idiot
a brief history by Tad Williams

It's hard to explain this to anyone who wasn't there. Of course, it's hard to explain to most of those who were there too, since a lot of them are still in rehab, litigation, or both.

In the years since the band broke up, the members of Idiot have founded religions, made bestseller lists, been arrested for espionage, and generally led weird yet fulfilling lives. But there has never been anything quite like the glory days. Thank God, because it would have killed us if it had gone on.

We were originally two pretty dreadful bands. Andy and Rick, who have known each other longer than either cares to remember, were playing guitars together one day when a couple of other people happened to join them. (It was the 70s, remember. Things like that happened.) In a week or two, they had worked out some cover songs, mostly by Kiss, and someone decided to call the band "Cold Gin." They had bad haircuts and some pretty good guitars. Tom, Tad, and Paul had formed a power-trio named either "Pimp" or "Stormbringer" (depending on the day of the week.) They had marginally better haircuts, but much poorer musical skills. In fact, unlike Andy and Rick's group, "Pimpbringer" or whatever it was called performed original songs, but since they were played so badly, it was hard to tell.

Both groups used to sneak out to practice on weekends in the Palo Alto High School ampitheater, where electrical power could be stolen and neighbors were too far away to complain. Like the Brady Bunch, but with more drugs, it soon became apparent that these two should form a family. The other two musicians in "Cold Gin" received the Pete Best treatment, and were lost to musical history (except that their friends and family are probably still thrilled to death they got out.) Thus, "Idiot" was born, taking its name from Macbeth ("Time is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing . . .") Oddly, the local media contain no records of this auspicious event.

Our first manager, Alex, found us a variety of the strangest gigs imaginable, including Pan's a vegetarian restaurant where we premiered our song "We Are Meat" while wearing bloody butcher's aprons and brandishing dripping canned hams. In fact, we didn't really have anything resembling a normal gig in the early days. We played at rich sixth-grader's birthday parties, the K101 Radio Amateur Hour (we finished second, between a blind folksinger and a nine year old girl tap-dancing to "On the Sunny Side of the Street") and the Children's Hospital, where we performed to about a dozen confused young people in wheelchairs, and their attendants. We have a tape of that latter gig where you can hear the IVs rattling with the audience's excitement as we slam through one unheralded rock classic after another. "Those must be whimpers of joy" is how we phrased it to ourselves during the gig.

By the time our second manager, Clay, began to push us toward the big-time (well, at least into actual clubs and things) we had gone largely to original songs, established a tradition of odd stage shows and costumes, and developed a small but extremely wary and depressed following. Playing at local coffee houses and dances, with "concept shows" such as "Going on a Picnic With God" (in which Andy in his Android Christ persona was crucified on stage during an extended jam session) we began a period in which the only things that were missing from our rock and roll star lifestyles were fame, money, and recognition. (Well, we didn't have our own PA system for quite a while, either. And only two of us had cars.)

In fact, the group began to develop a self-mythology which went far beyond anything that actually happened. More and more, our songs were about the killing pace of the rock and roll life, of year-long tours (while we were in fact mostly living at home, going to high school, and playing live about once every two months) and crazed groupies wielding sharp objects, and of our own inevitiable demise in the toils of decadence. (We wrote at least half a dozen songs about how all the members of the group would die in various entertaining ways, fat and hideously old old like 22 or 23, that is, since atthe time none of us was older than 19.) Instead of simply splitting up, as less imaginative groups did, we also devolved into other groups, and sometimes we actually opened for ourselves as these other groups, making a point of saying nasty things about the headliners, Idiot. Among other incarnations simultaneous to the uber-band were "The Bay Cruisers" (a teenage idol pop combo), "Xander Povar and the Soul Commandos", "Starbrats" (a glitter band) and others that we can't even remember. There were also a few different acoustic-playing versions of the main band, containing two or more members, such as "Slim Chances" and "Parallel Grooves", pre-dating MTV Unplugged by many years, and adding no more to our fame or success than anything else we did.

