Living The Dream

Hacks and novel solutions to unknown problems

I had this dream that I am lucky enough to be living in my current life, I had this dream when I was just a little boy, seven years old, maybe? I can remember still sitting in the driveway of my house with my friends, greg Walters, Derek Landry, Jeff Ozio, and telling them they should learn instruments and we should form a band as if we could just go home that night and learn an instrument and start our band the next day, that was how I saw the world. And when I look back on that, it does fill me with some joy that even then I was terminally optimistic. As I am now, I do believe in myself, I believe in you, I believe in other people, maybe I’m just an untanned Pollyanna from the golden triangle? I don’t know—I need some more coffee.

My friends, of course did not learn instruments and we did not start a band. If I had grown up in another time and another place, perhaps I would have done that—I would’ve joined a rock ‘n’ roll school, met other kids like myself and had teacher instruction showing us how to form a band and do a performance. These are great places schools of rock, that’s what it’s called. I have friends who own school of rock franchise in their town and they do great things for kids. I love that kind of music education. Well I love all kinds of music education really. I don’t think anyone could argue about the value of Music education in any child’s life. Any child who has music in their soul, which I believe is every child, but the child who is interested enough to pursue Music should have the opportunity, encouragement and the means to do so. And I believe yes, there should be locally collected taxes for a government that supports a school system, that yes can provide a good music education to any child who wants it. I steadfastly believe it. I’ve never met another person in my life who doesn’t believe this—yet here we are in this time, in this country, in this state of Texas, in the city of Austin and Music education, there is less of it now and it’s harder for children to access than it’s ever been. There are forces working in our world politically that have cut funding to music programs across the board in all schools, everywhere. In that vacuum has risen, small independent music schools, music stores with teachers in them, and musicians themselves are looking to help younger people learn the trade in the ways of the art of music. That will never go away. And likely it’s been worse at other times in history. So relatively speaking, I may be out of my box here when I castigate what are essentially neoliberal, red state governments for failing their constituents when it comes to music education. But I digress—

What I did instead was eventually after another seven years of dreaming about it, one summer with a friend—I believe it was at Derek Landry again, in my room with an old guitar of my father’s that had three strings on it. We spent the whole day making noise, singing songs with an atonal strumming, it was fun. We laughed. We screamed and my mother was going crazy. She wanted us out of that house so she could have some peace and quiet and watch her soap operas. But she never said anything. She never told us to get outside and stop making this horrible noise. What she did do is when my father got home from work, she told him that he needed to go in there and ask me if I wanted to learn to play the guitar. He was instructed to instruct me so as my mother put it, she wouldn’t have to listen to that noise anymore. Which I must give my mother credit, that is a very constructive way of approaching the problem of a noisy musical boy. And so my dad did all of that and I’ve told the story before many times—he walked in the room in his stern, giant fatherly figure, stared down at me and asked pointedly, seriously, and maybe a little passive-aggressively if I wanted to play the guitar? I certainly was intimidated and felt put on the spot. I didn’t want to challenge my father who was the guitar player of the family. But luckily, I had the courage and the intense interest from years of dreaming that made me say “yes sir I want to play the guitar.”

And I’m so glad I said yes in that moment. I can still feel the fear, the low self-esteem, the shyness of the moment. I can still feel that inside of me, when my father asked me. And that’s wild isn’t it—the memory of feelings stay in the body. As well as the memory of his feelings about Music, growing up and what it meant to him—he had a whole musical life as a child that he didn’t want. His mother would take him around to radio stations and have him sing on the air, which I’m sure he loved singing at radio stations, that must’ve been exciting. But from how he told it, he didn’t want to do it. He wanted to be playing outside with his friends. He didn’t want to be going to radio stations touted as The Next Mario Lanza by his mother. Which tells me his mother, my MawMaw Russell had a dream as well that she was trying to live out vicariously through her son. So the feelings of her musical dream, I felt strongly much in the way we’re handed down generational trauma, so also we maybe gets some generational dreams handed down? Idk, what do you think?

So what I did instead,after my father showed me a few chords, how to play Proud Mary by John Fogerty, one of his favorite songwriters, I wrote my first song thereafter called “Beaumont.” How cool I wrote a song about my hometown that sounded almost exactly like proud Mary, well it had the same chords, but different melody so technically it was a different song. So I really learned guitar so I could write my own songs. Why? I don’t know many young people that when they learned guitar, were writing their own songs. When learning the guitar as an instrument one learns scales. They learn theory, licks, chord progressions, circle of fifths from other recordings of other songs. I have friends who sat with their guitars next to their turntables playing sections over and over, chords, solos and licks, one friend, Robert Bernard of Picket Line Coyotes/Damantions/Prescott Curlywolf, told me he had a way to slow the speed down on his family’s turntable to learn Van Halen licks—

“We had one of those groovy 70s Magnavox console stereos that had 16, 33 1/3, 45 and 78 speeds. I found that playing albums at 16 speed lowered them by about an octave since 16 is almost half of 33 1/3, and I just had to adjust my tuning slightly.”

Friggin’ genius, that Robert Bernard

In first grade when I was six years old, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Gibson—that’s right just like the guitar maker—Also, I should I say my kindergarten teacher was named Ms. Martin, so, if that’s ain’t foreshadowing, ladies and gentleman, then I don’t know what it is. After an assignment I turned in, Mrs Gibson had graded and passed them back out, she looked at me in her horned rim glasses, and she told me point blank, “you are a writer!“ I mean, how beautiful is that? Sometimes I joke that she probably told every kid in the class the same, but actually I don’t think she did. I still believe she was trying to tell me, a tow-headed little boy with some obvious behavioral/emotional problems, that he was special and had talent—as I believe most teachers should do. So it wasn’t the guitar specifically I wanted to learn. It was a way to put my poetry to music.

So that’s what I did. I would learn songs out of a folk song book that had chord diagrams with sheet music and lyrics. I believe it was like “101 Favorite American Folk Songs” or some shit. I use the Mel Bay guitar chord book that my dad gave me to learn more Chords. I couldn’t read the music, and some of these songs I hadn’t ever heard, so I would just look at the chord diagrams and sing those lyrics to whatever melody came to mind. I think thats how I found my sense of melody. I remember the first time I ever encountered the Beatles/George Harrison song, Old Brown Shoe. I’d never heard it so I just made up my own melody to the lyrics. I wish I could hear it today. Compensating ignorance with imagination, I learned these chord progressions, and made up my own melodies, it wasn’t long before I started putting my own words to them and next thing you know, I was off to the races. Ever since that day I have been obsessed. It’s a lifestyle choice to be a songwriter. I am a poet and a songwriter and an entertainer. That’s what I do. That’s what I am. I know a lot of things, but that’s really all I know professionally is poetry,song and dance. That’s me in a nutshell.