The Beginning (part 2)

After moving to the suburbs I was in a different world. I lived in the middle of a retirement neighborhood that was on its way to turning over the residents to a younger generation in a few years. The old people were dying off and I was one of the new and early inheritors of this quiet new world. The closest people my age were over 7 blocks away, which also was a hell of a run to the bus stop in the morning since that was where the pick up was too. I met a lot of kids from school that lived in the area. We played a lot of sports all day long every day of summer and after school. Football, baseball, street hockey, climbing of buildings in the neighborhood (abandoned school I may have to explain later), biking, running, basketball, skating… we even had made up games when we couldn’t get enough players for the regular games: curb ball – take a basket ball or soccer ball throw it at the opposite curb for points. Penalty for missing. Boomerang biking – throw the boomerang and someone plays wide receiver to ride out and try to catch it. It wasn’t a great idea and it was very short lived. Not short enough, though. For those who know the history of a boomerang, yeah, for some reason mine also had a near-bladed edge on the back. Catching it was hard enough without cutting yourself without adding a bike into the game.

One of the kids in my school whom I had no idea lived close was Marc. He rode our bus but had genes that were unfortunate for a kid at our age, he looked and sounded like he was 30. He looked like a parent who forgot to bring their kid to the bus stop, or like he was going to shove one of us into his car. If anyone remembers cult leader David Koresh from back in the 90’s, this was what Marc looked like and he knew it. He had a dark sense of humor and thought that was cool. We became friends in acting class freshman year. He and I shared a sick sense of humor and would often find the most outlandish two person scenes and plays to perform or try to figure out which monologues no one else would touch. Everyone in class, fucking EVERYONE, either did “Rocky Horror”, or something Disney. Marc and I and one other girl who was actually for real bat-shit crazy and in love with Marc would pick either vulgar or outlandish esoteric material. Edward Albee was a good one. I did Sweeney Todd before anyone knew that was a thing that Johnny Depp would ruin later. We did improv where we would have to play psych games with each other live on stage to fool the other person into going along with the joke one of us was trying to set up and also keep the class and teach guessing on as well. It was fun stuff.

At home I found out Marc was one of the kids that lived at that 7-8 block mark for distance from my house when I saw him walking by. So I went over his house and saw the greatest collection of musical instruments, mostly guitars, I’d ever seen. Not since childhood in my uncle’s music studio had I seen so many in one place. My uncle, whom I was told I am not allowed to name online, played bass on tour for some well known R&B / soul singers in the 80’s. I was never told this as a child. Even as a teen I never knew. A chance meeting with a customer at a music store later in my story will enlighten me to a family secret that only I and my uncle would know.

At Marc’s, I was in an enlightened space that I didn’t even know I was missing. I hadn’t even learned where there were guitars sold in my city until that point. I played violin in 4th grade and that place sold pianos and brass instruments also. But the guitar was like forbidden fruit. My stepmom would never allow the noise if I got one, and I probably couldn’t afford a decent one if I had a job. But Marc introduced me to the only radio station worth listening to on the terrible radio this city had to offer.

Then known as CD101.1 FM, it was the alternative station. In the 80’s I mostly listened to oldies music, pre-1970 and classical music on the college public station. To this day, I am the only kid in 4th grade that called in to that station requesting Rachmaninov and Beethoven. I had classical mix tapes. I had oldies mix tapes. I bought cassette tapes for $4.99 at the dollar store of movie OST’s, like the Explorer’s with River Phoenix. To this day, I know that soundtrack by heart. I knew Danny Elfman’s compositions for films and TV before I even knew he was in Oingo Boingo. I called the oldies station in 3rd grade requesting songs and shoutouts to my Aunt Eleanor. I was not the typical child with my musical tastes. I never learned what 80’s music was until after 1996. I didn’t start listening to music that classmates were into until 5th grade when Guns n Roses released their music video for “Paradise City” and the girls in my class were all about Axle Rose and Slash.

I got big into MTV after that, but I still didn’t know what alternative music was and wouldn’t for another few years when I met Marc and he introduced me to CD101 and the likes of Nirvana, Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots and so many more. 90’s music was my gateway drug into music I’d never heard before. He also introduced me to classic rock. I’d never heard Hendrix, Pink Floyd, or The Who before. The oldies station I listened to was strictly 50’s-60’s music or mellower 70’s sounds like Cat Steven’s late at night. I went to bed listening to that as a younger child.

Now, I wanted a guitar. I collected cassettes from the flea market of Use Your Illusions I & II which also became a business model for a few classmates whose parents refused to let them listen to GNR. I must’ve bought and sold every copy that booth at the flea market had for a few months. It was a good deal until I felt like I was taking a kids money. He bought 4 copies off me over a few months. He said his parents kept finding the cassettes and destroying them. So I made him a deal. I’d sell them to him at cost. Music needs to be shared. That might have been my earliest memory of music as an important currency. To this day, I still believe that to be true.

