So it
goes.
ONLY
ROCK AND ROLL COULD SAVE MY MORTAL SOUL
I
finished college and have had a wonderful career in education and social
services now spanning over 25 years. I
have taught high school, preschool, and community college. I have helped people with mental illness and
developmental disabilities in a variety of rehabilitation and vocational
settings, and have found a wonderful professional home for the last 12 years in
the 3rd grade classroom. I
have raised 2 amazing children whose relationship with music is much different
and much less central to their lives than my own but who love and appreciate it
and endure my huffings and puffings about this “important album” or that
“National Musical Treasure,” which is all I can ask. And although I regret never trusting myself
enough to pursue some kind of career in music, I am very proud and deeply
gratified by my continued growth as a musician over the last 25 years.
As
college wound down, I had a rock and roll revelation at a party one evening:
someone put on a copy of Led Zeppelin II—which I hadn’t listened to perhaps
since graduating high school—and Jimmy Page’s gut-grinding guitar riff and
skin ripping solo on “Whole Lotta Love” shook the light fixtures in the room and
ended my “jazz phase” in less than 4 minutes.
Jazz was nice (still is) but was too hard to play and lacked the raw
power and frank clarity of rock and roll.
In the end, a jagged guitar riff and a backbeat driven by a rhythm
section with some shake to it are the essence of beauty in the ear of this
beholder.
After
college, I spent a lot of time playing rock and roll and blues tunes in the
various living rooms of the various apartments I lived in. I took great pride in my record collection
and referred to myself as a musician and a guitarist, but began to feel like a
poser: he who would call himself a musician should stand in front of people and
play music, not just wank in his living room.
And so wanting to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, I began to play
in front of people, toting my trusty acoustic guitar out to open mics—dozens
of them—all over the north side of Chicago.
3 songs or 10 minutes was the rule of thumb. The crowds were generally politely
inattentive and chatty, and the sound systems usually crappy, but once in
awhile place and performer would really click and share a moment of
beauty. The Abbey Pub had a great PA,
the audience usually shut up and listened, and one Tuesday evening a harmonica
player sat in with me on “Willin.’” When we finished the song the place, I
swear, went up for grabs. Another night
at a place called Weeds, a few drunk guys started doing the “hoo-hoo”s as I
sang “Sympathy for the Devil” and by the last verse the whole fucking bar was
singing and banging silverware and beer glasses in time. My teeth were on fire with joy. My favorite place to play was at Sheffield’s
on Sunday night. The Open Mic wasn’t
even really an open mic: we played on a tiny stage with no amplification
whatsoever—no mic or PA, nothing—in a back room, away from the bar. The only people back there were the people
playing the open stage and so everyone listened closely and, since it was a
small affair, usually everyone got 2 or even 3 sets of 3 songs. Coolest of all, a guy who played the didgeridoo
showed up pretty often to spice up the folky vibe in the most wonderfully
far-out way. I kept a list of what I
played, and when and where I played it,
and I played at over 100 open mics over a 2 year span. By the time my son was born and I took a break
for awhile, I had amassed an impressive catalog of songs I could perform and
I really did feel like, at last, I was a real musician.
SAM’S
LAST LAUGH
Space
got cramped and time got short as a new parent—the guitar went into its case
and stuck in a corner didn’t come out for awhile. I was still listening, though, and had taken
an interest in more country and bluegrass flavored rock and roll as a result of
the alt-country movement sparked by Steve Earle, Uncle Tupelo, and their rich
and myriad spawn. About 15 years ago,
reading one afternoon in a Sunday newspaper article that the mandolin—a staple
of bluegrass and country palettes—was tuned like a violin and thus used the
same fingering patterns, I thought vaguely that, given my history with the
violin, I might get a kick out of trying a mandolin at a guitar store
sometime. About a week after reading the
article, on a Sunday morning walk, my family and I wandered into a garage sale
and there, for 30 bucks, was a mandolin.
“The room seemed to tip and its
walls, ceiling, and floors were transformed momentarily into the mouths of many
tunnels— tunnels leading in all directions through time. I had a Bokononist vision of the unity in
every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind,
all wandering children.” * I picked
up the mandolin and suddenly, standing in that garage, my entire musical
history flowed through my fingertips—the years of failed violin lessons, the
thousands of hours spent picking the guitar, the lines of rock and roll, jazz,
country, and classical music running through my life all converged on the
fretboard at that moment. Somewhere my
grandfather, dead for 15 years, stirred—smiling or spinning in his grave. By that evening I was wailing away on the
mando with Steve Earle, Uncle Tupelo, and Del McCoury records, astonished at
how Grandpa Sam was managing to have the last laugh.
The
mandolin I had picked up at the garage sale was an extremely humble, even crude,
model, and so, now quickly hooked on the mandolin, I began lustfully eyeing
snazzier models way beyond my playing ability or budget in guitar stores and
music magazines. Then I had a
realization: despite the fact that I had been a contemptibly awful violinist, my
parents had purchased a pretty decent violin for me when I was in high
school. The instrument had been sitting
in their basement gathering dust and value for about 15 years. I dug it out, hocked it for a pretty penny,
and used the dough to buy myself one hell of a spiffy mandolin. My parents were overjoyed that their musical
investment was finally being put to worthy use, and I was inspired to a level
of disciplined practicing to develop proficiency on the instrument that would
have made Sam proud. Indeed, I have
named the instrument Sam in honor of my grandfather. Without the years of seemingly fruitless lessons
at his knee, I would never have been able to play the mandolin.
