How It All Began.

Caveat:

Chances are good that I have got some facts wrong in this recounting. I am positive my memories are extremely slanted, and influenced heavily by my own imaginative tendencies. I have discovered that I tend to have rich and poetic memories that probably have more to do with my own inner dialogue than with any common plane of Reality. Ultimately, the tale is true, for if I tell it with fear or flourish, you can trust* that that is how I experienced it, as well.

(*If someone from my past reads this and becomes offended by my recollection of a time period they lived through, feel free to mail me and correct my mistakes at junkmail@wreckingboy.com)

This experiential conversion does not apply to whether or not something actually happened, or if it did not, how important that absence may be. It must be understood that this is telling the tale of (some of) my past centered around the theme of my music. Some have read this and asked me why I didn't mention certain things and I told them that you can tell a story ten different ways, depending on your focus. You could choose girls, locations, music, writing—many different angles, many different tales. The appearance or mention of certain people, situations, or objects should not be equated with their importance or familiarity to me, overall.

In other words, this essay may smack of memoirs, but it is not. It is a salute and bow to the music in my life, and it sees all through that lens. One day I will write memoirs, and I will speak of everything that filled my days, mind and heart. I will tell all I can recall, and I will tell it with the intention of expressing and confessing all before my time on this world is done. But for now, know that this essay was made to explain, in 2003, my dedication to and love for making music.

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I'm not sure that what I'm doing now is much different than what I was doing at five, when my mother let me use her tape recorder and microphone, and I would spend hours talking to myself or singing myself to sleep, the recorder still in my hand.

From my earliest days, I can remember being fascinated with the element of capturing time and voice and expression with the recording mechanism. I remember all too well how upset I was when my mother made me un-trade a boy at school. I had paid fifty cents (my lunch money) for a mono tape-recorder he had brought to class -- this was first grade, I believe, in New Paltz, New York—and brought it home, happily. I was devastated when I was told I had to trade back. No one told me in my language why I had to give up the magic. It really was an amazing thing to me, and I had been quite excited to acquire it.

Before I gave it back, I sat under the table at storytime, and instead of listening to the teacher's reading with the rest of the class, I had my ear to the speaker. Even the sound of the wheels turning in there fascinated me.

When I turned 18 -- I was living with a girlfriend in some welfare-project housing and working two jobs -- I bought myself another recorder just like it—you remember the type: flat, black, and boxy. Simple. You push the "Eject" button, and the tape pops up. I remember it well, for I had no social life at the time, and was just not satisfied with my written journal. With the acquisition of the tape recorder, I was freed to express myself, even alone. I would take long walks, kept company only by my soliloquies. I started up a tape journal that I keep to this day. I have hundreds of tapes of conversations, phone calls, drastic moments, hanging out, monologues, confessions, fights, plans, song fragments, ideas, poems, goodbyes, and I often work bits of them into my music.

The climb is certainly not over, so I cannot affect a look back at how I made it to some wonderful place of recognition and monetary validation. I still struggle with poverty, my own demons, and absurd technical limitations.* But I have realized many dreams so far, along the way to the bigger ones. I have seen beautiful landmarks, and have already had moments I never thought I'd see. I would like to share them with you here. I am inspired and encouraged by the amazing results of my love-made-action, and in this appreciation, I instinctively look back to the very first seeds.

 

 

My early years were spent in the company of people whom we have since titled "hippies." That is to say, my mother and her friends were young people who recognized the folly and dangerous quality of the established order's rule, but saw to rebel by means of adopting a different lifestyle. Or maybe they were just troublemakers in the 70s because there was nothing better to do.

Either way, this lifestyle and environment exposed me to many things. I do observe and attempt to understand myself and all I come in contact with. And I have scrabbled my fingers down to the roots of my influence.

My love for acoustic guitar can easily be traced to those days that still hang in my mind's gallery: the ones misted with sunlight. Those memories where the frame is filled with gentle giants and all the very recognizable symbols of my past: guitars, long hair, smiles, denim. Guitars. Being a student of memory, I know that it is entirely possible that in actuality, I was only exposed to four guitars in my early years. Who knows. But I never forgot them, if so.

In my spiritual and psychic memory, there are many guitars and they are always playing beautifully, even when they are sleeping. High above all them was Richie's guitar. Richie's silver-skinned, elegant guitar. It had the winding, curling ƒ-holes. It was magic, as you can tell. And Richie was the kindest man I have ever known, even to this day.

