Band as metaphor

My all-boys-school-Rock-band experience gave me a glimpse of what my fateful life was going to be: “some will come, and some will go… “: my bass guitar player has been dead 8 years, my rhythm player, Hung Quach, went hard-rock (“Black Sabbath”) and turned out to be a prick ( looting my guitar). Only Son, the drummer, the nicest friend as it turned out, yet his whereabout unknown.

Later in the Spring of 1975, when the IBM tabulating machine, which supposedly replaced human examiner, jammed up, forcing our SAT-equivalent graders to go back to the old way of manual grading. Rest of the gangs passed except me. Son was the first to discover the Addendum list a few days later. And you should have seen the joy in his face and the speed of his announcement: ” Thang, you passed with honors”. (Earlier that day, other classmates came to my house for my wake, since the papers – fake news – had a small Luddite column about technology went haywire, resulting in a death of a bright student via suicide, mine).

Friends like these are hard to find. Not on facebook nor any social media.

Only when you were in the band together, rehearsed together and jammed together late into the night. It’s a metaphor for real life: ups and downs, fright and frustration, confidence and camaraderie.

We also spent time outside of the studio: listening to music of the 70’s, commenting and rating them e.g. Lobo wasn’t hot in the US, but he was cult figure in war-time Saigon, Christophe played at the cafe next door was cool (Nuit come la mer).

The bonding of the band and coming of age.

We united against the “authorities” (in this case, the Head Master, Canh “hu”, with his dreadful walk around – I am sure he ear-dropped and listened in our start-and-stop quarrels inside a non-sound-proof room).

I was popular in school and lonely at home. Even in Elementary School, I was in a school-play taking the role of an old lady just for attention and a laugh. From stage to stage, I solicited shock (my Middle-School Principle, Mr Que, bounced back out of his VIP seating at the conclude of my “Don’t Let Me Down”). This Emperor-Club institution where my brother-in-law and brother went had academic standards so high that it took me 2 years to pass its entrance exam (I had finished at a French Elementary, not Vietnamese one, hence fumbled the essay in my native language).

In case you were curious: bandmates quarreled and bonded, like any couple, except it’s two couples. We smoked, drank a lot of coffee and were too young for alcohol at the time. We played from Hit Parade, which was the musicians’s bible at the time: The Shadows, The Beatles and CCR’s.

More up-to-dates were Fire-and-Rain and the Carpenters’ Super Star.

The war kept raging on outside, the music jammed on inside. It was hot, crowded in and fun ( a bunch of people just wanted to ditch classes found a perfect excuse to hideaway).

Memories of war inter-mingled with memories of childhood. Friendship somehow lasts beyond war and the grave. “Long bass” was talented and took care of his second wife/kids before cancer took him. He was a very decent human being and a first-class musician.

Son drummer has been the best friend one could ever find and I hope some day running into him. Hung Quach, son of the gun and of a dance instructor, hung out with me off-on since he was a year my senior ( We appeared on Vietnam TV9 on a school dance – Tran Thu Luu Don. This art experience stuck with me years later and helped me relate empathetically with soldiers guarding the lonely outposts over the holidays). Hung Quach still “kept” my guitar in case I ever returned.

Band as metaphor for life: those hours of rehearsal were life itself if not life at its best: you jammed, laughed, hoped and compromised. You melded and mashed the sound and egos until there are none but one speed, talent and temperament.

We were 4 kids but actually we were one band like Dumas’ musketeers, all for the Queen of Hearts. We ‘re Jr Band, “we come to your town” we’re American Band “we just want to celebrate another day of living” and despite the rain in Southern Can-Tho, we went on with “It never rains in Southern California”.

We were the ultimate dreamers at a time and in a place of “horror”, Apocalypse Now? since “fell in love… before the second show’…hence, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’…and even so ‘ I pretend to pray’… California Dreaming'”.

We did not know better then. We were young, all hopes and dreams…. and no fear or doubt. Four but only one. We were a band and not any band: poor but hopeful and blissful in our own ignorance yet charming nevertheless. That necessary innocence, was not too different from the one portrayed in The Deer Hunter – friendship at work and at play, finding themselves in extremely difficult circumstances (Russian Roullete). Same time frame, same place. Alright, alright, let its theme (Cavatina) fade in, since this blog is about music and memories of a jr high-school band CVA 68-75.