Section Two: The Band
One Saturday afternoon I was in 'The Place'. I wasn't looking for a band, I wasn't looking for a woman, I wasn't looking for trouble, I was looking to relax, I had decided to take a sabbatical from the search, and some times when you’re chasing a dream too hard, if you step back it’ll come to you.
The bar was dark, cool and empty. It was early in the afternoon a couple of weeks before the fall semester was scheduled to start. After the school year started, the college crowd that frequented here was mostly a weekend crowd that came to get drunk and laid, and inadvertently see whatever band was playing. In the next room, I could hear Reggie, the owner of 'The Place' auditioning a band to play for that crowd. As one of the better customers I knew Reggie and talked to him when he sometimes sat in the bar having a beer. Reggie struck me as being a hustler, always on the make, there was something sweaty about him, he fancied himself a high powered rock promoter, his clothing was hip, but always about five years behind any trend.
"This one's an original composition of ours, one, one two three..." I heard coming through an amplifier from the other room. The band went into their song and by sheer force of habit I listened to their playing. I found myself nodding my head in time to the music.
"They're not to bad." I said to the bartender, who just shrugged his shoulders, probably having heard countless auditions, myriad bands, and endless original songs countenanced by their creators to be the next number one hit record. He retreated to the opposite end of the bar to read a newspaper. All of a sudden, I couldn't believe, it miracle of miracles, a keyboard came in. I went over to the doorway to watch the audition. The lone light in the room was from the single spotlight on the band on stage. The lead singer stood stridently in front of the microphone, yelling the lyrics just under the sound of the music. He was dressed in ripped, patched jeans and T-shirt, guitar slung low. The keyboard player was off to stage left, the lead guitar player to his right, and of course behind them on a riser, the drummer. The lead guitar player wandered the stage, eyes closed, 'feeling' the music like any good guitar player was supposed to. The drummer was hidden behind his drums, and they were good! Their playing was above average, their music hit some interesting ideas, but they didn't explore the note or concept when they were already off to the next thing musically, trying to fit in as many interesting things as they could before the end of the song. A quantity over quality approach to music, but their really big drawback was they were totally uninteresting to watch. They could have been any one of a number of garage bands around, but they were good enough for a cover band.
"OK!" Reggie yelled to the band and they stopped playing, "do you guys know any cover tunes?" The lead singer stood at the microphone, one hand shielding his eyes straining to see and hear out into the darkness. He looked at the other band members. They exchanged looks amongst themselves. "You know, like The Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin." Reggie said impatiently. The lead singer turned towards the other members of his group then shrugged his shoulders they looked like they had been playing together long enough to read the other's mind. They started to play Light My Fire, and a shot went through me! I struggled to contain my excitement, just as I had given up hope, destiny dropped them right in my lap, it's like the forces of nature conspire to bring everything you need to you, there are certain times in life when you're in tune with the universe, when no matter what turn you take, no matter what wrong turn you think you made, turns out to be right, it was almost enough to make you believe in a higher purpose or predestination. As the band got to the instrumental, Reggie once again yelled.
"OK! Thank you!"
Returning to my stool at the bar, I settled into another beer to calm myself. As the band sullenly packed their equipment I watched them struggling with it as they lugged it out. When they were taking out the last of it, I was still riding the wave of excitement of discovering them, and was just drunk enough to talk to them.
"You guys are pretty good." I said to the lead singer as he came by.
"He didn't think so." He said, motioning with his head back towards Reggie still in the other room.
"Ahh, don't worry about him, he's always trying to find an angle. Some day when you guys hit it big he'll see the error of his ways, and probably claim he discovered you. Can I buy you guys a beer?" The band members looked at one another, another silent conversation taking place.
"Sure." They sat at the bar, in what seemed to me in the pecking order of the band. The lead singer closest to me, the lead guitar player, keyboardist, and finally, farthest down from me the drummer. He was wearing what seemed to be the Rock 'n' Roll uniform of the day, ripped jeans and T-shirt but with the addition of blue hair.
