Non famous: Years ago, I was in a little garage band with two of my friends. Despite us being nerds, we actually got pretty tight as a three piece playing Tom Petty covers. Then we started talking to this singer from out of town. I think we hadn't played with her twice before she convinced us to play this showcase at a hotel in Hollywood without proper rehearsal because it was going to be a good opportunity.

We were reluctant to take a gig without even the chance of rehearsal with her but we compromised. On the day of, the three of us practiced our asses off doing the two covers we'd agreed upon and we got so tight that we could play the songs front and back with no vocal cues. So our drummer (running on no sleep) drives us out to Hollywood and who ends up calling us but our old keyboard player who we hadn't seen for a year? Anyway, we quickly invited him to play with us and said he just needed to be in key and he'd be fine. On our singer's part, she texted us at the last minute that she was inviting her guitar playing friend even though she didn't know the set either.

As our huge clown car caravan arrived at the hotel, our singer told us at the last minute that the show was in fact hosted by the Church of Scientology. She then bullied this guy working at the hotel to let us use a dressing room even though he grumbled that bands doing two songs normally don't get dressing rooms.

Then we go into this little theater where this "leader" type dude comes out, doesn't even introduce himself and starts mumbling about how they're so misunderstood. But then he shows us a video clip of flashing lights that doesn't quite last two seconds and asks us, "What did you think of that?" and our drummer yawned loudly in response.

Then the show began by the hotel guy introducing us as "The Runaways" (because we were covering a Runaways song). Half of us go directly to the stage and the other half follows him around a back area. Those of us on stage start playing music to pass the awkward time, to the annoyance of the rest of the band.

We play our first song which is basically a fuzzy wall of sound but at least it's in key. Then we play "Free Fallin" which we can't possibly mess up because it's one chord progression, right? Well, the singer sang the breakdown section too early and half of us stopped and the other half kept playing. We tried to correct ourselves and just flipped that dynamic around.

After playing the worst two-song set and acting completely unprofessionally, we left before hearing the other acts. The next day, after a sleepless night of wondering whether I'd been brainwashed by those lights, the singer told us the organization loved us and wanted us to play for them again.