A HICKSVILLE SUCCESS
By Jack Harrell
In 1978 I was a seventeen year-old at East Richland High in Olney, Illinois, where the students were divided into five distinct cliques. By the time I was a sophomore, I’d tried them all. The first few weeks of my freshman year, I hung out with the FFA Boys—the Future Farmers of America. But I wasn’t a farmer, and I wasn’t quick with the crude jokes or putdowns they thrived on. Getting stuffed in a couple of lockers during gym class later that semester told me I wouldn’t fit in with the Jocks, either. So I spent most of my freshman year with the Nerds—the pocket-protector set—hanging out downstairs in the student lounge, even on the sunniest spring days. The Nerds weren’t terribly competitive, but they read a lot of books and got good grades. I had a hard time keeping up. At some point in my freshman year I even tried mixing with the Preppies, the kids who wore Levi’s 501’s and Polo shirts. The Preppies all had college plans, which wasn’t common in southern Illinois in the 1970’s, and they were nice kids with good Midwestern values. But in the end, I couldn’t afford their style. By the time sophomore year came along, I ended up with the parking lot crowd, the least demanding bunch of all.
The students in the parking lot at East Richland High smoked cigarettes, had long hair, and were called “heads,” short for “pot-heads,” because of their frequent marijuana use. A lot of misfits hung out in the parking lot, but everyone got along fine as long as they kept three unwritten rules. The first rule was, “Share your substances.” The saying was, “A friend with weed is a friend indeed.” If you didn’t share your dope, or you took too long of a hit off a joint when it came your way, you were a “bogart.” No one liked anybody who bogarted dope. The second rule was, “Don’t be a narc.” In other words, don’t tell teachers, parents, or law enforcement who’s smoking what or where they got it. If someone wanted to turn themselves in, fine, but the rule was, don’t do it for them. The third rule was, “Be cool to others.” This involved being generally civil to one another: don’t hit people, call them names, steal their stuff, or do anything else that might be deemed “uncool.” No matter how many zits covered your face, no matter how poor you were, no matter what your grades were, it was a communal life out there in the parking lot, with a nice dose of civility. No competition, no one-ups-manship, no unpleasant standards. And I learned to fit in just fine. I attended school . . . in body, if nothing else. For me, high school meant having a smoke between classes, talking with friends about music, and finding out where the good keg parties would be that weekend.
When I wasn’t in school, I was at home playing guitar. I spent hours every day, sitting on the edge of my bed in front of my amplifier, banging out chords. I met some guys—Mike, Brian, and Greg—and we formed a band called “Euphoria.” We bought decent guitars and a nice PA system, some stage lights, and we practiced hard a couple of nights a week. We learned a bunch of songs by Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick, Lynard Skynard, Jimi Hendrix, and others—what’s called “classic rock” nowadays. Soon we had an hour’s worth of material and an itch to play.
About that same time, a guy from school named Hicks decided to have a party on his father’s farm, and he asked our band to play. Around five o’clock on the evening of the party, we arrived at Hicks’s farm. Hicks had us pull our cars in the big aluminum building where the party was going to be held. The building had a concrete floor and a visible wooden frame, and cleared of equipment, it looked like it could hold several tractors and trucks. Two flatbed hay wagons sat at the closed-end of the building for a stage. We parked our cars in front of the hay wagons and began setting up drums and amplifiers so we could be all ready to play before the crowd arrived.
Because the wagons sat end to end, we couldn’t put the drums behind the guitarists like most rock bands did. Instead, we had to set up single-file. On stage left was Mike, who played bass. I stood next to him, playing rhythm guitar and doing most of the singing. Mike and I both had long stringy hair, his blond and mine brown. I knew more of the technical stuff about music and electronics, but Mike was a natural at sitting around giving orders.
We set up the drums next to me. Greg, our drummer, was truly gregarious. He had a special setup of lights that shined just on him and his drums. He sang a couple songs in the middle of the set, one of them a song he’d written called “Set Me Free.” Greg would peel off his shirt and smear natural Indian stone make-up on his face before singing. “Set Me Free” had three chords but no specific lyrics, so Greg would just scream whatever came into his head at the moment. On the other side of Greg stood Brian, our lead guitarist and Mike’s younger brother. Brian had long curly brown hair and played practically by instinct. None of us had had music lessons, but somehow Brian played amazing guitar solos even when he didn’t know what notes he was playing or what key we were in.
