{"id":4983,"date":"2020-12-24T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-24T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=4983"},"modified":"2020-12-25T10:02:42","modified_gmt":"2020-12-25T15:02:42","slug":"the-rock-town-hall-christmas-story-is-retold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-rock-town-hall-christmas-story-is-retold\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rock Town Hall Christmas Story Is Retold"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Flunk Punks “Guitar Tech” Paul Shields, with THE INFAMOUS YAMAHA DT 175 IN THE BACKGROUND!<\/p><\/div>\n

Happy holidays, Rock Town Hall members and hangers-on!<\/p>\n

As has become a bit of a tradition ’round these parts, on this festive day of the year, I present you with the annual telling of my greatest moment of rock embarrassment — namely, the story of The Day I Rode My Motorcycle On-stage at School Assembly and Proceeded to Suck Mightily<\/em>. This year, however…there’s more!<\/p>\n

First of all, there are pictures to share, culled from dusty old photo albums–including, as you’ll see above, a picture of the actual motorcycle! I wish I had pictures of all the members of the “band,” but there seem to be just a few in my possession. Perhaps more illuminating, I’ve managed to gather a few recollections of the event from other members of the Flunk Punks<\/strong>! This year, I managed to track down two: David “Bertie” Bertram<\/strong> and Peter Horn<\/strong>. Peter was characteristically taciturn about the whole affair, but Bertie remembered something I’d long since forgotten: the Flunk Punks “groupies!”<\/p>\n

Anyway, the story proceeds below, followed by our star witnesses’ commentary. Enjoy, and–best wishes for the season, RTH!<\/p>\n

HVB<\/p>\n

Many of you already know that I went to high school in Africa, in a small mountain kingdom called Swaziland. Swaziland was a wonderful place to be a teenager for all kinds of reasons\u2014wide-open spaces, little in the way of \u201crules\u201d (though the everybody-knows-your-parents-personally Mayberry vibe of the place kept things healthily in check), no real way to fuck yourself up other than booze and some godalmightyblowyourheadoff pot, and\u2026 motorcycles. Everybody<\/em> in the 16\u201318-year age group had a bike of some size and shape, though almost all were off-road or dual-purpose jobbies.<\/p>\n

The off-road capabilities of these bikes were very important, as Swaziland didn\u2019t have too many roads back then. Plus, the preferred method of driving out into the countryside to get loaded was to organize a caravan of dirt bikes, with one of us borrowing a pickup truck (a \u201cbakkie,\u201d borrowing from nearby South African slang) to actually transport the crates of Castle Lager required to achieve the desired effect.<\/p>\n

But I digress. (Ah, sweet memories! Strange that I\u2019ve forgotten the skull-crushing hangovers, and omitted the stories about Adam Elliott pissing all over my bike in a fit of drunken pique about something, or Goff Haw waking up with his head on a vomit-encrusted pillow, moaning woefully, \u201cI\u2019m swimming in puuuuuuke!\u201d)<\/p>\n

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The author, Goff “I’m swimming in puuuuke” Haw, Peter “Pubes” Horn<\/p><\/div>\n

The point here is that I may be the only RTHer who ever actually pulled a Judas Priest\/Rob Halford<\/strong> motorcycle move on the rock stage.<\/p>\n

See, as a pimply-faced 16 year old, I managed to bring together four or five of my closest music-loving friends to form a band. The cast of characters was an odd one, by virtue of the fact that there just weren\u2019t very many people to choose from. Nobody could afford to be a member of a \u201csubculture,\u201d since we had trouble enough finding a roomful of people to agree on a culture to begin with. There was Peter \u201cPubes\u201d Horn (drums)\u2014at the time, five feet tall and so upset about his height that he grew a five-inch pile of hair on the top of his head; Alan Kang<\/strong> (bass), budding computer genius who mooned hopelessly after school hottie Dawn Sherper; Richard \u201cSki\u201d Zwierczowski<\/strong> (piano), who smoked so much dope that his hair and<\/em> his teeth turned orange; David \u201cBertie\u201d Bertram (vocals), who once famously totalled his mom\u2019s Citroen in a drunken stupor, then polled the dudes in the back seat as to whether they preferred to go home or haul the unbroken bottles of beer back to his house for a party; and, of course, me (guitar). I suppose my claim to fame in this bunch was that I was the jive talker, the asshole who usually got us into trouble and was the first to talk his way out of it. Thus, I was occasionally known as \u201cCon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Together, this band of losers was known as, uh\u2026well, when we played school assembly, we were called, um, the Flunk Punks. Hey, we were 16, and living in Africa, for fuck\u2019s sake! We didn\u2019t know from cool!<\/p>\n

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Bassist Alan Kang, master of the funk-waltz<\/p><\/div>\n

