how the band got formed

January 22nd, 2008

     We get a lot of inquiries from the press, historical societies, Rolling Stones magazine and the Smithsonian Museum, how is it the Band got its start?  How did a Musical Force the likes of which hasn’t been heard in these parts since Gramma served up those half cooked baked beans that awful winter of ’62, how did it come together?  Or as Prof Bezalel would phrase it – what is its ETIOLOGY??
 

     A good question, Perfessor.  Truth is, it was Erich’s mom who can take the credit.  Her boy was getting ready to move lock stock and wine barrel down to the South End and we were over to one of their moving- in barbecues, some kind of burnt animal on the grill, and Mrs. Schweiger was fretting over what would become of her baby boy down here in the culturally challenged wilds of the South End.  She was wringing her hands and holding her head and kinda starting a low moan.  There’s no theater here, she’d say and wring her piano playing hands some more.   There’s no concerts, she’d say and tear some more at her hair.  There’s really nothing here, she’d say and we’d start to go around all over again.
     Now, I didn’t know Erich ALL that well myself, but I could see obviously Mrs. Schweiger had had someone ELSE raise him.  This was a boy who wasn’t even FROM Wisconsin who’d search out the nearest taverns every weekend trying to find one showing the Green Bay Packers.  It isn’t a Philharmonic, the Packers, it’s a football team. I AM from Wisconsin.  Culture IS the Packers there.  Mrs. Schweiger didn’t have a thing to worry about concerning the South End and Erich’s continuing aesthetic journey.
 

     But she DID ask me and I’d said, now now, Mrs. S, it isn’t like he’s moving to the Ozarks or the South Pole …or Green Bay for that matter.  YOU”D a lied to her too, seeing her extreme distress.  COURSE we got cultural nousishment here, I said.  Poetry readings at the Grange.  Opera at the Performing Hall at Tyee.  Concerts in the Park.  (She didn’t know there’s no park…or that I meant parking Lot)  Theater in the round.  Sounded good to me.  I told her how all these artists and musicians living on the South End were transforming it, practically a Renaissance in the making here.  I was hoping she hadn’t noticed the UFO bus stop or the elephant head rusting on the side of the art gallery that looks like an old garage, which of course it was.  
 

  Anyway she finally quit her moaning little by little and I promised her her boy was gonna be fine.  He wouldn’t revert to one of those barefoot hillbillies who only live to make moonshine or wine and raise hell.  We’d raise him in the worldly ways of South End gentility.  Protect him from the temptations of Stanwood and Gomorrah…     Which is why we started the Band, a kind of Finishing School of Higher Learning.  Imbue him with South End societal ways.  I think we’ve done a fine job with this young man. Altho Mrs. Schweiger doesn’t speak to me any more….  But I blame that on the Green Bay Packers, not the Band.

Entry Filed under: after the rapture (apocalypse then)