Art Photo Music

My high school battle of the bands was one of the deciding moments of my life. Although I didn't win it, it was the time I decided that I wanted to be a musician. Up until the battle of the bands, music was just something that I did for fun. It was a blast to get together with friends and make a lot of noise in the garage. We wrote our own original songs as well as covering some of the classics from the 60s. We loved classic rock more than grunge, and dedicated ourselves to preserving old music.

We sort of entered the battle of the bands on a whim. It actually felt like a joke to us. We played gigs at friends houses, but weren't very competitive. The band battle was just a way to get a little bit more exposure and have fun playing in front of our friends. As the battle of the bands got closer, however, we sort of got caught up in the spirit of it. It was contagious. There were so many bands that were aggressively promoting themselves, and we didn't want to be left behind. Soon, we were handing out free demos at school, practicing practically every day, and coming up with some new songs specifically targeted for our audience.

In retrospect, we sort of overprepared for the battle of the bands. We planned a whole set, rehearsing every choreographed move as well as every lick and cord. When the contest actually came out, however, we only had time for three quick songs. Because we had the whole stage show set up, it sort of threw us off. We had to start in the middle and skipped some of our best songs rather than playing things in the order we had intended to play them in.

Nevertheless, we did pretty well. We weren't in the top three, but we got quite a bit of applause. I would say that we were the fourth or fifth out of about 25 bands. That isn't a bad showing, particularly because we were playing music that wasn't in the style that was popular at the time. I think if we had played grunge with the proficiency that we used for classic rock, the might have been even better. As it was, I was pretty satisfied with the showing. I was hooked on the attention and the feel of the crowd cheering us on.