Like I already said, I had two friends who already knew their trade (like I always told them with my youthful levity), but I’ve learned a lot with their help. At the beginning it was a very hard fight against the pain in my fingers that came after five minutes of playing caused by pushing down the silver glittering, stainless nickel-wounded steel-strings onto the neck of the guitar. But the grandiose sound of a power-chord-major-g coming out of the amplifier made me forget all torments. This was my first step forward becoming a famous rock star (with bloody fingertips… there wasn’t nearly as much callosity I have now after two and a half years of playing)
Later after having learned the easiest way to play some accords on my instrument we, three of my friends and I, founded a little band so we could play our favourite songs for our own. But there was the second hurdle we had to take… All of us have learned so much things with our instruments in such a short time that nobody really had ambitions for more practicing and our first sessions ended in a big drinking-disaster (s. Markus’ essay) or in other things we shouldn’t have done (like trying to sink the neighbors dog in a fishpond and things like that…).
About three months later (we haven’t met for practicing the whole time) we decided to separate. Here began the time I started to be in doubt about my preferences in making music. I used this timeout to practice playing and singing at the same time. Therefore I recommend songs nearly everybody knows, especially from “Die Ärzte” and songs like “Wonderwall” from “Oasis”
But thank god I had a friend who played drums in a band. And thank god, too, that they needed a new guitarist and a person for second vocals. This band never wanted to cover not even one song; it was called “Tuesday Night”. In the same band my friend and guitar player from my first band became bassist in the same week. A few days later both of us rearranged the whole band. The keyboarder was kicked out of the band and the first vocals were set to me. So we became a five-person band. I think about three weeks later we had our first gig… there have been nearly 600 people who wanted to listen to “Miasma”, “Everlaunch” and “Tuesday Night”. After this gig the second singer left the band not because he didn’t like our music or us but he got a Studienplatz in Emden and the distance from Rotenburg to Emden was too far for him. So we had to completely rearrange again.
Now we got more and more abroad. Sometimes we had three gigs in one month! That’s a respectable number of performed shows and the tendency got higher and higher… And now on the highest point of our career the whole band imploded… Every time we saw each other we began to quarrel without any real reason… Not even five-year-old children would wrangle like we did… so the band became history in February 2003 and we scattered in four different directions. The drummer started a new career in a band that only covered songs; the solo guitarist moved to Delmenhorst, the bassist (who now became my best friend) bought a new guitar from the one who has stolen his girl. I changed my school and am now trying to build a new band with my best friend and his new guitar (he did a really good deal with that!!!).