It’s time again for another installment of My First Time, the (allegedly) weekly series where I ask some of my favorite bands to share stories about their musical “firsts.” This week we’ve got a real treat: longtime YANP-friend Keith Murray of We Are Scientists has provided us with probably the best MFT we’ve had yet.

MP3: We Are Scientists – Impatience

We Are Scientists are currently finishing up their American tour in support of their new record Brain Thrust Mastery. They’re playing this Sunday at the Southgate House in Newport, KY with Oxford Collapse.

My First Time …with Keith Murray of We Are Scientists

First record you bought
I have an older sister, and so, until I was in high school, my music collection was largely made of dubs of her cassettes – lots of Poison and Bon Jovi and sweet garbage like that. I do recall that the first CD that I bought was for this same sister. My parents had purchased her the first CD player that my family had ever owned for her birthday, and so I wanted my gift to her to be something that would show off that hot new digital signal. Some douchebag at the record store recommended that I buy her Joe Satriani’s Surfing With The Alien. Even for someone who liked Warrant, that album proved unlistenable.

First record that changed your life
When I was 14 years old, Marilyn Manson (then known as Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids) were local legends, regularly selling out the 300-capacity Plus Five Lounge, which was located only a couple of miles from my parent’s house in Ft. Lauderdale. Their shows were pretty compelling to a kid in his early teens – creepy dudes, drug paraphernalia, loud guitars, outsized theatrics. I saw them religiously. The fact that they couldn’t really play their instruments made them more appealing to the budding guitarist in me. I bought their cassette demo, The Family Jams, and learned to play it note for note. That was the first time I realized that I could legitimately replace the guitarist of a band I loved, and it was pretty empowering. I’m not sure their guitarist (Daisy Berkowitz) was all that threatened by me, but he did get fired a couple of years later.

First concert you attended
I’m not sure how old I was, but I vaguely recall being taken by my parents to see The Animals at Miami Metro Zoo when I was still small enough to spend the bulk of the show on my father’s shoulders. I guess I was also too young to catch on to the pun involved in the booking of a band with that name at that venue, but, damn, that’s a really crappy joke.

First concert that blew you away
The first arena show I ever attended was Bon Jovi/Skid Row at Miami Arena. I was in the 7th grade, so things like explosions and big hair and extended drum solos and several thousand screaming glam fans left a big impression. Aw, who am I kidding – they still do leave a big impression.

First time playing live
When I was in high school, my older sister’s boyfriend was an aspiring musician, and he essentially coerced me into being his musical support at a talent show when I was about 16. We performed two of his original compositions, both of which were super-treacly acoustic love songs (about my sister, presumably). He was the first person to ever force me to sing (the songs were harmony-laden), so I suppose I do owe him for that, but, wow, do I ever hope that video of those performances never surfaces.

First tour (horror stories, unexpectedly great shows, etc)
We’d done a few multi-date road trips before then, but I think the first time We Are Scientists ever felt like we were on “tour” was when we played a series of shows with Bishop Allen in 2004. We barely knew them at the time, but after a sharing a show together in New York, we realized that our plans to play a couple of nights in Los Angeles were going to coincide with the west coast leg of their mammoth US tour (their whole tour lasted for three months, which, at the time, seemed inconceivable to us), and we decided to join forces. We ended up doing something like six shows together on that tour. On the first day, as we were caravanning from LA to Reno, the We Are Scientists rental van blew a tire. Rather than forfeit the show that night, we decided to load all of our stuff into Bishop Allen’s van, dump the rental in a WalMart parking lot in Los Banos, CA, and do the whole tour traveling together. There was some instant and rather passionate bonding as a result of the close quarters, and, to this day, it’s still one of the tours I look back on with the most fondness, even though, to be perfectly honest, the shows themselves were positively wretched.

First instrument you learned and/or first piece of equipment you loved
My parents were big on their kids having loads of extracurriculars, so, as a child, my schedule was loaded with such indignities as art classes, little league sports, and music lessons. My first instrument was piano, which I loathed and refused to practice, and, as a result, I can pretty much only play chordal stuff that sounds like “Hey Jude.” The first instrument that I actually loved was a hot pink Kramer electric guitar that my parents bought for my sister’s 16th birthday. It turned out that she was about as committed to guitar as I had been to piano, and, when she quit a few months later, my parents, pissed off at having spent the money on the guitar, demanded that I take it up. I resisted initially, but, man, how long can a man resist a neon-colored guitar with a whammy bar and a floating Floyd Rose bridge? Not long, in my experience.

