My Rock n' Roll Past
I was a good kid at school - a sort of hybrid between a hardworking geek and a complete and utter doormat. Hardly the type of pupil to smash up a practice room.

Life picked up a bit when I took up the bass guitar, motivated largely by a dream to appear attractive to womensound like John Entwistle, and also because everyone else was playing the guitar, and I found my friend's guitar too small and fiddly with too many strings.

My school's music department was quite proud of its practice rooms. Basically they had one room of a decent size, and then three or four alcoves with thick doors.

So, with three or four of us sat in one of these tiny rooms, I went to plug my bass in.

My bass has a socket on the bottom of the body, so habitually I would raise it up, neck in the air, to find the appropriate hole and drive home my metallic probe.

This room had a low ceiling, and a strip light covered by one of those flimsy, rectangular plastic shades.

So inadvertently, the head of my bass went straight through the light cover and bought it crashing down on the space in between us. It's amazing nobody was injured by a shard of plastic.

Everyone else in the room was very good, and covered up for me, saying that the cover had just fallen off when we slammed the door.

But for a few days after that, it was kind of nice to have a few people pat me on the back and say "Hey, I saw the way you trashed the practice room..."

For a few days, I was Rock n' fuckin' Roll. Sort of.
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 30 Jan 2009, 17:31, Reply)