I'm probably giving too much thought and expression about a band that last played 31 years ago. But I do believe that band was pretty good and could have been on to bigger and better things.
To fill in the gaps and spaces of the happenings many years ago. One thing is certain. We had chemistry and the ability to improvise and extend the jam. Not too many bands do that, even back then most stuck with the record version. But Dennis, Russ and myself we basically self taught ourselves. Out of all the band members who had bar band experience, only Mike Swearingen, Doug Spinler had played in bars. Russ played in the high school pep band. Doug and Russ also took part in variety school talent show. Yours truly did not.
Most of us went to the same high school together, we all were in different classes and graduating years and outside of Russ, I didn't know the others very well till we starting jamming and became then The Open Highway band. Doug Bonesteel took the place of Doug Spinler although, Doug was never an official member. Doug S, was more into country. We were rock and rollers through and through.
Many years ago, when we were in grade school Russ and a third best friend Jeff and I thought about starting up a band called The Living End, but nothing came of it. Jeff had a drum set in his folks house and we basically bashed on the cymbals more than the drums. Once in while we would goof off on Jeff's mom's keyboard. Russ, Jeff and I were pretty tight through the fourth grade and part of the fifth before a certain girl came between me and Jeff and we split apart. Neither one of us got that girl, Jeff found a better woman, as for myself I gave up looking. Recently Jeff and I did managed to talk about the good times and he does play guitar on the side, as a hobby of course. I told him he's welcome to join up to jam if that ever happens.
Out of the Big 3, Russ was the athletic baseball and golf player, Jeff was very handy with the tools and I was a excellent record collector even back then. I had toy drum sets and a guitar to boot but in hindsight I was lousy with practice and didn't invest the time to learn how to play back then. Had I done that, or learn to read music, I might be playing professionally and better known. But I was a loner back then and outside of playing basketball or riding bikes with Russ and Jeff I kept to myself most of the time.
Getting back to Paraphernalia Tyrus. It was hard to keep the band going while Russ was doing his duty to Uncle Sam and since I was very shy and withdrawn, I never did branch out to other bands. I had dealt with stage fright all through this life. And while the guys really want to get serious with the band effort, a part of me wanted nothing more than write original songs. When I came up with Town's Edge Rock, I really thought I could make it on my own with original songs. Problem was Town's Edge Rock was a great album to me but the overall picture was that the songs were not good enough for a downtown bar gig. And the guys look at TE Rock as a hobby album, they tried their best to do a couple songs but looking back, it didn't work out very well. And so I was being dragged kicking and screaming into the new band once Russ came back in 83. It didn't help that I was quitting one day and then coming back the next week.
For a up and coming bunch of friends trying to impress our friends and family, we never could find the idea guitar player to compliment Dennis. By then Dewayne Schminkey found a career job at the sewage plant and couldn't be a part of the Tyrus band. We didn't try out too many guitar players, there was Tom Tjarks but he wanted to be in a working band. We ended up on Will Sigsbee, who like Doug Bonesteel could play rhythm guitar but not so much lead. Will played in the band for about three months and finally we parted company with him after a disastrous outdoor kegger party in May, It rained all day and when we came around to play, the skies parted and they heard us all the way into Cedar Rapids as far as Bowman Woods. And to this day, I can't understand why we started at 8 PM, when we should have started much earlier than that. I'm still amazed that we managed to do about an hour's worth of loud music before the Marion Cops shut us down. To which on Season Of The Witch, Will finally played lead guitar....throughout the damn song. No wonder he eventually went to college and is now a highly successful CEO at a Minnesota health care place.
When we talk about the old days, the biggest gripe was that our lead singer didn't help us get further into the music scene. I know we were constantly reminding Mike to get us to the local bar scene and he had reservations about our guitar player situation. Dennis came into the band as a harmonica player but he worked his butt off trying to be a lead guitar player since nobody else could or would play lead guitar. Shawn Ster came on board as a guest star, like Mike he was in another band and was a hired hand from the start. The thought was that perhaps that Shawn might have connections and maybe he might get the word out but in the back of my mind he was there at Mike's suggestion. And that was as far as it goes. He might have some photographer taking pictures of the band but he had a way to get into her pants. He could play lead guitar, since being in other bands, he could apply what he learned as lead guitarist, even if it meant hitting the whammy bar or hair metal leads. Shawn was a short term player and he would go on to a career headlining his own band and solo career the next three decades. He's good at what he does but in our band it was a clash of styles and it sounds like it on certain songs.
What I recall, the Wednesday Night show, was feedback laden and a painful exercise of getting through but something told me to record the next night show and I did. It's a document of a band that finally made it to the corner bar of their own home town and was proud of being there, and we gave it our all. Listening to it all, by the time we got to the final set, I was wore out from that playing. Musically Dennis and Russ came into their own and even Shawn did sound good from time to time, it did help a lot that he did sing on a few songs and let Mike rest his voice. The roughness of Lonely Is The Night and On The Hunt is evident, as our lead singer struggles with the arrangements. I think we worked up On The Hunt about two weeks before the OK lounge show.
We can only speculate what would have happened after the show. We were losing Russ back to Uncle Sam and Mike was making better money with the other band. We could have played New Year's Eve 1984 had we found a bass player. With Russ gone, Mike elsewhere, it left me and Dennis and I really didn't feel that gong ho about continuing on. I really needed to get a real job since 32 dollars take home pay for one night wasn't going to pay bills or rent. But I did put Paraphernalia Tyrus on hiatus for about 30 years till I finally retired the name once and for all. In 1985, Mike drafted me to join him in a new version of Stone Garden a band with Virgil Hanson and Rick Novak and a bass player who I forgot his name and we did about a couple weeks of rehearsal before Virgil and Rick got into a violet argument and that was it.
Looking back, I should have been more enthused and more into keeping the band going. I know Dennis would have wanted it that way too. If I had the confidence that I do nowadays and be able to sing on some of the songs that would have worked well. But I was trying to find my voice in 1985 and I didn't feel I was up to sing anything outside of what I wrote. Things are much different today; jam sessions have enabled me to sing live and having 3 decades of music written and sang have helped a great deal. Russ still can play the bass, Dennis is now an airline pilot and hasn't picked up a guitar in quite a while but he has two sons that can play. Mike is mostly retired except hosting his karaoke show at Checker's Tavern from time to time. I learn to never say never and I have been hearing from Russ about doing this all over again. And he's been known to show up at a jam session from time to time.
We'll see. If we can work around a evening job and other life happenings it can be possible. All things are possible.
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