My History with Skeletune

Back in late 2021, I received a message in facebook from a long time high school friend (late 70’s early 80’s), fellow musician and drummer Tripp Holland aka. “Glen Soderling” (or do I have that backwards?…lol). The message was “Hey Mark are you still playing bass guitar these days?” I responded with “I am, why what’s up?” Tripp “So how are you chops?” I said “Good.” At this point Tripp told me they were thinking of getting all the old musicians back together from high school and playing at our 30 year HS reunion.

I thought that was a great idea… Although I had been playing my bass my entire life, I was kinda dedicated to all original music. Meaning I really didn’t know or remember any of the cover tunes from back in the high school days. But, I thought it was a great idea, a challenge and an honor that they were considering me. Because, you see back in the high school days Tripp and I played together a couple times but for the most part we were in rival bands. Back in those days it was kind of a competition between bands sort of like two footballs teams going up against each other.

So Tripp told me that we had about 8 months or so to learn the songs, rehurse and get ready for the gig. Donnie Blankenship would sing lead vocals, Tommy Jones aka. “TV Jones” would play lead guitar, I would play bass and of course Tripp would play drums and sing. The crazy thing about this was, Tripp lives in Arizona, Tom lives in Washington State, Donnies lives in Anaheim, CA (our home town) and I live in Riverside County, CA. So the idea was, put together a list of songs we did back in high school, learn them all, then get together for a rehursal.

So I got busy working on all the songs they wanted to do, which was a lot of work since I had to memorize everything and it was a bunch of tunes I’ve never played before. I believe when all was said and done it was 20 songs we learned. The great thing about this was, we ended up having a rehursal about 2 months prior to the show to see if we were even gonna do it or not. Actually, since we were all in rival bands back in the day I think it was to see if I was gonna be able to pull it off or not…lol

Well, needless to say I succeeded and when we all met in Arizona to rehurse the first time, it was great. Donnie and I were able to reconnect and he invited me to play with his current band (after the reunion gig was over) since they needed a bass player. At that time they were called “Teachers Pet.” The reason for that was because three of the members were teachers for elementary schools. After I offically joined the band we renamed to “Skeletune.”

This is the reason for “Skeletune.” At the time I joined, we had an extremely difficult time trying to get practices with the entire band due to scheduling issues. We laughed about it and I think it was Donnie that said “We should call ourselves The Skeleton Crew?” seeing as that we had such a hard time setting up practices together. Later we found out there was another band out there with that name so Donnie mentioned “How about Skeletune?” Everyone in the band liked it so we stuck with it… And here we are today!