Rockin' Out The Door

Every time it's October, or if I'm in that part of town, I'm still haunted by the memories. In a good way, because of the fun we had watching The Rock Show, and even getting to be part of it at the end. And in a bad way, because most of the people in my life from that period are now gone, or have long since disappeared. I haven't seen Henry J. since the T-shirt signing party at our house in the summer of 1984, and I have no idea of whatever became of him. I didn't have much of the show to remember it by, except some loose artwork pieces by Dad, and my own memories. I can't believe we didn't take a camera with us to that final episode! As the years went by, I would bring up the subject of the show, but it didn't register with many, because a lot of people didn't have cable at that time. But one day down at Guitar Maniacs, I brought this up with Johnny Jones, and he had a story to tell me. Back in the early 1980's, he was in a local band called Mayhem, and one evening, he and the band's singer paid a visit to Henry J. at the studio...and took a handful of pictures to prove it!



Wow...there he was! And look at the equipment they used! It may have been pretty high-tech stuff then, but does look pretty threadbare and low-budget by today's standards. But I remembered the cool posters on the walls and in the studio. The memories really flooded back seeing this. Since there was no video, this looks as if this is all there was to prove that the show ever existed.

I made a little slideshow with pictures of the long-ago meetup, with an appropriate song to go with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0CbOqviAds

On July 25, 2021, John L. Rice left me a YouTube comment:

Sweet! Thanks for posting this. Every once in a while I try to search around looking for any videos from Henry J's show, especially the video battle of the bands he put on because I was the drummer in one of the bands that competed (THEATRE) and through a series of Spinal Tap type circumstances we were eliminated twice but got into the finals won the grand prize! lol I keep holding out hope someone video taped this shows and even a bad copy would be fun to see.

For those that don't remember or never knew, Henry J had 17 bands play in one day (!) at the Temple Theatre in Tacoma WA USA and video taped the whole thing. Then once a week he would play one song each by two bands and people would call in and vote for their favorite of the two. (a land line with a touch-tone phone was required, and I think it cost $0.10 or $1.00 per vote but the memory is fuzzy and it may have been free to vote?) After many weeks of eliminations the top 6 favorite bands (Crossbow, Theatre, Madcap, Menace, Xanadu, and Rennegade) and special guest band Freeway Jam played live at the Midland Hall south of Tacoma on December 20th 1982 and audience members were given a paper ballot to fill out for which of the six bands they wanted to win.

The grand prize was stated as "A television contract for cable TV" which I'm sure all the bands were thinking "Holy crap if we win we'll be on our way to becoming rich and famous!!!" but . . .what took place was we were given two days to record what ever we wanted at Evergreen College's video studio in Olympia WA and I believe it was mostly the AV students enrolled at the college doing the engineering. We discussed just working on one song to make it as good as possible but instead opted to play as many songs as we could.

The first day was pretty much all setup and sound/video checks (maybe we recorded one or two songs?) and the second day was a bulk of the recording and then teardown/pack up and leave. The only involvement that Henry J had was arranging the studio time and providing the black video tape (. . . actually there was a period of time where we couldn't get a copy of the video . . .I think maybe there was some "confusion" over who was responsible for payment for the tape and eventually we managed to get a VHS copy of the tape but I don't think any of our stuff was shown on Henry J's show). I don't remember ever seeing Henry J at the recording session and I never saw him again.

For anyone interested, while there is no Henry J or his show's content, the video we recorded is on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/user/Theatre1982 A lot of it is rough, weird, and unintentionally comical at times, but we are grateful to have this record of what we were doing at the time so thanks Henry J and all involved!!!

Maybe others that were involved in any way with the "1982 Cable TV Battle Of The Bands" will see this and add their own recollections? :-)