"I'm Johnny Rydel," the lead singer said, introducing himself, "this is Brian, Mitchell, and Ian. Who're you?" He asked.
"Oh, sorry, Michael Desmond." I said extending my hand. "So, how long have you guys been playing together?"
"Well, Mike, it's"
"My name is Michael, not Mike."
"Sorry, is that some religious thing or something?" Johnny asked, they all shared a chuckle between themselves.
"No." I said, "so, what's your band's name?"
"Ghost Dance."
"That's cool, I like it. Where do you guys know each other from?"
"Brian, Mitchell and me have been playing together since high school."
"What about you Ian?" I asked.
"I was a music major at the school, these guys were playing some house party that I had crashed. During a break I was goofing around thumping on the drums, they were a little out of tune so I adjusted them."
"His tuning was better than our drummers drumming, so we brought him on."
"Let me tell you," I said, "I think you guys are pretty good. A couple of rough edges, but you'll work them out."
"Yeah, that's what we're trying to do, we want to get out in front of an audience and get some experience and some exposure for our songs. Maybe make a couple of bucks. Here," he said, reaching into his coat pocket and pulling out a tape and handed it to me, "it's a tape we made of our songs. Listen when you have a chance."
"Thanks." I said. I looked at the tape he handed me. Small bands like to identify with the bands they idolize so when they make a tape they usually title it something that's a play off of a title of their favorite band. This one was titled 'Pieces of Fate', I smiled as I put it in my pocket, no matter how good they were, they weren‘t going to make it any time soon, they wore their influences on their sleeves. I leaned conspiratorially over to them, "you guys want to go to my place and get high?" They looked amongst themselves, hesitation and distrust in their eyes "no, no, no, I'm not some kind of weirdo, we'll just smoke a joint."
"Okay."
(The Last Stage is available on Kindle, Nook Books, or if you would like a signed copy of The Last Stage they're available from my website (only $20!) at Jymsbooks via Paypal (jymwrite@aol.com, please don't forget your mailing address!)
Chapter IX: The Trailer
Showing posts with label Rock 'n' Roll. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rock 'n' Roll. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Post Graduate Work
I lived simply to keep my freedom intact. I bought a trailer outside of town picking up jobs as I needed them, janitor, convenience store clerk, telemarketer, gas station attendant, everything except Indian Chief. I only took the jobs to finance the buying of bootlegs and books. I wanted but didn’t want the things that my contemporaries sought out, a kick ass stereo, a hot car, a big house, those things that salved their conscious of abandoning their dreams. I wanted more. If a job started to last too long, or started making too many demands on me, I quit. I wanted to be free.
I found the buying of bootleg concerts provided the same thrill as scoring dope. You had to know someone, who knew someone who was "dealing". Connections were loose, people tenuous. On the way to a "score" I'd look over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't being followed, and that no one suspected what I was up to, which may have lead people to suspect I was up to something much more illegal. And you had to be wary of new people. Were they trying to rip you off? Were they trying to sell you a commonplace concert that everyone has and they just added on some songs from another concert or cut a tape short? Were they "narcs" from the RIAA's police, or cool like you, just trying to score some stuff? And once you got your "stuff'' you ran off to the secrecy of your own pad to ingest the substance. In this case, listening to your contraband concert. A totally furtive lifestyle.
