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Autobiography
I was born in 1983, only a few short weeks before the music video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller was broadcast for the first time. I didn’t know it at the time, but Thriller would go on to become the most often repeated and famous video ever.
I didn’t find out who Michael Jackson was until some time after that, and even then I didn’t know much about him other than that he was a famous man with interesting hair who moved around in strange ways on the television. My earliest specific Michael Jackson-related memory is probably from the age of about 3. I was at my friend Erin Koen’shouse, and he and his father were explaining to me what moonwalking was. The way it was described to me was as a dance in which you walk as though you are walking forwards, but you move backwards. I made several attempts at moonwalking on their living room floor in socks that day, but I was unable to be as successful with it as Erin was.
Michael Jackson was never a big part of my childhood, but he was there, lurking in the background for most of my early life. This was the 80s, after all. I have a very clear memory of a commercial for a best of Michael Jackson compilation that used to air constantly on Nickelodeon. I think that commercial was my main exposure to his music. It played 3-second snippets of many of his hits from the Jackson 5 era, many of which I never heard all the way through until years later, but I continued to have the 3-second snippets floating in my head. For example, “Rockin’ Robin” is a song I don’t remember hearing all the way through until 4th or 5th grade, but I always knew the one little part that goes “He rocks in the treetop all day long, hoppin’ and a-boppin’ andsingin’ his song.” However, I misheard the first of these lyrics as “Heratt Semateeta, all day long” (For years, I didn’t realize that most lyrics use real words, and actually mean things. I’m still disappointed that this is the case. Several years after this, when I heardGod Only Knows for the first time, I thought the lyrics to part of it were “You never deet’ndoo dah dit; I’ll make you so sure about it” and I thought those lyrics were brilliant, and I was glad to hear musicians throwing that sort of nonsense into their songs. It wasn’t until I heard somebody cover the song that I realized the words were “Need to doubt it” and since then, I’ve liked the song a little bit less).
I also remember a sketch from You Can’t Do That on Television in which one of the characters thought he had bought Michael Jackson’s glove, but then the producer of the show points out that the other glove is in the suitcase, and it turns out to be Michael Jackson’s gardener’s glove? I don’t think that’s quite how the sketch went, but it was similar to that. Michael was a man whose name and image I knew better than his music.
During my early childhood (Up to this day as well, but especially in early childhood), I used to spend hours studying the patterns on the walls, in the trees, in the clouds, on the rugs, on the upholstery, in the wood, in windows, on the road, on the ceiling, basically everywhere. I would sit and look at things and study them. I’ve never asked anyone whether they did this as much as I did during early childhood, so I’ve never known whether it was at all peculiar to me, or just the way with all children. The transparency of my hand when looking at it through crossed eyes was a consistent source of amazement. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s great film, The Mirror, there is a scene of a child holding up his hand in front of a fire and looking at the fire through the hand. That was basically my childhood. The first part of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is another thing that comes to mind as a masterful depiction of early childhood. I think my early childhood was pretty similar to the early childhood that Joyce and Tarkovsky depicted in these semiautobiographical works, and I don’t think it’s necessary for me to make too big an attempt at capturing this part of my childhood, because in general, I’d just suggest that someone take a look at these works of art instead. However, there are some specifics that perhaps are worth mentioning, and I am going to focus on those memories that relate to music and sound.
I used to often have trouble falling asleep at night, and when the house was completely silent, I would sometimes let the ringing in my head take over. I think the sound I am referring to is the sound of the blood moving in my head, but I’m not really sure. It is a high-pitched sound that I don’t usually notice at all, or if I do notice it, I observe it as a quiet sound, but when I am surrounded by silence, I can allow that sound to come into focus, and it appears, sort of like an aural Magic Eye. A Magic Ear, if you will. When the sound comes into focus, it becomes almost unbearably loud. Terrifyingly loud. But terrifying like a roller coaster. I occasionally allow this sound to come into focus to this day, but it usually doesn’t grow to quite as threatening a roar as it did in early childhood.
