The year was 1982, over 20 years and a million beers ago, so excuse me if the details are a bit sketchy. I guess the band was started by Roy Stanley and myself after another band we were in collapsed. The earlier band, which I don't even remember the name of and may not have even had a name, went through a series of bad lead singers. My favorite one once went into the bathroom in the middle of a song and came dancing out with a sanitary napkin with an adhesive strip stuck on his forehead. I was very impressed. This was in the town of Carbondale, IL, a college town surrounded by farms and wilderness. There were three of us college students and two local guys in the band and these two local guys were having none of this - this singer was just too weird for them! The band got another singer who sang equally out of out-of key but had no crazy antics and the band just fizzled.

This was actually a good thing because we started a much more interesting and fun band. This was a small rural town in downstate Illinois and in 1982 punk rock and new wave music was just starting to seep into the college dorms. Most of the bands in town were still playing Grateful Dead and Eric Clapton covers. We were considered radical at the time for playing Ramones and B-52's songs, old hippies and bikers were always giving us grief. Luckily, we had Teresa, our singer, who was quite attractive and always wore mini-skirts. Suddenly, we were packing the place every night we played with a mob of drooling frat boys. Once Teresa made some comment on stage like, "We're here to entertain you!" The entire crowd roared this resounding lascivious, "Yeeeeeeaaaah!!!" like they were in a strip club or something. And she responds without a trace of humor, "No, I mean wholesome entertainment!" The whole crowd burst out laughing. Another time she suggested we try playing some "renegade music." We all stood around rather bewildered until someone figured out that she was actually talking about "reggae music." I was really into the wacky costumes - the bandana scarves, the 77¢ kiddie sunglasses from KMart, the ripped shirts, the pointy red shoes. I wanted us all to wear plastic cornucopias on our heads but Roy wasn't willing to go that far.

In hindsight, it was a utopian band experience - about two months after we started the band we were playing to big crowds at the local bars, all the free beer we could ask for and getting paid too, we all had new girlfriends with new wave hair-dos and went to all the parties, we never had arguments, we were all best friends, no ego battles over who's songs we should play because we never wrote any songs. We put up ads for a drummer and a lead guitar player and the first two people who auditioned were great and were immediately in the band - how often does that happen? In reality, the band was only together for six months. Pat graduated and needed to move back to Chicago. Teresa began insisting we play her original song, "I want the Best Guy in Town" and I seem to remember her making other demands that didn't sit well with the rest of the band. So the band broke up ... sort of.

The Trend turns Inside Out - The Saga Continues....

Pat, Ron, Teresa, Mark at The Club	"I'm not just the spokesman for The Club, I'm their biggest client"	The mysterious "sixth member of the Trend" Ben Levine, Ron, Mark, Roy

 

1982 -The Trend - New Wave Music hits Carbondale, Illinois and its not a pretty sight!