The day of our first ever live performance began with me on a skateboard. I was right around 14 years old and it was mid morning during a summer break from school. I was still generally too lazy to learn many real tricks, so I was spending this bright, warm morning leaping off my concrete front porch, spinning the board around in the air and landing on it with both feet. You would assume that with the amount of time spent on these front porch and driveway tricks that I would have had more to show for it by now, but like I said, I was simply unmotivated about it. My only true motivation at the age of fourteen was in the form of the electric guitar. And even at such a young impressionable age, I desired intensely to play the guitar well.
The specific reason that I remember so vividly what I was doing on this morning - the morning of our first-ever live performance was because of the wound that I was soon to receive. During one of my “kick flip off the deck” attempts, I miscalculated something and my skateboard flew up and hit me in my own forehead. The impressive miscalculation and mark it left had brought along with it a nice (and possible attention getting) cut an inch or two right above my eyebrows - just in time for our first punk show.
Back then I would use most opportunities with a skateboard or a BMX bike or a musical instrument almost solely for the opportunity to show off in front of girls. But on this humid midwest summer morning I didn’t have anyone around to show off in front of. I wanted to skate alone and calm my nerves with Operation Ivy songs in my head. For me - Operation Ivy wasn’t just a San Fransisco bay area punk band. They were a defining characteristic of who I was as a person. I used to believe that if I could go to school with these songs stuck in my head - that school day would be better. It’s completely possible that I was distracted by the often poetic lyrical content of lead singer Jesse Michaels and company, but it’s also possible that my chain wallet got caught on my leg.
As an adolescent small town punk rocker/skateboarder/soon to be performing musician, I liked to express myself though my clothes, my taste in music, my bad attitude and the length of chain on my wallet. What began a few years prior as a regular length chain wallet, had by this point in time grown to a chain that almost reached my ankle. A local skater friend named Jay from a few towns over had inspired me with the longest chain I’d ever seen hanging off a wallet. I remember the day that I showed up at school with my extra-extra long chain hanging from my back pocket and connecting to a back belt loop of my jeans. I remember walking proudly through study hall with my new chain dangling like a loose pendulum.
I always wore my pair of Alien Workshop skateboard jeans. Whenever my California Cheap Skates (CCS) mail order catalog would show up in the mailbox (and never having a single cent to my name) I had to settle for flipping the pages and dreaming about one day owning a new deck, or even some new clothes to go with it. The most that I was ever able to achieve financially came at the end of the summer that I worked on my uncle’s farm. I stuffed away all of the cash that I made that summer, dedicated entirely to buying myself a pair of Alien Workshop jeans right out of the catalog. That year as summer turned to fall, with my hands sore from months of digging post holes and pulling weeds, I finally had enough money to order myself a pair.
My connection to the Alien Workshop skate brand started one summer when I was camping with my dad and his new family. I was sitting out on the top of a picnic table by myself. I wasn’t allowed to ever step foot inside of the camper with them, but it always sounded like fun in there. Out on that picnic table, I saw a kid about my age skating through the park on an Alien Workshop “The Missing Link” deck. I was instantaneously smitten with that deck and the simple and effective artwork that it presented. Without any possible way for me to ever obtain one of those skateboards - my next best option was a pair of those jeans - and my extra long chain wallet would be the perfect accessory to go along with them.
I spent that entire day of our very first gig with a massive amount of butterflies in my stomach. What if no one showed up? What if people did show up? Up to this point I had never really planned on actually singing in front of anyone. The first time that I ever belted anything out into a microphone in my garage during a practice with the band, I was horrified at what reverberated back to my ears through our overly-large PA system. With the deafening sound of my own voice pummeling my ears, I swore that I would never - sing - again.
As much as I was shaken by singing into a microphone, I never struggled with those feelings about playing the guitar. Hearing power chords blasting through some kind of guitar amplifier had the total opposite effect on me. I wanted a lot more of that. But singing never came naturally to me in that same way, and it still doesn’t. Unfortunately, as any three piece band will tell you, at some point we were going to need vocals. Operation Ivy had vocals. Having no interest whatsoever in adding a fourth member to our band - one of us was going to need to sing something…
As the weeks went on, I slowly tiptoed my way back to the microphone. Even after my strong initial refusal, I actually did begin to get a little bit more comfortable making sounds into a microphone while I played my guitar. It was never singing though. Maybe shouting towards a key? Talking towards a pitch? Whatever it was, my commitment to the band had won out, and by the middle of that summer I became our lead singer.
We had a couple of songs ready to go by the time the small town legion hall gig rolled around. I was even playing some lead guitar in a few of the songs. My version of solos though was taking the lowest note of a power chord and just playing that one note instead of the full power chord. I used to that a lot. Hammer-ons and pull-offs where still a few years away from me.
After we accepted the offer to be the opening band for the gig, I very vividly remember the flyer that someone made with our name on it. It had the main headliner, the middle act and us an openers, “Haywire” written down towards the bottom in handwritten big block letters. The strength of the commitment of our band name on a xerox’d flyer. I remember the rush that I felt from that act alone, of someone even knowing the name of our band. This gig was getting real, and fast.
