Early on, I remember that my dad's band ( the Mar-Teks ) would practice in the living room. At one point, he ran a dance club ( the Twilight Zone ) in my hometown(Dothan, Alabama), and somewhere in there the Mar-Teks did a show with Roy
Orbison (and loaned their equipment to Orbison's band, because Roy's equipment truck was late).
A few years later, I often listened to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, playing along with the trumpet parts on paper and comb kazoo. When I enrolled at Rusheon Junior High School in Bossier City, Louisiana, my mom encouraged me to join the band program. I wanted to play sax, but wound up playing the baritone( euphonium ) until my junior year('73-74) at New Caney ( Texas ) High School. I switched to tuba and Sousaphone to fill the slot left open when the tuba section ( Tony Chilton and John Paul Jones ) graduated. And, no, it wasn't that John Paul Jones.
About this time, I also joined the school's stage band, playing bass on a guitar strung with bass strings, and soon borrowed some equipment to form my first rock band, Nantucket. During my senior year in high school, I was the only bassist in the stands, on the field for the half-time show, or onstage...I was hooked. All of Nantucket's members got jobs at Right Machine Company in Houston, Texas, which was owned by the brother of our rhythm guitarist, Tommy Mullane.
As soon as I could afford it, I bought my dream bass (a white Rickenbacker 4001) and an Acoustic 370 amp to play through. Nantucket continued to do small shows for a while, but the band split up in 1978. I packed my stuff into my black-over-yellow '72 Pontiac Luxury LeMans, tied the speaker cabinet onto the roof, and moved to Birmingham, Alabama, to attend Jefferson State Junior College.
My first major was computer science, which was a little different back then:
We input each of our programs with great stacks of punched cards - each student had to sit down at a card puncher and type a single Fortran or Basic command for each card, then carry those (hundreds of) cards in order over to the card reader. The reader would grab them from the stack one at a time, read them and send the command to the CPU in the middle of the room...if you had typed all the commands correctly, and if the cards were still in the right order, then you would be rewarded when the printer issued forth a legible sheet showing whatever you had asked the computer to do, with all the numbers in the right place or whatever.
No keyboard ( except on the cardpunch ), no monitor, no
graphics, no mouse, no scanner, no speakers, no disk drives, no CD-roms, no joysticks, no hard drives, no zip drives, no modems, nothing...
that was exactly what we had:
diddley squat.
It was glorious.
...with gratitude and apologies to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr....
All text Copyright 1997-2004 Michael E. Carpenter All Rights Reserved
Someday, when I have time, future histories could include band stories about Gypsy, Stillbrook, Sleeper, Half and Half, John Doe, Wolf Creek, the Ray Guns, the Kilowatt Kids, the Cash Houston Band, Donna Hopkins and Variety, Mixed Company, Zero Plus, Zero Plus Three, American Made, Sheep's Clothing, Catch of the Day, the Stingrays, Spilt Milk and Skunkmonkey. Maybe.
Favorite Groups
In the late sixties and seventies,
I listened to a lot of Alice
Cooper, Emerson, Lake &
Palmer, Chicago, Deep
Purple,
Grand Funk Railroad, Kraftwerk, Genesis, Pink
Floyd, Yes, and Frank Zappa.
Then I added Crack
The Sky, Gentle
Giant, Electric
Light Orchestra, Rush,
Santana,
Robin
Trower, ZZ Top, Climax
Blues Band, Weather
Report, Renaissance,
Steve Morse and the Dregs, David Bowie, Focus, Jethro Tull, Queen,
King Crimson,
Osibisa, Led Zeppelin, Nektar, the Who, Black Sabbath,
the Beatles,
Brian
Eno, Little Feat, Devo, Elvis
Costello, The
Doors, Captain Beefheart,
Talking Heads, the Clash, the Specials, Stanley
Clarke, Peter Gabriel,
Tom Petty,
Steve Miller Band,
Supertramp, Jeff
Beck, Steely Dan,
...and then the eighties began...
so I added Jaco
Pastorius, Adam and the Ants, the B52s,
Camper Van Beethoven,
Thomas Dolby, the Dead Milkmen, They Might Be Giants,
David Byrne, UB40,
Timbuk3, Spinal Tap, Wazmo
Nariz, the Stranglers, Orchestra Luna, The
Rutles,
...and in the nineties I supplemented my collection with
Phish, Soundgarden, Martini Ranch, Crash Test Dummies, the Horse Flies,
Primus, Béla
Fleck and the Flecktones, Dread
Zeppelin, Cake...
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