Manager Clay began to find us a better grade of weird gig, such as Jerry's Stop Sign, a club in Berkeley that at first seemed strangely deserted when we arrived, ready to rock. The lack of crowd made more sense when the bartender told us someone had been shot there the night before. We also began to play real venues, like the Mabuhay Gardens, San Francisco's best-known punk club of the time. We were perhaps a little too baroque for the Mabuhay, and a little too heavy on the irony when we played Sean Cassidy cover songs or pretended we thought we were performing in a donut shop, but they liked it when we tore the head off a life-size Olivia Newton-John doll.

Somewhere during this time, Paul either fell out of the car or went to Mexico or just got tired. It's hard to remember now. In any case, he was replaced by Pat, another drummer (and thus, unfortunately, no less inscrutable than Paul.) Also, our off-and-on-again synthesizer player Ivan was absorbed and duplicated by another off-and-on synthesizer player, John (whose father later won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, ironic in a number of ways.) Neither one of them could ever quite make all those boxes and wires work properly, but it was still cool, all those synthesizer "whoop-whoop" noises. I guess you had to be there. Oh, you were?

The number of special Idiot happenings are too many to retail here, but a few should be mentioned. One of our favorites was our first full-fledged dance, at Jordan Junior High School ("The Inhuman Jive Bozo Dance"). Police records suggest that among the highlights were: the band waltzing around the stage with our friend Josh who was wearing a Nixon mask a totentanz which escalated into a switchblade fight scene culminating with Josh/Nixon's dramatic stabbing (which drenched several rows of innocent, high-potential children with fake blood); Andy and Tom having a savage game of soccer using a large baby doll as the ball; and Rick with his famous Endless Guitar Cable leaping off stage and wandering around in the crowd while playing searing rock god solos. Indeed, as junior high dances go, it was one of the interesting ones. Soul classics were rendered with Android Christ wailing on clarinet while dry ice fog streamed over the stage. Tad was thrashed with huge bullwhips. Hundreds of chocolate cupcakes were flung into the audience, where they were ground into a cocoa-and-polysorbate topsoil over the entire gym floor. Janitors were enraged. Chaperones had to be given special counseling. Countless children were scarred for life, at least emotionally.

In fact, our short-lived career as a school dance band probably set the cause of education back to the 19th century, if not further. On another infamous occasion we were banned from performing at a school because of our parent-horrifying show the year before, but we played there anyway, pretending that we were not ourselves but a "normal" band from Nebraska named "Wheatstraw." We dressed up like standard Boogie Band musicians long hair wigs, false mustaches, even using theatrical makeup to turn Rick into an Afro-American and played original Idiot songs, but attributed them to bands like Thin Lizzy and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. We revealed ourselves at the end, to the cheers of that portion of the student body who would later go one to become stalkers and insurance salespeople (if there's a difference.)

And of course there was our lone television appearance, where we had to retape our entire set a half dozen times due to engineering incompetence, and each time were forced to sit through the host's interminable Walter Brennan impressions.

Idiot (also known as "The Greatest Band Nobody Ever Heard Of") actually fell apart rather than exploded. Shadowy alliances and conspiracies resulted in bad communication and a less-than-Socialist sharing of drugs, and before we knew it, we didn't know it any more. The gray zone. People went on to do other things, including playing in other bands. Many still play music professionally. Some are allowed to operate heavy equipment.

But none of this really explains it all. Nothing you could read, or even hear, will bring back those occasional moments of wild glee, of stoned semi-genius, of actual art. Yes, we wore giant cardboard outfits. Yes, we wrote songs about bowling, and Denmark, and human sacrifice, with very little practical experience of any of those things. Yes, we lived an excessive teenage lifestyle and probably drove everyone around us mad with our irritating habit of always having so much fun, and so loudly. But the point is, we did it, and we got away with it. What else is there to say?

We used to believe that nothing in life was better than sex and drugs and rock and roll. Now, twenty years after we blew up our band, we are no longer boys, but grown men. We have families, and careers, and responsibilities, and now with the gift of memory, and the accuracy of hindsight we know that we were absolutely correct.

Tad Williams August, 1997 London

Idiot is... Tad Williams — lead vocals Andrew Jackson — rhythm guitar & vocals Rick Cuevas — lead guitar Max Tyrell — bass Paul Almeter & Patrick Coyne — drums

WEB PAGE DESIGN BY Andrew L. Jackson

COPYRIGHT 1997-2003 TAD WILLIAMS & ANDREW JACKSON