First band you were a part of
In high school, I was part of a nameless band that played in Jeff Graham’s garage every few weeks. We mostly either jammed aimlessly or played covers of Alice In Chains and Rage Against the Machine. The stupidest part was that we didn’t have a singer, so we’d just run through three-minute instrumental renditions of 90′s alt-rock.

In college, my best friend/dorm roommate Joe and I started a band called Avi’s Worst Nightmare. We never played a show, we just recorded very strange songs on my Tascam 4-track. We made three cassette EPs over the course of our freshman year, none of which are still in my possession, but, in my memory, they were brilliant, and really, REALLY fucked up. One of them was called “Amphibious Pal,” and was essentially a jingle for commercially-sold pet frogs. Oh, I forgot: Joe and I had a similar project in high school called the Barcaloungers, which was the two of us writing songs and anonymously delivering the recordings to a girl named Lynn. The provenance of these cassettes was a long-standing source of mystery and torment for her. Then, she became my girlfriend.

Jesus, I was a fucking nerd in high school and college.

First time getting press and/or being interviewed
This really awful girl who wrote for Columbia University’s school newspaper did a piece on us in 2002 or ’03. Her bedside manner as an interviewer was pretty grating – she was dripping with condescension and self-satisfaction. Weirdly, the piece that resulted from the interview was pretty complementary, so it’s strange that she was affecting such attitude during the interview itself.

I also just remembered that the first time we were interviewed on the radio was at our college radio station, KSPC in Claremont, CA. We played a couple of songs and broadcast a pre-recorded skit that featured Chris playing a character named Serge, a French journalist whose accent and colloquialisms proved impenetrable for me. So stupid. I wish I had a recording of it.

First song you wrote and/or recorded
I guess the songs by the Barcaloungers were the first ones I ever wrote. We had a jazzy song called “Class President Girl” (the girl we were tormenting was the Senior Class President), and another one called “Goodbye, Cruel World,” which was about a minute of actual song (sung by Joe, the lyrics went: “Goodbye, cruel world/I’ll see you on the other side”) followed by two minutes of Joe attempting to do himself in with a myriad of gun sound effects (starting with pistols, escalating to machine gun bursts, while he vocally bemoaned his inability to effectively kill himself), until he apparently finally succeeds by detonating a nuclear bomb.

First awesome thing that happened solely because you were in a band
I’ll tell you what the last awesome thing that happened was: a few weeks ago, during our last tour of the UK, the whole band became obsessed with the Alien and Predator film series, since we’d recently gotten a box set comprising all of the films as a reward for doing an in-store. The box set didn’t include the latest installment, AVP:Requiem, which was about to be released on DVD, and the fact that none of us had seen it yet was driving us insane with desire. The day the DVD came out, we snapped it up, hoping that the university we were playing that day would provide us with a halfway decent AV situation. When we got there, we were utterly deflated: they’d brought us a terrible, old, 13″ television, which is no way to soak up AVP. We begged them for about half an hour to have pity on us and hook us up with something better, until they finally acquiesced, granting us two hours in their film screening room. It was about a 300-capacity theater, with a giant screen, a high grade video projector, and a sweet soundsystem, and we had it all to ourselves. We provided our own alcoholic refreshment and got pretty rowdy. The movie sucked, but it was one of the best moviegoing experiences of my life.

First horrible thing that happened solely because you were in a band
In a fit of rage, I once sliced my hand open on a cymbal, and then had to pathetically walk from the show to the hospital through a really sketchy part of Brooklyn. It was a long walk, and it was cold. And raining. At one point, I stopped at a fire station to ask for directions, prompting one firefighter to question the intelligence of strolling alone through that part of town at that hour. Another fireman behind him weighed in as, well, audibly remarking, “What an asshole!”

I spent five hours in the waiting room, and was given four stitches in the palm of my hand, which, because I didn’t have medical insurance, I later removed myself.

First reactions from your family when you played them your music
My parents are ludicrously supportive. When I give them new recordings, my mom actually does this thing were she sits down with a legal pad and writes down all of my lyrics. When she tries to cross-check the accuracy of her interpretations with me, I refuse to clarify the lyrics. I’m a bad son.

First musical obsession (band, song, singer, genre or otherwise)
Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper, when I was about six. The saddest part is, I think those two influences are really pronounced on our latest album. I need to buy some new records.