A History Lesson of My High School Band

The Napoleans, a Band
During my senior year of high-school, my friend Adam and I wanted to have a band to play in the Lake Brantley High School "Showcase of the Bands". It used to be called a "Battle of the Bands", but they eliminated any sortof competitive elements and it became a showcase.

Adam and I had tried to get into the Showcase our sophomore and junior years with our band "10 Minut Flush" but were unsuccessful. Even leaving a "God I hope we make it... If we don't, I'll kill myself!" message a couple minutes after the last song on our demo didn't convince any teachers to let us play terrible songs for people. Odds are they didn't listen that far, but I'd like to think they just didn't care.

Two failed attempts under our belt, Adam and I knew we had one last chance our senior year. Unfortunately, we didn't have a band. "10 Minut Flush" had dissolved when our drummer moved to Ohio and our bass player joined Crew and didn't have time to practice. Torn asunder by physical distance and physical fitness, our band was lost.

Getting Started

Fortunately, Adam had met some underclassmen who were in a Band called "Panic Attack!" and floated the idea by them to join up with Adam and I and record some songs to get into the Showcase. They already had an empty house with their equipment set up in it, so Adam and I brought our instruments over to see what we could do.

Adam just reminded me of something I forgot, and I am editting this entry to include more facts!

Joel,

That was great. I'm very appreciative of "Joel: The Historian". I'm also really glad that you used me getting gang banged by the band (and loving it) as the link. Look at that grin! Look at that chin!

One thing you overlooked was the circumstances around the recording of the initial "demo". If you remember, we either didn't get around to playing together, what we recorded was total shit, or the recording equipment wasn't working properly before the deadline. However, due to a period of serious rain, which made it physically impossible for students to get to the classrooms housed in portables, they canceled a day of school. The canceled day was the exact one when prospective bands' tapes were due! We went to Brent's house (which was fortuitously empty since he, his Mom, and the insatiable Lucy [Brent's Dog that loved humping the floor] had just moved to an apartment) and recorded all night, fueled by sugar and caffeine since taurine had yet to be discovered.

School getting rained out? An empty house that a bunch of teenagers had free access to? The synchronicity of it all makes me think we were supposed to be a Wyld Stallions, universe shaping band. Unfortunately, that particular future must have spent too much time eating fairly fast food and avoiding sex motels instead of building time machines to come back and tell us how awesome we could be.
--Adam



Things were slow at first. The first thing we did was select a name. We picked up a book and opened to a page and pointed to a word. It was "Napoleon", so we were "The Napoleons". We didn't really know eachother and had no cohesive idea of what kindof music we wanted to play and had a hard time just inventing a song out of nothing but the will to make a song happen. A little frustrated, we went to 7-11 to get some fuel for making music. Big Gulps and Chewy Sweet-Tarts seemed to be a magic combination because once we had those we came up with a couple of songs in no time.




"Quickie Motel" was based of a very simple accordion riff I played that Brent was able to turn into a solid song with guitar and vocals. Adam didn't particularly care for it, which might be due to it's standard/simple/boring I-IV-I-V bass-progression.

"Spelling" started with a bassline from Adam that Brent played wanking guitar on-top-of. I improvised some words about speak-n-spells and and threw in some call-and-response and it worked. After that, any time I tried to write words down for the song they seemed forced and lame, so I continued to improvise them, causing me a good deal of anxiety before shows. One note, we actually changed the band name from "The Napoleons" to "The Napoleans" because I spelled it that way in the call-n-response part of the first recording of "Spelling". I may love to spell, but I'm not very good at it.

It should be noted that none of it would've worked if Rustin hadn't been such a great drummer. He was not particularly complicated or technical, but playing an appropriate beat for each part of the song, keeping time perfectly, and knowing how and when a song should end totally kept us from being a mess or a sprawling jam-band. I had never worked with a drummer that competant, and it was amazing.

Our 2-song demo was complete. The songs were a bit long (not surprising since they were essentially jam sessions) but there was some bit of magic to them.




Getting Together

Later that month, the band-roster for the Showcase was announced and we made it! We were super excited, and began the effort to craft a few more songs to round out the 15 minute set we would need. We started practicing a few times a week, or we tried to. Adam had recently started dating someone, and was sometimes hard to get a hold of. He once hid from us as we knocked on the door of the house his car was outside of. At one of a few missed practices, Brent, Rustin, and I felt we couldn't really practice without him, so we used our wasted time to form a band called "The Adam Sucks" and wrote a bunch of songs about how we wished he would die. He didn't, and that was for the best.