I used to enjoy cupping and uncapping my ears, especially while in a moving car. Do you remember the scene in Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad in which Mr. Toad cups his ears and de-cups them (I don’t remember if it was in the Wind in the Willowsbook or not)? That was what I used to do with my ears. And with my eyes, I would experiment with making things go in and out of focus. I would make the lines in the middle of the highway zigzag around the dirt marks on the window. When these visuals combined with the cupping and uncupping of my ears, it was quite the ballet, believe you me.
The sound of the Fire Alarm in my hometown of Hamilton, NY is another sound I remember being intrigued by. The portamenti of the alarm sound would rise quickly, and then fall slowly. Each time the alarm went off, this would happen many times, until the last time, when it would just keep falling for what seemed like forever. Each time it started to go down, I would sit at the edge of my seat waiting to see if it would go up again, or if this was the final slide. When the final slide finally did come, I used to ponder it intently, wondering how the pitch could keep going down, and down, and down, for so long. Apparently, it was because of the auditory illusion known as a Shepard Scale, but I was quite unaware of that at the time.
As a young child, whenever I visited the bathroom to urinate, I would try to fill the entire surface of the water in the toilet bowl with bubbles. I don’t know if this is something that every man has noticed, but when you urinate into water, bubbles form on the surface. These bubbles are erased if you aim your flow straight at them, but if you move the stream around, new bubbles are created. I would try to aim my urine at the areas that didn’t have bubbles yet, so that I eventually would fill the entire surface with bubbles. This was an impossible task, because at the end of the process, you paint yourself into a corner where you just keep watering a small bubble-free area, but I tried every time nonetheless. At least, I tried every time until I outgrew it. I have trouble estimating the exact time at which I outgrew it, because my bathroom routine is so disconnected from everything else I have ever done in my life, and thus without reference points, but I would guess that this game was a part of my bathroom ritual for at least 15-20 years. The sound of water on water always provided an enjoyable soundtrack to my bubble-making game.
My parents used to sing me lullabies when I was in the crib. In addition to the standard lullaby songs, they would often sing James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James and The Beatles’ I Will. Although I don’t remember my parents singing I Will (I only know they did because they tell me they did. They say that is why I like the Beatles so much), the song has always had a quality that makes it seem like it has been around forever and that it is very important. I’m not sure if that is because of some sort of subconscious memories of having it sung to me as a lullaby, or if it is just because that is the nature of the song itself. Sweet Baby James, on the other hand, is a sung that is very clear in my memory as being sung as a lullaby (although this is probably more because of its heavy rotation in the lullaby set list for my younger brother James). I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know all the words to Sweet Baby James. The sound of my parents singing quietly is firmly embedded in my memory, and no singer could ever match its warmth. People often ask me if my parents are singers, and although they don’t sing often or publicly, when they do sing, it is always accurate, in tune, and beautiful.
My parents also used to play a lot of Raffi tapes for me. I am eternally grateful to them for this, as Raffi is one of the great musicians of the Common Era, and being surrounded by his brilliant music on such a regular basis no doubt had a positive effect on my musical upbringing. In addition to being great music, many of Raffi’s pieces are structurally very interesting, and this probably helped whatever part of my brain later went on to compose music. Let’s take a look at a few of the things on Raffi’s first album, Singable Songs for the Very Young.
The first track on the album, “The More We Get Together,” is obviously a great way to start an album (and a career). Raffi welcomes you into his world where children are encouraged to make music and sing along with the adults. Every listener has a voice. Something that makes that song extra special for me is that the first name that Raffimentions on the first song of his first album is my own. “There’s Chris and Tonya and Jason and Justin.” The next song Raffi presents, “Down By The Bay,” is a game, in which the listener is hopefully encouraged to invent his own lyrics in the musical breaks where the rhymes come in. Raffi even bends your mind with, “Did you ever have a time when you couldn’t make a rhyme?” The paradox contained in this joke is quite challenging and fun for a preschooler, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this song is what caused me to start thinking in the first place.
Throughout the course of the album, Raffi presents several process pieces. “Brush Your Teeth,” “Five Green and Speckled Frogs,” “Spider on the Floor,” “Five Little Pumpkins,” “Old MacDonald Had a Band.” All of these songs unfold in logical ways that are natural extensions of the way they begin. They are structurally satisfying in the same way that something like Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” is.
