Almost Famous

“Guitar player wanted,” read the ad in The Harrisburg Patriot News classified section in early spring of 1985.  I had recently been kicked out of the band I was in after the one and only concert we played, an assembly at my high school in Mechanicsburg, PA, which I booked.  Suffering from mono at the time, no warning, discussion nor common courtesy was extended.  They just dropped off my guitar equipment after the show and that was it.  Determined to continue with my passion for the guitar, I searched for another outlet.  

Rick Ream answered when I called the number in the ad.  Rick, six years my senior, lived in the neighborhood adjoining mine.  He told me he and Bret Sychak had left their previous “cover” band, The Spectors, and were putting together a band that would only perform original material.  They intended to use the next six months to “get tight” then move to Los Angeles.  He asked my plans.

“College,” I replied.  I obviously was on a different trajectory.  After all, an education was in my near future and they had aspirations of becoming “starving artists”… or so I thought.

A few months later, Rick and Bret were at the high school passing out pink paper flyers containing four individuals photos, each occupying a quarter of the page, of Rikki Rockett, Bret Michaels, Bobby Dall, and Matt Smith.  The flyers announced that their band “Paris” would be the performers for that evening’s high school dance, although heavy metal is not really danceable music.

After school, the cafeteria was abuzz with students waiting for their buses to take them home, while “Paris roadies” fought the outbound current of kids, like salmon heading to their spawning grounds, bringing platforms, drums, amplifiers, and guitars into the cafeteria.  Rikki and Bobby entered confidently.  Rikki looked much the same as I had always known him to look.  Bobby strolled in looking nothing like I remembered.  

When we had met years earlier, he looked much like an MBA grad student with a preppy button down shirt, slacks, and a short cropped haircut.This day he wore a leather jacket, t-shirt, and torn jeans with long flowing locks of dark hair extending to his low back, the prototypical “bad boy of rock” look.

A few minutes later Bret sauntered in with the same look as Bobby, his usual style, with an air of what I interpreted at the time to be arrogance, but what I now see as calm self assuredness. Matt Smith, the guitar player whom I had never met before, frantically entered, almost on the brink of a nervous breakdown.  While loading his equipment for transport, he had dropped his Marshall 50 watt amplifier head, shattering its tubes that provide the patented Marshall sound.  Without them, the amp would not work.  He had neither the time nor the money to replace them on such short notice.

I had a Marshall 100 amplifier head that I  offered him for the show.  Back at my house, I strapped on my Kramer Voyager Imperial with Floyd Rose Locking Tremolo, my favorite “ax”, slang for guitar, to give him a quick tour of the amp head.  I started playing a riff that I had made up some weeks earlier.  Matt excitedly slung on the strap of my Les Paul Standard, another of my axes, and excitedly exclaimed, “Cool lick.”  “Teach it to me,” he requested.  So I did.

The fall of my sophomore year at Dickinson College in 1986 as I strolled through the bookstore, an album cover on an end cap caught my eye, stopping me in my tracks.  “No fucking way.” I murmured to myself in disbelief.  The album cover was almost exactly the same as the flyers being passed out years earlier, only the name of the band had changed and C. C. Deville’s picture sat in the quarter of the cover that used to be occupied by Matt’s in the flyer.

I purchased the album and went straight to my dorm room, placed the record on the turntable and the title track began.  “NO FUCKING WAY!” I screamed within the first four beats.  There it was.  My riff.  The title song.  I was floored and in shock.

No one believed me.  At least not until, while at home for break,  I went down to the basement where I had my “studio”, a portion of the basement my dad and I had “finished” years before.  I intended to learn the other songs on the album.  After all, I already knew the title track.  The first song began.  Within four measures, the basement door flew open.  My mom stood at the top of the stairs shouting, “Rudy, They’re playing your song!”