(as recounted by Nathan Brown, esq.)
John Wurth and I started the Malone Brothers on a stormy evening sometime in 1988. We started with a borrowed electric guitar with 3 strings and a Casio keyboard. The key to the Malone Brothers (and later, the Playful 8) was simple: stream of consciousness lyrics and no rehearsal. Whatever we made up on the spot was the finished product. Thus, we began our long roadtrip to rock stardom.
The Playful 8 came about when John borrowed (stole) a pieced together drum kit with no matching parts, I scrounged up enough money for 3 more guitar strings, and our good friend Ian Chandler got a $50 bass guitar for his birthday. Ian really made this thing a "band". I think this was in '89. None of us really knew how to play our instruments, but we took a "learn as you earn" mentality and decided to make a 26-song epic rock album anyway. What the hell. This was the birth of "8 is Enough", available only on cassette.
These "songs" were pretty much perfect.. full of do-it-yourself grit, bad, almost indiscernible humor and inside jokes, and the kind of pubescent skater-punk silliness you just can't find anywhere else at any price. To this day, we have no idea why anyone else would ever listen to this stuff... but it really took off. We must have dubbed a thousand copies of that album over the next year. It's the perfect example of how easy and fun it is to just hit 'record' and be yourself. Art in its purest form. We really didn't care what anybody thought of it.
Ask anyone from Jon Bon Jovi to Bono... with this kind of rock stardom comes great responsibility. So, at some point, we decided that it was our duty to actually learn how to play our instruments. It was around this time that Ian said he had a friend at Tilghman who had an electric guitar and an amplifier... and he actually knew ALL the chords! After extensive interviews and background checks, Brady was welcome into the fold. He was a little nerdy and his hair was huge, which was really important to us at the time. Inside his massive coiffeur, he could actually hide 34 pencils. I could not make that up.
The Playful 8 was up to four members... just like the Beatles. I was the stinky one, John was the skinny one, Ian was the cute one, and Brady was the talented one. But our similarities to the Beatles don't stop there... oh wait... yes they do.
We played our first show with the legendary Paducah bands MC2 (MC squared) and Mrs. Frazier These bands were made up of former members of the cornerstones of the Paducah underground music scene like LSD, The Drooling Idiots, Brain Dead and Signal 30. We were honored to play on the same stage with these guys. We represented the next generation of Paducah misfits, and we were proud of it. There are so many levels of the Paducah Punk scene, it would be difficult to mention them all here.
After this show, we were officially a real band... and we started to realize how important it was. Other bands started popping up all around us. We certainly don't take any credit for it, but It was the beginning of a sort of 'movement' in Paducah, and it seems to be alive and well to this day. I'll try to mention a few old names (if I can remember them): ASB, Curtis Strange, Room 27, Inflatable Dates, Ozone Kite, Plaid, Vicious Circle, HHM, Three Legged Perverts, the Pubic Region, Critical Mass, Groove Corps, Primal Blues Brigade, the Clap, Sweet Revenge... I don't know.. a BUNCH! Some of these guys are STILL playing music in Paducah to this day.
We played lots of "hall shows" over the next year or two. A hall show is the kind of thing that existed in lots of cities all over the world. There was absolutely NO venue for bands like ours to play, so we just rented out large rooms wherever we could and threw our own shows. Normally, we charged $3 and had three or four bands. We were 15 and 16 years old, and we were totally in charge. We played in John's parents' garage, the KC hall, the Elks Lodge, the National Guard Armory, the basement of Symphony Hall.... and eventually got kicked out of all of them. I guess time heals all wounds, because we've somehow talked the KC Hall people into letting us rent it out again... how soon they forget. I think it will work out fine, since all of our "fans" are 35 years old with kids and mortgages now.
I guess we "broke up" because we all had to go on with our lives after high school. Oh.. that and the fact that we were all addicted to alcohol, heroin and fast women. But... like any other gang, we're all in it for life and the only way out of the Playful 8 is in a pine box. We never broke up... we just all took on "side projects" that lasted 15 years. All the members of the Playful 8 moved on to play in lots of other bands, and music has always been a way of life for us. We all may be fat, balding and grumpy old men, but we've been rockin' since you were in short pants and we're still playful after all these years.
We decided that 08/08/08 would be a fitting time for a little get-together, so we set out to throw a traditional old-school hall show in honor of all the Paducah rockers that came before us and after us. We called our friends The Wheelers and The Union Suit (both full of legendary Paducah punkers) and slapped together a shin-dig. Will there be others? Definitely not. Possibly so. Who knows?