Marc and I became good friends over a shared love of music and movies. He too was into OST’s for movies and knew even more than I did on the composers of every action film made since Die Hard. He even wrote to them and had a few responses back. Marc could read music. Even though I played violin previously and tried learning piano from my grandpa and at a babysitters house, I could never read music notation. Marc taught me about guitar tablature. That was far easier to read. But harder to find for some pieces. I learned a few tricks in a few years to follow that I now found out aren’t really taught anymore. I learned to play by ear and for a while was really good at it. If I heard it, unless it was really technically complex, I could play it. I learned relative tuning which isn’t a widely known or practiced thing anymore. I just needed to get instruments of my own.

Next time: How I pissed off a music teacher and was told never to touch an instrument again.

Sorry these are so spaced apart. I have been really really busy up until a cancer diagnosis. Now I am finding time to write again. While a few people have heard a very abridged version of this story told, unless they were there they don’t know all of it. I think it is a fun story having lived it. Especially the time I tried to interview Henry Rollins for a newspaper I hadn’t yet gotten a job at. But it isn’t what you think;) (sorry, those clickbait YouTube videos use that line and I thought I’d try it out. But it is a fun story I’ve told and never written.)

Have you ever made such a huge mistake…

In 11th grade I had this stupid idea. Absent of any brilliance at all. I left a high school that I enjoyed. A school of the arts that was for artists and it was a school that gave a shit about whether the kids had a future. Picture a high school where hardly anyone was an outsider. A school where freaks and geeks had a place. Stupidly, I figured I could do better by being the shining star at a school with lowered expectations. I would get hassled less by a few problem teachers who had singled me out for their own personal nefarious plots to ruin my high school experience. Instead, I ended up at a school that met, in my opinion, the bare minimum requirements for being a school, but met more qualifications of being a prison. It had classrooms set up like group jail cells, and it had some teachers (not all were teachers), and some armed officers. It had a library, with a barely used computer lab because at the time very few people owned them and the Internet wasn’t as it is today. So it was me and a few friends that hung out in the computer lab. We helped the librarian police the computers to make sure they were being used right and after a while we were recruited to work on the school newspaper. Sounds cool, but it was a reason not to go to study hall- or known as: the place where bully’s hunt. 

There were teachers, sometimes. We had a German language teacher who was young blonde and hot. She quite not even halfway through the year. Rumor was that the students were sexually harassing her because she dressed like she was in a catholic school girl fantasy porn. There was an awesome physics teacher who clearly had been placed at the wrong school as he taught upper level physics to a class of 8 kids including myself. He was a pothead who smoked on his lunch break almost daily. But if you knew the crappy shit he put up with, you’d have something [weed/flask/gun] in your car too. He quite 10 weeks into the following school year because a kid threatened to kill him, for no reason other than it was Wednesday, in the middle of class. This school was like that. He cited liver issues as the reason. I spoke to him in his office regularly. I don’t believe the liver thing. But given the amount of pot my class knew he smoked, it’s possible. Or he took the early retirement to go back to get his Ph.D. in astronomy like he talked about. I really hope that happened. He was a good guy. There was a chemistry teacher who came close to blowing up the school a few times. Not sure how he didn’t smell all that Bunsen gas, but there was an evacuation once. He looked like how you would picture a brilliant but mad scientist to be. Balding, too whispy hair to do a comb-over, extra space between his teeth as though they were all just gonna fall out of his aging pale thin face. I dropped his class after a week because I felt we were all one chemical spill away from melted faces and mustard gas sealed airways. There was a history teacher, whom I felt was one of a few teachers, at that school, I can say to this day I respected and cared about after school. He gave us no bullshit on the history of everything. The future we faced. Civic responsibility. A presence in class that almost everyone paid attention to. I worked for the local symphony shortly after senior year and ended up working there with both of his grown kids. I was like a crazed fan and could not shut up about how cool he was. That man also saved my life once due to another “no other reason than it was Wednesday” moment. 

There was also a library assistant, who was very creepy as I think she provided alcohol to some kids on the weekend and other stuff. There were inappropriate conversations with minors, for sure. There was a music teacher who was rumored to have fucked a kid up in retaliation for the kid slapping him in the back of the head and it being more of an assault. (a report was never filed because the numb-nuts that did it, hit a respected teacher) The teacher’s head hit the desk and kids laughed. The teacher, whose head was down for what seemed like forever, gets up and goes all Kong on the kid. The teacher picks up the nearest chair, or music stand and chucks it in the direction of the kid. But misses and wipes out an up-right bass. Destroyed it. The kid tried to run, but you never turn your back on a pissed off giant hulk. The second throw, which was a chair, clipped the kid in the back of the head. He was able to still escape but had a slurred speech issue ever since. This teacher will be back later in this story because shortly after this incident I am describing, I had to audition for him.

