I have wanted to be in a band ever since I heard The Clash and U2. I have wanted to play bass in a band ever since I heard that throb from John Entwistle (R.I.P.) in “The Kids Are Alright” right when Roger Daltry sings “But I know sometimes I.” Right on that second “I.”

Just this past Friday, I’ve joined a new band. No name yet, but we’ve already got a great dirty sound.

Being in a band has little to nothing to do with being a good musician or singer. It’s a real chemistry thing. The love/hate/attraction/repulsion you all have for each other has to work out. A lot of bands break up on tour because if you’re not making music together, you may not all have that much in common. You’re sitting in a van or bus for hours on end you’re bound to have fights sooner or later about something personal or political.

Having been in many different bands, I would say that Jake and Elwood summed it up pretty well in “The Blues Brothers.” They said they were on a mission from God to put the band back together. And it is a spiritual undertaking, being in a band. You have to believe in something bigger than you and every other individual in the band in order to make the music work.

About 12 years ago, I was in a band called Tea Club. The drummer was this dude named John who reminded me of a gaunt Herman Munster with thick glasses. The guitarist was Stan, who was in charge of booking our rehearsal time at Tucasa and would routinely show up an hour late even though he was the one who set the time. Donna, the singer, was usually either high or pissed off that she wasn’t.

None of us were great at what we did, but we were pretty good at creating ferocious sonic landscapes for Donna to flip through her notebook and find words to shout over. We could come up with three or four songs every two-hour rehearsal.

We played two shows. One was at the grand opening of the Asian American Writers Workshop at its basement St. Mark’s street location, and we successively drove out most of the more than 100 people onto the street. The second was at the Asian Pacific America Heritage Festival in 1995 in Union Square.

Amazingly, I found an academic paper on us (apparently presented last year) that referenced our song “Alien,” which I came up with the music and Donna the lyrics.

That Union Square show was memorable for me because Donna and I got into a huge fight right before we were going to go on. A. Magazine was sponsoring a contest to find the best Asian-American band and Donna wanted to enter it.

Unfortunately, the deadline was that day and they needed a cassette handed over immediately at their booth at the festival for us to be considered. I had brought a cassette for the soundboard guy to record us. Donna wanted us to hand over the tape to A. Magazine after we played so we could enter the contest.

I was like, we hand that tape over, we’re never going to see it again and anyway they’re looking for like some bullshit pop garbage like Ace of Base.

Donna: “We need to enter that contest!”
Ed: “It’s a band decision!”
Donna: “So what, majority rules?”
Ed: “Yeah!”
Donna: “Well what the fuck is your problem!!”
Ed: “It’s a band decision!!”
Donna: “So why are you against it, you fucking asshole!”
Ed: “Go talk to Stan and John! If they go for it, then we’ll give A. Magazine the tape!”

So she goes over and bullies Stan and John into agreeing with her. But she still has to have it out with me.

Donna: “Why are you against it?”
Ed: “We’re never going to see our tape again! We’ll never have a record of the show!”
Donna: “We have to be in this contest!”
Ed: “Well, the band already agreed, so we’re going to give them the tape! Now shut up, you little bitch!”
Donna: “Don’t call me a stupid bitch!”
Ed: “I didn’t call you ‘stupid bitch’! I called you ‘little bitch’!”

Then we had to go out there and play. Stan owned two guitar amps, one good and one bad. For some reason, he brought the bad one and when it died, I started jumping up and down to distract the crowd.

So of course we didn’t come close to winning the contest. And despite repeated calls to A. Magazine and head honcho Jeff Yang, we couldn’t get our tape back. To be fair to the magazine, in any contest like this, you can’t go through the expense and time to return submitted materials.

But I still wish I had that tape because we had put on a pretty good show.

I also had a serious conflict in another band with another woman. It’s not that I have a problem with women. I have a problem with drug addicts. Yeah, this second woman, Laura, I found out later, was a crackhead.

So I was in this band, which never really had a name, with my college friends Howard and Dan on guitars and Laura on drums.

It’s tough finding a drummer in New York City. There aren’t many drummers and even fewer actually have drum kits because of the space situation in the city. Even fewer can actually play.

So when Laura would go on her crazy rants between songs (she said I looked like Chairman Mao and that the NHL goaltender Grant Fuhr was cool because he was black), Howard and Dan would just look at the floor. She was a good drummer who generally showed up on time. Because of that, she usually got her way.