I think that “Spider on the Floor” represents one of the masterpieces of 20th century music. It is completely a cappella except for a single guitar chord at the beginning of each verse, and one brief moment near the end where a synthesizer takes over. The action depicted in the song ignites the imagination. As the spider climbs Raffi’s body, rising in altitude, the shift in space is accompanied by appropriate increases in tempo, pitch, and key, as well as intensity of singing, and urgency of rhyme (the lyrics even reach the point of “Oh I wish that I were dead,” one of only a few instances I can think of in which suicidal urges are mentioned in children’s music) culminating in a climax at which the only place the music can go is to a complete departure from what went before. That’s where the synthesizer takes over, depicting the fall of the spider. Then the song returns to the first verse. It is a textbook example of the sort of dramatic arc that certain theorists say a work of art ought to have. It is simple, clear, concise,perfect. In my mind, “Spider on the Floor” is the perfect piece of music.
In addition to Raffi, I was exposed to the great music of Fred Rogers. His positivity has, I think, always had a big effect on me. When I was in college, I got to take some classes with one of the world’s great musicians, Anthony Braxton, and his lectures had a kind of positivity that reminded me of Fred Rogers’ lectures. They are both excellent role models, and I think that anyone who performs or interacts with people on any level could learn from both people. Fred Rogers’ songs express a sort of emotion that few songs do, and that emotion is the feeling that you are special. When I play a Mr. Rogers record, I feel special, and I go about my day in a good mood, and happily interact with other people, all of whom are also special. To this day, I frequently listen to Mr. Rogers in the morning when I drink my coffee.
My childhood also included a lot of Disney movies. Probably the two that I watched the most were Pinocchio and Mary Poppins. The music in each of these is, of course, outstanding. Especially the music in Mary Poppins. That movie just has one fantastic song after another. When I was a young child, Step in Time used to get me ridiculously excited. I would get dressed up like Bert and run/dance around the living room with a broom, singing along. However, at the time I thought the words to the song were “steppy guys,” instead of “step in time.” Nobody bothered to correct me on this; in fact, they encouraged it, and adults around me started referring to the song as “steppy guys.” It wasn’t until I was a teenager that my cousin Sara said something about how I had thought the words were “steppy guys” when I was kid, and I said, “They’re not????” I was told what the real words were, and have been disappointed ever since, because I like my version of the words a lot more.
There have been so many great songs in Disney movies over the years. I’ve always been especially fond of the Disney movies from the first Golden Era. A re-release of Snow White was the first movie I ever saw in theaters. Did you know that Sun Ra used to screenDumbo regularly for the people in his arkestra? That’s another great movie, although I didn’t watch it as much as some of the other Disney movies as a child. The Arkestra did a lot of Disney music near the end of Sun Ra’s life. Sleeping Beauty is another one that I watched a lot. When I was in high school, I got really into Fantasia. But that’s a story for a different time, since I was pretty bored by it when I was a young child. I think of it as a movie for adults. It is definitely one of my 10 favorite movies nowadays. I enjoyed all the other Disney movies as well, but I don’t think it’s necessary to mention all of them.
I watched a lot of Looney Tunes, as any healthy child is bound to do, and I think they probably had a big effect on me. I don’t recall paying too much attention to Carl Stalling’sbrilliant music, but its regular presence must have had some sort of effect on me. I would guess that this is the case for any musician who has grown up watching Looney Tunes. I would assume that Mel Blanc’s voices also influenced my singing.
One of the few pieces of music that I apparently loved but have no recollection of having loved was the theme from The Waltons. My parents tell me that when that tune came on the television, I would stop whatever I was doing, run to the tv, and start dancing. I have no recollection of having done this, and have listened to the song since and didn’t even recognize the melody. This is unusual for me, because in general I remember every tv theme song going back to when I first started watching tv.
The first instrument I can remember playing was the harmonica. I had a cheap plastic one. When I visited Disney World as a child, I insisted on bringing it so as to perform for Winnie the Pooh. I did have a chance to do this, and he danced around enthusiastically with me as I played. This is one of my earliest memories.
We also had a bugle around the house, which I have been told is from the Spanish-American War. I was never able to get it to play until I was learning trumpet, but my Father was quite good at it. He was the only person in the family who could make sounds with it when I was a child.
