The
tape was recorded on Saturday October 21 st 1961 at the
Concord Academy – an all-girls school located roughly 50
miles away from the all-boys St. Paul's School attended
by the 16-year-old Kerry and his schoolmates. The group
- which was originally formed in September 1960 by Kerry
and three friends - lasted for some 3 years before disbanding
in the summer of 1963. Playing at the annual “Concord Academy
Tea Dance” was a prestige gig for the young band.
The
tape was made because the band was planning to record an
album – and they had wanted to make a test recording at
a live performance. After listening to the tape a couple
of times – it was placed in a storage vault and forgotten
about until recent publicity about John Kerry's first “band
of brothers” led to its discovery.
The tape lasts some 30
minutes and features a total of 10 performances. It was
at the end of the performance of the last song – an instrumental
called “Rawhide” - that the unmistakable deafening sound
of ‘feedback' takes place.
John Kerry's guitarist
schoolmate Larry Rand – one of the co-founders of the band – has
just listened to the tape for the first time in 43 years – and
it brought back vivid memories of the show and the feedback
incident:
“We were playing a major
gig in front of hundreds of schoolgirls and we were out
to impress them. Everything was going well – and then suddenly
at the end of one of our songs there was a terrible grating
electronic sound – and we all looked around. My best recollection
is that it was coming from John Kerry's bass guitar amplifier!
We were mortified! This was long before psychedelia and
it was definitely not the type of sound that surf groups
and garage bands of that era made!”
“Of course a few years
later rock stars such as the Who and Jimi Hendrix were
intentionally incorporating feedback into their live shows
and records. We did it before them – though quite accidentally!
Even back then our good schoolmate John Kerry was clearly
a visionary and ahead of his time! The rest of the band
was thinking about impressing schoolgirls and he was busy
pioneering psychedelic feedback!” |
A
completely-forgotten live tape of John Kerry's high-school
rock ‘n' roll band (The Electras) recorded 43 years ago
at a school dance has just been discovered buried in a
vault. And the tape - which is in pristine condition – reveals
that the young John Kerry and his teenage bandmates were
caught on tape unwittingly creating what is probably the
first-ever recorded example of the pioneering, psychedelic
effect of “feedback” – the audio distortion first made
popular by Pete Townshend of the Who in 1965 and subsequently
by Jimi Hendrix! 