After setting up our equipment, we did a sound-check, played a couple of songs to warm up, and then left together in my car before the crowd arrived. Hicks’s farm was five miles from the main highway in a country of corn and soybean fields crisscrossed by gravel roads that connected the isolated farms. I drove the band a few miles and turned onto a dirt road so we could talk, parking my car in a place where the corn was high enough that my 1964 Chevy Impala couldn’t be seen from the gravel road. Greg opened a paper bag and got out “The King Bong,” a large ceramic water pipe with a face on the front like a Polynesian king. He then opened a small Tupperware container of marijuana and chose a light-green bud that he’d been saving for a special occasion.
Greg loaded one-hit bowls for each of us. When it was my turn, I held the bong and put my finger over the carburetor. I put my mouth to the bong, Greg lit the bowl, and I toked until the chamber was filled with smoke. Then I let off the carb and inhaled deeply, feeling a head-rush right away. In just a few minutes the corn seemed greener, the sky bluer, and the clouds whiter. We passed the pipe a couple of times and talked about our plans for the performance. Worried that we didn’t have enough material, we divided our song list into three parts and agreed to take two twenty minute breaks to make the show seem longer. Well after the party was supposed to start, we returned.
By the time we got to Hicks’s farm, about three hundred people had filled the machine shed. It seemed our whole high school was there—Jocks and Preppies, Heads and FFA Boys, and even a few Nerds. Hicks had supplied five kegs of beer. The crowd had been drinking for almost an hour. They were getting drunk and anxious for a show. We walked through the crowd, straight for the stage, dressed in our usual jeans, tee-shirts, and sneakers. We thought wearing anything else would be pretentious. It wouldn’t be “rock and roll.”
No one introduced us, and we didn’t speak to the audience before we began playing. Maybe we were just too nervous. We started off with an instrumental we’d written ourselves. Greg began a drum beat, and Brian played the first few bars before Mike and I joined in. The music sounded good. We had a great mix, we were hitting our chops, and we felt confident. It felt like rock and roll. We finished the song, and the crowd roared its approval. It felt like a real rock concert. I looked at Mike, and he shrugged his shoulders. None of us had expected such a warm response. Then Mike motioned that we should get on to the next song. I stepped up to the microphone and said “Thank you.” Then we jumped right into the next song. Later, when we began the classic “Stairway to Heaven,” the crowd went wild at the first few notes.
As we approached the end of our list, I was nervous because I knew the crowd would want more. We’d played hard, though, and we didn’t have any more. Our last number was a song Brian and I had written together, a song called “I. C. U.” It was the best song we had—fast, loud, and hard. We started in and gave it everything we had. We were going crazy on the stage, I was screaming into the mic, and Brian was doing solos like a madman. Then, about halfway through, Hicks’s dad turned off the power to the building. Everything went black. Greg, seeing an opportunity, did a drum solo while people in the crowd lit cigarette lighters and held them in the air.
After a few minutes the power came back on. Hicks came to the stage and explained that someone had damaged the seed bags stacked against the wall, and his dad wanted to end the whole party. I was relieved. Now we had a good excuse for ending our performance. I announced over the microphone that we’d play our last song and the party would then move to the river, a spot north of town familiar to everyone. Once again we began “I. C. U.,” putting everything we had into our performance. We went nuts on the stage, playing as loud and fast as we could. Then we closed the song with a drawn-out, crashing ending, all of us jumping in the air and coming down on the final chord.
As the crowd started to clear away, we began to break down our equipment. Several people came and complimented us. One friend told us that we looked liked a rock and roll band up there. He said that was what made us good. We pulled our cars inside to load them up with guitars, drums, and amps. A few minutes later, as I stood there wrapping up cables, I looked around at the now-empty building. It had felt so good being on stage. I’d put my whole soul into something I believed in: playing rock and roll. It had been the best night of my life.
The next day, around noon, I went to Mike’s house and found him on the front step, smoking a cigarette. I sat down and joined him. Pretty soon, someone very popular from school drove by with his friends. Everyone in the car waved at us. Mike looked at me and said, “That’s been happening all day.”
People who’d never spoken to us before went out of their way to notice us. We knew that we hadn’t changed overnight, but they had. I stuck with my usual friends from the parking lot. But now everyone in high school knew who I was. My life had somehow changed. Now I was somebody. I was Jack from the band.
