About the Band

The Comedian was a punk rock band from Plano Texas, active from 1989 to 1990.

Scott:  Bass, Vocals, Drum Programming

Amy:  Keyboards, Vocals

Deron:  Guitar

 

Scott:  Looking back, it occurs to me that at a suburban high school with something like 2000 students, The Comedian was probably the only punk or indie or alt rock band, and possibly the only half-way legitimate band of any kind. We wrote original songs, had our own sound, played some shows and made a decent recording. Who else was doing that? I don't know of anyone. There was no scene, no all-ages club, and no club that would let us in. No local bands to look up to or follow in the path of. There were just bands on records that none of us had ever seen or heard live. None of that occurred to us at the time, and would not have mattered anyway. I suspect that in 2010, one in ten high school kids is in a band. It really is a different world now, which was a lot of the reason I wanted to put this page together. 

Deron:  I agree that we were the only legitimate band at our high school. Tim, Graham, Keith and Chris had Iconoclast (not sure if that's what they were going by?), but they only played the one show at Tim's house and never recorded. Definitely not as serious a project. I often remark that when we were in high school, the only people who formed bands were outcasts and listened to fringe music. Nowadays, it's totally normal to be in a band.

Amy: At the start of the 1990s, access to musical means of production was much more limited than now: Scott mentions having to work an entire summer to purchase a drum machine, and my subsequent Kurzweil K1000 keyboard was an unexpected high school graduation gift from my parents. Although creating art is a labor of love in any era, that labor had to extend to obtaining the sound sources and effects back then. 

I concur that we were the only legitimate band in our school, in terms of originality and integrity. This isn't just pride talking…we cared a lot! ;-) Regarding Iconoclast, I liked that our bands were from the same "tribe," but I remember more about their logo than their music, if that tells you anything.

Plano, TX has a sordid history for teenagers. In 1983, there was a rash of suicides that caught national attention. In 1999, its heroin epidemic made the cover of Rolling Stone. Plano Senior High was mostly upper and upper-middle-class…living in an apartment carried a stigma. Lots of rich kids neglected by jet-setting parents, lots of drug use. One of the precious few things I did like about our school was its size: our graduating class had approximately 1,200 students. It was easy to be autonomous, and there were enough personalities to find a few you could mesh with.