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Four guys have assembled in the basement rehearsal room of an Ogg Hall dorm and are looking at each other blankly, sharing the same thought:

Well, what do you wanna play?

This is the usual opening line tossed from one musician to another. After some pointless, overly polite discussion the drummer mumbled:

"How about some Judas?"

And he thundered into the intro for Hell Bent For Leather. It sounded great and I had never heard it played by a real live drummer before, so this was an amazing start.

With that bit of loose cannon fire the band began. TRAXX was a four piece rock outfit, based on the utilitarian quartet mold I loved so dearly. We had to find four hours of material that the band could a) play b) get hired with, so we sat down at our singer’s house and began hashing it out. Add "set list construction" to the list of things bands eternally fight over.

Crikey, the Versailles Treaty wasn’t this disputed and fumed about. One guy wanted much more pop stuff (this was the drummer who started us off with the Judas Priest tune), one wanted more aggressive stuff, one didn’t want to look like a sell-out, and one really didn’t care as long as his wife liked the tunes we chose. She agreed to write out the lyrics for him, so her satisfaction with our repertoire was paramount to keeping the peace in his household. If I didn’t understand that then, I certainly do now.

Set list in hand, we began rehearsals. This was after our bassist’s impromptu wedding (Well, impromptu to us. After asking him if she was pregnant, and she wasn’t, we were still confused.) where we got up and frightened the wedding band. We plowed through the Scorpions Blackout, and nearly wrecked their mid-60’s gear. Oops. A belated apologies, boys.

Noisy run-throughs of the set began in a basement out on Madison’s beltline, where we shared the room with a batch of newborn puppies. And yes, they shit everywhere. The most inopportune fecal placement  for the drummer was his bass pedal, although for comedic value it was most opportune for us. We complained to the management (a pal of our singer’s) and he disciplined the nine dogs and moved them out of the room.

They got back in.

One night, as the overhead light popped on, they guiltily bolted through a hole in the new plywood wall of our room and back to their own. Behind me I heard our light man say "Busted!"

We clearly need more glamorous and less pungent quarters. And we found them: a mushroom factory warehouse. Our fastidious drummer, who hated the smell the dogs left behind, was apoplectic the first time we drove into the warehouse.  All you could see were 25 foot high piles of manure nourishing mushrooms, lovingly spread out over 25,000 square feet of our new rehearsal room floor.

It was indeed going to be a long way to the top, as we rock and rolled.