So there's this blog called One Base on an Overthrow on which the writer posts his thoughts on his own record collection and bands he sees live. Each post comes with pictures and digitally-listen-to-able songs. Beauty part is, this dude's from Connecticut, so I know, or know of, lots of band members discussed. Lately, he's been talking a lot about a few Connecticut bands whose members include people who were fans of my old band, The Pac-Men, almost ten years ago.

These kids (now adults) were staples of the Danbury-area scene, and The Pac-Men could count on them to tear it proverbially up at all our shows. We had a good thing going--I like to think of our little faction of the "scene" as the rag-tag underdogs--we always joked how we attracted the most disaffected/illusioned youths. If you were a nerdy kid who not only had no friends in school but also weren't accepted within the punk/hardcore community, The Pac-Men were for you. While the macho shithead bands, the pop-punk bands, and the emo/screamo/dreamo/shitmo dual-vocal, emotionally-draining faux-metal bands were playing over at some other venue, we and our little crew were having a ball over at the teen center or the VFW hall.

The point I'm trying to make here is that I like to think my band influenced those kids, and now several of them are doing their own creative things and getting attention for them. Granted, we weren't the only ones, but I hope what we did helped them in some way. At the time, we Pac-Men were already post-college age, but who knows, maybe by making some of those kids feel accepted and letting them know that music is supposed to be fun, we helped to spin their lives off in a better direction.

The video below from around 2000 features one of those kids, "Tom," now known as the singer of Guilty Faces, interviewing Malcolm Tent, without whom a lot of what's happened in Connecticut underground music in the last 20 years would not have happened, as he was the longtime owner of Trash American Style. (Speaking of influences.) It's just kind of a nonsensical interview, but I like the dynamic between the up-and-coming punk rocker teen and the wise, mature spiritual leader of the scene. If you can't hear a word they're saying, I've transcribed it over at the YouTube page it's on. Oh, and this originally aired on my old cable access show, Ready! Filmed in Newtown, CT, by me, Jere, probably between bands at a Pac-Men show.