When I was in high school and early college, my friends and I had a band called Iron Horse.
Blaine used to make these hilarious tapes, where he’d sing and play guitar and make up songs on the spot, and bring them to school for me and a handful of other people to listen to. I can’t begin to describe them, but there were studio ones, mock radio shows, “live” shows (where he’d use his Casio keyboard to sample crowd noise, then he’d set up his amp and PA and everything on the back patio and sing to the hillsides behind his house). . .yes, some of those tapes still exist.
Long story short, I thought the tapes were great, and wanted to play guitar with him on some of them. Of course, this changed the sound dramatically, so we started writing “real” songs, instead of improvising. We would use a four-track tape recorder, a drum machine, and a keyboard to make some surprisingly decent recordings, and work out our ideas.
After collaborating for a while, we thought that the natural next step would be to start a band. Russ was a neighborhood friend of Blaine’s who had a really high singing voice, and he also was learning to play bass. So he was in. Eric played drums amazingly well, and after just one ‘audition’, on everything we could think of (including a tongue-in-cheek rendition of “Bark At The Moon” by Ozzy Osbourne), he was in. Tony was a friend of Blaine and Russ’s from the church they went to. He’d done lots of singing and acting, he had a really strong voice, and he could also play rhythm guitar, so he was in.
We had to come up with a name, at which point we had a problem because the tapes that Blaine and I had been making, under the name “Iron Horse”, were starting to get a little bit of attention from The Kids. So since we couldn’t come up with anything better, we decided to go with that name, even though we knew it was kinda cheesy.
Once the band was formed, we set out rehearsing and playing shows, like bands do. Incidentally, the first time I saw the movie “Donnie Darko”, I cracked up to myself. You know how its chapters are different days in October 1988? Every time one of those came on the screen, I’d think, “Hey, that’s when Iron Horse played this one show. . .!” or whatever. Hilarious.
Anyway. . .we made a good go of it for about a year and a half as a full band. If you count all those early tapes, then it was probably more like two and a half, or maybe even three years. Our lives pulled us in different directions and locations, as often happens, but we all look back fondly on that time.
We’ve gotten together a couple of times over the years, and we even filmed one of those reunion “performances”–it was really a one-off rehearsal, but we sounded better than ever, after not even playing together for six years!–and put it on television, where it ran regularly for a few months after that.
So why am I telling you all this now?
Because at some point recently, I realized that 2007 is the twentieth anniversary of the formation of Iron Horse. Blaine and I were e-mailing each other, and I mentioned that to him, and we thought it would be fun to do all new recordings of those songs. You know. . .in all that free time that we have. Since Blaine and I are both semi-professional producers and recording engineers these days, we’ll be able to make it sound really great, and have a blast doing it. The working title of the project so far is Iron Horse – XX.
Yes, I KNOW you want to hear something, or see something, or both. I don’t have a way to transfer video tapes to my computer—at least not without a lot of hassle and expense–but I do have a box full of old cassettes and CD’s floating around, and a book or two full of pictures, so I’ll find some good stuff and post it soon so you too can capture the magic of the “rock and roll juggernaut.” No. . .the magic of “Central Washington’s rockin’ machine.”
Yes, that’s it; THAT’S what we were. Or so we keep telling ourselves, even after twenty years.
