Gotta Start Somewhere Jason Narducy of Verbow's pre-pubescent, televised punk origins

No matter how successful entertainers become, they'll inevitably always remember the first gig—whether it was disastrous, wonderful, or absurdly strange. Gotta Start Somewhere embraces these nostalgic moments by asking established entertainers to retell the first time they ever graced a stage. In this edition, The A.V. Club caught up with Verbow’s Jason Narducy before his eight-years-dormant band reunites for a one-off show at Schubas on May 15 to support the new Live At Schubas album. He looks back on his coincidentally but similarly named pre-pubescent punk band, Verboten.

Jason Narducy: It sounds like a joke. I got my first electric guitar when I was 9 years old, and it was not that long after I had seen The Kids Are Alright, The Who documentary, and I had seen Cheap Trick in concert. It was just sort of, "Okay, I'm going to do this." I started playing a lot, and basically found some friends from the neighborhood, and put together Verboten. Our first show just happened to be at the Cubby Bear.

AVC: How did you get that show? You said you were 10, right?

JN: Yeah. I was the youngest, Zack was 11, Chris was 12, Tracy was 14. And Tracy, our lead singer, was really immersed in the punk-rock scene and the bands, and she just knew a ton of people. She was quite the charmer; people really took to her. I don't think we even had a demo tape. We just were starting to get some good shows. There was a level of novelty involved.  

AVC: Do you feel like you were taken seriously, or largely treated like a novelty act?

JN: It went back and forth. I think the crowd, at certain points during that show, didn't know how to react to it. We knew that we were very young. We were aware of that, and it would be hard not to realize that in a stinky bar with a bunch of punk-rock kids in it. I think for me it was that my dad drove me to the show.

AVC: Your parents were okay with all this?

JN: My dad was. He drove me to the show, and we got there before they opened the bar. So we sat in his car and watched a drug bust go down right in front of us. They just slammed this guy up against the wall. I think my dad was having second thoughts about the show before it even happened.

AVC: That couldn’t have helped.

JN: Yeah. So I had my electric guitar and my little practice amp, and we sort of realized quickly that my practice amp wasn't going to cut it. So one of the other bands let me use their guitar amp. I was pretty nervous, but also pretty excited, and I think what was cool was we got to be a tiny little part of that moment, which was kind of cool. It was a type of music that wasn't embraced by hardly anybody, let alone clubs and music fans. So we felt like we were involved with something that was unique.

AVC: Were you treated as such?

JN: Yeah, I guess I didn't finish that thought. It was back and forth. I think you saw that video where I go into a guitar solo and they're mocking being arena-rock fans, and bowing at my knees and stuff. But I was also a fucking ripping guitarist for a 10-year-old, if I do say so myself. [Laughs.] And they knew that. So we got respect. We got lots of shows and the band broke up because we sort of took off so quickly.

Basically all of the parents except for Tracy's parents put the brakes on the ambitions we had. We were okay with that, too. I think at the time we were like, "Well, why can't we get into the van and tour?" And it's like, "Oh, yeah, we have school." Or, "Yeah, I haven't gone through puberty yet."

AVC: Was it presented that you guys weren’t old enough? Because some parents just want to kill that ambition in their kids and make sure they have a safety.

JN: No, it wasn't that. All the parents were completely supportive of the creative end of it and were bragging to their co-workers about the band. We were on this Kidding Around TV show, and they loved it.

But it was Tracy who was like, "Okay, well, you know, I'm sort of friends with the Dead Kennedys, let's get a band and put out a single." It was like, "Yeah, I'm going to let Jason finish fifth grade." 

AVC: He's gotta learn about long division first.

JN: [Laughs.] Yeah. That show—you say Cubby Bear, you immediately picture this frat bar with tons of lights, machines, pinball, and games. It wasn't that at all. It was one-10th the size that it is now, it was black, and they didn't even have stage lights. It was very dirty and unkempt.

AVC: This is the Cubby Bear in Wrigleyville?

JN: Yeah. Right across from Wrigley Field. By the late '80s it was a much bigger room, and they were—and it sounds funny to say this—they were competing with Metro for shows. Mostly local bands, like The Service, and The Slugs, and bands like that. They got some national acts, too. It was a viable venue for a while. And this is in '82 that we played there, January of '82, so it must have been three or four years later that it cleaned up under new ownership or something.

But, the punk-rock scene was really supportive. There was aggression in the, I guess they call it a mosh pit now, but outside of that it was a very welcoming community. We mainly did some club shows but not a ton, some all-ages shows at churches. It was always supportive. Probably one of the weirdest things we did, we went out to the suburbs to do a battle of the bands.

AVC: Which suburb?

JN: It might have been New Trier High School. That was sort of weird because we were playing punk rock, and all the other bands were Rush cover bands. At this point I'm probably 11, and I remember sitting on my guitar amp waiting for us to go. I'm sitting back there in this gymnasium alone, drinking orange juice because I had a bad cold. This high-school guy walks back there and asks if he can have some of my orange juice. It was so weird. Well, he was pouring it into a container with vodka to have a screwdriver. I had no idea what that was. So there were some welcome-to-the-real-world things for an 11-year-old new to the music. Friends have asked me to come to their school and talk to their sixth-graders about being a musician and writing songs. Sometimes it hits me: I'm looking at these 12-year-olds going, "Wow, by the time I was your age, I was doing it for two years. Gigging for two years, recording, writing."

AVC: You were jaded by that point.

JN: [Laughs.] Yeah, yeah, we were burnt out. I don't know what possessed us and why we were so obsessed with it, but I'm really glad that someone captured that show.