Then we learned that WQFM radio in Milwaukee was holding a contest for bands like ours, statewide, with the playoffs at the Palms nightclub -- the same place where I saw Wendy O. Williams get arrested and the Ramones tear the roof off -- and the finals at Milwaukee's lakefront Summerfest festival. The winners would play on the Pabst Festival Stage, and with the amount of PBR that I had run through my system alone in the last few years, I figured we were a cosmic lock to make it.
The only hitch: We had to perform songs from 1975 and earlier. It was a challenge, but we worked up tunes like "The Crusher," "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin," "All Day and All of the Night," etc. The extra stroke of genius: Playing on our theme of emphasizing the visual, we called our show "A Trip Thru TV Land" and included the Outer Limits theme, the Batman theme, etc. We also pioneered the idea of "mixing" that is so prevalent today: I worked like a dog to edit the stuff into quick drop-ins, rather than the whole theme, since we only had 15 minutes and wanted to present a sensory-overload, non-stop visual extravaganza.
It worked. We made it to the finals and headlined the opening night. There were 12,000 people at the Pabst stage. I was nervous as shit, and so were some of the others once they saw the crowd, but the free Pabst backstage -- and the fact we were up last -- helped. Still, we gave a somewhat subpar performance and finished second to this band that had four white guys dolled up like the Supremes. One-trick ponies.
We continued to build a big following over the next year, and WQFM couldn't wait to welcome us back into the contest the next year, which I believe was 1983. We kept the same concept but reworked our set entirely, using the Peter Gunn theme, Surfin' Bird, Mony Mony,
