Garage Band Legends

By Pierre Cochrane

David, Clifford and Dale, three yoyo kids who travel back and forward between their divorced parents, form a rock band and audition for West Mall Corporation’s Christmas Show. They are contracted to play a kid’s musical Percy Gnome and the Flowers to an audience of children in malls and shopping centres during the Christmas holidays.
Playing live performances day after day the band develops a split identity; they continue to think of themselves as hard rocking “Legends” but become universally known as “Percy Gnome and the Flowers”.
From a nervous beginning, David develops into a lead guitarist with flair and discovers an unexpected gift for song writing and composition.
Clifford sees himself as a rocker with attitude determined to live the rock and roll dream. The more successful “Percy Gnome and the Flowers” becomes the more negative and resentful Clifford becomes.
Dale develops his people skills; he is the one who holds the band together when it seems musical conflicts will drive them apart.
Irene joins the show to sing Rosemary’s part in the ‘panto’ and signs on as a ‘Flower’ not a ‘Legend’ which causes complications when she falls in love with David .
Disturbed by this blossoming love affair, Irene’s mother, Ingrid dusts off her Cabaret Act and books a six week cruise on the Pacific Princess sailing to Osaka in Japan.
Irene is faced with the decision does she go on the cruise and perform with her mother, or stay with David and the band?
The big musical finale occurs when the band is invited to take part in an Australia Day spectacular, a cavalcade of rock and roll at the Superdome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pierre Cochrane
• Release date: Jun 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458100665

Pierre Cochrane

I was born in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea in 1952. I wrote my first play when 14 years old. My second play won three awards. My first screenplay won an AWGIE and I have won several international poetry awards.After 25 years in advertising and PR in Sydney, I moved to Brisbane and began to write full time. I have written nine stage plays, four musicals, five screenplays, four novels, a book of song lyrics and poetry and a number of stories for young children.

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Garage Band Legends

by

Pierre Cochrane

Smashwords Edition

*****

Published By:

Pierre Cochrane on Smashwords

Copywrite 2011 by Pierre Cochrane

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Table of Contents

The bad stuff

Black Friday

Forming the band

Yoyo year

The audition

Our first gig

Opening night catastrophes

Year 10 formal

Roll over Beethoven

Christmas Eve

Eruptions

Eruptions take two

Dress rehearsal

Pacific Princess

Showtime

Act III

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Chapter 1: The bad stuff

My mum hated my dad and that’s the truth. To her he was a non person. When he came to her house to collect me he would knock on the front door then go and stand outside the front gate on the pavement. Mum would stand just inside the hall and they would have non-conversations through me if they had anything to say.

Dad might say, ‘David, tell your mum we’re going fishing’, to which Mum would reply, ‘Tell your father you have to study for a physics examination’. I, of course, didn’t have to say anything. Just pack my sports gear and my guitar into the boot of Dad’s car, jump in then wait till we drove off before asking, ‘Well, Dad, what have you been up to?’

My cousin Dale was a yoyo like me. His father was a barrister, his mother a fruitcake, but Dale loved them both and bounced backwards and forwards between his two parents’ houses as if it was all water off a duck’s back.

Dale is very tall and very skinny because his mother can’t cook and feeds him on instant three-minute noodles, pizza and BBQ chicken. He is in Year 10.

My other cousin, Clifford, lived with his mum. His dad was an alcoholic whom he never saw. It was really sad but Clifford refused to talk to his dad whenever he rang up, wouldn’t see him, go to the pictures with him, and if he got a birthday present from his dad, he’d smash it.

Apart from being seriously pissed off with his father, Clifford is a lovely guy, boisterous and enthusiastic and very, very loud. He is very tall and broad and blond and loves kung fu, works as a supermarket shelf-stuffer and is in Year 11, same as me.

Dad’s garage became our real home because it was rough bouncing back and forth between the olds. The reason we hung out in the garage was Shriek-a-lot refused to let us into her house when Dad wasn’t home.

Shriek-a-lot was our nickname for my vile stepmother. She arrived when I was three. I didn’t like her then and I don’t care for her now. I guess the real fight was about whom Dad loved the most – me or her? The answer was me, of course, and I can prove it. Every Saturday during the spring racing carnival Shriek-a-lot would demand the car because she wanted to go to the horse races. I would pipe up, ‘Dad, she can’t have the car. You have to take me to cricket’. I never missed a match.

Dale, Clifford and I went to the Castle Hill High School that was a high-Victorian monstrosity of arched and cantilevered sandstone walls that trail ivy. The windows were lead-lined and ornate and the green copper-covered bell tower was covered in ugly gargoyles. The new science block was cubist in exposed aggregate while the music school was a red brick box that separated the football fields from the white picket-fenced cricket ovals.

Clifford and I played cricket for the first 11 while Dale played for the 16Bs because he was the youngest and could only bowl a slow medium pace. In addition to cricket in summer and soccer in winter we played in the Castle Hill School Concert Orchestra, basically to avoid cadets and because the band was co-ed. There were eleven eager teenage girls mixing it with us three guys. I played clarinet, Dale trombone and Clifford percussion, and it was radically sick because most of the girls flirted outrageously with us when our music teacher Mrs Cecilia Clements was otherwise occupied.

