Gigantic.4
Stage Dive
“Who picked Elephant Gun?”
“They needed a name,” Mike said.
He’d signed us up for Battle of the Bands. Apparently there’d been a deadline.
We had practiced a few times, this was our first gig. Bill, on bass, had written some chord progressions. I wrote some lyrics, which is how I became singer. Mike on drums enlisted Jason Truckenbrod to play guitar. They’d been in another band together back in Buffalo.
Years later, I found out that an early version of the Velvet Underground had played the Battle of the Bands in Syracuse back in the sixties. But this was 1988, and the event seemed pretty provincial, no known pedigree.
It was in the basement of a bar called Sutter’s which maybe I’d been in twice. Not completely mobbed, but a pretty good crowd.
I can’t remember how many other bands. We knew some of them, including our sister band, Baby J, with Jonathan Palmer on vocals. Tony, who we’d played on Marshall Street with, played one of those headless Steinberger basses that were sort of popular then.
How did I get so confident? I had a lot of art school friends and I’d been in some of their short films recently. But it was probably the alcohol, to be honest.
I’m guessing our set was about five songs long, seems likely. At one point I did a stage dive, and this really happened: the crowd parted. The night would’ve ended much differently had a big guy who was helping with equipment not swooped in and caught me inches before I did a face plant.
A few other recollections. A drunken football player peed on my shoes in the filthy men’s room. An ex-girlfriend who’d left me for someone else suddenly found me attractive again.
Baby J won that night. Then something funny happened. Maybe because we had friends in University Union who felt bad we’d lost. We mysteriously got added to a highly publicized upcoming show, opening for Big Dipper and the Goo Goo Dolls.
The name Elephant Gun was suddenly in the paper and plastered on posters all over town, like we were a real band.
We’d played only one show, and already we were locally famous.
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That's more or less how it happened!
"I wrote some lyrics, which is how I became singer"—an excellent line.