The name of this band is The Minors.

Formed in 1985 or so, by a group of friends from the Mount Vernon Guard Fife & Drum Corps, this was the first band for all of us. Countless hours were spent in Andrew McCain's basement, honing our craft. And by "honing our craft" I mean we made a mighty racket down there, which may or may not have actually resembled "music" (it doesn't matter if the notes are good so long as they are loud, right?). We were still 11, 12 years old at the time and were just learning how to play.

Eventually we started to gel as a unit and we attempted to get a gig. We had gone through about a thousand names by that point (two of those short lived names were The Gist & Union Whispers). One of the directors of the fife & drum corps was trying to get us a gig, at Whitey's in Arlington VA (a place where I would spend many an inebriated evening in the early 00's). Because we were like eight years underage, we jokingly called ourselves The Minors. That, of course, was the name that stuck.

Of course we did not get the gig. Thank fuck for that. At least one of us would have probably gotten hit with a thrown bottle, or ended up way prematurely wasted. But we kept on honing our craft, and had worked up a bunch of Beatles and Monkees covers, and started writing our own songs as well. For a bunch of middle-schoolers, we were almost tight.

Cut to the 4th of July 1987. We had all performed at Mount Vernon Estate that morning, and there was to be a pool party for the Guard at Andrew's house. What better time to unveil our little band. While my memories are very fuzzy, we surely rehearsed a LOT for this, maybe even every day, in the two weeks since school let out.

For our set, we were pretty heavy on Beatles covers. This recording, as it exists, features five different Beatles songs (and one that was played twice) while we managed to hang on to one of our old Monkees songs. The most exciting part of this is our original material. While nowhere near awesome, it was still a very proud moment when we were able to play something that we were responsible for creating. It is still a point of pride, even to this day (where every song I play is an original) but, back then, it was monumental.

"Burning Flag" was particularly awesome, as we had this whole elaborate fireworks thing planned. The kid that was responsible for pulling it off didn't really pull it off but it was still pretty epic.

Unfortunately the video of this performance (from which this audio is sourced) cut off before the end of the show. While I can't imagine what else we played (I distinctly remember playing "Wipeout" but nothing else), the fog of memory suggests that we played for at least an hour more, but it could have also been like ten minutes.

One of the coolest parts of our setup was that I created a hybrid drumkit, out of both mine and Andrew's drums, and that was totally badass (it would be even more outlandish the next year). I can't really say for certain what people thought of us but we didn't care. We felt like rock stars and that grassy poolside could have been RFK Stadium for all we cared. I miss the days of joyous, youthful naivete. Fortunately we have the recordings to remind us.

-CA, 6/29/23