In a college town there's a new influx of excitement and adventure every fall, in the form of a new class, especially the girls. My brother and sister always teased me, asking if my girlfriends were at least eighteen, it was just that as I got older, my girlfriends didn't. Most of the girls thought I was a local and didn't fit their definition of success. They were unimpressed with my dreams, and they would soon be off to trendy careers and successful husbands anyway. They were interested in one thing, and it wasn't the one thing I was interested in. The girls I did interest ran from the neo-hippie chicks who loved to wear tie-dye and have sex, which they considered a form of rebellion, but as their graduation loomed and their rebellion came to an end, so did our relationships. Then there were the girls I always seemed to fall for, the girls with purple hair and problems. They were the wildest. But I was saving myself, not from sex, they were the type of girls that you could take to the bars and concerts, but I was looking for someone more in line with my ambitions. I started to see the passage of classes as the passing of seasons, one piling upon the other. First there were a few, then a handful, then more and more, until I became worried the passage of seasons was becoming too many.
I had just broken up with my last girlfriend, Deidre. We'd had an on again, off again relationship for about a year. Whenever we had a fight, or she was acting like she wanted something more from the relationship, I sent her home. She wasn't beautiful, but she wasn’t ugly either, and there was something latently sexual about her. She was twenty-one to my thirty, and I liked her because she wore low cut blouses, short skirts. I guess I wasn’t very good on waiting for all the rewards later, there were other benefits to be had, namely blow jobs, I knew the luxuries would come later. The ironic thing was she turned out to be a local, and not from the college. She was a Rock 'n' Roll chick through and through. She had a collection of black concert T-shirts from the 70's, which in some kind of relativistic universe should have made them antiques. The glass of her vanity mirror was almost obliterated by the ticket stubs of every concert she'd ever been to. She was not quite a groupie, and something more than a fan. It was like she lacked the imagination or perhaps the ambition to be a groupie, I knew almost from the start it wasn't going to work out. I met her at a party. I didn’t notice her until she came up to me.
“You look like Jim Morrison!” She shouted above the music. I was already drunk and being complemented by a pretty girl added to my euphoria. We started talking, she agreed with everything I said.
“I want to move to Los Angeles.”
“Me too!” She enthused.
“What you going to do there?” She asked.
“I don’t know, see what comes up.”
“Me too!” I couldn’t believe how much we had in common, she was infectious and I was enthralled. She was also lying about everything, but I didn’t notice until later when we had nothing in common. She was a neo-hippie chick who had never met a hippie, or a counter-cultural thought, break the skin and she was like the surrounding town, conservative. I knew from almost the beginning that it wouldn’t work out but she came along at a time in my life when I was feeling particularly vulnerable, and didn't want to be alone, I should have known better, but I consoled myself with a steady supply of sex until she discovered the truth. There are times of our lives when the answers to our problems seems to be to bury our flesh in that of others. And what happens when you make compromises? You end up compromising yourself.
As time went by I felt trapped with her at the trailer, like any good college town Madison has its own strip of bars. So, to avoid the realization of the inevitable, I'd taken to spending afternoons in the various bars, alongside the locals avoiding wives, girlfriends, and responsibilities. Whenever the phone rang someone invariably yelled across the room to the bartender,
"Hey, Sue, if it's my wife I'm not here." I was avoiding going back to my trailer, dreading one of those crushing relationship ambushes when the other person is there at an unexpected time, and you know you're in for one of those heavy talks about the relationship that you usually experience right before you break up. The death of our relationship was my ambition, and hers was to be married. It was beginning to look like any other relationship, I was beginning to look like any other resident. I was looking for a new world of thought and feeling.
(The Last Stage is available on Kindle, Nook Books, or if you would like a signed copy of The Last Stage they're available from my website (only $20!) at Jymsbooks via Paypal, please don't forget your mailing address!)
Chapter IV: The View From The Audience
I found the buying of bootleg concerts provided the same thrill as scoring dope. You had to know someone, who knew someone who was "dealing". Connections were loose, people tenuous. On the way to a "score" I'd look over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't being followed, and that no one suspected what I was up to, which may have lead people to suspect I was up to something much more illegal. And you had to be wary of new people. Were they trying to rip you off? Were they trying to sell you a commonplace concert that everyone has and they just added on some songs from another concert or cut a tape short? Were they "narcs" from the RIAA's police, or cool like you, just trying to score some stuff? And once you got your "stuff'' you ran off to the secrecy of your own pad to ingest the substance. In this case, listening to your contraband concert. A totally furtive lifestyle.
