The first band I was in when I was about 15-16 was basically us playing about 10 Eric's Trip covers. I'm pretty sure it was mainly the "Love Tara" album, but we didn't consider ourselves to be a cover band at all.

i dug limp bizkit

Andrew L. wrote:When I was 13 I had long hair and looked like a girl. And by that I mean anyone who didn't know me assumed I was a girl. During those girly times I once saw what I thought was a great blues performer at a music festival. I went up to talk to him and buy a CD after his set. He was wearing cowboy boots and his shirt was unbuttoned halfway down his chest. I remember we talked about Ry Cooder. When he handed me his CD he leaned in and planted a solid kiss halfway on my lips and said, "you're a sweet girl."

Don't remember who the guy was or what I did with the CD. But I remember the stubble and the kiss.

Another:

I played in a band in junior high/early high school. I was supposed to be the "lead guitarist" because I was the guitarist who didn't sing. But I couldn't play lead at all. We went into a studio to record and I couldn't come up with any lead parts so our drummer came out from his little isolation room and did all the overdubs. Then I learned to play them off the recording. So sad.

The part about being mistaken for a girl still happens to me from time to time.

When I got a 4-track for a present as a teenager, I immediately plugged straight in, recorded hours of garbage bedroom death metal, overdubbing to use every track. Then I played that tape in my portable Walkman and was very confused. More embarrassing is that only recently did I figure out how to do an effects loop on the thing. What can I say, I always lose manuals.


There's no way I'll tell the one about when I tried to join Melvins' fan club.

At first, I was going to say "I haven't listened to Silkworm yet," but I'm not embarrassed about that. Why should I be? I hadn't listened to Slint until some months ago either...

Um, maybe that should be it. That I hadn't listened to Slint until some months ago. (I sent a copy of Spiderland in a package of six CD's to the girl who has now become my girlfriend. She really likes it. Slint = Music You Can Give To People Who Will Start To Date You. She doesn't dig Zen Arcade. Oh well...not everyone likes hardcore.)

Well, I'll go with this one: I listened to Limp Bizkit in 8th grade. And liked it for a couple months.

Forgive me, lord. Please. I didn't know what I was doing. I was young and stupid. (I now loathe them, obviously, but...they were pretty big in 1999. And part of it was because they were so stupid.)

A moment in my rock music education that later became illuminating: I wrote at least five reviews on Amazon.com about CD's I'd actually never listened to. And they became featured customer reviews for at least six to eight months. It showed me that you really don't need to know anything to be a music journalist, which pisses me off...I still want to be a music journalist, but one who knows the shit inside and out.

you know, i've been listening to the dead milkmen for about twenty years. and it turns out that i've always heard their lyrics incorrectly...

riding the bus home from the halen show this morning, had "eat your paisley" on the ipod...

never understood the line in "the thing that only eats hippies" about bob and craig and graham - ok sure, it's bob dylan and graham nash, but who the fuck is craig? i never heard of no hippie named craig.

wait a second... bob and greg and grant. it's a husker du joke. holy shit. i've been missing that joke for literally 20 years. goddammit.

Mumbled my way through 3 songs that I never got around to writing lyrics to at practice and at shows. When we got to the studio, the rest of the band decided to record 2 of them. I went outside with a spiral notebook while they were miking the drums. The guitar player went outside for a smoke and asked what I was doing. I gave him a bullshit line but he smelled the crap. They wound up pretty decent but I did feel like a dickhead at the time.