The Blog

I have no excuses.

I wasn’t misunderstood.

I wasn’t ahead of my time.

I wasn’t fiercely independent.

I just missed the train, all the trains, over and over again. Stood nervous on the platform, and waited.

Waited for the next train, and the next.

Drank at the station, taking notes, making lists. Ready to get on, soon as I completed my list.

Read the big board, all the cities along the track, distant destinations. Oh, Atlanta! Memphis, Austin, Eugene. Might as well have been Mars.

Didn’t want to catch the wrong one, get my only ticket punched for the wrong town.

Along about midnight, picked up my bag and went on home, whistles cryin’ in the night.

Five years after I saw “Rock Around the Clock” I got my first guitar.

By that time, my mother had moved me and my two brothers and two sisters from Minnesota to Southern California, on the run from domestic chaos. I don’t know exactly when my parents’ marriage started to disintegrate. I was too young to understand, and I guess I still am, but that’s another story. I mention it here only because maybe coming from a “broken home” somehow made me want to be a performer.

Certainly I was a fish out of water in California. Shell-shocked by the divorce, transplanted to an immense and unknowable city, just about to start my teen years, I found myself alone among the super-hip, super laid-back kids of Torrance, California. I was far ahead of them academically, but that didn’t matter to them, and eventually not to me, either.

I started ninth grade with no contacts at the school. There were a thousand kids at Stephen M. White Junior High School, the largest student body I’d ever been part of. Ninth grade was the third year of the three-year program there, so everyone pretty much knew everyone else, except for me, or so I thought. It wasn’t horrible, but I found myself alone a lot. I made a few male friends and mostly fantasized about the beautiful, aloof, tan California girls. It was during that year that I heard live rock’n’roll for the first time, at school dances and assemblies. They were surf bands — lots of twangy electric guitars, lots of reverb, not much singing.

The next year my mom bought me the guitar. We got it at Sears, brand new for about thirty-five dollars. It looked like this:
I had no idea how to play it, but I’d been hanging out with another transplanted misfit, a transfer student from Oregon named John McClain. He’d taken piano lessons for quite a long time, and so he knew chord structure. By that time (1964) the writing was on the wall, and it was clear that the guitar was going to be cooler than piano, not to mention more portable, so John got a guitar, too, and together we figured out how to play chords, translating what he knew from the keyboard to the fretboard. Pretty soon we were copying licks from Rolling Stones records (themselves taken from Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry records).

I can’t remember how long it was before we decided we were a band. Maybe six months, maybe a year, but here is where we’re starting to get to my point.

See, a rock band is a team, in some ways like a sports team. There has to be coordination and practice to make it work. The big difference is that in a band, you might find yourself playing with a bunch of people who all want to do something different. In athletic terms, it could be like playing on a team with a power forward, a quarterback, a shortstop and a goalie. Everyone’s a jock, and while this is clearly not the ideal situation, everyone is skilled, and whatever game you happen to be playing, there’s at least a reasonable chance the team can hold it’s own.

In bands, this mix-and-match thing happens because at first, you know who you know, and if one of your friends happens to play drums and you don’t know any other drummers, you sign him up, even if he’s mostly into Sousa marches. It’s not like you have a lot of connections and you can select the perfect drummer to complement your own musical style. Circumstance threw me together with John McClain, and it was a useful collaboration for a while, but in the end he was more Tony Orlando and I was more Hank Ballard. We still played together for a year or so after that.

As you grow up and play more places with more people, you have a better chance of hooking up with the “right” players, musicians who have the ability and the inclination to work in the same sort of musical style that interests you, but in my whole life I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a group or even known a group in which everyone was exactly happy with what was happening and all the players were on the same page musically. Naturally when there’s enough money involved you can take your pick of great players and make them do what you want, but A.) this scenario (tons of dough) is rare, and B.) if you’re a sensitive creative artist you might want to feel as if your bandmates are diggin’ it as much as you are.

Now I will tell all you aspiring musicians a secret. This is not the secret to landing a huge record deal and having a billion fans and hooking up with nubile models in the hotel room. Obviously, I don’t know that secret. This is the secret to making a living playing music. It’s so simple I don’t know why it’s a secret, or why it took me thirty years to discover it. Ready? Here it is: Find a niche and stay in it.

If you want to play the blues, play the blues. Or be a zydeco band, or a klezmer group. You could play R&B, folk-rock or bluegrass. But the key is to be consistent. Develop a style. Be the band your audience expects to hear, every time. Because there is a blues crowd out there, and a soul crowd, and a folk crowd. If you try to do everything, you’ll be competing with everyone. If you try to play a little blues, a little speed metal, a little punk and a little jazz, you won’t be as good at any one style as those who do only that style, and you won’t have an audience, because those who were hoping to hear a little jazz will walk in after you’ve played your jazz number, or they’ll leave before you get to it, and all they’ll hear is your rendition of Black Flag’s “Nothing Left Inside,” and they will never come back.

If you find a niche and stay in it, you’ll probably never have a billion fans. But eventually you’ll have 5,000 fans, and they’ll come to every gig. You’ll be playing music and making a decent living.

So I am dismayed when someone in my band wants to do a song that, in my opinion, doesn’t fit in with anything we’ve been doing, a song that is so not in the groove we’ve been building, a song demanded, perhaps, by some faction in the audience which does not like the niche we are working within.

A song like “Kryptonite.”

