High School Talent Shows
HarveyCanal
"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Never participated in one myself...but I've been reminded recently how at one point I reeeeally wanted to sign up for one in order to do a cover of "Willpower" by the Replacements along with a couple of friends. Problem was that among those friends, only one of us (a drummer) knew how to play any of the instruments we'd need to do the song.I recall that a group of other dudes, who did know how to play their instruments, wound up winning that particular talent show with a cover of "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd. 
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One of my high-school talent shows was won by a dude who was forced by the administration to censor his selection and sing "Wasting away again in Coca-Colaville." I think second place went to a bunch of dudes in color-blocked button-ups who lazily lip-synched along to "New Jack Swing." After that was my friends' punk band, at which point half the audience walked out. At the end, most of whoever was left got on stage and group-sang "God Bless The USA" by your man Lee Greenwood. Shit was wack on many fronts.
(peep the world-famous collectro at the very end)
Especially considering that that song wasn't even out yet.
Hell to the yes...which reminds me of the time that these dudes did a PE cover performance one morning in our school cafeteria for evidently no official reason at all. They set up turntables and mics, whipped through a couple songs with a bunch of extra yeah-boy's added in...and then we were off to class. Now that I'm on facebook, I've recently seen that the main dude from that morning is now a singer in what appears to be a country/honky-tonk band.
I forgot the lyrics though, it was mad long ago.
The first story I have comes from my junior year playing with the group I played with all through high school. We had auditioned Black Hearted Woman by the Allman's and they put us in. We later asked if we could change the song but got denied. We decided to play One Way Out anyway figuring "the man" wouldn't know the difference anyway. So we get through the whole song and had planned on doing one of those big, bombastic blues endings but apparently the teacher organizing the show finally figured out we weren't playing the original song. So right before we played that blues ending the whole auditorium goes dark with the intention of shutting us down but the shut off was so perfectly timed with what we were playing it just added to the performance. Afterwards people were asking us how we planned the lighting so perfectly.
The second one comes from a pep fest senior year. Played with the same band as before. This time we were asked to play because we had made a name for ourselves at the prior year's talent show. The teacher that asked us to play was a self-proclaimed Bob Dylan fanatic and we had been playing the Funky Meters' version of Rainy Day Woman so we figured it'd be perfect. We didn't know how he'd respond to that idea considering the chorus (everybody must get stoned!) but he OK'd it no problem and thought it was a great idea. So we get on, start playing and as the chant part comes up we completely cut off and the entire gym explodes EVERYBODY MUST...... This goes on for about two verses/choruses before they pull the plug on us. They searched all our lockers and cars because they accused us all of being potheads (they were right) and ended up finding a couple knives one of our guitarist's cars. Dude got expelled but he was going to Post Secondary the next semester anyway so he just got an extra long winter break.