In a college town there's a new influx of excitement and adventure every fall, in the form of a new class, especially the girls. My brother and sister always teased me, asking if my girlfriends were at least eighteen, it was just that as I got older, my girlfriends didn't. Most of the girls thought I was a local and didn't fit their definition of success. They were unimpressed with my dreams, and they would soon be off to trendy careers and successful husbands anyway. They were interested in one thing, and it wasn't the one thing I was interested in. The girls I did interest ran from the neo-hippie chicks who loved to wear tie-dye and have sex, which they considered a form of rebellion, but as their graduation loomed and their rebellion came to an end, so did our relationships. Then there were the girls I always seemed to fall for, the girls with purple hair and problems. They were the wildest. But I was saving myself, not from sex, they were the type of girls that you could take to the bars and concerts, but I was looking for someone more in line with my ambitions. I started to see the passage of classes as the passing of seasons, one piling upon the other. First there were a few, then a handful, then more and more, until I became worried the passage of seasons was becoming too many.
I had just broken up with my last girlfriend, Deidre. We'd had an on again, off again relationship for about a year. Whenever we had a fight, or she was acting like she wanted something more from the relationship, I sent her home. She wasn't beautiful, but she wasn’t ugly either, and there was something latently sexual about her. She was twenty-one to my thirty, and I liked her because she wore low cut blouses, short skirts. I guess I wasn’t very good on waiting for all the rewards later, there were other benefits to be had, namely blow jobs, I knew the luxuries would come later. The ironic thing was she turned out to be a local, and not from the college. She was a Rock 'n' Roll chick through and through. She had a collection of black concert T-shirts from the 70's, which in some kind of relativistic universe should have made them antiques. The glass of her vanity mirror was almost obliterated by the ticket stubs of every concert she'd ever been to. She was not quite a groupie, and something more than a fan. It was like she lacked the imagination or perhaps the ambition to be a groupie, I knew almost from the start it wasn't going to work out. I met her at a party. I didn’t notice her until she came up to me.
“You look like Jim Morrison!” She shouted above the music. I was already drunk and being complemented by a pretty girl added to my euphoria. We started talking, she agreed with everything I said.
“I want to move to Los Angeles.”
“Me too!” She enthused.
“What you going to do there?” She asked.
“I don’t know, see what comes up.”
“Me too!” I couldn’t believe how much we had in common, she was infectious and I was enthralled. She was also lying about everything, but I didn’t notice until later when we had nothing in common. She was a neo-hippie chick who had never met a hippie, or a counter-cultural thought, break the skin and she was like the surrounding town, conservative. I knew from almost the beginning that it wouldn’t work out but she came along at a time in my life when I was feeling particularly vulnerable, and didn't want to be alone, I should have known better, but I consoled myself with a steady supply of sex until she discovered the truth. There are times of our lives when the answers to our problems seems to be to bury our flesh in that of others. And what happens when you make compromises? You end up compromising yourself.
As time went by I felt trapped with her at the trailer, like any good college town Madison has its own strip of bars. So, to avoid the realization of the inevitable, I'd taken to spending afternoons in the various bars, alongside the locals avoiding wives, girlfriends, and responsibilities. Whenever the phone rang someone invariably yelled across the room to the bartender,
"Hey, Sue, if it's my wife I'm not here." I was avoiding going back to my trailer, dreading one of those crushing relationship ambushes when the other person is there at an unexpected time, and you know you're in for one of those heavy talks about the relationship that you usually experience right before you break up. The death of our relationship was my ambition, and hers was to be married. It was beginning to look like any other relationship, I was beginning to look like any other resident. I was looking for a new world of thought and feeling.