There were non-teachers as well. The school resource officer. Pretty much this was a grizzled and very gruff old man who never smiled. Not ever. Picture a gruff older white Chicago detective who was a week away from retirement, who smelled of coffee and cigarettes, and flashed his gun when he thought there might be an uprising from one of his juvenile offenders. This guy shows up to class, know shit was gonna get real when he found whomever was on his list. The gun always was exposed when he entered a classroom. I never saw anything like it until I went to that school. We had a few police officers assigned to the school. This was for someone’s safety, not always the students. The officer was supposed to provide the presence of authority the school admin staff couldn’t. It didn’t work so well. 2 major fights happened that proved they had no authority there in so few numbers. One fight, someone went for his gun when the officer tried to break it up. There were about 40-50 kids in the hall during a class change at the time. He had to mace everyone within spraying distance. It was bad. The next incident was so bad it went through the courts for years after I was out of there. I kept in touch with a teacher involved. That one was worse. It might as well have been called in as an officer down call. It seemed every cop in the area and from two nearby suburbs came. This predates Columbine by a couple of years. So there wasn’t a procedure for the type of thing that happened. There were also non-licensed employees watching kids in classrooms, posing as teachers. Where a substitute teacher is clearly a masochist for showing up to this school more than once, These people were sadists. They would find any reason, valid or not, to give a student shit. One tried to break me. But I was already baptized by fire through a hellish summer camp experience staffed by sadistic shitheads that ran their version of Fight Club among the kids. Thunderdome rules applied. I gave her more shit back and somehow got her to announce for half the student body she was not a teacher. Therefore, she should not have been able to take a class of 25-30 kids on her own.

So that was what I went into. That is where music, already a huge influence in my life became necessary for survival. I escaped from that hellish place every chance I got. Listening to a small radio, the size of a quarter, I ordered from Popular Science. Or, CD player in my jacket pocket. Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Kmfdm, etc., etc…

So with a better understanding of what it was already like, I still wanted to learn something there. I had already surpassed the electives offered at my previous school. There was nowhere else to go except music, or a foreign language I spent 2 years learning and still hated. I had a friend in the school marching band that had spoken to the “Kid Crusher” who fucked that kid up. The teacher needed a bassist and I wanted to learn. I was told he would let me in the class and teach me. On my first meeting, I found he was told something else. He was as intimidating as the story on how he fucked that kid up. 6’5″ tall, he stood with a hunch. When he was walking at full speed the hunch was still there but it was like watching a juggernaut in motion. He was a large, built dark-skinned man who was not to be fucked with. I was staring at an upright bass with a giant splintered hole and a piece of a music stand still jutting out of it. 

My friend and “kid crusher” are finishing their conversation across the room while I am trying to figure out if the hole in the bass could be explained as some kind of accident other than what the rumor was. Then I realize,  they are both looking at me. I missed the first question of my audition because I was afraid of being the next Mario in a fucked up real-world game of Donkey Kong. 

How long have you been playing for? What gear do you play on? Can you set it up and play something if I get a drummer in here? 

Sadly, those questions created answers that proved I was not yet ready, at all, for a shot at this. I didn’t own my own instrument yet. The last thing with strings I played for any amount of time was a violin. Bring on the drummer! Can I borrow your bass guitar… and amp?

Audition over. He laughed. At me. I’d prefer that over the alternative which was sticking out of an instrument lined up on the back wall of the room. 

This would not be the last big mistake in my wannabe music career. Just the most embarrassing and awkward. So I thought.

The beginning

I listened to music all my life. My earliest memories were of listening to old Jazz records my dad played when he got home from work after everyone thought I was in bed asleep. I suffer from a bad case of insomnia going back to early childhood. This helped in many ways since it allowed me to listen to music that normally wasn’t played during the day around my house or on the local radio.

Local radio in this town back then was terrible. At the time, I could never have known about the corporate nature of most stations that played decent music, or how cutthroat an industry running a good locally owned and operated station  was, or how difficult. I know now due to relationships, that I value greatly, I have made with people as an adult who work in radio for such a station. But, back then there was less of that. An overly crowded AM band full of R&B, religious music, and talk radio. Many of which were only broadcasting during daytime.

The FM band was tragic. There was the local public radio station from the college who only broadcast classical music, an oldies station a classic, rock station, a few pop stations that all played the same thing… seemingly, at the same time, a rap station, jazz and one really cool station that played newer rock mixed with 70’s rock.

For years as a teen I was in trouble or busy avoiding being in trouble. I had cool friends introducing me to musical influences I had no idea were around and how to play guitar. Being in trouble allowed me to focus more on music since I was severely limited, as a punishment tactic, on my tv watching time. I listened to all forms of rock all the time. I tried to listen to rap and, maybe growing up in the suburbs- at that time, it just wasn’t striking any chords with me. I lived in neighborhoods like what the rappers talked about until I was forced to move to the burbs with my dad to get away from my mom. The bad neighborhood was full of shitheads who held nothing sacred, not even loyalty to friendships formed. I was lucky to get away from there. I was introduced to better people, better music, and a better life.