At my Nanny and Pop-Pop’s house in New Jersey, there was a slightly-bigger-than-softball-sized mechanical egg with a crank that when you turned, caused the egg to play “The Farmer in the Dell.” I was always really interested in this toy. If you turned the crank backwards, it played the song backwards, and it sounded just as good. The only difference was that the melody was less recognizable. I think I enjoyed the backwards melody more than the forwards melody.
I have been singing my entire life, and I’ve always been amazed to find people who claim not to sing at all. Singing seems to me about as natural as eating or sleeping. I didn’t realize that I was unusual for singing until I joined my first band. As I thought of songs that would be good for the band to do, and kept thinking that I wanted to sing all the songs I thought of, I worried that there would be fighting over who got to be the one to sing them. On the contrary, not only did I get to sing all of the songs I wanted, but it was expected that I would sing other songs that other people wanted to do, and everyone refused to sing backup vocals. This was shocking to me. And it was around that time that I first realized that not everybody likes to sing, and that, in fact, many people don’t sing, period.
There was a lot of singing to be done at the Nursery School I attended in Hamilton. I don’t remember what songs we sang there, but I remember going to a room to sing them, and I would imagine that a lot of the songs that every child knows were learned there. A few of my favorites of those sorts of songs are “I’ve Been Working on the Rail Road,”and “This Old Man.” When people ask me what my favorite song is, I often say “Pop Goes the Weasel,” which is certainly one of my favorites. In “The Farmer in the Dell,” I remember always being intrigued by the line, “The cheese stands alone.” I remain quite fond of all of the songs I learned at that age. I don’t consider them children’s songs, but rather just good songs that you don’t have to be an adult to appreciate.
There is a lot of footage of me singing going back to early childhood. There is video footage as well as audio footage. The video footage was all captured by other people, but the audio was mostly captured by myself. I had Fisher-Price tape recorder that I would record with. I would often tape over my parents’ mix tapes. In the car, they’d be listening to Crosby, Stills & Nash, or something like that, and suddenly the tape would cut mid-song to their 3-year-old son singing, “Spiderman! Spiderman! Does whatever a Spider can! …” with a thick Hamilton accent, which they never understood, because neither of them had such an accent. The accent disappeared just as mysteriously as it appeared sometime in early elementary school. Maybe I have some kind of accent still, but it is completely different from the accent I had as a young child. I have also found some cool recordings that I apparently made by secretly planting my tape recorder. These can be a fun listen.
I’m not sure when I first became acquainted with the concept of harmony, but I do remember that when I used to play Nintendo, which I did a lot between kindergarten and, maybe, 3rd grade, I used to hum along with the music the whole time I played, and that when I hummed, I would not hum the melody, but would make up harmonies to go along with it. This was a constant unconscious thing I’d do for the entire time I would play a game. It would be a quiet hum. The kind you would definitely notice if you were sitting next to me, but wouldn’t notice if you were in the next room over. I also have always been in the habit of, when I have a song stuck in my head, singing harmonies and variationson it rather than just the melody.
The first song I ever invented that has stuck with me is an extremely short little ditty with the lyrics “Christopher Shakin’ And Bumpkin All Achin’ And Couldn’t Get Up In The Morning; Christopher Shakin’ And Bumpkin All Achin’ in.” I don’t remember the actual act of composing this song, but for as far back as I can remember, I can remember thinking of it as a song I had composed. I should point out that even though I have written the words down in a way that makes them appear to be actual words, I think of every individual sound as total gibberish in my head (with the exception of the word ‘Christopher,’ and perhaps ‘couldn’t get up in the morning’). To this day, this is one of the best songs I have written.
The first songs that I actually remember the process of writing were done in kindergarten, or perhaps 1st grade. I remember waking up one morning before everyone else and writing these two songs down, and then waking my parents up to show them to them. The lyrics of the first one are, “Detective Chris, coming to solve the case, and there he is coming to solve the case. Detective Chris, coming to solve the case, and there he is coming to solve the case.” The lyrics of the second are:
He went into his house and he ran upstairs, He went into a rocket and a boom went off (And oh boy, what a boom!) He parachuted down in the nick of time, And he landed by a grave, and a man came by (and buried him!) He poked his head out, he was a skeleton, Then the man said, “Aaaah!” and he ran away.
