Bad by U2

This is a story of a band I was in during high school. 

Well, kind of.  We only did one real gig. Mercifully, for all involved, especially the audience.

My friends John and Barney were members of the Mormon church and I spent a lot of time with them in high school. Barney was pretty religious, John less so, but we enjoyed the social aspects together. I played 3^rd base on their team in the Mormon softball league and went to the dances they held on Friday nights (we had to be appropriate) and dated a couple of their friends.

Barney played the guitar and wanted desperately to form a band with us.

I can kind of play a few instruments. I never took lessons because I couldn’t stay disciplined enough to practice, but I could play things by ear and figured out how to play guitar, bass and drums – each well enough to handle basic duties, should the need arise for me to step in and take on rock superstardom at any point. It hasn’t yet, but I will post here if it does.

Anyway.

The three of us spent many afternoons in Barney’s bedroom, with me usually on drums, John singing and Barney on guitar.  We wrote a bunch of terrible lyrics and a few songs that weren’t complete disasters, but nothing anyone would really want to hear. We certainly weren’t ready to perform anything live. Every once in a while, my friend Alex would join us. He went to a different high school but we all ended up together most weekends. Alex could sing a little bit and had written some lyrics. He took an interest in what the three of us were doing. 

But then a call came.

“We got a gig!” Barney told us at school one day.

He was thrilled. I was terrified. And confused. I didn’t know we were looking for gigs. But there it was: we were going to be performing as a band. We didn’t even have a name. I think we were going by either Stereo. Or L’Image or maybe The Face. Real compelling stuff.

And then the details came in. We were going to be playing two songs at a banquet.  At the Mormon church. For widows. Elderly women who had lost their husbands.  It was called “The Widows’ Banquet”.

Stereo/L’Image/The Face was the entertainment. Headliners.

Surely, we’d find two great songs to perform?!  A classic or two?  Maybe something by The Beatles? Buddy Holly?  Perry Como even?

Well.

This was, after all, our first gig. A chance to see how an audience would respond to our musical stylings.  The beginning of the road to rock superstardom! I warmed to the idea.

Alex had written lyrics to a song called “Dance It Till It’s Gone” – a 15-year-old’s ode to giving it all you’ve got for a shot at rock and roll superstardom. We all switched to different instruments so we’d have a bass player, which meant Barney played bass. I took the guitar duties, John moved to drums and Alex handled the lead vocals on his song.

Catchy enough, naïve and mostly inoffensive, except for a line about “not enough drinks/not enough smokes”.  Perfect for this crowd.

So of course, that was the perfect choice for song #1.  An original. What would we choose for song #2?

Barney’s dad (Barney Sr.) was a musician who played in bands when he was younger. He built a guitar from scratch for Barney, and I remember listening to him play his guitar in the living room at their house and trying to teach me a bass line that wouldn’t have been out of place in something by the Monkees or any other 60’s pop group. He shared his love of playing music with his son, with whom he was very close and who was very devoted to trying to make our young band into something. In the years that followed, Barney Jr would get into New Order and Depeche Mode, whose music would significantly influence his guitar playing.

Alex was going through a phase at that time, wearing a trenchcoat and sporting a flat-top haircut under a yellow fisherman’s hat. He had taken a liking to non-mainstream music and had developed sophisticated tastes, with bands like Lloyd Cole & The Commotions, The Go-Betweens and U2 before they were globally famous.  He’d eventually learn to play guitar and we wrote a few songs together. He even taught himself how to play drums and bass, and wrote a whole batch of songs on his own, some of which he recorded one summer while living by himself in a house in Lubbock, Texas.

John was the only one of us who was trained to sing. He was a member of the Phoenix Boys Choir, which was a pretty big deal back then and they used to sing at events all over the state. So of course it made sense for us to stick him on drums with no vocal mic.  He retired from the Air Force a couple of years ago.

So, how were we going to rock those widows? What song did we play for song #2?

While I can’t say for sure, it had to be Alex’s love of U2 that somehow convinced us that “Bad” by U2 was the choice.  

Don’t get me wrong: “Bad” is an amazing U2 song. It’s one of their best live moments and fan favorites, with The Edge’s signature ringing guitar and some seriously soaring Bono vocals. Even if you hate U2, you have to respect this one. It wasn’t a hit single, the studio version was from “The Unforgettable Fire” but the incredible live version from the “Wide Awake In America” EP gave it new life, especially after their 12-minute version of it at Live Aid in mid 1985. 

Still, most histories of the song say it’s about the effects of heroin addiction or addiction in general.  A natural fit for the closing number for a Mormon church’s widows’ banquet!

Dressed inexplicably in stage gear consisting of a baby blue sweatshirt and cargo pants, I set up the guitar and amp I borrowed from Barney. The other guys assembled their instruments to the corner of the extremely brightly fluorescent-lit room and watched as 15 or 20 women and their church-assigned young companions filed in and sat at banquet tables.  I don’t remember the dinner part but they ate apprehensively, I assume.  At some point there was an introduction to Stereo/L’Image/The Face and we launched into Alex’s song.

I remember a room of mostly stone-faced stares and genuinely puzzled looks.  The others just covered their ears and didn’t hide their pain. It wasn’t that we were that bad, just too loud and probably the absolute last thing that septugenarian women were interested in hearing in 1987.

We finished “Dance”, worked through the aptly titled version of “Bad” and left to a smattering of polite applause, rock and roll dreams deferred to another time.

I’ve seen U2 live so many times over the years. “Bad” is always a favorite. It reminds me of hanging out with Alex when we were young and figuring out what we loved about rock music that wasn’t on the radio or MTV. The live version still requires me to crank up the volume to hear the Edge ride the guitar arpeggio at the end of the song. The volume also helps suppress the inevitable memory of our one and only gig at the Widow’s Banquet.

Over the next couple of years, Alex went on to do his own musical things. John and Barney and I were joined by a guy named Eric, whose mother was a professional piano teacher, so he had some very cool keyboards and a synthesizer. Barney, ever resourceful, figured out how to break into the church so we could do band rehearsals on the stage in the auditorium while no one was around. We covered more U2, Poison and The Cars, played a couple of cover songs at another church event. We wrote a bunch of new wave/edgy originals with mostly dreadful lyrics that no one ever heard. We even recorded one pop song in a studio, with John singing lead and me on drums and backing vocals, joined by a guy named Mark who could really play the guitar.

I have it around here somewhere, just in case I get the call for rock superstardom.