Roane County Battle of the Bands, 1984.

Posted on the side of the phone booth just outside of the high school, like whoever put it up was eager for no one to show. To eliminate the competition.

That didn’t fly for you.

You wouldn’t say your band was established. You gathered your experience on guitar from your grandfather growing up, learning on acoustics that gave your electric a strange, grunge-y sort of feel. That is to say, Alice in Chains, if this very event didn’t take in 1984. One that your dad would linger in the doorway of your bedroom listening to, and silently make tweaks to your lyrics when you weren’t looking. Or, rather, pretending you couldn’t see him.

You had a good friend, Allen, on drums. You two weren’t really close anymore, driven apart by friendships and cliches and highschool and pulled back together by music and weed. Your mom’s highschool friend, Jeanette, was on bass. For an old chick, she knew how to slap it down. And you had a random freshie on sound system. You couldn’t remember his name, but you knew that he knew when you needed volume, where you needed it, and how to use the distortion to your advantage.

A small group. Nothing big, but something you could brag about. Yeah, I have a band, at Thanksgiving. And when asked if you made money off of it, you could proudly say that you made roughly three hundred a night in tips, not to count how much the bars pay you to play. It had been volunteer work at first, but then they started to notice. The sullen, needy sort of lyrics that could resonate with the drunk middle age men in the bar, with the sweet vocals of you, was exactly what their clientele liked. Not metal. Not pop. Perfect.

Eddie, on the other hand, was another topic altogether.

Munson himself had been the one to put the flyer on the phone booth. The manager he had grown to be friends with at The Hideout, perhaps maybe just his alcohol provider at his ripe age of 19, asked him to post it, since Hawkins was hosting BOTB this year. Eddie didn’t need any more competition than what the rest of little county Roane had to offer. His band was good, and they knew it. Maybe Jeff tended to rush, and Gareth was a little pitchy, but Eddie knew he made up for it. For what he lacked in looks, appropriate social skills, popularity, style, and maybe just everything under the rainbow? He made up for with his hands. Both his guitar, appropriately named Sweetheart, and a few of the middle aged women he met at The Hideout when he performed could attest.

Which was why his stomach had been in turmoil for weeks over the fact that the poster had been stolen off of the side of the phone booth the very same day he put it up. He had no idea who he was facing, if they were any good. But Eddie had faith. He amped up the symbolism in his lyrics, the needy rawness in his vocals when he all but tore them out of his throat while he played, and the playing. Showy. Loud. Metal.

Eddie didn’t have many doubts when he and his boys with Corroded Coffin loaded into the bar. There were probably six other bands. Amateurs, with plain black and white Stratocasters and guyliner and sharpied tattoos. There was one band that stood out— quiet, in the corner. They didn’t see to communicate much. A beautiful guitar hung around the neck of a, if Eddie didn’t say so himself, beautiful player, holding what he could only assume was a lyric book. You.

The rules were Simple. The bands play, the crowd votes via noise and amount of booze slung at the band, and the band that wins progresses to compete against the next band with a new song. The final song had to be an original, and the best crowd pleasers won.

So, Eddie started off strong. A cover that he and the boys had played a million times over, a little crowd pleaser. Fade to Black. Everybody loves a little Metallica. It was good. It was practiced. It was perfected. But the band that came next, the quiet one that he couldn’t place, was what set Eddie on the edge of his seat. He didn’t know what to expect.