My favorite New Year’s Eve bash took place when I was 18 years old. My band staged a performance in my parents’ basement. Afterward, we were whisked away via white Oldsmobile to a party at the posh Buckingham home of my childhood friend Winston Seto.

What was special about our show that night was that we were performing as an alter-ego band. Usually we were Trajan, a bunch of Burnaby headbangers. On that evening, however, we were The Boring Holmgrens, a punk band lead by the mythical Exciter Boy.

The thing is, The Boring Holmgrens were better.

I thought of this recently as I pondered the fifth anniversary of the release (or perhaps I should say the re-release) of the one and only album by the rock band Huxley.

Like the Boring Homgrens, Huxley was an alter ego band. It was the brainchild of Rob ‘Mule’ Hughes. He wanted to create a concept band that would deliver its listeners back to the early 1980s, the Elizabethan age of heavy rock.

So off we went, recording the whole thing in my dad’s house on corner of Moscrop Street and Huxley Avenue. Most of the bed tracks were done in the summer, but the real work came in November. It rained like hell all month, my dad went to Hawaii, and Mule and I settled in for a month of adolescent regression that ranks, I confess, as one of the best times in my life.

For me, the Huxley sessions marked a return to music. I had actually stopped playing my guitar altogether for a number of years; it was a no-hope addiction. I suppose I was pre-emptively taking the advice that the Mule himself would dispense years later:

“Stop it. Put that down. Take a break, go to school, get a trade. Make yourself useful. There’s way too much music out there in the world already. While I respect your need to spread your ‘message,’ please keep it to yourself.”

It was actually not a bad period. What it lacked in rocking it made up for in everything else. But then, out of the blue, JR McClelland gave me a call and the whole thing got rolling again.

Actually, come to think of it, nothing got rolling. We jammed about once every six months. It was only when Rob, with the Mule-like sense of purpose that is one of his hallmarks, decided that the Huxley project should go ahead in earnest that things began to change. A new era dawned in my life.

At the time it seemed utterly positive. It was a great year. I was like the Roman Empire during the era of Trajan himself. Settling into a month of rock and roll and booze in the old man’s basement seemed to be a perfect way to cap it all off.

And five years later I still get people talking to me about the “Huxley album.” Indeed, aside from its bargain basement production, it’s quite listenable. Lots of good riffs, conceived spontaneously and without inhibition.

Huxley was a four piece: Wes Byrne on guitar and vocals; Willingdon Black on guitar and vocals; Aljoz on bass; and Hugh Robson on drums. What I remember most fondly was sitting there amidst the cords, mics and amps, laying down guitar or vocal tracks some blustery evening, then adjourning to quaff down pints of the ‘Famous Ales of England,’ not to mention the not-so-famous ales of half of the rest of Europe and a good portion of Canada. There were some various malts and brandies comsumed along the way too. Recently, while cleaning up my father’s house, my sister came upon a large stash of exotic empties, archeological proof that Huxley did indeed once exist.

While Huxley were a typical British hard rock band, The Boring Holmgrens were something else altogether. Their origins lay in the fertile imagination of my long time pal Victor Keong.

“My puppet crawls, mortally wounded, as I kick the shit out of it.”

That from a song called “City of Desecration.” There were other tunes as well, among them “Cum Machine,” “Blood in Bombay,” and “She’s from Mt. Gonnga:”

“Oh great Shiva lend me a hand,
‘Cause I’m starting a rock and roll band.”

Perhaps you had to be there, but the Holmgrens' stuff rocked pretty well, and worked for the same reason Huxley did. It was not serious. Once you are freed up from trying to be serious, you end up being more real. The trying and the posing are gone, and all that’s left is the doing. It’s a good way to generate ideas.

And the ideas can then be used elsewhere. I have recycled pretty much all of the old Boring Holmgrens riffs. They’ve made their way into the first and (if it ever gets released) second Stoke records. I’ve also recycled a few of the Huxley songs.

You use the goof band as the catalyst to come up with the ideas, then you use the ideas in the real band.

The thing is, what if people think the real band is also a goof band? It came to dawn on me that if you play in a band called ‘Stoke,’ who play songs about Penthouse Pets and whose drummer twirls drumsticks, you may end up back at square one.

Of course, many of the most popular bands in Vancouver are goof bands. It says something about the emasculated, insecure nature of this town that cloaking youself in ‘irony’ is the only way you can safely express yourself.

And indeed, who are the ‘serious’ musicians these days anyway? For a couple of years I’ve been reading about how this place is an hotbed of ‘Alt-Country.’

Hmmm. We’re about as far away as you can get, geographically and philosophically, from Tennessee, Kentucky or Texas, yet a twang-accented hillbilly from Kitsilano or Commercial Drive raises no eyebrows?

More irony, I suppose.