By Jack Harrell
In 1978 I was a seventeen year-old at East Richland High in Olney, Illinois, where the students were divided into five distinct cliques. By the time I was a sophomore, I’d tried them all. The first few weeks of my freshman year, I hung out with the FFA Boys—the Future Farmers of America. But I wasn’t a farmer, and I wasn’t quick with the crude jokes or putdowns they thrived on. Getting stuffed in a couple of lockers during gym class later that semester told me I wouldn’t fit in with the Jocks, either. So I spent most of my freshman year with the Nerds—the pocket-protector set—hanging out downstairs in the student lounge, even on the sunniest spring days. The Nerds weren’t terribly competitive, but they read a lot of books and got good grades. I had a hard time keeping up. At some point in my freshman year I even tried mixing with the Preppies, the kids who wore Levi’s 501’s and Polo shirts. The Preppies all had college plans, which wasn’t common in southern Illinois in the 1970’s, and they were nice kids with good Midwestern values. But in the end, I couldn’t afford their style. By the time sophomore year came along, I ended up with the parking lot crowd, the least demanding bunch of all.
The students in the parking lot at East Richland High smoked cigarettes, had long hair, and were called “heads,” short for “pot-heads,” because of their frequent marijuana use. A lot of misfits hung out in the parking lot, but everyone got along fine as long as they kept three unwritten rules. The first rule was, “Share your substances.” The saying was, “A friend with weed is a friend indeed.” If you didn’t share your dope, or you took too long of a hit off a joint when it came your way, you were a “bogart.” No one liked anybody who bogarted dope. The second rule was, “Don’t be a narc.” In other words, don’t tell teachers, parents, or law enforcement who’s smoking what or where they got it. If someone wanted to turn themselves in, fine, but the rule was, don’t do it for them. The third rule was, “Be cool to others.” This involved being generally civil to one another: don’t hit people, call them names, steal their stuff, or do anything else that might be deemed “uncool.” No matter how many zits covered your face, no matter how poor you were, no matter what your grades were, it was a communal life out there in the parking lot, with a nice dose of civility. No competition, no one-ups-manship, no unpleasant standards. And I learned to fit in just fine. I attended school . . . in body, if nothing else. For me, high school meant having a smoke between classes, talking with friends about music, and finding out where the good keg parties would be that weekend.
When I wasn’t in school, I was at home playing guitar. I spent hours every day, sitting on the edge of my bed in front of my amplifier, banging out chords. I met some guys—Mike, Brian, and Greg—and we formed a band called “Euphoria.” We bought decent guitars and a nice PA system, some stage lights, and we practiced hard a couple of nights a week. We learned a bunch of songs by Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick, Lynard Skynard, Jimi Hendrix, and others—what’s called “classic rock” nowadays. Soon we had an hour’s worth of material and an itch to play.
About that same time, a guy from school named Hicks decided to have a party on his father’s farm, and he asked our band to play. Around five o’clock on the evening of the party, we arrived at Hicks’s farm. Hicks had us pull our cars in the big aluminum building where the party was going to be held. The building had a concrete floor and a visible wooden frame, and cleared of equipment, it looked like it could hold several tractors and trucks. Two flatbed hay wagons sat at the closed-end of the building for a stage. We parked our cars in front of the hay wagons and began setting up drums and amplifiers so we could be all ready to play before the crowd arrived.
Because the wagons sat end to end, we couldn’t put the drums behind the guitarists like most rock bands did. Instead, we had to set up single-file. On stage left was Mike, who played bass. I stood next to him, playing rhythm guitar and doing most of the singing. Mike and I both had long stringy hair, his blond and mine brown. I knew more of the technical stuff about music and electronics, but Mike was a natural at sitting around giving orders.
We set up the drums next to me. Greg, our drummer, was truly gregarious. He had a special setup of lights that shined just on him and his drums. He sang a couple songs in the middle of the set, one of them a song he’d written called “Set Me Free.” Greg would peel off his shirt and smear natural Indian stone make-up on his face before singing. “Set Me Free” had three chords but no specific lyrics, so Greg would just scream whatever came into his head at the moment. On the other side of Greg stood Brian, our lead guitarist and Mike’s younger brother. Brian had long curly brown hair and played practically by instinct. None of us had had music lessons, but somehow Brian played amazing guitar solos even when he didn’t know what notes he was playing or what key we were in.