Band practice was on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. On this particular Thursday we were rehearsing Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King while a plane was sky writing FRIDAY THE 13TH HORROR MOVIE MARATHON in a patch of sky behind Mrs Clements.

Clifford was mucking up as usual, tiptoeing across to Destiny, a girl he was sweet on, then hissing, ‘I vant to drink your blooooooood!!!!!!’ in his very best ghoulish voice while pinching her behind.

Destiny squealed loudly. Mrs Clements led the orchestra to an abrupt stop, pointed her baton at Clifford and said, ‘Clifford, can’t you count? You forgot to come in again. If you don’t want to be in the school band, form your own band. From Section B – straight in’.

Our own band playing our own music – we’d be rock stars. Just to underscore the point, the orchestra played a fanfare followed by a drum roll.

Mrs Clements tapped her baton on her music stand and said, ‘Percussion, I suggest you look at your part. It would be nice if you got it right’.

As soon as Mrs Clements’s back was turned I thumped Clifford to get his attention.

‘Why don’t we form our own band? Call it Black Friday?’

‘We’re rockers, not hobgoblins’, growled Clifford. ‘The Clifford Band’.

Dale let out a discordant musical exclamation that made Mrs Clements look up from her score.

‘The Cousins cause we’re cousins’.

‘Look guys’, snarled Clifford, who didn’t like to be crossed. ‘I’m the only one with a six pack. We’re The Clifford Band’.

‘Friday 13th zings’, I muttered.

‘Kissing Cousins cause girls would go for it’.

Clifford whacked Dale with his drumsticks.

‘The Cliff! Clifford and the Tigers!’

‘Fourtune as in four and tune’, I suggested.

‘The Golden Horns?’

This from Dale.

Destiny and her friends Alexis, Grace, Kaylee and Megan got the giggles, causing the strings and woodwinds to lose their place.

An exasperated Mrs Clements interrupted us.

‘Certain discourteous percussionists and trombonists are letting the band down and giving me a great deal of aggravation. Another word Clifford, Dale, and you too, David Lockett, and you will all be doing a 4-hour detention on Saturday morning’.

Our band was only two minutes old and we had lost our way already.

When the class was over and we were packing away our instruments, Mrs Clements said, ‘Class, be careful going home. It is Friday the thirteenth. Don’t walk under ladders, avoid black cats and don’t break any mirrors. Next rehearsal Tuesday 4:00 pm’.

I should have listened to Mrs Clements and taken her advice.

Chapter 2: Black Friday

Mum picked me up after school that afternoon and drove me to Dad’s house.

When I dumped my cricket kit, clarinet case and school bag on his veranda and put my key in his front door she wound down her car window and said, ‘If your rat of a father is too drunk, doesn’t have money for petrol or is too selfish to drive you home, call me. I’ll come and get you’.

‘OK, Mum’, I answered. What else was I going to say?

Dad was home, sitting under his mulberry tree in the backyard, drinking beer while playing his favourite electric guitar.

‘What happened to you?’ I asked.

‘Got fired’, he said grinning. ‘Don’t tell Shriek-a-lot’.

Dad had been a council worker down at the depot for years.

‘What happened?’

‘My front-end loader ended up in Napoleon Creek’.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Didn’t break anything’.

‘Dad, Dale, Clifford and I are forming a rock band’.

‘Great’.

‘We need a catchy name. I was thinking Friday 13th?’

‘Do a Google search?’

‘I did. There’s an Oasis tribute band in Denmark, got their own website, sell CDs and T-shirts and stuff, but they spell it differently’.

‘Doesn’t matter. They own the rights to that name’.

‘Clifford likes Clifford and the Tigers’.

‘There is an R&B band called Johnny Clifford and the Detroit Tigers’.

‘In the USA?’

‘Make a list, look in music industry directories and company directories’.

‘Why?’

‘If you called your band The Dominos …’

‘That’s so gay …’

‘Domino’s the pizza company would take you to court and fight you over their name and trademark and it would costs millions of dollars and you’d lose’.

‘I didn’t realise it was going to be that hard’.

‘Your name is out there. You will know it when you stumble over it’.

Parents can be very annoying. Being right just makes them more annoying.

‘So much of the music industry is based on marketing and promotion. Your band’s name will become your most important asset because your fans will associate your sound and your reputation with your name’.

‘We’re not rock stars yet’.

‘When you have built a reputation around your name you have to protect it’.

I just looked blank.

‘We were pretty pissed when our record company stole our name, trademarked it, and used it as a marketing tool’.

‘You were in a band?’

‘I was 17, had a great time, but we were ripped off something chronic’.

‘A rock band?’

‘The Surfing Strawberries’.

‘What was it like?’

‘Awesome. There was this New Zealand band called The Surfing