Syracuse was a sea of small apartment buildings. The buildings had basements. The basements had parties.
How many parties we played I can’t say. The most memorable was so packed, steamy, and loud, the cops could not muscle their way in to close it down. They shut off the power right in the middle of our set, leaving a dark basement full of drunken college students to feel their way out.
At another party, two messed up guys from a different band were rolling on the floor, punching the crap out of each other. There are no bouncers in basement parties.
“Do something!” this girl cried and looked at me. She’d seen me at the mic a few minutes earlier, apparently this was my job. I managed to get clocked a couple of times but could not pry them apart. I decided to let them continue to work it out after that.
The night of our “real” show arrived. They needed us to arrive hours early for soundcheck. What the heck was that? At all our other shows, we just showed up and played.
Mike gave me a ride in his girlfriend’s car. It was the 80s and it had this weird feature, when Mike started the car, the seatbelt automatically wrapped itself around my chest. That freaked me out. I’m glad they stopped making cars that do that.
The Lost Horizon was miles out on Erie Boulevard. The place was legendary in my mind. I’d walked all the way out here by myself to see the Dead Kennedys in 85, I couldn’t get anyone else to go with me.
The sound man scolded us for having crappy cables, they made the system crackle. It was obvious we didn’t know what we were doing. The backstage smelled like baked ziti, which apparently we were meant to eat? I didn’t realize that clubs were responsible for feeding touring bands. The headliners were nowhere to be seen. They had the good sense go find something else for supper.
A lot of our friends turned out. We had eight or nine songs by this point so it was respectable. Jason broke a string and, of course, had no back-up, so Bill and Mike and I improvised something while he fixed it. This happened so often it was almost part of our act. On the whole, it was a pretty good set.
The Goo Goo Dolls didn’t like us. They were a Buffalo band at that point, but they’d been signed and didn’t have much patience for us. They did a killer cover of Don’t Fear the Reaper that night.
Big Dipper from Boston were the headliners, and they were actually pretty nice to us. The singer sat at the bar talking with Bill for some time. They had a song on the radio then, now I can’t remember what it was.
After the show, our friend Jonathan from Baby J wrote a good review for the paper, and lots of other shows came our way. We did a record store appearance even though we didn’t have a record. We played outside a candy store a couple of times. The guy who owned the candy store liked us, and kept paying us.
We played a punk show at the VFW. The other bands all dressed like punk rockers and sneered at us, like, “You’re not punkers.”
We were, like, “Neither are you.” It was 1988. We loved the Minutemen and wanted to play like them. Beyond that, we understood that we’d moved beyond both punk and post-punk at this point. What came next it seemed like we were inventing.
One day in June, our friend Tony came down to the basement where we practiced. He’d just gotten a four-track recorder, we were finally going to record these songs we’d been playing live. Thing was, he didn’t know how to use it yet. The rest of us didn’t know how it worked either. After an hour, we left the basement. No recording.
The next week, Bill and I graduated. A week after that, we both moved to New York City.
Was this the end of Elephant Gun?
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