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The band first took shape in discussions with Mark over the woodshop tables in the dark, dingy, backmost lower wing of Hyattsville Junior High School, the ancient, crumbling brick building destined for the wrecking ball only a few months later and hung with a crepery of morbid expectation and palpable decadence, especially in the dark cellars where the shop classrooms buzzed and vibrated, the thick dust of wood and metal swirling in the steam-heated air, rising up into the intricate metal rafters and elaborate industrial light fixtures and falling back down onto the boys below working wide-eyed at the loud, dangerous-looking bandsaws and jigsaws and drill-presses, where it was not unheard of for someone to lop off a finger or slice quickly in and out of a thumb, a sight all of the students, from the dimmest to the not so dim, would always remember: that high-pitched squeal of shock and the unreal redness of the blood spurting up suddenly bringing the grey dust-covered surroundings to life in a way nothing else could. And those of us with only a passing interest in these machines would congregate around the big, thick, heavily worn wooden tables, idly sanding a napkin holder or a little shelf or filing away on a piece of plexiglass for a letter-opener—or a shiv—and discuss issues that would prove to have a critical impact on our lives. We mainly discussed rock’n’roll music and musicians and what their work meant to us, but we also talked politics, focusing on political radicals and anarchists or the crimes and misdemeanors of our leaders, or the anti-war movement, or underground newspapers and underground comic-book heroes, and of course all manner of subversive and forbidden subjects like sex and drugs.
Music played a critically important part in our lives as the lens through which the shifting beams of the world passed and came into focus for us. Musicians were making important statements about the world and were seemingly on the verge of bringing about revolutionary changes, and we wanted to be a part of that. And we felt instinctively that we could be a part of it just by getting together and making a good, holy racket. So I had a cheap little Ventures-like Univox electric guitar and amplifier and Mark had a mid-sixties model Fender Stratocaster, which, for legal reasons, he had transformed from its original green sparkle finish to a nice flat white, and a big Acoustic amp, huge, powerful, clean, courtesy of his father, Jim. Jim had also picked up an old Hagstrom bass and another Acoustic monster amp for Mark’s little sister, Penny, who thereby became our bass player. Jimmy, a one-time nemesis who had annoyed me good-humoredly but relentlessly throughout seventh grade but had smoked pot over the summer before eighth grade and metamorphosed, a common phenomenon of those years, evolving from greaser to hippie, took up the keyboards, playing a little Vox Jaguar organ, black keys where the white ones should be and vice versa, going through a massive polished wooden furniture-like Leslie revolving speaker cabinet. Our drummer was the ubiquitous Hyattsvillian Mike Leo, a lunatic, wild-man drummer in the Keith Moon tradition who could be depended on only to be undependable. And so we set out practicing in Mark’s basement.
Mark’s Basement: To understand Mark’s basement you have to know that Mark’s father Jim was in the vending machine business, specifically pinball machines and jukeboxes, and was part owner and sometime bartender at a bar on Main Street in Laurel called the B&E Tavern. Mark’s basement, underneath the blue-painted 1930s bungalow on Jefferson Street in Hyattsville, at the bottom of the narrow, dark staircase, contained five Bally pinball machines, which were replaced with newer ones every five or six months, and a big Top 500 jukebox, all lit up and ready for action, arrayed closely around the edges of the tiny low-ceilinged room. On the walls, illuminated by a couple of long black-lights, were a variety of cheesy psychedelic posters, some in fake velvet, glowing with fluorescent fervor. The band’s equipment, such as it was, was somehow squeezed into this cramped space, Mike’s drums backed into a corner, the big Leslie cabinet looming between the drums and a pinball machine, just enough room for the two guitarists and the bassist to stand with instruments held close while Mike thrashed away in the corner and Jimmy perched on a stool behind the keyboard inches away. Around the corner in the back of the room was a dark little bar with a wall-unit jukebox selector, mirrors on the walls and ceiling, colored lights, a vinyl-padded bar, tall stools, a refrigerator, and lots of liquor, of all varieties. A few times Jim served as bartender at parties for the assembled 8th and 9th graders, providing full services that included card tricks and other magic diversions, dirty jokes in endless variety, and very strong drinks. A side room, behind the laundry room, was filled with half-assembled jukeboxes and various parts of pinball machines, coinboxes and gearboxes and strange metal springs and cogs, and dark, greasy tools of all different kinds. And around the walls, on narrow wooden shelves, were thousands of records, jukebox 45s of the past, every record ever released and given a place of honor on local jukeboxes for the past thirty years all lined up in tight black waxy rows around this cavelike room in the back of the basement, staggering the imagination. Many times Mark and I explored those endless shelves and pulled out treasures of untold magnitude and significance, taking them upstairs to his room and spinning them on his record player: great honky-tonk epics, unfathomable rhythm & blues melodramas, goofy, chipper British Invasion knockoffs, weird, devastating wall-of-sound girl group records, fantastic, gut-wrenching soul ballads, even ancient, otherwordly jazz, everything coming through a fine spray of vinyl hissing and popping, the upshot of a few months, or years if they were lucky, on some jukebox. Naturally one of our first goals was to get a record of our own on the jukebox, though we realized quite well, every time we practiced, that that dream was still a long, long way from becoming a reality.
Which didn’t stop us from practicing every Saturday afternoon. We built up a repertoire of ten or twelve songs quickly, covering the Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, the Who, Alice Cooper (for some reason, at the time, we loved Alice Cooper), “Time is Tight” by Booker T and the MGs, “Up Around the Bend” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, I think, “Four Day Creep” by Humble Pie, something by Johnny Winter, or Edgar Winter, and various other stuff, including a plodding, ponderous original composition that we called, touchingly, “Our Song.” The weak point of our lineup was that nobody could sing. Right there in the basement we had a fancy Shure PA system with mics and everything, courtesy of Jim, origin unknown. It only scared us; we couldn’t play our instruments well enough to sing at the same time, even if any of us could sing. We needed a singer, so somehow we recruited Kendall, a crazed skinny acid-head kid with big eyes and long blond hair. He could do a little Mick Jagger thing and had a thin but passable voice, but there was some friction between him and Jimmy, who hadn’t left behind his greaser roots so much that he could tolerate a fruit like Kendall, who would provoke him in all sorts of bizarre, dadaist ways. But it was with this lineup, after a couple months of practice, that we named ourselves Duke of Madness (after a Firesign Theatre routine) and were offered a spot in a lineup with two other bands for a rock’n’roll show on a big stage in the library parking lot.
Robert Earl Hardy
1996
Next: Part 2. Out of the Basement, Into the Parking Lot
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