We set out to take the music world by storm with a sound parallel to cross-pollinating the Ramones with the sounds of a really bad car accident.

I put my first band together when I was 10, five weeks after I received a guitar and an amplifier for Christmas. It was a trio with a collective age of 31 consisting of guitar, drums and piano.

Largely influenced by punk rock and the avant-garde jazz records the piano player’s father had, we set out to take the music world by storm with a sound parallel to cross-pollinating the Ramones with the sounds of a really bad car accident.

Practices were sparse. We felt the intensity of the music needed time to manifest itself naturally. Also, we could only practice when the piano player’s parents and neighbors were not home. The music itself was Kool-Aid-induced and ever evolving.

We felt that the complex chord progressions and polyrhythmic drum patterns would take our listeners to places they couldn’t fathom. With reckless tenacity, the pianist would play the shoddy family upright with a handful of hammers he found in his dad’s workshop.

Our drummer would explode into 5/4 time signatures with ease and precision, often smashing his drum set and putting it back together again in the same song. I would try to recreate the chaos of the Hindenburg disaster with the use of feedback from my guitar and a vacuum cleaner set up next to a microphone.

Solos could sometimes last up to a half hour with newly discovered scales, loud kitchen appliances and harmonic theory exploration around every corner. When we locked in with one another musically, jagged up on Kool-Aid or not, truly amazing things were bound to manifest themselves.

When we felt we were ready to create the greatest social utility through our music, we gave our group a name, “The Electric Donkey Jazz Disaster,” and began looking for shows.

Given the fact that we were light years ahead of out time, we knew that gigs would be hard to come by. But we knew that people had to hear us. We felt that our brilliance and musical integrity would shine through, exposing our audience to the many advanced facets of music that they were simply incapable of grasping on their own.

Our first real concert was the talent show hosted by the park one block away from the piano player’s house. The day of the show we loaded up our wagons and pushed the piano to the stage set up at the park. We set up our instruments and anxiously awaited our introduction.

Even though we recognized the arbitrariness of the number system, we still felt obligated to count off the beat at the beginning of the song. After that the song exploded like napalm on our unsuspecting audience.

Unfortunately, after about 40 minutes of pure avant-garde punk rock anarchy, it was demanded that The Electric Donkey Jazz Disaster stop playing right in the middle of the third vacuum cleaner solo, or suffer the most unpleasant of circumstances.

When I looked up from my guitar, I saw a resentful mob of music haters shaking their fists, children crying and the judges clutching their ears. Alas, our music would not molest the judges’ ears the way we had anticipated.

Our group did not win a trophy, ribbon or even an honorable mention. All who had witnessed our performance hated us.

It was at that exact moment in time that I realized how incredibly fulfilling it was to piss people off through the use of art as a medium of self-expression — and I have continued to do so ever since.

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