Then he went into his house and he ran upstairs, He went into a rocket and a boom went off (And oh boy, what a boom!) He parachuted down in the nick of time, And he landed by a grave, and a man came by (and buried him!) He poked his head out, he was a skeleton, Then the man said, “Aaaah!” and he ran away.
Then he went into his house and he ran upstairs…
[Repeat ad infinitum]
I think that somewhere I still have the notebook in which I wrote these songs, but it doesn’t really matter, because I have committed them to memory. I wasn’t familiar with the term “ad infinitum” at the time I wrote this song, but that was what I intended for the song to do.
I guess my brothers and I have just sort of been making up little ditties our whole lives. A lot of these are so old that nobody really knows where they came from. My brother James says that he came up with “Piss, Piss, Piss, My Fanny Goes Piss!” which is one of the classic poems in our family. Among Tyler’s best songs is, “Saucy, Mossy, KeenaKonskiss BRIE brie!” We also speak in a variety of silly voices whenever we are together. This is the environment I grew up in.
Another example of my early experiences with songwriting that I remember vividly took place in elementary school music class when we had a substitute teacher for some reason. The substitute teacher demonstrated that you can pick a random series of words and turn them into a song. To demonstrate, she had everybody in the classroom name something that you play, and from the list of things assembled, the rhythm of the song was derived. I still remember the song very well. “Parcheesi, Chess! Balloon! Violin, checkers!”
In kindergarten, at the end of the year, everybody was awarded a certificate for “Most ______” or “Best _______” or something along those lines. My certificate said “Most Creative.” I treasured that distinction, and ever since then I have self-identified as acreative person.
From a very early age, I have always imagined the things I was doing for fun as being productive on some level. For example, the act of pretending, whether in my back yard or on the playground, or when playing with things that I had made out of Legos, was frequently viewed by me as coming up with stories and characters that I would one day put into books. Although I did pretend to be Superman a lot as a young child, I quickly moved beyond that into pretending to be superheroes of my own invention. And I always planned write about these superheroes. Or I would build things, hoping to discover some new indispensible invention for the future. Again, I’m not sure if this was a way of approaching play that was unique to me, or whether all pretenders are such dreamers.
I also always tried to read books that were supposed to be “good” books and watch movies that were supposed to be “good movies.” At first this took the form of just trying to read books that were written for adults, but it evolved into seeking out lists of “the best ____s all time,” and that sort of things. For example, when I was in 8th grade, the AFI made a list of the 100 Greatest American Movies of all time. I had already seen a good number of them for my age due to my tendency to seek such things out, but after seeing the list, those movies ended up being the only movies I cared to watch for a little while, and within a year or so after reading the list, I had seen all of them. My craving for such lists has continued to this day, but I have at least gotten to the point where I try to suppress it, as I have grown to learn about the limitations, ulterior motives, inaccuracies, and biases of such lists, as well as the stupidity of people in general.
In 2nd Grade, I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and have been really into Mark Twainever since then. I would assume that a lot of the rhythms and humor in whatever writing style I may have grown into over the years have been heavily influenced by Mark Twain’s writing style, but I have never gone through and tried to determine exactly if and how that is the case. In 2nd Grade, I also enjoyed reading about King Arthur, Robin Hood, and folks of that sort, and I enjoyed many books by Matt Christopher, who wrote many novels about child athletes. I also used to enjoy reading about incredible facts, and that sort of thing, as well non-fiction books about ghosts, unsolved mysteries, the Loch Ness Monster, and anything that might give me goose bumps. I read a lot of Encyclopedia Brown, and The Hardy Boys. And a lot of books about baseball players. And a lot of just whatever I could find. There was (and continues to be) so much to read that it has always been tempting to just shut myself up in a library for the rest of my life. Someday.
On the first day of school in second grade, everybody in the class introduced him or herself by giving a name and saying one sentence about who they were. I said that my name was Chris “and I like sports.” If I were asked to say one thing about myself today, it would probably be something other than that. For example, if they had asked me that question two years later, I probably would have said, “I like to play the guitar.”
