Sometime during my ninth or tenth grade of high school, my brothers and I entered ourselves into the school talent show under the band name of "Full Force." I don't think we knew very much about micing our amps or the drums nor did we own any type of effect pedal for say distorting our electric guitar sound. This would be our first big show.
A few weeks earlier, during the audition, I had the unfortunate experience of freezing up while trying to sing "Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers" by ZZ Top. Alas, I had a new lifelong nemesis, stage fright, anxiety, and fear of anything public! None-the-less the band was still allowed to enter the contest. And so instead of doing a piece with lyrics we did an instrumental piece that we had written ourselves. We played it with our amps and guitars turned up as loud as we could go but with zero effect pedals on the guitars.
I remember being totally blown away by the other band, led by a kid named Sanji, and the totally FAT, distortion pedaled guitar sound, during the opening riff of their rendition of Smoke on The Water by Deep Purple. My brothers and I just looked at each other and committed then and there that we needed to find out how to replicate that sound for ourselves.
Interestingly, instead of my brother Marc on the drums, a neighborhood friend of ours and fellow classmate, Andy Grube sat in on the kit. Speaking of Andy, he could play, practically beat by beat, note by note, the drum-centric piece "YYZ" by Rush. In fact, in the following year, Andy Grube entered the talent show by-himself, as a solo drummer, and performed "YYZ" to perfection.
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