Thursday, February 22, 2007 @9:25 AM
When Ashes Go Down (Part 1)
when i first picked up a guitar, i was only only 4 or 5 year old. when i first started learning guitar i was 15. i was never interested in rock music until one day i went to junming's house and started to know blink 182 better. from then on, all the classical roots in me were dead. i first formed a band when i was in sec 4 during May. i rmbed playing dota with jm one day, and he told me he was learning drums. then i asked him whether wanna form a band anot, haha he said having a band was his dream. i rmbed so so clearly how excited i was last time. during that period studies were like heck care i only wanted to form a band. i guess, a youth's impulse trying to indulge in something that he didn even understand what was it.
from there we progressed, melvin was the vocals, huangyong was the lead guitar, chunkit was the bass, junming was the drummer and i was the backup vocals and guitar. i rmbed with extreme clarity that the first song we suggested to jam was mcfly's obviously LOL. it was a total failure, but i guess i should thank huang peng, as he was really the one who gave me a more insight detail of playing in a band. he taught us songs like, suicide note (aww who can forget.), zombie and boulevard of broken dreams. as the 5 of us tried hard to make out the songs, we got excited as we saw we are progressing. soon a chance came for us to showcase our efforts, the PHS carnival. thus we signed up to perform as a band on that day. it was to be our maiden gig. my very first.
can you believe that we were so excited that there was one day, 4 of us (melvin excluded) ponned school to practise at rhythm masala. wait a minute....RHYTHM MASALA? LOL. the very first studio we stepped into eh haha. alright and the songs were boulevard of broken dreams, adam song and suicide note. haha i can rmbed the jellyness of that time man, standing around stupidly like a statue and not able to play a simple note correctly, but overall it was kinda good, the feeling was good. i rmbed the crowd, our friends cheered for us. i was at the top of the world then, thinking we were already very good, but that was like so wrong. we were barely a toe out of the box yet. people in music tend to make this mistake, practise only when there is a need or practise only whatever you need. i did that last time and i shall never repeat my mistake again. this is a gesture of a "rockstar", no i dont want to be that. i wanna be an artist, a musician that creates and understands art. this very mistake continued even when we performing on Teacher's Day. we played shut up and dirty little secret, and that was the very first time i was singing to a crowd ( only short parts though). haha still we were like stone during the performance. but the crowd cheered for us though, they thought we were "good". i was over the moon, and gotten more conceited.
this period of time, i totally didn understand what music was. i thought of it only as a chance to showoff, gain popularity and for fun. it was the most immature part of my musical playing life. even through the auditions for yiyuan concert. we played, i played with passion but without understanding. i acted like a rockstar, some people think we were cool, but ultimately i was just a fool. we saw other bands playing like shah's band, joshua's band, etc. just because we were the "best" band there ( due to imcomparable standard) i became damn cocky.i thought nothing of them, to be honest. simply said, i thought they sucked compared to us. at this point i forgotten that everyone has to start sometimes. it was wrong. wrong to laugh, wrong to point fingers, wrong to be arrogant. in the end, the concert didnt happened. i rmbed we played always by salive and all the small things. ( now i think ah, rojak genre sia, totally no guidance at all haha).
EXITWOUND, at that time we were known as, we decided to change a band name. i suggested the runaway connection after watching the channel 8 show called the rainbow connection LOL. in the end it was cut short to the runaway. we took a short break for O levels, and after that resume jamming. haha guess what? this time was at lee kwong seng, after we came out of the studio to pay money, the uncle said we were good, and he offered us to play in a charity gig. we were naturally excited because every gig offered is like a precious gold waiting to be kept.
not to mention it was our first outside school gig, which means out of our comfort zone. at this point of time, my delusion of a rockstar image deepened as i thought we were so good to the extend of playing in a outside gig. i was wrong, cause everything at the gig went wrong.
just too wrong.