Anyhow, the school assembly gig was fast approaching, and we were in conceptual disarray, as always. Bertie, who eventually went on to join the Merchant Marines and now works for a shipping concern in Durban, was concerned about his Look, and dubious about the jumpsuit we urged him to wear as frontman. Kang, who eventually did<\/em> become a computer genius, and now teaches the subject in university somewhere, was apparently genetically incapable of being funky. Kang\u2019s job was to lull the audience into thinking we were going to play one of the school favorites of the day, \u201cAnother One Bites the Dust,\u201d after 30 seconds of which the rest of the band would roar into our stirring, proto-rockist anthem, \u201cDisco Is Dead!\u201d \u00a9 Bertie\/Con Music, Inc. Unfortunately, whenever Kang played anything <\/em>on the bass without a band behind him, it came out in 3\/4 time. Imagine the opening bass notes to \u201cAnother One Bites the Dust\u201d played as a waltz, and you\u2019ll get the idea. Ski, who, I think, eventually went crazy, had just discovered the wonders of \u201cjimson weed,\u201d some kind of naturally ocurring hallucinogen, and refused to play anything other than AC\/DC songs. He could not be budged on this point, so we had to add \u201cRock and Roll Damnation\u201d to our set list to appease him. He agreed to sit at the piano and appear bandly during the other numbers, though he would not play. Peter, who eventually grew up to be a six-foot accountant, was impatient. And I, who eventually grew up to be an underemployed composer for film and TV, needed to come up with some kind of galvanizing focus for this impending disaster.<\/p>\n

Enter the motorcycle.<\/p>\n

It was decided that the grand gesture we needed to wake up the sleeping assembly masses was a triumphant ride down the assembly hall steps\u2014down, down to the stage, exhaust roaring\u2014hell, flames shooting out of our tailpipes if at all possible\u2014and fists pumping. I had a bike, Peter had a bike\u2026we could do it!<\/p>\n

Sadly, Peter (who was always the practical sort), refused to take any part in this madness. His Yamaha 200 already had weak front forks, and his parents wouldn\u2019t allow him to ride it to school anyway. This left me, and I was determined.<\/p>\n

The day before the fateful assembly, I drove my bike to school and walked to the top of the steps in the assembly hall. I looked down them, and was suddenly struck by the unacceptably low payoff-to-danger ratio of my concept. But I would ride my bike into the performance\u2014I must! Scouting around the stage area, I noticed a door to the left of the curtain. Sure enough, it led outside, and was just big enough for a gangly 16 year old on a dirt bike.<\/p>\n

The big day arrived. Bertie was nervous, Kang was distracted, Ski was high, and Peter was focused on the task at hand. Headmaster Dick \u201cMass\u201d Eyeington (who was later brutally murdered in Somalia by Al-Qaeda, believe it or not) made a few announcements, and the curtain opened. As it opened, I kickstarted my Yamaha DT 175 into sputtering action, gave the engine a couple of hesitant revs (man <\/em>was it loud! Am I gonna get in trouble for this?) and engaged first gear.<\/p>\n

What I hadn\u2019t anticipated in my 16-year-old rock and roll fantasy was that it\u2019s awfully hard to get to bugs-in-your-teeth, wind-blowing-back-your-hair speeds when the distance from the stage door to the other side of the stage is about 24 feet. And anybody who\u2019s ever ridden a bike will tell you that the first 20 feet\u2014especially if you\u2019re nervous\u2014are the slowest and the wobbliest. So the net effect of my Big Rock Gesture was: Vroom, cough, sputter, click-wobble, roll, idle, waitaminnitIgottaputthekickstanddown<\/em> and then a degrading walk back over to my side of the stage to don my guitar and switch the amp on. While the rest of the Flunk Punks waited with beads of sweat forming on their noses.<\/p>\n

What happened next is lost in the dim recesses of my panicky memory. Kang screwed up his bass part, nobody in the audience got the joke, \u201cRock and Roll Damnation\u201d kicked ass, and then Peter\u2019s bass drum pedal broke during a laughably un-rockin\u2019 version of \u201cIce Cream Man.\u201d We occupied ourselves in the post-mortem with conspiracy theories about who might have sabotaged our drum set to ruin our performance. Strangely, I was never singled out for my lunk-headed motorcycling contribution to the fiasco.<\/p>\n

My, I seem to have rambled, haven\u2019t I? Do I win a booby prize for longest RTH post ever?<\/p>\n

Thanks for letting me relive some treasured memories. One of these days I\u2019ll transcribe the yearbook story I wrote during this era about our band\u2014or, rather, a later incarnation called, uh, \u201cWarhead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hey, I was only 17, man!<\/p>\n

UPDATE:  PETER HORN CHIMES IN!<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think I was so traumatised by the foot pedal coming off that other memories are overshadowed. So unfortunately I don’t have much to add, but I will check with my brother Martin in the New Year because he probably witnessed the whole debacle!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

UPDATE:  DAVID “BERTIE” BERTRAM CHIMES IN!<\/strong><\/p>\n

The one thing that I can remember is that we understood the idea of how to get an audience behind you and in order to do this we employed the services of a number of rather rowdy, beautiful, outgoing groupies who went mad in the audience as soon as we appeared. Once they started screaming the rest of the rather skeptical attendees fell into line and screamed and cheered along with them.<\/p>\n

I know that there were two separate shows. The first was an assembly and the second was during a \u2018talent\u2019 show. I know that during the talent show we were unable to get any sound out of the amps at the time of the rehearsal and (English teacher) Robin Malan who was sort of directing the thing was threatening not to allow us to go on until he had seen what we were going to do. In any case his threats came to naught and we performed an appalling rendition of Johnny B Goode (I still cringe when I hear what it was meant to sound like) \u2013 but all things considered it was loud enough and our \u2018groupies\u2019 were good enough that we passed the event more or less unscathed. I remember being really depressed at the end of the show and I was backstage having a cigarette and my parents came to find me to congratulate me and to my eternal shame I was very rude to them–but they forgave me as all good rock star parents should forgive their wild ones.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n