Duck Butter

Every year my high school held a Battle of the Bands competition. It was usually pretty terrible. One year I got a hair-brained scheme to get some people together to make a band and enter the competition and perform. I wanted this band to be the craziest band in the competition and deliberately suck. I gathered a total of nine people to be in the band, which we called Duck Butter.

We practised one time before the concert. We basically wrote two songs which sounded almost identical. I don't play anything so I was the vocalist and we had a couple of guitarists, a bassist, a drummer, someone who played the symbol and a couple guys who just stood around. It was a real freak show. Our plan was to dress in costumes and create a real scene. I dressed in a full spandex Elvis outfit with a jockstrap overtop. Other people dressed in masks and different stuff like that. On the evening of the battle of the bands, our drummer didn't show up. It was a big dilemma for us because even though we knew we were going to suck, not having a drummer would have sucked a little too much. At the last minute, my friend Derek agreed to drum for us literally minutes before we went onstage.

We had about 15 or 20 minutes to perform. First we did one of the songs we wrote and then we did a cover of Jewel's "Foolish Games" punk rock style and pretty much improvised. It was funny. We tried to bribe the audience for our vote by tossing out pieces of bread. Apparently it worked as we tied with another band for third place. I guess we won a lot of people over with our entertainment factor and I was happy people got joy out of it.

To this day, when I run into certain people from high school they still remember me as the guy from Duck Butter.