Just a minute guitar break

My first press photo

Several years ago I was in a soft rock cover band, aptly named “Soft Supply.” We were direct descendants of the bad hair, bad sing-along choruses, bad over-reverbed guitar solos of the 1980’s cheese-ball soft rock world. Our heroes: Well, of course “Air Supply”. We also dipped our quill in the ink of “Journey”, “Chicago”, “REO Speedwagon (whatever that is)”, and a smattering of one-hit jackasses like Dan Hill (“Sometimes When We Touch”) and Melrose Place’s Jack Wagner (“All I Need”). To sum it up, we were cheese.

And with every band, a press photo had to be acquired. (For what purpose, I could never figure out since we never had a website, nor promoted any of our gigs, or, for that matter, tried to do anything to get the band noticed — and we were rewarded for our nonchalance — A write-up in 2003’s LA Weekly’s best of issue. Classic.)

Back to the band photo. We decided to create the homage to the zillions of other band press photos — keeping the cheese factor in mind. So we headed off to downtown Los Angeles (at the time, a ghost town) and found a graffiti laden brick wall. It was perfect, as if a troupe of art directors had created a set for us. Like something out of a bad Night Ranger video, like there’s any other kind. So we donned our wigs, slipped into our Member’s Only jackets and stuck a pose. The photographer could barely control her laughter.

Until we saw them…

Yes, walking up the garbage-filled street was another band with their photographer. An, no, they didn’t have silly wigs and faux rock and roll clothing. They were for real — long, feathered locks, impossibly tight jeans, rocker earrings. It was like “Stryper” and “Creed” had a baby. Their tasselled leather jackets clicked along with their boot heels stepping through broken glass.

And we were at ‘their’ wall. I imagined a Mexican-band-stand-off to unfold. We would beat them using our working knowledge of the lesser-known album cuts from Phil Collins and a few soft-rock kicks to the face. As they got closer and we got a better look at them, we thought better of battling the real rock band. They weren’t a bunch of doughy, 30-somethings trying to recapture their youth. They were animals — malnourished, street-toughened, gasoline for blood and razor blades for eyes. Or something like that. But there was no way we were going to tussle with these chaps, so we quickly ran to our Geo Metros and Honda Accords and sped out of there. Let them have the wall, we laughed as we drove past them, already in a rockin’ pose, they’re missing the irony of the whole thing. And we turned up the “Christopher Cross” on the car radio.

-s/k

This entry was posted on April 2, 2010 at 12:10 am and is filed under Stories . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.