Making It Work For Us

Items discussed: long-running local rock & roll bands, bocce ball, “Weird Al” Yankovic

Items not discussed: baffling cell phone plans, the inexorable flaking away of my humanity, that episode of Punky Brewster where Cherie gets stuck in an old refrigerator

For the past 28 spine-tingling (or coma-inducing, depending on who you ask) installments of SubVersions, the little byline-thingy at the bottom has always read, “Matt Wild is ¼ of the rock & roll band Holy Mary Motor Club.” What hasn’t been stated, however, is exactly how long I’ve represented this not-so-enviable quarter-slice. Some scattered pockets of inactivity notwithstanding (several of which swallow up entire years), H double-MC (as the kids used to call it) has been around for a terrifying 16 years. Initially born out of a shared love for Mad Magazine, “Weird Al” Yankovic and copious amounts of Mr. Pibb, our scrappy little group has gone on to write and record hundreds of songs, release a couple of albums and play cities as far-off and exotic as Alton, Illinois. I was 13 years old when we first started; now, at 29, I can easily say that I’ve been a member of this band longer than I haven’t.

One of my fondest band-related memories occurred near the very beginning: on a whim – and high on whatever small-town, 13-year-old dweebs could possibly be high on – we decided to move our equipment from our drummer’s basement to his spacious, bucolic backyard. It was summer (of course) and I recall some vague notion that we were putting on our version of the Beatles’ Abbey Road rooftop concert, except that instead of a city roof there would be a suburban backyard in Mayville, Wisconsin; and instead of a crowd of adoring Londoners, there would be a nearby soccer field filled with puzzled 7-year-olds.

As was our custom in those days, we simply thought up a random title, hit “Record” on a barely-working boombox and hoped for the best. Three minutes later, we had unwittingly produced an adolescent masterpiece: a bouncy little ditty called “Bocce Ball.” So enamored were we with our new creation that we shouted for joy and began rolling through the grass, the sounds of which you can still hear on the original, near-fossilized cassette today.

All of this is to simply say that at one point in the distant, summer-soaked past, three scrawny, affable kids formed a band and recorded a song called “Bocce Ball.” Nearly 15 years later, one of those kids – now a grown man with a full-time job and a generous dental plan – would catch himself humming that very same song throughout the 2007 Forward Bay View Bocce Fest, where he and his fellow VITAL Source teammates would eventually suffer an ignominious defeat in the third round.

For the uninitiated, bocce ball is a relatively simple game: throw a little ball in the grass, then try to roll a heavier ball closer to that first little ball. It’s fun, surprisingly addictive and gives you the chance to say “balls” a lot. Participating in the Bay View tournament also gave me a chance to reflect: whereas the “Bocce Ball” of 15 years ago provided a much-needed salve to the pains of my adolescence (whacked-out hormones, fear of perpetual virginity, shitty haircuts), the bocce ball of 2007 merely offers me a criminally brief diversion from the dreary minutiae of adult life (utility bills, student loan payments, shitty haircuts). Nevertheless, a few highlights soon emerge:
– Running into local singer/barber Jose the Barber, who thanks me profusely for a nearly year-old column I wrote about him.
– Meeting a pleasant enough fellow who not only praises the “bar-hopping” aspect of my columns, but also informs me that his college nickname used to be – what else? – “College Days.”
– Listening to one of our defeated opponents coming off like a whiny, junior high grade-grubber – repeatedly claim that we won a close match due to an inexplicable scoring error.
– Enduring the musical stylings of The Jumping Frenchmen from Maine, if only to reaffirm my disbelief in a just, benevolent God.

Later that evening, I somehow find my way to Mad Planet for a non-bocce related rock show. Crowd-pleasers Pillow Fight put on one of the strongest sets of their young career, instantly vaulting themselves to the top of an already crowded field of all-girl bands that write songs about pirates and unicycles. Meanwhile, Quinn Scharber and the… stun the audience with their highly unorthodox choice of instruments: guitar, bass and drums. With nary a French horn or a fucking glockenspiel in sight, the boys remind you what solid, well-written indie rock used to sound like before the whole “Americana” thing dropped its steaming loaf all over modern music.

Walking home that night – tired, guarded and not a little bit drunk – I bump into an old friend. He’s pretty hammered himself and after a few minutes of alcohol-infused reminiscence, he suddenly says: “Man, we’ve gotta figure out how to make all this sad-sack nostalgia work for us, not against us!”

His words are still fresh in my mind the next morning as I decide to pop in a few old HMMC cassettes and get to work on my project for the upcoming Cedar Block Science Fair (check cedarblock.com for more details). The title of my entry? “Language-Based Humor and its Effect on the Parietal-Temporal-Occipital Complex, or: Can ‘Weird Al’ Improve Your Scrabble Score?” Here’s hoping the relics of the past can still pull me through. VS