When you’re just out of high school, it seems like the friends you have will be your friends forever. For the RPM Band, that turned out to be true.

Steve Block and Bill Pickering started the band in 1979, around the time they graduated from Willow Glen High. They were soon joined by classmates John Silva and Bob Moya, as well as Mark Hanson, who went to Branham. They still have the set list from their first gig, playing a house party on College Avenue in Los Gatos. They were paid $75 and all the beer they could drink.

The band signed with California Talent Associates on Feb. 27, 1981 — which Block considers the band’s birthday — and for the next couple of years, they were booked to play nine or 10 times a month at proms, nightclubs and theaters throughout Northern California. They added Steve Cardinale as a sound and keyboards guy, Dave Severson did the lighting and Chris Stearns was the stage manager. They were livin’ the dream — and then life happened.

“I quit the band in 1983,” Block said. “I had to get married and finish college and all that stuff.” A couple of other band members also realized playing gigs and getting a degree weren’t so easy to do at the same time. They sold their equipment and got about $8,000 out of it. Silva and Moya recorded a single and pressed about 100 copies that mostly went to family members.

For dozens if not hundreds of high school garage bands that formed in the early ’80s, that would have been the end of the story. But the RPM Band members stayed in touch. They comforted each other through divorces and the deaths of parents. And then about 25 years ago, they started taking family trips to Disneyland every other year. Their kids — eventually there would be 16 among them — became friends at annual July 4 barbecues in a spacious Campbell backyard. The instruments would come out, and they’d play some music for fun.

Then about seven years ago, the RPM Band played a public gig to benefit the children’s burn unit at Stanford Hospital and have been back together since, playing a couple of times a month. The venues are new — places like San Pedro Square Market, Charley’s LG, No. 1 Broadway and Santana Row — and they’ve updated their setlist to include favorites from the ’70s and ’80s along with newer hits like “Uptown Funk.”

“Back when we started, to learn a song you had keep putting the needle back on the record to get to the same part again and try to figure it out,” Block said. “Now, you just got to YouTube and somebody’s already posted how to play the bass parts.”

Block, 60, went into high-tech marketing; Pickering is a vice president for an LED lighting firm; and Hanson is a vice president at Sony. Two band members, Silva and Moya, work in the medical field. They’re not all in the Bay Area, either. Moya flew in for gigs from Seattle, and Silva commuted from the Central Valley. Fortunately, technology helped the band stay together despite the distance, and it’s helped them during the COVID-19 pandemic, too. They all have studios set up in their homes and use an audio interface device called JamLink to rehearse together.

Their last gig together was at the Sons of Sicily’s crab feed fundraiser in San Jose last March, and everything else on their calendar was canceled because of the pandemic. They had hoped to play a big 40th anniversary show this weekend but are now aiming for an outdoor event in late August to celebrate 40.5.

“Every song we play, you can either dance to it or sing along to it,” Block said. “We want people to come there, have fun and soak it in.”

FRY’S FOREVER?: Lots of people in Silicon Valley are thinking about the legacy and impact of Fry’s Electronics this week. The store fueled a generation of computer enthusiasts, providing home tinkerers with what the components they needed to build a tech-based society. Of course, for the rest of us, the big allure of Fry’s were the deals on everything from TVs and laptops to DVDs and audio equipment — and the eyepopping design of the individual stores. There was a Mayan temple in San Jose, an Egyptian one in Campbell, a giant slot machine in Las Vegas, and tributes to 1950s sci-fi and Alice in Wonderland in Southern California.

Derek McCaw, editor of the website Fanboy Planet and a recent transplant from the Bay Area to SoCal, suggested on Twitter this week that all the store decor needs to be gathered and displayed at a Fry’s Museum. That would be a great re-use of either the San Jose or Campbell stores and would provide a fun stop for tech tourists.

GETTING RESULTS: One of Fred Ferrer’s goals when he took over as CEO of Child Advocates of Silicon Valley was to expand the diversity — on several levels — of the court-appointed special advocates the nonprofit provided training for. It looks like CASA is on the right track after it celebrated the graduation of 81 new special advocates this month who were sworn in by Judge Shawna Schwarz.

This was the largest class in the agency’s history and included a range of ethnicities and ages from 20-somethings to people in their early 70s, who all had to complete 30 hours of training.

“Ensuring the diversity of our volunteers reflects our community and the children we serve is important to us,” Ferrer said. “We believe the diversity of the class, plus the enthusiasm the new CASAs demonstrated throughout the training, will lead to a more enriching experience for the children we serve.”

LAST BIRTHDAY: Last week, I wrote about all the friends and family who provided video greetings for Marge Valente’s 100th birthday on Feb. 22. There’s no doubt they’re all happy they took the time to do so, as Valente passed away during the night after her birthday. “Marge was determined to have her ‘last party,’ ” said longtime friend Helen Marchese Owen, who visited Valente on her birthday.