*from Cat’s
Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
PICKING SOME GRASS, SONGS BLOWING IN
Over
the last 15 years, finally coming to peaceable terms with the immense gift and
legacy of my family, I have had the privilege of participating in several
bands. As I picked up the mandolin, I
had the sense that, while guitar players are a dime a dozen, mandolin
players—even ones with very modest chops—are a relatively rare creature, and so
I figured I might be attractive to potential bands. Sure enough, within a couple of months of
picking up the instrument, I struck up a conversation at a Friday Night YMCA
family swim with another guy named Mike who, I learned as we chatted there in
the pool amidst our splashing offspring, played banjo. His wife was (and is!) a terrific singer, and
they had a fledgling little bluegrass-folk outfit getting started that also
included another family with small children.
I joined Banjo Mike and his band that Sunday afternoon, picking along
competently with “Glendale Train,” “Blackberry Blossom,” and “Old Joe Clark,”
and rounding out their sound nicely.
Although we changed names several times as we got things together (from The Dirty Diapers Folk and
Bluegrass Ensemble to Past Forward, finally settling on The Grass Stains), musically we gelled quickly, practiced nearly every
week, and were invited to play at a number of church, school, and charity
functions over the next few months. I
remember our first “headline gig”— 2 full length sets at a Border’s Books on a
Saturday night—with electric fondness.
By the time we got to Steve Goodman’s trainsong classic “The City of New
Orleans” to wrap up the 2nd set, with the audience singing along, my
eyes were wet, I was grinning like a hyena on laughing gas, and my feet were 10
feet off the ground. Although we hit a
few bumps—our bass player had aspirations higher than Border’s Books and had a
bit more time and money to devote to the project, and one of the couples in the
band split, which sometimes resulted in some tension—mostly, we had a great
time. After a couple of years, I entered
graduate school, though, and no longer able to make rehearsals regularly, I had
to split. I remain in contact with The
Grass Stains' families, however, and still jam at Banjo Mike’s house with some
regularity. And I had been part of a
band, which I had not been since high school—though a potential minefield of
cross purposes and conflicting agendas, it had worked out pretty well, and
playing with others was something I now felt was an integral part of my life, a
need and entitlement as basic as food and water.
Also
during this time frame, I tried my hand at songwriting. Despite my literary training in college, I
did not and do not seem able to generate song lyrics. Period (see “A SLAP IN THE FACE” in Family Gifts, Family Business, Part II). Since I first picked up the guitar, however,
I have been able to generate riffs and chord changes as I noodle around with
the instrument in my hands. My friend
Mark (a published novelist, he) was going through a pretty ugly divorce (there
are no pretty ones, right?) around this time and had written some lines that he
thought might be poems or might be song lyrics.
He and I got together one night, placing his lyrics, my guitar, and the
two of us in a room. I’ve heard many
great songwriters say that people don’t really write songs in conscious or
directed ways, but rather that songs write themselves or simply arrive, and I
never knew what the hell that meant until that night. I remember that a window was open in his
living room and that the wind seem to blow through and push Mark’s words off
the page and onto the fretboard with my fingers. The songs seemed to come together quickly, and we certainly felt more like conduits than songwriters, but it worked quite magically for a brief spell. Over a period of about 6 months we put together a set of
20 or so divorce songs which we called “Samsara—“ a Buddhist term which refers
to the suffering one endures on the path to enlightenment. A few of these songs—“Pipe Dream,” “Knock Me
Down Flat,” and “Right On Time” in particular— I think are pretty damn good,
and a few of them have entered the repertoires of the several different bands I’ve played in
over the last 15 years.
THE HACKSAW THREE, A COUPLE OF HACKS
After
graduate school, I put a together a new band from scratch, careful to assemble
a group of people with not only similar musical skills and interests, but also
similar time, money, and goals to contribute to the project. The Hacksaw Three featured myself on guitars
(standard acoustic, 12 string, and resonator / dobro), mandolin, and
occasionally bass, my old college friend Holly on piano and bass, and Patrick—a
grad-school education professor of mine—on guitar and bass. Though no one had a particularly gorgeous
voice, we all could carry a tune and our voices each had their merits and so we
passed the singing duties around pretty evenly.
We were an organization of generalists—anyone might sing lead or play
one of several instruments and take a solo as such on any song—and our
repertoire covered a huge swath of musical acreage: from country to bluegrass
to rock and roll to jazz to gospel to folk to blues. Our songbook included
everything from Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” to the country / bluegrass
standard “The Race Is On” to Monty Python’s “The Universe Song” to R and B
classics like “Dat Dere” by Bobby Timmons and “Crazy ‘Bout You Baby” by Ike and
Tina Turner (I played bass on that one!) to Tom Waits nuggets like “Picture in a
Frame” and “Take It With Me” to Schoolhouse
Rock’s classic “The Preamble” to original country, blues, jazz-pop, and rock
and roll original material written by us in the band. We played occasional gigs and recorded 4
albums (OK 3 full albums and one EP length half-album) in my friend Johnse’s
basement studio. Picking me up to go in
for our first day of recording, I said to Holly, “This is the day I’ve been
waiting for my whole life.” And, indeed, it was. The sessions went well, and a few weeks later, sliding the
final version of the first disc into my car’s CD player for the first time, my
hands shook and I couldn’t even speak as our version of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" tumbled out of the speakers.
I stand by 2 of these records—our 2nd album entitled Pipe Dream
and our last entitled Musical Chairs—as the proudest musical
accomplishments of my life. After about
10 years a number of personal and artistic forces converged and ended the run, however. Holly left The Hacksaw Three, leaving my old
professor and I as just A Couple of Hacks.
We soldiered on, but lacking the versatility provided by my Holly’s
piano and with a notably more basic sound palette and limited range and
repertoire, things stagnated. The band
was dying.
So it
goes.
Well I wouldn't say we were "dying". We did a helluva version of "Atlantic City." Let's just say we were in "suspended animation." So much so we could have called ourselves The Cryogenics.
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