The Weakend

It's a sweet morning.

            After basketball season, a very successful campaign which included the school’s first win over McMinn Central, an 18 game winning streak, and the first trip by Madisonville to the regions of state tournament (The Heroes’ guitarist was the big man on team), The Heroes regrouped for its last gigs. I believe The Heroes played a time of two in the high school cafeteria, and I recall, though I might be a tad mixed-up, that the last two gigs were played in the newly rebuilt gym in the late spring.  As I remember them, the band’s performances were laid back and effective. Some songs from the past like Lonely Too Long and You Keep Me Hanging On came out of mothballs, and sounded sweet to boot, and the note for note version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida proved what the band members were made of. The Heroes did not survive the graduation of the drummer and guitarist (the bass player had graduated the year before but played with The Heroes while attending a local college).

            Around that same time Tig and I had become closer friends and spent a goodly amount of time talking about and listening to music. Three bands we always agreed on were Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf, and Vanilla Fudge, especially the Fudge. To us the Fudge seemed the perfect band due to the members’ abilities to play airy, atmospheric passages and still deliver a blow to the head whenever one was called for. Both Tig and I liked Oh, Well, by Fleetwood Mac, a shortened version of which had charted on Top 40 radio.

            I wanted to play in a band with Tig, but he was already in a band. Two of the band’s members, the drummer and bassist/keyboardist, came from the high school marching band. The lead vocalist and co-lead guitarist used a strange, rag-tag assemblage of equipment. He used a Hagstrum guitar (a brand I had only seen in advertisements a few years earlier featuring The Mothers of Invention), a decent Fender amp, and some kind of bullhorn PA system which delivered a harsh, metallic vocal tone. I’d once jammed with the guitar player, but nothing came of it.