(The Last Stage is available on Kindle, Nook Books, or if you would like a signed copy of The Last Stage they're available from my website (only $20!) at Jymsbooks via Paypal, please don't forget your mailing address!)
Chapter IV: The View From The Audience
Rock 'n' Roll Dreams
To understand me you have to understand my story. I had an idyllic childhood of backyard adventures and playground heroisms. I grew up in the 60's watching the trembling lift-offs and cool blue splashdowns of the Astronauts, first in Mercury, Gemini, and finally Apollo. I remember the front porch conversation of the neighbors after Bobby Kennedy was killed, peace signs, baby sitters that were hippies, beads, and bellbottoms. I remember the excitement of the times without being a part of it. When I was a boy I wanted to be an astronaut so my mother enrolled me in all these classes at the planetarium but all the mathematics were a drag when all I really wanted to do was look at the stars. My father was military even after he wasn't. When I was a kid we had lived in a typical white picket fenced in house, several of them. Eventually settling in a suburb of Chicago, so I could identify with Morrison. His father too was military and the family had been Navy nomads moving around the country at every change of assignment. Like the young Jim Morrison, I retreated into books, one subject leading to the next. Curiosity was my only guide it was formless, without direction.
In high school I got a taste of the Rock 'n' Roll lifestyle I was a roadie for a band, although it was more a ruse to get into parties. Through a friend of a friend I met the band at a party and they asked if I could help bring their equipment in, I said “sure!” and being the resourceful guy I am, and wanting to keep my party schedule full I asked where the next party was they were playing at. I showed up at the party and brought in the equipment, and that lead to a summer’s worth of parties, but I never took out any equipment when the party was over, I was either too busy making out with a girl or throwing up, nothing was ever said about it.
The summer between high school and college I followed the band around because of Cassie Leighton, the beautiful apple cheeked ministers daughter who was ‘in love with the snake’ who wasn’t me, it was the leather jacketed new lead singer of the band. That summer the band played sweltering outside gigs, the phosphorus flash of smudge-pots as he struggled to read lyrics off a notebook he had stashed on-stage.
After high school I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It was one of the more liberal of the liberal arts schools. The town had a counterculture post hippie feel to it. In college I started hearing songs I remembered from my childhood. I asked around and discovered the songs I liked were The Doors. I read everything I could find out about The Doors. I became enamoured of Morrison. I saw my reflection in him, a disaffected youth who had some problems with his parents, who didn't want the world imposing its rules on him. I discovered the legendary Rock 'n' Roll stories I'd heard as a kid were Jim Morrison stories, like a band was getting on a plane and a groupie tried to board the plane and someone asked her what she did and she answered "ornament", or a rock star in a restaurant orders one of everything on the menu just "to see what everything tasted like." I started reading all the same books Morrison had, Nietzsche, Blake, Kerouac, Huxley, Ginsburg, seeing a path in the wilderness I was in. It became my real education. I dressed in black jeans, and reenacted everything I'd read about, I did balancing acts, took stage dives, I hung off balconies, and drank to excess trying to find the palace of wisdom. I became a minor hero, someone to invite to your party to make it interesting, then an object of ridicule.
After graduation, I wanted to do post graduate work, but my parents pulled the plug on the money. They refused to pay for any more schooling insisting my choice be practical, get a job with the education I had, and to pay for any further schooling that way. I liked the lifestyle in Madison so much I didn't leave. I guess I subconsciously chose nothing, but got experienced in everything. The atmosphere was stimulating, nonjudgmental, and there was an acceptance of a range of thought leaning towards the experimental. It was around this time I met Colt and his wife Jessie, I used to hang out at their second floor apartment smoking hash. They were newlyweds, their furniture was all new looking, like it had all been bought from the pickings of wedding envelopes. Colt was a good looking guy with long blond hair, always wore a buckskin jacket and behind one of the couches in the living room stood his guitar case, he looked like a cross between Custer and Eric Clapton. Jessie was a pretty blond who always wore white billowy blouses that were popular in the 70’s. And when she looked at Colt her eyes gleamed with admiration, she had obviously hitched her star to Colt’s, she unflaggingly believed he was the next Eric Clapton. They were contemporaries, the first married couple I knew working towards their Rock 'n' Roll dreams, but I didn’t know how to get there, yet.
