This weekend is my (gulp) 20 year HS reunion. My old band (and first band), Silent Majority, will be rocking the house on Saturday. Ok, actually we're just going to be background music, but in our minds the high school lunchroom will be transformed into Madison Square Garden. As you can see from the above photo (my all-time favorite by the way), taken at the Hood Amphitheater (aka their driveway) when I was a senior, it was a lot of fun. We weren't very good but we didn't know or care. Looking at the photo, I see three things in that photo that I miss: my blond Rickenbacker bass, my Woody Allen T-shirt, and my cadaverous figure.

My dad was a musical influence on me growing up, having played in high school and college himself (and still to this day in fact). I was somewhat of a jock as a kid and played football, baseball and basketball up until 7th grade. After that, football and baseball became too much of a pain in the ass but I stuck with basketball. However, I was one of those players who was good enough to make the team but was primarily a benchwarmer. When I got to high school in 10th grade, I decided I’d try out for the JV basketball team. The coach was also a football assistant, so the first workouts consisted mainly of a bunch of us goofing off in the gym until football practice was over.

That same week, some buddies and I decided to “jam” one afternoon at my friend Bart's house. It went well and we decided to practice a couple of times a week. Once football season was over, the coach (who was also quite a prick I might add) decided to make us show up at school every morning at 6AM to run a mile on the track. Anyone who knows me can see where this is going - after all, I'm a lover not a runner. At that point, I weighed my options: either spend 3 hours a day busting my ass and sitting on the bench for my efforts or form a band to play at parties where we would drink beer, meet chicks and hopefully make a little money. Gee…what a decision.

Needless to say, I chose the latter and we called ourselves The Side Effects (which would later be changed to Silent Majority after we discovered another band with the same name). The four of us, Bart, David, Brent and I (along with our friend Beth on keys for a short time) played all through high school and sporadically during our first couple of years in college. David and I went on to form Three Hour Tour and the rest is history. This weekend will be interesting. We'll probably hit some right notes, most likely will suck in other spots, but we'll definitely have a blast.