It’s 1982. A group of teens in Bloomington, Indiana, spend their free time riding around listening to music, engaging in high risk behaviors, and having adventures typical of their demographic. The music they listen to is not typical: a cocktail of punk, proto-punk, hardcore, psychedelia, garage, and anything else far from the mainstream. It grafts onto their brains, informs their world view, and makes them restless to add their voices to the din. Ross and Greg play in an established local garage surf rock band, Moto-X, with a couple older dudes, including incendiary guitarist Frankie Camaro. David doesn’t play an instrument, and so he will have to be the singer for their new hardcore band, which would be called Yellow Rain, named after a purported chemical agent used in southeast Asia. After securing a drummer, they manage to come up with a handful of original songs and a few covers, and they play a couple parties, a couple shows at the local all-ages venue, and by early 1984, as has happened with thousands of other bands, their life trajectories began to send them in different directions, and they fizzled out. Ah, well. They weren’t that great anyway.
What they couldn’t have known was that Yellow Rain wasn’t dead, but merely dormant. Fast forward a few decades. Ross and Greg have been involved in music the entire time, playing in various bands, together and separately. David has pursued a more conventional path: marriage, children, and a career as a children’s librarian in the public library system in Columbus, Ohio (really). He’s seen the others only a few times, but then a close friend dies, and at the memorial service the three of them realize that there is unfinished business. Yellow Rain had yet to realize its potential. And now, perhaps this stark reminder of their own mortality has them thinking…what, exactly? Now or never? Might as well? In any case, they recruit Dan, a long-time friend and some-time collaborator who also happens to be a badass drummer, to replace their original drummer (John, who, having a busy and successful career and family life, was not to be part of the project–yeah, whatever John), and they meet up to rehearse for the first time. They’re not sure how it’s going to go. It’s like hooking up with an old flame, and you don’t know if there’s anything still there or if it’s just going to be weird. And of course it’s weird, but you know what? There is also something there. They can play harder, faster, better. New songs, really good songs, are added. Everyone gets along. They practice regularly, add more material, and they are able to do things that the original incarnation of Yellow Rain never did: play in actual bars for actual money, record their music, and, at long last, make it available to the world.
This is it. The rough beast’s hour has come round at last. It has taken a long time, true, but it had to take this long. That which had been buried since the days of Ricky’s Canteena has now re-emerged, like an unholy swarm of cicadas. It’s a great time to be alive.
