I created a fake band with my friends in the 90s and now my kids think I'm a rock legend.

By @benish · Family

We made up a whole backstory for a fake indie rock band in 1996 for fun. Now my teenage son found the old Geocities fan page I built and is telling everyone his dad was a semi-famous musician.

The full story

Back in the mid-90s, when the internet was still the wild west, me and two of my buddies were huge into the indie and alternative rock scene. We were just out of college, working dead-end jobs, and spent most of our free time going to shows. For a laugh, we invented a fake band called 'Asbestos Curtains'. We came up with a whole mythology: we were from a small town in Oregon, we had a rivalry with Pavement, our lead singer was notoriously moody, all that stuff. We even recorded a fake 'demo tape' which was just us making noise in my garage with a cheap microphone, and I built a whole fan page for the band on Geocities, complete with fake show flyers, blurry 'photos' of the 'band' (just pictures of random people from magazines), and a detailed discography of albums that didn't exist. It was a dumb, elaborate inside joke that we got a huge kick out of for a summer and then completely forgot about. Fast forward to last week. My son (16) is digging through old internet archives for a school project and somehow, through some unholy digital necromancy, he stumbles upon the old Asbestos Curtains Geocities page. He saw my old email address on the 'contact' page and put two and two together. Now he is 100% convinced that I was in a cool, semi-famous underground band and just never told him. He's been playing the horrible 'demo tape' for his friends, telling them it's 'raw' and 'ahead of its time'. He even asked if I could 'get the band back together' for a fundraiser at his school. I've tried to gently tell him it was all a joke, but he thinks I'm just being modest or humble about my 'brush with fame'. My wife thinks it's the funniest thing that's ever happened and is encouraging me to lean into it. I feel like this is spiraling out of control. Do I need to sit him down and crush his dreams of having a cool dad, or do I just ride this out and become the local rock legend I never was?

How people voted

OP Is Right — 31% (28 votes)
Both Messy — 39% (35 votes)
OP Is Wrong — 30% (27 votes)

Readers are split: “Both Messy” leads with 39% — 90 votes and 5 comments so far.

What people are saying

@brbcrying — This is a classic case of imposter syndrome over a thing you literally invented.
@mehhh — A rivalry with Pavement is the most believable part of this story.
@brynnkindof — I feel like you're leaving out the part where you secretly wish it was real.
@tom — lmaoooo
@yaralol — My uncle told everyone for 20 years he was an extra in 'Jaws' and we all believed him until my aunt posted the real story on Facebook last Christmas.

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