songblog

Entering Area 51

For once this is not specifically about songwriting but is it about being a musician and how that has effected my life, since I am offically a year older today.

Yes it is my 51st birthday, what I think should be a national holiday, but I don't have the pull for that. However, I thought I would take a few moments and ponder how my obsession has changed my life. Note that I am of course leaving out way more than I am leaving in, since this is thru the lens of my musical obsession.
I have been playing music pretty constantly from the time I was seven years old, with a break between 13-16 or so. Except for that one period, it has been my constant source of struggle, expense, inspiration and fascination. And fun don't forget fun.
I have so many memories connected with music. My Mom was a pianist, and I can't remember not having music around the house. I still have the piano my Dad gave her on her 25th wedding anniversary. Its in my studio, where it should be, ya know?
The phrase 'soccer mom' hadn't been invented yet. My Mom was more of a 'band practice Mom', hauling me and the trumpet she bought me from her part time job all over the place so I could sit in my second chair trumpet spot and try to sound together enough not to embarrass myself.
I can remember marching in the Rose Bowl parade when I was maybe 10 or so, and having the thrill of getting into someplace free cause I was a musician. I never have stopped liking getting comped into a club.
I took trumpet lessons for years, but then the Beatles happened and so of course I had to take up the guitar, this was maybe 1965???? I know that when I quit the trumpet I got a huge ration of crap from everyone, especially my trumpet teacher. But hey, he wasn't cool like the Beatles, right?
The guitar teacher I went to, who looked impossilby old to me, didn't cut it so I spent the next bunch of years trying to be whoever I thought was cool at the time time, Dylan, whoever, just learing on my own.
I can still remember the first lick I ever stole from a Grateful Dead record, that was a big postive thing for me!
When I was maybe 19 I got serious and started taking lessons from a great and somewhat wacked guitarist. I ended up playing classical music exclusively for the next six years. It was a great way to expand my ears, and I still think I have greater finger dexterity than most people that have only played rock guitar.
I remember one night going to a bar to see some guy play, and then I had that light go on in my head - 'hey, I could do better than that!'. Oh boy, did that one thought change the direction of my life.
It took some time, but eventually I started playing in bands, and then for the next ten years that is basically what I did. I had day jobs, and liked some of them, but I never thought about any career other than music, I mean to the extreme: I thought I could never survive if I didn't play music for a living. I guess that has turned out not to be true.
Being in so many bands, most of them long term situations, made a lot of my decisions for me. Just before the band era started for me, I was going to go to college to study classical guitar, but even though I passed the audition, I couldn't afford it. I didn't even qualify for student loans! After this happened, my first marriage crashed and burned, along with my desire to play classical music any longer. The marriage and the quite expensive classical guitar and I parted company. It was a good thing on the whole.
All through those years I spent enormous energy playing guitar, singing and writing and getting myself into all sorts of situations that I would not have otherwise been in. At one point, the whole band lived in the same house and we would practice seven nights a week in the basement. Later, I lived in a smaller place, and the practice room was the living room - you know, wanna watch TV move the drumset, that sort of thing. All this time I was in Seattle, a decade before grunge was popular, and it was a real nowhere place musically, but the small punk scene was to say the least interesting. Certainly I think I have played in more shitty dives than most folks. I finally had to move on.
I grew up in LA but I was always in love with SF, and thats where I ended up in the fall of 1981, broke but excited. I landed a job, got a place to live (sounds so simple, doesn't it? It wasn't) and after a long long time formed another band.
This band lasted maybe three years, and what head trips that put me through. We did play a lot of gigs, and just original material too, what might have been called new wave at that point. I hate that term. We also had the weirdest set of managers imaginable, two differnet sets, each weird in their own way.
Things happen, bands blow up and you either stop playing or get in another band, which me being a music junkie, I did. This was a pretty popular death rock band - yes kids, before it was called Goth, back when Bauhaus etc were first around it was death rock. It was a great band in many ways, and I got to play in much larger places than I ever had. No touring tho, just one trip to LA. We did have some great shows, and opened for some big name bands. I am still good friends with everyone in the band, and two of them live like a mile from me here in Portland. Good folks be hard to find bro, hang onto them.
Eventually that wound up, and I ended up in an all cover band, that was a testament to what partying and not practicing will do for you. It was great, but my substance abuse, always a problem, got worse and worse. I hated my day job and so went down to motorcycle mechanics school to try and get an 'honest' career - but I still took my tenor sax with me. The best times in a really terrible place were sitting in with blues bands, and they had some fine ones there. That kept me from going crazy while my second wife, who stayed in SF, left me. This was not a good time in my life!
Coming back to SF, I realized I hated working on other peoples bikes, and that I worked for a total a-hole, and got out after a year. I made more money temping in any case.
I finally met the right woman, and started working on my own stuff at home, and I sitll do that do this day.
Now - to the meat of the meal. When I think back over the years, I realize that at every turn, where I went and what I do was influenced at least in part by the primal need for me to play music. Now of course I have my own studio, but naturally that has only increased my addiciton. When I recall all the things that being a musician has led me to in my life, I can say that its all been to the good. Sure, I never made it as a rock star, but how many do? One thing I know for certain that having the outlet for my creative energy has made me feel that I am not just what I always feared I would be, a man in the grey suit: faceless, with no interests, nothing to keep my mind engaged and keep the wheels greased.
Long ago I got over any illusions about getting rich and famous off this, but I also realized that doing music or any art must first and foremost be a selfish activity. The creative spark inside all of us needs to be fed, and for me this is how I do it: making music makes me feel a more complete person, and I cannot imagine not being in the musicians tribe, any more than I could imagine not being Jewish, which of course is my other tribe.
These things run as deep in my soul as possible, they are here every day, and I am grateful that I have been given a bit of talent, and a way to work on it. For all the good and bad times in my life, music has always been there for me to enlighten and frustrate and give me a center to revolve around.
So to whoever may read this, I hope you can relate just a little, cause if you can, you are indeed a fortunate person. Now go in peace and write some music!