I was in a band once, we opened for the Gossip

What you see above is the only remaining evidence that I ever played music in public. I found an old unlabeled VHS tape in a box but I put off digitizing until this year. (I took the tape to Digitas, by the way, a great and friendly digital shop in Greenpoint. Recommended!)

Anyway, this tape contains three or so performances I had with Obsession in Pink, a band started by two friends in Tucson. One of them, Brett, I can’t find at all. He was from Omaha and may be back there. The other guy in the band is Michael Coomers, who I met when I saw his band Coomers Explosion, and who eventually started the band Harlem. Brett and Michael invited me to join their months-old band to play synth — Obsession in Pink was all keyboards and a drum machine. Oh, and an organ that belonged to another Tucson musician, Seth Bogart, who eventually did Gravy Train and Hunx and His Punx. (We all tried to practice for a band exactly once, but he and Coomers got into a fight and Coomers kicked both me and Seth out of his house.)

For first shows, they were pretty great. My first time playing with a band in public was opening for the Gossip. Others we opened for: Tracy and the Plastics, the Rapture, the Fucking Champs. The video above is us playing our first song at the Gossip show. Even now I think our gimmick was solid — we played rough synthy minor chord stuff and wore suits (well, I wore skirts and dresses) to the shows. But our eighties was, in a word (and my bright idea), rich. We drank wine and champagne on stage, we had condescending stage banter. For this show, Brett and Coomers snuck into a graveyard and stole roses, which, if you can’t see, cover the stage. The Gossip loved us; they not only came out and danced for our set (and yelled ”sluts” at us the whole time, but when they returned a year later they asked the audience where we had gone.

I just encoded a second video of us playing a laundromat illegally, in our underwear. I’ll save that for another post.