Each day at school, we would pass around small notebook between classes, and whoever had it would write song-lyrics or draw pictures and comics in it during the next class, and hand it off to someone else afterwards. A couple of new Napoleans songs were born this way.

Our first public show was at my 18th birthday. We were using my parents' living room as a practice space, and so after a day at the park playing volleyball, we came back to my house and had cake and then The Napoleans played. We were pretty sloppy and played a few songs there that we would retire soon afterwards (including an instrumental or two since we didn't have any words for some songs). The show ended when we covered the Veruca Salt song "Seether" 7-8 times until almost all of my friends left. Then we went to see the MacCauly Culkin film "The Pagemaster" at the dollar theater.

As the Showcase approached, our practices increased, but also got more frustrating. Our first two songs had flowed out of us, but coming up with new ones the same way didn't seem to work. Sometimes someone would bring a part of a song and we'd try to hammer out a gem from it, but it rarely worked. Writing songs at practice usually resulted in an embarrassing improvised tune about being sodomized by an xmas tree, or a boring instrumental, and always plenty of instrument switching as people became bored with what they were playing.




Brent managed to write a song that worked for us, but only because he had the words and structure down before practice. "Sn'SP" was short for "Steak n' Shake Posse" and was a song that Brent wrote referencing our 'gang' of friends and our love for eating at "Steak n' Shake". The song was pretty straight-up punk and didn't have room for an accordion, so I switched to second guitar when we played it.

Brent sang on most of the songs, having the most cohesive singer/songwriter chops, but everyone sang a song. We added the song "Creepy Jackalope Eye" by the Supersuckers to the set and Adam sang that, and Rustin sang "Seether" when we played it.

Getting Ready



The week before the Showcase, we made flyers to advertise our gig. We pulled drawings and pictures from our notebooks and pieced together 7 different flyers for the $3 show. Here's what we came up with.

The day before the Showcase we went through our set and recorded it to make sure we were timing it right. A big problem was that a few songs had no set structure. Both "Quickie Motel" and "Spelling" had been pared down from their original 5+ minute versions, but where changes occured and when the song ended was still largely based on feel and Rustin's gut. We were still a bit shaky, but eventually we figured that all we could do was play it and hope we didn't mess up any songs so bad that we'd have to restart them. We didn't mind embarrassing ourselves, but we didn't want to suck.




On the day of the show, we skipped school, telling our teachers we had to go set-up for the Showcase. We went to a thrift store to buy stage-costumes. Brent and I had a friend cut our hair with clippers. I opted for a checkerboard, while he went with the double-mohawk. On the way to the Showcase we stopped by 7-11 to get Big-Gulps and Chewy Sweet-Tarts, hoping to recreate the magic of our initial performance.

The Big Event

Here's the recording off the boards of that performance.

Here, I "liveblog" it for you.


Getting Going
We were pretty happy with how it went. We knew we had plenty of mess-ups, but the big things that we expected to go wrong didn't.

Afterwards, the sound guys gave us a recording of the performance on cassette, and we then dubbed it onto cheap tapes we'd get in the Camelot bargain bins (recording over old Ratt albums) and sold them for $1 in the cafeteria the next week.

We played a couple of other shows after that. One at the LBHS "Culture Fair", which was an outdoor event in the football stadium. We played on the track and since Rustin couldn't be there we had to get our College friend Brian Costello to play drums for us. While it wasn't our best performance, there were some bright moments.

-We opened for ourselves as "John Carter and the Totally Banners" and played a Mummies cover and got our favorite teachers to dance around.
-Kids could buy fruit at the Environmental Club booth, which some people threw at us. After getting pelted with an orange, I picked it up and ate it.
-Brian led us and our audience in an acapella hand-claps version of "God Gave Rock n' Roll To You".
-Adam nearly got in a fight with a weasely white-power kid who wanted his band to play after us on our instruments. Adam ended up pinning the kid against the side of my car and the kid yelled "Administrator!".

The other show we played was at a Church Battle of the Bands, which was actually a battle. We were 'beaten' by a ska-band that had been around for a few years and was actually 'good'.

Getting Gone

The band dissolved in the summer of 1995 as Adam and I were going off to college. Before I left for Tallahassee, 4 hours away, Brent gave me a picture he painted of the Napoleans logo with the words:

The Napoleans
Gone But Not Forgotten (yet)

10 Year Reunion?
1994 -

Now I can officially say "No, there was no 10 year Reunion, even though we've all kept in touch. That's sortof lame."

And it is.