A shot at a dream

Even though my younger years on this planet were probably filled with typical activities that a kid would get into such as action figures, video games , things of that sort, from as far back as I can remember music has always been a pretty big part of my life in some shape or form. My earliest musical memories started when I got the guitar hero game for PlayStation 2 when I was probably 9 years old for Christmas. Being that young I think my parents were surprised at the interest I took in a game like that and the music that went along with it , so for the following Christmas, I got an actual electric guitar.

Initially, I thought I could just play it like I did in the game and got fairly discouraged at the time and when I didn’t progress as fast as I had hoped, I put it down for about 4 years, and for all that time it sat in my closet. When I was 13 or 14, midway through my middle school years, something happened where my old attraction to rock and metal music came back in a way that really inspired me to pick the guitar back up and try and make a serious attempt at learning how to play. When I brought this up to my parents, they seemed excited at the idea that I wanted to be constructive in a way and they got me signed up for weekly guitar lessons in Auburn. The first few months of lessons seemed to be very tedious as a lot of what was being taught was really technical beginner things like basic chords and scales, not exactly what I wanted to get out of the experience, but I knew i had to put the time in and eventually my teacher was helping me learn riffs and full songs that I had asked him to teach me upon request.

Then, after 6 months I was confident enough to leave my lessons and self teach myself the rest.Entering high school I took my ability and love for music with me , and as my social circle expanded I meant like-minded people who also wanted to jam and make music, and conveniently, also played drums, guitar and one of my friends wanted to try singing.From here we got to hanging out regularly and playing, mostly senseless jamming until one of my friends wrote a song that we all tried to learn so we could eventually bring it to life in a better way. It was around this time that our school held a “Lip sync” battle contest where a bunch of people got together to lip sync and dance to song’s of their choice and at the end, it was judged and there was a winner. Just for fun, my friends and I had an idea to seek permission to bring our real instruments and try playing our song as the opening act for the lip sync battle and it was approved.

Upon approval, it was kind of a mutual opinion that we shouldn’t have committed to the act because we had barely enough practice to even attempt to play the whole song in front of everyone. By the time we had committed , the contest was only a week of way so we couldn’t even make an attempt to grind out a bunch of practices last minute , so we were aware that we were in for a mess. The day of the show rolled around and we squeezed in one rehearsal last minute before we took the stage and that just further cemented the fact that we were going to mess up, and even further killed the band morale. By the time we were called up to the stage, it was apparent that none of us wanted to be there and we just had to wait it out , it was borderline humiliating.Much to our surprise the intro didn’t sound half bad but as soon as the vocals were supposed to come in we realized we could barely hear them because everything else was way to loud and I think it was that shameful reality that got into our heads and caused us to completely bomb the rest of the song. When it was over we left the stage to a pity applause. Once I got home and the reality of what just happened started to subside, I heard from my mom that she got a full video recording of the performance and I had sat down to watch it, ready to be humiliated, but was actually surprised at how un-bothered I was watching it. In fact, halfway through the video something struck me as hilarious about the whole situation and I just became hysterical. I was surprised at how the evidence of such a shameful moment was so unapologetic-ally hilarious to me. After watching it 2 or 3 times i sent it around to my other fellow musicians and surprisingly they had the same reaction i did. We had turned a shameful moment into a memory that we joke about or reference in a humorous way almost every time we get together to practice and it still has yet to lose its original charm.

Photo on Foter.com