She slowed down one of Howard’s songs, changing a Replacements-like song to a funereal-beat, robbing the song of all its hooks and appeal. She also said that none of us could use curse words in our language anymore (i.e., “Shit, I’m sorry I fucked up that song, guys.”) because it was offensive, even though she would go off and sing the lyrics to Richard Hell’s “Love Comes in Spurts.”

The end for me was when my grandfather had died and I had to go to Taiwan for the funeral. Laura was yelling at me, saying I wasn’t committed to the band if I left. I just smiled at her. Howard and Dan stared at the sidewalk. I walked away from Laura and the band.

To this day, I still feel so much animosity towards both Donna and Laura I can totally understand how former band members can hate each other’s guts. When you’re creating music together, such an arena is fraught with heightened emotion. Everything you feel is doubled or tripled.

This new band I’m in, after one practice I can already tell we’re already experienced enough to not piss each other off. We’ll probably get out and do some shows.

Will we ever do an album? I think I have the right attitude in saying that I don’t fucking care. Being a band and recording an album are two completely different things; as different as writing fiction is from publishing fiction.

After the sleazy hotel in Jersey, after moving to the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania the summer before my senior year in high school (thanks, mom and dad), after a senior year in a redneck high school in which I spent every other day in the principal’s office, there was the haunted farmhouse.

It was the summer before I was leaving for college (and in my mind, never fucking coming back). My parents found an old farmhouse on a large plot of land (including half a mountain). It was really cheap (this is when the warning light should have gone on), but it was about an hour away from the town proper.

[I still hate that town. In fact, I'll save more discussion about it for a future entry on its own.]

Anyway, they sent me to live in it for the two months before school to keep an eye on the place.

It was a house that was built, I’m guessing, in the early 1800s. There was a ground floor, an upper floor and a dirt-floor basement with a coal furnace. The steps for all the stairs were steep and uneven — crudely hand-sawed. I had to shovel coal into the furnace to get hot water and clean out the ashes regularly and haul them to a disposal chute so the coal could get enough oxygen to burn properly.

[Years later, when a reviewer noted that the narrator in Waylaid "seems bent on more than hauling his ashes," I knew exactly what he was talking about.]

Some days, when the water wasn’t coming through properly, I had to go up to the top of the mountain, clear the mud, stones and other debris from the lake drain so that water could again flow uninterrupted down to the house.

My first night in the house, I had just moved in what I planned to take to college: records, a stereo, a pillow (and later a blanket because although it was the summer, it got cold at night) and some clothes. I took one of the bedrooms on the second floor.

I turned off my bedroom ceiling light and was about to go to sleep when I heard some snoring sounds coming from the bedroom across the hall.

My first thought was that some homeless person had snuck in and was hiding out.

I got up, turned on my light, the hallway light and then I stepped into the other bedroom and snapped on the light.

What I didn’t find was scarier than anything I could have found.

The room was completely empty. There wasn’t even a bed, or any other furniture. But the snoring had stopped.

Then I thought, man, I’m just imagining it all. I turned off all the lights and went back to bed.

And the snoring started again.

Mind, you, I know what a settling foundation sounds like. It’s sharp and irregular. Not rhythmic and certainly not offset with sounds of exhaling.

I turned on all the lights again and went back to the room. Nothing there and no snoring.

Okay, I thought. I could choose to be afraid or not.

I went back to my bedroom and left the light on. I put on Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power album and flipped it over a few times.

After a while, I turned everything off and got back in bed. I heard the snoring again. I was now less scared, but I couldn’t sleep.

If I heard “Get out!” I would’ve been gone so fast, but the presence was nothing more than just some disembodied snoring.

In the early morning a rooster crowed in the distance and the snoring stopped. It was truly amazing to hear that relationship.

No more sounds came forth, such as trudging to the wash basin and then downstairs to breakfast and then work in the fields.

I called my parents and told them there was a ghost in the house. They told me to shut up. Typically superstitious Asians.

The snoring didn’t happen every night, but at least a few times a week. When I left that house and went to college, I started asking other people if they had ghost stories.

Even now, it’s still an icebreaker with me. If we ever meet, please tell me one.

Or write one into the comments!

this one is now up.

Thanks for stopping by. I already keep a two-sentence-per-entry blog on myspace, but I plan to write a less-frequent, more-impactful blog here.