On borderland we run

Where to meet? We had a bassist, long-time friend Tommy V. We also had a drummer. Wes had a friend in drama, Barry, who was willing to give it a go. Both Tommy and Barry were in band together. But where to meet? A band cannot simply practice anywhere. U2 hammered out War from inside a garden shed behind the Evans' home, but none of us could think of a spot in God's country where the beating of cymbals and drums, the crunch of a distorted guitar and the thump of an electric bass wouldn't enrage the surrounding populace. (By the way, here's a fantastic way to make a little money. Build a garage, run electricity out to it, heat it, soundproof it and then rent it by the hour at a price low enough to allow bands to practice and high enough to pay a little sum above heat and electricity. One could even charge to store or rent gear! It's an untapped market, as far as I'm concerned, because every band from here to Seattle has to practice somewhere.) There was one place that could serve our purposes, however, and that was the church.

Over the few years we attempted to play together, we met in at least two churches. The first one was a local Christian church, a brown, barn-looking building, which my family had long-attended. What made it attractive was that it was available. It had a piano and, more important, it had a new sound system! I begged a key, and Wes and I met there one Saturday morning to give it a go. It was cold that day. Wes' knuckles ached against the piano keys, and my guitar refused to tune properly. We found the thermostat, and turned on the new sound system - Crack! Hummmm. It wasn't difficult to get the microphones going, but the board was beyond us. (We were never able to sort out the electric complexities of a sound board.) Man, that guitar sounded good coming from the eight or 10 speakers in the auditorium: speakers on every corner and even in the pulpit. That was a lot of sound for a 250- to 300-seater. The second church we used was a truly auditorium-style Assemblies of God church in Johnson City. It also had a sound system and, more importantly, a mixing board. I also had a key, but it was just as cold. A few hours into a session and everyone was shivering. The face of my guitar - by then I had inherited a yellow pine-faced Yamaha acoustic from my maternal Grandfather - was always cool against my forearm. Wes also graduated up to a four-octave keyboard. Neither instrument was performance quality (the Yamaha buzzed ferociously above the 5th fret).

Now, you would think that the real trick is what to play, but it isn't. The real trick is how to play. We had some interesting chord progressions, a few U2 songs Wes and I wanted to take apart and put back together, and what not. But how do you get four people to work together? It isn't easy. First, there is an order to readiness. Once the drums are set up, they are ready to go. Keyboards aren't far behind. The bass guitar requires only a little tuning. And once musicians are next to their instruments, they are going to play them. Try tuning up to three guitars in that! Wes, whose attention to the acoustic detail was better than any of us, was always responsible for miking instruments, running wires, setting levels and getting all the amplification to work together. His job wasn't much easier - that's the last thing to go. By then, Tommy is discussing the technical boorishness of Van Halen's bassist, Barry is half-listening while running through a 2/8 tempo band exercise on the snare, and I'm going over a few particularly sticky riffs embedded in the session's playlist. Someone has to be the heavy. Someone has to lead. Someone who has the song in mind and knows how to get there. Someone who isn't (like me) painfully obsessing about their instrument to the detriment of everyone else. We had no such person. Early sessions were a horror of fits and starts, re-tunings, side-conversations, and other snafu's.

Looking back, we didn't really understand what a band is supposed to do. As simple as it sounds, having fun with your instruments takes precedent over making art. In some ways this reflects the difference between piano and guitar culture, shaped music versus discovered music, controlled liturgy versus pietist emotionalism. Piano culture is notation, planning, elegance, complexity, full-harmony. Guitar culture is wondering what happens when you do THIS. It is an unfortunate polarity. Piano culture, like Chopin's nocturnes or Mozart's concertos, was once improvisational. J. S. Bach, for example, was renowned for his improvisational abilities, transposing and arranging in his head on the fly. Improvisation is the electricity of a performance. Play is the mother of art. Mutual improvisation - jamming - encouraging and being encouraged in your instrument - this is the most important thing. You might even call it a form of musical love, the ex nihilo creation of a selfless and creative community whose being-together begets and is begotten in the whirl of energetic and spiritual power called music. "Do you know how to dismantle an atomic bomb?" Bono asked an incredulous Michael W. Smith a few years ago at a Nashville fund-raiser for African debt relief: "Love."

A good band, be it bluegrass or Dixieland, watches each other, listens to each other, and gives individual space to first one instrument and then another. Every instrument gets a turn. Even a symphonic orchestra passes the underlying motive around like a communal cup. The sum is better than the parts. Every musician will tell you how much they learn from such experiences; you come out better than you went in. But we didn't know this! Like children in a nursery school, we simply did not know how to work together. U2 provided little guidance.

The members of U2 seemed to know and inhabit their places from the very beginning. Together they formed an ordered, liquid suspension of Bono's ego meets Larry's unflappable, type-B personality and Clayton's determination to put up with anything in order to be a rock star. The only odd piece was the Edge, Paul McCartney to Bono's Lennon. Wes and I were two David Evans on the bare edge of failure or success. We knew our project needed better models if it was going to survive, and so we went out searching.