I know this was the long way around for this explanation, and I’m sorry. Believe me, I could have gone on for much longer. But down at the bottom, here’s what I’m saying: I can’t play with anyone I want. I have to play with who I know. I’m trying to have fun with this, and if I look for the Perfect Situation, the fun will be delayed, possibly forever. And I want to focus on a particular musical niche, and I want these guys to enjoy what we’re doing, because the pleasure is infectious and feeds on itself and makes everyone (especially me) happy.

We’ve got a gig tomorrow night. Lawyers. Why does it have to be lawyers?

Music has always thrilled me.

As a little kid I remember a cheesy portable record player, with a tone arm heavy as a log and a needle on the end of it as big around as a No. 2 pencil. Maybe it was the equipment that fascinated me as much as the music, because, really, all I had was a Gene Autry record, a 78, I think, Gene singing “Here Comes Santa Claus” b/w “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” There had to be other records, but my memory is hazy. There might have been a comedy record by a guy named Yogi Jorgensen, who pretended to be drunk. I might have had “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?” by the fabulous Patti Page. Hey, don’t blame me. I was four years old. But I enjoyed messing with that little record player, and I played those records until my parents must have wanted to scream. I shudder today when I think what the tone arm and stylus must have done to those poor old discs with every play.

You might think it was a lame time for white American music. But it was the very early 1950’s, and I know now that there was a lot of cool stuff going on. Just not at our house. Musically speaking, I guess my parents were dorks. It wasn’t their fault. I remember the music that came on the television: Burl Ives, Perry Como, Dinah Shore. I was so brainwashed that when Elvis showed up on The Ed Sullivan Show in the Fall of ’56, when I was 8 years old, I was as disgusted at his filthy gyrations as The New York Daily News, which reported that Elvis “gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos.” Hmmph.

The following year I went by myself to see “Rock Around the Clock” with Bill Haley and the Comets, and I think I can say it changed my life. I had never seen anything like it. The bass player fell down on the floor and played the big upright bass as it lay on top of him. If the sexual suggestion wasn’t strong enough, girls in the on-screen audience twirled their poodle skirts so you could see their panties, and all the dancing was done with what seemed like erotic abandon.

I wanted me some of that.

I completely lost interest in Patti Page. I tried to get my father to build me an electric guitar (I don’t know why I didn’t ask him to buy me one. Maybe I thought such a strange contrivance had to be custom-made. It certainly didn’t look anything like my Uncle Ralph’s ukulele.)

That was how it started, the obsession. It would be five more years before I got my first guitar, but I was mesmerized that afternoon, and I haven’t really come out of the spell yet. Maybe I never will.

All this is in response to kStyle’s interest, and Smokin’ T’s advice, but it’s late and it’s a long story, so I’ll work on it some more and try to make my point here soon.

I’m feeling ragged and emotional tonight.

Sydney Pollack is dead. Dick Martin is dead. I accidentally deleted ten directories off the network today at work. It will take one full day to recover from that, plus the stress of trying to conceal that it was my fault, followed by catching up on all the work I didn’t do while I was recovering from my stupid mistake.

I’m feeling rotten about my band. I’ve always known I’d get nowhere with it, and that was OK. It was just for fun, just so I wouldn’t have to be defined as a low level bureaucrat in a legal-but-immoral corporate enterprise, just so I could forget my real life, just so I could touch the strings and hear the noise, just so I wouldn’t die in utter boredom, just so I could share the happiness I feel from playing rock’n’roll.

But my bandmates don’t get it. I don’t know what they think I’m about as a musician, but the other day it was strongly suggested that we learn and perform a song called “Kryptonite,” by a band called 3 Doors Down. I resisted as long as I could, because I smelled something fishy, but over the weekend I was forced to listen to it for the first time, and I thought it was some kind of joke: a wall of distorted guitar is thrown up at the 8th measure, and it stays up for the next three minutes, no dynamics, no letup, while a “singer” intones sophomoric lyrics, the melody ranging perhaps from “A” to “C”. It probably fades out. I don’t remember. It wouldn’t be worth the server space to post the MP3 or the lyrics to this piece. I’ll just say it isn’t merely a song that wouldn’t be right for my band. It’s a crappy song, period.

Today, after I fucked up the network, I looked up the song, and I found out it was a monster hit eight years ago, Number One on the Billboard chart, and 3 Doors Down won a million awards for the song and the album it was on, and it made them huge headlining stars and they’re rich and idolized all over the world.

And I hate it. That’s how far out of it I am.

I’m not used to being out of it like that, and it’s depressing me. I made my feelings about the song clear to the band, and they’ve backed off as if they’d stepped on a rattlesnake. So I’m pretty sure I’ll never actually have to play “Kryptonite,” but what turns me upside down is the thought that someone — someone I know — would suggest that song to me. Am I working with guys who have no discrimination at all?

I guess I can hope that we are in one of those generally sucky periods of music, such as the one that immediately preceded the first English Invasion in 1963, when Tommy James and the Shondells were the best we could get on the Top 40 radio, or just before the Punk/New Wave explosion in the late 1970’s, when tedious pomp rock ruled the airwaves. People that come of musical age during such awful times don’t know any better. I can’t blame them for making “Kryptonite” a hit.

Now, I’m sure, I’ve offended somebody, and I’m sorry. That seems to be what I do lately, and I’m sorry for all my sins and it’s been 40 years since my last confession. Mea maxima culpa. If you can defend “Kryptonite,” please do. If you can tell me what’s profound or memorable or clever or even fun about it, I’d like to hear.

And now a gratuitous picture of Goldie Hawn in a French maid’s uniform. Say goodnight, Dick.