Reliving my ‘Yellow Submarine’ experience

Even as I write this I started playing the song “Yellow Submarine” by The Beatles in the background (on a constant loop) as I tell this tale of teenage angst and embarrassment.

My good friend William Andrew Puterbaugh and I began playing guitar at age 13 when a new man of the cloth took over the local church and agreed to teach us. However, we made a pact with the pastor that once we were able to play, we would perform during every church service strumming church hymns in order to continue receiving lessons from him.

I guess you call something like that a “pray-to-play” arrangement.

Two years later Puterbaugh and I decided to enter our school talent show as separate participants and ply our trade as teenagers who believed they were excellent guitar players because they knew a few songs and had a few hundred church hymns committed to memory.

We each picked a song to play at the talent show and decided we would play along to the music as opposed to playing and singing ourselves.

Puterbaugh went first that day and encountered nary a problem as he played “Runaway Train” by Soul Asylum. His execution was flawless, but I felt his pageantry left little to the imagination.

It was just an empty school gymnasium stage with some weird-looking kid sitting on a metal folding chair and jamming away to a song that now dates the two of us.

My performance, however, had all the glitz and glamour that you would come to expect from a middle school talent show.

I was decked out in some totally awesome, bejeweled turquoise jacket, which matched the colors of my blue electric guitar. But no, I would not stop there.

The simple dynamics of school popularity would not allow it. I needed something bigger, better — something extremely large, extremely flamboyant and extremely yellow!

The planned performance was simple. Once my music started my two friends, Brad and Shane, agreed to carry a gigantic cardboard submarine across the stage behind me as I played. In the hours before the performance we had all applied generous amounts of brain-cell-killing yellow paint to the contraption, which was more like an overly-painted, cardboard Hindenburg.