After setting up our equipment, we did a sound-check, played a couple of songs to warm up, and then left together in my car before the crowd arrived. Hicks’s farm was five miles from the main highway in a country of corn and soybean fields crisscrossed by gravel roads that connected the isolated farms. I drove the band a few miles and turned onto a dirt road so we could talk, parking my car in a place where the corn was high enough that my 1964 Chevy Impala couldn’t be seen from the gravel road. Greg opened a paper bag and got out “The King Bong,” a large ceramic water pipe with a face on the front like a Polynesian king. He then opened a small Tupperware container of marijuana and chose a light-green bud that he’d been saving for a special occasion.
Greg loaded one-hit bowls for each of us. When it was my turn, I held the bong and put my finger over the carburetor. I put my mouth to the bong, Greg lit the bowl, and I toked until the chamber was filled with smoke. Then I let off the carb and inhaled deeply, feeling a head-rush right away. In just a few minutes the corn seemed greener, the sky bluer, and the clouds whiter. We passed the pipe a couple of times and talked about our plans for the performance. Worried that we didn’t have enough material, we divided our song list into three parts and agreed to take two twenty minute breaks to make the show seem longer. Well after the party was supposed to start, we returned.
By the time we got to Hicks’s farm, about three hundred people had filled the machine shed. It seemed our whole high school was there—Jocks and Preppies, Heads and FFA Boys, and even a few Nerds. Hicks had supplied five kegs of beer. The crowd had been drinking for almost an hour. They were getting drunk and anxious for a show. We walked through the crowd, straight for the stage, dressed in our usual jeans, tee-shirts, and sneakers. We thought wearing anything else would be pretentious. It wouldn’t be “rock and roll.”
No one introduced us, and we didn’t speak to the audience before we began playing. Maybe we were just too nervous. We started off with an instrumental we’d written ourselves. Greg began a drum beat, and Brian played the first few bars before Mike and I joined in. The music sounded good. We had a great mix, we were hitting our chops, and we felt confident. It felt like rock and roll. We finished the song, and the crowd roared its approval. It felt like a real rock concert. I looked at Mike, and he shrugged his shoulders. None of us had expected such a warm response. Then Mike motioned that we should get on to the next song. I stepped up to the microphone and said “Thank you.” Then we jumped right into the next song. Later, when we began the classic “Stairway to Heaven,” the crowd went wild at the first few notes.
As we approached the end of our list, I was nervous because I knew the crowd would want more. We’d played hard, though, and we didn’t have any more. Our last number was a song Brian and I had written together, a song called “I. C. U.” It was the best song we had—fast, loud, and hard. We started in and gave it everything we had. We were going crazy on the stage, I was screaming into the mic, and Brian was doing solos like a madman. Then, about halfway through, Hicks’s dad turned off the power to the building. Everything went black. Greg, seeing an opportunity, did a drum solo while people in the crowd lit cigarette lighters and held them in the air.
After a few minutes the power came back on. Hicks came to the stage and explained that someone had damaged the seed bags stacked against the wall, and his dad wanted to end the whole party. I was relieved. Now we had a good excuse for ending our performance. I announced over the microphone that we’d play our last song and the party would then move to the river, a spot north of town familiar to everyone. Once again we began “I. C. U.,” putting everything we had into our performance. We went nuts on the stage, playing as loud and fast as we could. Then we closed the song with a drawn-out, crashing ending, all of us jumping in the air and coming down on the final chord.
As the crowd started to clear away, we began to break down our equipment. Several people came and complimented us. One friend told us that we looked liked a rock and roll band up there. He said that was what made us good. We pulled our cars inside to load them up with guitars, drums, and amps. A few minutes later, as I stood there wrapping up cables, I looked around at the now-empty building. It had felt so good being on stage. I’d put my whole soul into something I believed in: playing rock and roll. It had been the best night of my life.
The next day, around noon, I went to Mike’s house and found him on the front step, smoking a cigarette. I sat down and joined him. Pretty soon, someone very popular from school drove by with his friends. Everyone in the car waved at us. Mike looked at me and said, “That’s been happening all day.”
People who’d never spoken to us before went out of their way to notice us. We knew that we hadn’t changed overnight, but they had. I stuck with my usual friends from the parking lot. But now everyone in high school knew who I was. My life had somehow changed. Now I was somebody. I was Jack from the band.
