Subtle Hint: Foundations

Five years and three manifestations later, Subtle Hint was born.

But I get ahead of myself.

That whole freshman year at college one thing and one thing dominated my mind: well, I’m not going to talk about that here. The other thing that constantly buzzed in my brain was my guitar, and music. I became heavily immersed in Rush, particularly the early albums up to Permanent Waves. My playing improved as I struggled to master the technique of Alex Lifeson. My creativity grew, too, as I started to come up with cool riffs and chord progressions and jotted them down here and there.

Winter break, and I met Steve again, quite by random, at a Burger King. He remembered me from the previous summer mini-jam-thing. “Hey, LE,” he shouted from his car, leaving the parking lot as me and Bob were pulling in, “you still play?”

“Yeah! But I’m at college.”

“I’m starting a band. Stop by when you get out for the summer,” and he peeled away, not knowing what a burning image he planted in my mind.

I’m going to be in a band!

Suddenly, my studies didn’t matter. That other thing didn’t matter, either. Actually, one thing did: that damn guitar. I mastered a slew of Rush songs, learned Physical Graffiti by heart, and started writing songs I could use in this future band.

That summer was … well, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic … it was the greatest summer of my life. I met up with Steve May 25, and the next day we jammed with Rich and this high school kid he had playing drums for us. “Black Dog” by Zeppelin was too hard for him, so we focused on AC/DC, simple 4/4 power-chord stuff. I can’t describe the joy I felt playing in that grimy ghetto basement. People I didn’t know came and went. There was beer, there was cigarettes, there was light recreational drugs, there was simply no authority. And I was important, because I was in the band.

All that went on that summer is the subject of its own post one day, when I can truly do it justice. For now, all I wish to say is this: we learned to play as a band, we wrote half-a-dozen songs, we recorded the four most promising at a recording studio, we got them copyrighted on a day trip down to the Library of Congress at Washington DC. It was for this purpose that we came up with a name: The Outpatients. We never played live, though, only in Steve’s basement. Our rehearsals became parties and our parties became jam sessions.

The main reason we never played live was that we never filled out the band. We had Steve for vocals, Rich on lead guitar, and me on rhythm. Occasionally Russell the high-school kid played drums for us; occasionally Steve did.

I dropped out halfway into my sophomore year, mainly to concentrate on my new girlfriend and push the band farther. Pumpkinskum was born. I remember a meeting Steve set up with this alleged high-caliber drummer. We went to this dude’s basement studio, all his buddies present, with all our equipment, and blew them all away with one single, tight, well-rehearsed, well-performed song. That was a powerful feeling, one that was never surpassed though easily matched a couple of times in the next few years.

Pumpkinskum floated around for a few months with a few drummers joining in. Eventually Steve drifted away, and Rich and I did our own thing with a drummer friend he worked with that summer. A couple of newer, more complex tunes developed, as well as some funny stuff. Rich had a Tascam, a mini 4-track recorder, and we got some very high-quality recordings of rehearsals. We fiddled around with high-pitched vocals, low-pitched vocals, backward messaging, backward soloing, a whole bunch of weirdities. We even made a PSA featuring us doing some celebrity imitations. I did Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rich did Pee Wee Herman.

The next year I drifted away from Rich and Steve came back in the picture – this time, recruiting me to play bass for a mutual friend’s band. Well, actually Per formed the band, which he dubbed Free Reign, to play a gig at the local community college talent show. We had a week to come up with a song. It was like an all-star jam band: too many musicians, nobody knowing what to play, people eventually playing different instruments than they were at the beginning of the week. Heady times, heady times. Lots of adrenaline. And I got my first live performance under my belt, and let me tell you: what a powerful aphrodisiac. We expanded to a four-song set (including an awesome cover of “Down By The River”) at an outdoor festival at the college that summer.

I spent the next year playing with the remnants of Free Reign (Per dropped out to pursue other things), and eventually it dwindled down to drummer Rob and me. Rob was a huge Rush fan, too. So, twice a week I’d go to his house and we’d play two or three hours of Rush covers. I enjoyed most “No One At The Bridge,” “The Analog Kid,” “Countdown,” and “Xanadu,” among a whole host of others, including most of the first album. We also drove his mother crazy upstairs with ten or twelve minute versions of “The Wurm,” the repetitive 3-chord finale sequence to Yes’ “Starship Trooper.”

Another year went by, with me working full-time, single again, finishing up an associate’s degree at night school, and playing guitar sporadically.

Then, as often happened back then, Steve called, and my life changed.