data discs will never have any value beyond my own obsessions. Once I’m gone, there’s no one who’ll work to continue preserving them and they’ll end up in a landfill somewhere.
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| Album art for unreleased recordings, spring 1981 |
Yet I’m sitting here, compelled to commemorate this milestone as if it has some significance. The truth is that it does have meaning and value, but only to me and possibly the people with whom I shared those times. We are, after all, merely the sum of our experiences and these ones made me the person I am. They are the mirrors I passed through in order to comprehend the world around me and the spirits that shared it. The artifacts which remain are useful only in the sense that they can be time machines for traveling back to those experiences for brief moments. Doing so serves the purpose of revealing the distance traveled by comparing then to now. If it has any significance to anyone outside of those directly involved, perhaps its as an example and inspiration to take the chance on trying things like this in their own lives. In some ways, we all live partially vicariously through the experiences of others. At most, I can hope that those vicariously living through my experiences find them a little inspiring or at least entertaining.