Richie left my life suddenly, when my mother and him parted ways. He had been around for a while. I don't remember how long. Long enough to leave me with some very beautiful and important memories. My mother later explained to me that she left Richie because she had to go with someone else, someone she did not have the "wrongness" feeling with. Something was not in Richie's future, my mother sensed, and so she couldn't marry him, as he had asked.

What was not in Richie's future was Richie. He died when I was five or so, shortly after my mother chose another man. Right before my stepfather entered my life. The Guitar has stayed with me, in my mind and heart, throughout all the years between then and now. The images of Richie—a man whose love came with no shadow—stayed with me. Richie taught me some of the most important things I know today about being a man. They were not things told to me. They were things shown to me. And while I could not list them here, they did take root. They very gently took root and sheltered me during some of the hard years passed in between then and now. The memory of Richie lives on, and is honored through my dedication to this music.

 

 

But I didn't pick up the guitar for a long time. And I paid guitars little mind after Richie and all the others stopped coming around. After the new Family began. Guitars seemed to fill my early days, and then, with the commencement of a different, more scabby time period, there was not a one on the landscape. Not until many years, passed. And then, with the dawning of my teenage liberation from my family—I first moved out at 15—the guitar seemed to make a reappearance, as if with the coming of a new day, I was returning to a grander time.

There was one guitar, for a time, when I was ten. I remember always having it in my room, as a child. I had this bright yellow thin and tall room, like a lemon wedge at the end of the house. And my door was split in half. I had a top half and a bottom half. And a guitar that always remained dusty and still in the corner. I know I looked at it from time to time and thought of the person that gave it to me. I don't remember if my biological father or Richie handed it down to me, but it had been one of theirs. I must have grown tired of looking at it. I don't know. I traded it for a tennis racket.

It was 1979, and there were many things I had yet to realize and remember before picking up a guitar meant what it does now.

 

I started messing around with a guitar at 15, simply from being near one often enough. I was living with my best friend, Gary (shown at left), and his family. I had moved out of my mother's after her and my stepfather tricked me into entering rehab, which I subsequently ran away from. I was also asked to leave Gary's a week or so later, when Gary and I drank his dad's vodka and I threw up everywhere in a blackout. It was a rough time for me, and for a time, I relied too much on things that would take things away. But that's a whole different story.

My best friend, Gary, had a couple guitars. Gary had all the power chords down. Gary was Eddie Van Halen.

Well, not really, but he idolized EVH, and so often played his music—the walls were covered with his images—that to this day, when I think of Eddie Van Halen, I think of Gary. Van Halen was big news when I was in high school. And I loved them. Hell, but we all did. Well, those of us who weren't into Duran Duran. (Actually, I liked both of them, for different reasons, truth be told. But I didn't collect Duran Duran.)

As much as I loved Van Halen and Black Sabbath back then ( and I also loved Madonna and Michael Jackson), when I picked up the guitar, it was not to thump out heavy, three-finger chords. It was not to try and riff like EVH—it was to make songs that almost sounded like Fripp and Eno—at a kindergarten level. At 16, I specialized in one-note repetition-compositions that twiddled along and then strangely hung up on the tension of the half-step, and just staggered there for a bit, until finally, sweetly resolved with the return to the tonic in conjunction with the last words of the song. (Or "song.") Each song would have one or two lines in it, that dealt with very simple subjects, like sunsets or elephants, or armpit itch.

What these songs would be good for was sending Gary into laughing hysterics. Both of us, actually, although I would do all I could to "sing" it straight.

And we would be off in gales of uncontrollable laughter.

After that brief time at Gary's, I didn't pick up the guitar again until I was nineteen. But from that point forward, it was something entirely different.

I owe great thanks to a friend, Chris—who was known as "Donx." It was being his close friend, being on the inside of making music, being inspired and appreciated by him that fed my dormant hunger for music.

I have always loved music. In a way that I imagine all humans must. Doesn't music make you weep? And laugh? And move unexpectedly? Doesn't music make you free? What is a musician, if not a human who simply decides to devote himself to music? Are we different creatures? No.

I didn't get crazy about making music until I was about 19, when I met Donx. He was a 30 year old friend (I was 18?) who made his own music, overdubbed his own vocals with harmonies. Very original stuff. Real cool little falsetto solos, where I might whistle, or another might lay down a guitar, or someone else might squash a grapefruit. I do miss his stuff, sometimes. He infused a lot of emotion and intelligence into those songs. His tapes did not survive one or another exodus, and can now only be found in my memory, although what I learned from his songwriting stayed with me.

