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Like many teenagers, I was in a garage band in high school.  That’s when garage bands actually played in the garage, or the basement, or in our case the loft of one of our members parent’s house.  There were eight of us in the band and I was the last to join, although we did add another member a few years later.

I was the only girl in the band when I joined…so there were seven guys and me.  And the reason I joined was because I had a crush on the drummer :-).  The reason I was ALLOWED to join is still a mystery to me.  I think they needed a singer.  I got kicked out when I tried to play guitar.  I guess I wasn’t very good then, or, at least, I didn’t play the songs that these guys played, so it didn’t work out.  But they still needed a singer, so somehow I was allowed back.  It was customary to kick somebody out of the band every now and then, just to keep it fresh 🙂

We had a funny name:  Estipod.  It was a sort of bastardized version of a Welsh word meaning a group of musicians.  The drummer found it in the dictionary when we were looking for a name and nobody could think of anything else.  Actually I wasn’t in the band then, otherwise I’m sure I would have come up with something more memorable.  Ahem.

Well as soon as you put a band name on posters, you’re kind of stuck with it.  And even though we tried several times to change it, we could never agree on anything else.  So Estipod it was.  Over time I think we realized that we could never change that name;  it was who we were.

Most of our practices were at the parent’s place of two of our members.  They had an odd sort of house;  it was a split level which they had built on top of to create extra rooms…essentially it looked like someone had just dropped a barn on top of a house.  But we would cram ourselves in there and blow a fuse or two almost every weekend.  A few times the neighbours complained and we ended up with the police knocking on the door.  The father of the house was occasionally known to turn off the power in the house when he’d had enough of us.  I don’t know how they put up with us really…we had a full drum kit, tons of amps and several brass instruments and mics pounding away on top of them for hours on end sometimes.

It was a little strange being the only girl in the band.  First of all, I never got their jokes.  There was always some reference to something the guys had seen or done together that I was just not privy to.  But I’d laugh along and pretend I knew what they were talking about.  Then there were the songs.  Most of the cover songs we played were written for a male voice and the topics were often around female love interests, and there was little I could do to re-word the lyrics to fit me (ie David Bowie‘s “wham, bang, thank you ma’am” from Suffragette City particularly annoyed me), but I would belt them out as best I could.  I never could hear myself anyway.

We really didn’t get anywhere other than playing a few gigs in a couple of roller rinks (that’s when people actually tied on roller skates and skated around a rink to live music) and pizza joints and the odd backyard performance for our friends.  Eventually we all went our separate ways, some off to higher education, others to jobs, moving out of our parent’s neighbourhoods and off on our own.  And at some point, we decided we should have a reunion.  This was around the time when The Band released “The Last Waltz”, so we decided to call our reunion “The Last Polka”.  I think we held this event about 4 or 5 times in as many years.  We  rented a hall and invited all of our friends, some of the guys’ girlfriends made lots of food and we got a liquor license so we could have beer.  It was great fun…probably the reason we kept doing it.

Over time, even the polkas fell by the wayside as we all grew up and got married (I married the drummer) and started families.  In more recent years with most of our kids grown and some nostalgia setting in, we’ve have a few more reunions and they’ve always been great fun.  When we can find an excuse together, we do.  And an excuse came a few weeks ago when we heard that the barn-house was going to be sold (well, probably leveled, actually), and we decided to get together for one last jam in the same room, just the eight of us.

So there we were a little older (okay, a lot older) crammed into the loft once again, two elderly parents downstairs, one with a set of headphones on so he could tolerate us, and the other upstairs with us, thoroughly enjoying the idea of all of us being together in her house again.  We played poorly but we laughed well 🙂  And a few times we actually sounded like something…we rocked the “Monds.  The “Monds” was our nickname for the subdivision the house is in…every street name ends in “mond”, as in Desmond and Trumond.

We took lots of pictures and video (hopefully they’ll never show up on YouTube!), and kept it down to about an hour.  In the end, we thanked the old folks went our merry way.  And we told ourselves that we are going to do this again.  Soon.  It’s amazing how quickly soon goes by…