OUR FIRST SHOW EVER

Today (and for the next few entries here) I’m going to head back to the photo albums. And when I say photo albums, ultimately, that means going back old, old school. Not just old school like most of these posts, but WAAAY back.

Thus, today, we’re talking about The Tazmanians once again and these photos of our very first show in the basement of a church. This is interesting because it was our first show as a band but more importantly, it was our first show ever. None of us had ever played music before in front of any sort of crowd. Until this moment in time, our experience was playing music (or trying our best to play something that resembled music) in a small shed in Chris’s parents backyard, my parent’s garage, or any other variety of locations lent to us, free of charge, by our parents.


T.J. singing.

T.J., Greg, Ron, Chris and I were in 9th grade which dates these photos to 1989. We had started our first band that summer and had worked up a few songs and a lot of covers. We spent time at lunch drawing pictures of ourselves playing shows imagining what it would be like to have real amplifiers and a crowd to actually watch us play music. We dreamt of being good (even tho we knew we were badass which is not the same thing) and we tried to wrap our young minds around how one might go about getting a show…anywhere. So we did what any resourceful group of young lads might do. We played for our Boy Scout troop.


Ron playing guitar.

Now, it might be a bit of a contradiction to imagine young suburban punk kids also belonging to a boy scout troop but alas, that’s who we were. However, I should explain that our boy scout troop wasn’t what one imagines when thinking of scouting. We all loved camping being outdoors and the assorted things that came along with boy scouts and it ended up being more of a gang than anything resembling an ordered scouting experience. But nonetheless, we were scouts and as far as we could tell, our scout troop and our meeting place in the basement of a local church was our only hope at finding a venue and a crowd.


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So, we convinced our scout master (sounds funny saying that phrase to this day…scout master) if we could play one night and he said yes. Looking back it was incredibly cool of him. But then again, he was a great guy who supported all of our lunacy as an odd bunch of rogue kids so I guess it was just another statement of his own badassery.


Me on the bass.

We settled on a date and after one of our more amusing scout meetings, walked over to our instruments and banged out our tunes. I can’t recall what we played. I can’t recall how long we played for. But I can tell you that we played for maybe 8 people and that was enough because in that moment, we all felt like we could do or be anything.

More importantly, we were punks.


Greg on the drums. Please note the roto-toms.


An action shot! Please note the incredible equipment we had.

5 thoughts on “OUR FIRST SHOW EVER

  1. You see, here’s where I wish TJ wasn’t in jail or had internet or something…

    Were we in fact called Tazmanians at this point? My bass has an ultra cool, electrical tape logo that reads AK-47, an earlier iteration of this band. Perhaps we were called that at this point.

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