(The Last Stage is available on Kindle, Nook Books, or if you would like a signed copy of The Last Stage they're available from my website (only $20!) at Jymsbooks via Paypal, please don't forget your mailing address!)
Chapter III: Post-Graduate Work
In high school I got a taste of the Rock 'n' Roll lifestyle I was a roadie for a band, although it was more a ruse to get into parties. Through a friend of a friend I met the band at a party and they asked if I could help bring their equipment in, I said “sure!” and being the resourceful guy I am, and wanting to keep my party schedule full I asked where the next party was they were playing at. I showed up at the party and brought in the equipment, and that lead to a summer’s worth of parties, but I never took out any equipment when the party was over, I was either too busy making out with a girl or throwing up, nothing was ever said about it.
The summer between high school and college I followed the band around because of Cassie Leighton, the beautiful apple cheeked ministers daughter who was ‘in love with the snake’ who wasn’t me, it was the leather jacketed new lead singer of the band. That summer the band played sweltering outside gigs, the phosphorus flash of smudge-pots as he struggled to read lyrics off a notebook he had stashed on-stage.
After high school I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It was one of the more liberal of the liberal arts schools. The town had a counterculture post hippie feel to it. In college I started hearing songs I remembered from my childhood. I asked around and discovered the songs I liked were The Doors. I read everything I could find out about The Doors. I became enamoured of Morrison. I saw my reflection in him, a disaffected youth who had some problems with his parents, who didn't want the world imposing its rules on him. I discovered the legendary Rock 'n' Roll stories I'd heard as a kid were Jim Morrison stories, like a band was getting on a plane and a groupie tried to board the plane and someone asked her what she did and she answered "ornament", or a rock star in a restaurant orders one of everything on the menu just "to see what everything tasted like." I started reading all the same books Morrison had, Nietzsche, Blake, Kerouac, Huxley, Ginsburg, seeing a path in the wilderness I was in. It became my real education. I dressed in black jeans, and reenacted everything I'd read about, I did balancing acts, took stage dives, I hung off balconies, and drank to excess trying to find the palace of wisdom. I became a minor hero, someone to invite to your party to make it interesting, then an object of ridicule.
After graduation, I wanted to do post graduate work, but my parents pulled the plug on the money. They refused to pay for any more schooling insisting my choice be practical, get a job with the education I had, and to pay for any further schooling that way. I liked the lifestyle in Madison so much I didn't leave. I guess I subconsciously chose nothing, but got experienced in everything. The atmosphere was stimulating, nonjudgmental, and there was an acceptance of a range of thought leaning towards the experimental. It was around this time I met Colt and his wife Jessie, I used to hang out at their second floor apartment smoking hash. They were newlyweds, their furniture was all new looking, like it had all been bought from the pickings of wedding envelopes. Colt was a good looking guy with long blond hair, always wore a buckskin jacket and behind one of the couches in the living room stood his guitar case, he looked like a cross between Custer and Eric Clapton. Jessie was a pretty blond who always wore white billowy blouses that were popular in the 70’s. And when she looked at Colt her eyes gleamed with admiration, she had obviously hitched her star to Colt’s, she unflaggingly believed he was the next Eric Clapton. They were contemporaries, the first married couple I knew working towards their Rock 'n' Roll dreams, but I didn’t know how to get there, yet.
(The Last Stage is available on Kindle, Nook Books, or if you would like a signed copy of The Last Stage they're available from my website (only $20!) at Jymsbooks via Paypal, please don't forget your mailing address!)
Chapter III: Post-Graduate Work
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