The show was going to take place in a small town VFW hall about forty-five minutes away from where we lived. We drove with our guitars, basses and drum sticks in the hot early afternoon sun, not a cloud in the sky. Once we got there and started loading in our minimal equipment - I felt in shock by the amount of real equipment that had already set up for us to use. There were real Marshall tube amps and matching speaker cabinets, microphones plugged into a real PA, a couple of big bass amp, and a very real drum set with cymbals. Up to that point I had never played through a real guitar amp, and had just barely ever played with a real guitar. I was still playing on my friend Luke’s guitar that was always missing two strings and I was using a white shoelace for a strap. I used to plug it into a tiny shoebox-sized guitar amp with no knobs that a friend grabbed from the local junior high band room. You couldn’t adjust any tones on the amp. You just plugged into it and turned it up all the way, and it met my needs perfectly.
The bigger concern for me, seeing all of that real equipment sitting on that stage - was my total lack of knowledge on what to do with any of it.Which knobs do I turn? I The Marshall head had a power switch and a separate stand-by switch? This head has four guitar inputs - which one of these do I plug into? The foot switch on the floor that controlled the different tones of the amp had four buttons on it. When and why do I step on these? Lucky for me, the much older guys in the other bands didn’t seem to have any problem helping us get ourselves sorted out on their stage with their gear. I was able to coax our bass player Chad into tuning my guitar for me. I was still a few years away from knowing anything about how to do that.
I don’t remember the names of the other bands, but one of them sounded and looked and acted and played exactly like Nirvana. A bunch of the guys in the headlining band were an easy 10 to 15 years older than us and a lot of them had really long hair. It wasn’t hard to tell that by comparison - we were a couple of literal children completely out of our element, but all those older guys really did their best to make us feel at home on this gig. I’m sure they could see it on our thirteen and fourteen year old faces that we didn’t know what to do with any of this. It’s hard to have a poker face when you’re too young to enter the casino.
The three of us were still setting up and running around and trying to find food when I heard one of the members of the Nirvana-type-band ask out loud where “the little punk band” was - I felt a sense of great pride at his question. Obviously our fame was now literally growing by the minute…
As people started to show up and settle in, we took the stage and played our set in the early evening hours, feeling quickly like we owned that little legion hall with our (probably) out of tune guitars and even worse out of key singing. “We’re Haywire”, I said softly into the microphone as it echoed through the large hall. I could feel the room spinning as we sped through our already short three-song set. The feeling of going from refusing to ever sing into a microphone in my garage, to playing for a room of 30 strangers felt like Wembley stadium to me. We shouted our way through our songs, and before I could look up or catch my breath, just like that - it was over. Our friend Donald held a VHS camcorder in the back of the room to record our performance - but I’ve still to this day never seen or ever desired to watch that tape. It’s incredible likely that I even threw the tape away so it couldn’t ever be viewed. I prefer to carry those memories with me how it all felt for me, instead of how it probably “actually” sounded. In my mind and ears - we were a young Social Distortion, and I was Mike Ness in a packed California club - blasting our way through power chords amplified with the intensity of 100-watt Marshall tube amps and the hammering of the nicest drums that my twin brother David has ever sat behind. Sure, we would soon return to our garage with our shoe lace straps and our drums with no cymbals, but in this moment I had somehow managed to find my confidence in my own little world on this stage in this long hall with guitar amps the size of refrigerators.
I hung around for the rest of the night, holding my head high, to hear the other bands as late summer darkness transformed the small Iowa town. A huge sense of relief came over me for what we had accomplished. We were “the little punk band” and we just finished our first ever live performance. My memory tells me that we even received a few compliments from the older Nirvana-type-guys and the long haired veteran rockers in the other bands. Those casual words of simple encouragement go a long way for a kid that up to that point hadn’t ever turned the dial on a guitar amp.
As the show continued, while the Nirvana-type-band played after us, I remember a long haired rocker even younger than I was - who spent the entirety of his night moshing and thrashing around by himself in the middle of the large sparse room. I wonder where that kid is now and if he’s still out somewhere rocking out.
For me, our first live show was a thriving success. We had the first one out of our systems. Now anything could be possible for us and our new found career as “live musicians” - though our second gig would end up being in an even larger legion hall, in an even smaller town, with a way smaller crowd - we just had to get out there and get that first one out of the way.
In the end, it’s probably a good thing that our memories mostly only hold onto the best parts of things. I’d rather not know what my guitar playing actually sounded like that night, or how huge that guitar looked on me. Like I said, I’ve thrown away any physical recordings of our first performance, but to this day, somewhere at my mom’s house there still exists a photograph of me taken on that night, wearing a blue and white stripped short-sleeve bowling shirt buttoned all the way to the top with my hair sticking up in every possible direction. We had just finished our set and I’m sitting against a side wall of the small town legion hall with a bad attitude, and a huge bandage across my head.