But for the half year or so that I lived with Donx and his family, I was greatly inspired. Before then, I would dance, weep, yell to music—even sing along—but never would I allow myself the luxurious idea that I might create it. Even though, since the very early days, music was a great love. (The songs of the Beatles and Dylan and Baez and Joni Mitchell, Rolling Stones, Neil Young, CSNY and Carole King rocked me in loving arms until I was old enough to go to school and start paying attention to the radio. I can't even listen to a documentary about the time period without spinning off into my own memories when I hear the songs. My memories are not as momentous as the media clips, or the movies. They're personal, and warm, and real. And that music always plays in them.)

I have always greatly loved listening to music, feeling it course through me, animate my frame. Nevermind that I played trumpet for a year in school, or violin, as well. Those were joyless endeavors. I never understood why I was doing what I was doing. Ultimately, it was not worth the lips that buzzed for an hour after practice, or the neck that got stiff. No one taught me with love, nobody made me understand the connection between repetition and technique, or if they did, nobody taught me the connection between technique and joy. Nobody made it fun for me. My memories of playing that music is not like playing music. It is memories of my family being too poor to afford the nicer trumpet, or of my social ineptitude at a young age. It is memories of a house that had silent corners and explosive hallways and me in the room with my flat notes and loneliness. Not until I was away from those days did I really begin to relax into music again.

Donx wanted me to be his backup, his rhythm guitar and background singer. Those were the plans, really. We were grooming me. And that would have been a lovely plan, if a few other situations were also possible. It turned out that none of them were. And the most important one to mention for me is that I have too much creative vision to play second to someone else's vision. That would not work for either of us. Things dissolved strangely between him and I, though I will always remember him fondly, as a wonderful artist who helped me begin in earnest.

He helped me mainly, by investing the belief in me. I can't really remember if I was playing before then. Surely I must've, if he saw enough in me to groom? I probably just started. No coincidence. But even though he rejected my friendship later, after I rejected his profession of romantic interest for me, he helped me get that start. There was no taking it back, once I started to dream.

Ever since I can remember, musicians were my idols and fellow travelers. I didn't set out that way. I didn't pick them purposely because they were musicians. That's just who always seemed the most worth looking up to.

I did develop some terrible goals and justified some pretty bad habits in this way. I would justify my living on the street at 16 years old by thinking of Neil Young -- I could imagine him doing that. The soulful nomad that he was. And I taught myself how to drink Southern Comfort all because of Janis, it's true. And so on. And this was all before I was playing, writing songs, or singing! I just identified with them. (I have "written" songs for many years, but I am not classifying the ones i wrote before accompanying myself with guitar as "songs".)

At the time I started really trying to play and sing on my own, I was really into Tracy Chapman. I wasn't trying to imitate her, but I saw such a plain, honest, forthright and strong style in her, that I did look to her for a certain amount of modeling, when I wasn't sure, yet, where I wanted to go. And many of my songs in the earlier days of my songwriting were modeled after folk music. It was the most honest, bare, direct way that I saw of telling a truth, musically. (There are many arguments against this, conceptually, but I am just telling you what made me this Me. Not claiming any Truths. This was my experience.)

Bob Dylan was a huge influence for me, and many of my early songs reflect this, with long, rambling, repetitive structures. I was very into lyric, and valued it higher than rhythm, funk, groove, melody, or anything. For me, it was extremely important that my words be heard. It took a few years, yet, before I began to understand the rest.

Bob Marley is music I grew up with, and music that influenced me more than I was aware of for a long time, as my music does not sound much like his, especially in the early days. But he was an important teacher, even when I had no idea he was teaching.

Dylan, Tracy Chapman, Bob Marley, Metallica, among others.

I very much listened closely to Metallica's quieter moments, for I loved the juxtapostion of the classical guitar that Hammet wove in so beautifully, and the crushing power that might erupt at any moment from the quiet. Again, the various levels of sound and texture and the irony of certain combinations of sounds was very exciting to me.

It's almost painful, when I listen back to those early tapes of me fumbling along, in search of a note that is not broken, in my hybrid and perverse style. In those early, early days, I was doing nothing more than shaking out the rust, bending joints, warming up. Getting to know the ergonomics of the vehicle. Forget about racing. It wasn't until...about a year, at least until I started to hear the voices of my own "style," consciously, and want to shape them. This was after I met Vance and we took off to Iowa in the middle off the night with our guitars and nobody knowing where we ran off to. Except an irate mother missing her daughter.

That comes a little later.