People often ask me why I started playing the guitar, and the short answer is that I really, really, really liked the Beach Boys when I was in second and third grade. But the answer is a little more complicated than that. Let’s examine it from all possible angles, starting with the Beach Boys.
I think the first song that ever really moved me (not including superhero music), beyond just causing me to want to dance, listen or sing along, was the Beach Boys song, Surfin’ USA. I’m not entirely sure where I heard it for the first time, but the earliest place I remember hearing it was in the 1985 movie, Teen Wolf, starring Michael J. Fox. In that picture, Michael J. Fox’s character (and a friend of his, in another scene), blast that song while standing on top of a speeding van, in a surfers’ stance. This, obviously, was very cool, and bears a bit of a resemblance to one of Michael J. Fox’s cool moves in another film of that year (Back to the Future, which I will discuss in a little while), which was to grab onto the back of moving cars while riding his skateboard so as to get around faster.
Anyway, I heard the song a few more times, and started asking for a Beach Boys tape as a gift, because obviously I needed one. Not really understanding how the record industryworked at the time, I assumed that any Beach Boys tape I acquired would have Surfin’ USAon it, but unfortunately it wasn’t till the third try that I got a recording of my favorite song. The second Beach Boys tape even had a false alarm for me when it included the song Surfin’, which I assumed would be the same song, but as it turned out it was not (It wasn’t even the original version of Surfin’, but a re-recording done in the early 90s). Anyway, the third time is always the charm, and after getting a third Beach Boys tape, I had Surfin’ USA to listen to whenever I wanted, and I could enjoy that and other Beach Boys songs at will. I think that the most satisfying music-listening experience of my life was the time my brother Jamie and I put Surfin’ USA on in a boom box in our room, and jumped up and down on our beds while it played. I think we may have rewound the tape and done it more than once, but I’m not sure. All I know is the happiness I felt during that moment.
The first two Beach Boys tapes I acquired were, perhaps, the worst two albums they ever released: Summer in Paradise, and Still Cruisin’, BUT … (and this is a big but), … StillCruisin’, although filled almost entirely with the crappiest Mike Love garbage imaginable, ended with three previously released classic Beach Boys tunes: I Get Around, California Girls, and Wouldn’t It Be Nice. These are songs that aren’t just good, they’re great. In fact, even the word “great” doesn’t do them justice. They are absolutely top shelf. And I learned to appreciate them thoroughly before I got my Best of the Beach Boys, vol. 1 for Christmas, which was all good stuff all the way through, and contained Surfin’ USA. TheSummer in Paradise album, let me just say this again, was basically shit all the way through (with the possible exception of Uncle Jesse’s version of Forever).
Because of my fondness for that Surfin’ USA song, it is perhaps surprising that I chose the guitar and not the organ, because the organ plays a much more exciting part in that song than the guitar does, in my opinion. But, honestly, I don’t think I was paying too much attention to the instruments. They were there, moving me, but the vocals where what my ear was focusing on. The Beach Boys made me feel that I needed to be a musician, and the Beach Boys had guitars, but I think my decision to pick the guitar specifically was based on more than just the Beach Boys.
From a very early age I had, like many children, a notion of the guitar that was strongly associated with an image of coolness. My own particular conception of this relationship was in no small part inspired by what was my favorite motion picture at the time, Back to the Future (which also, incidentally, introduced me to such other cool things as skateboards, being late for school, and the phrase “Holy Shit!”). There are three guitar scenes in Back to the Future. The second one, in which Marty’s band auditions for the school dance and gets rejected (By a Huey Lewis cameo) didn’t have much of an effect on me. However, the first and especially the third had a major impact on me. In the opening scene, Marty goes to Doc’s house, plugs into his huge amplifier, slowly turns the amp and the guitar up all the way, sticks some sort of device into his guitar (which I later learned was a pick), and then blows the amplifier up, and sends himself flying across the room. This was definitely cool. In this scene, the guitar, without even being established as a music-making device, was established as an instrument of coolness. However, near the end of the film, when Marty plays Johnny B. Goode at the Enchantment under the Sea Dance, that was probably, more than anything else, the thing that made me realize that guitar was something I needed to learn to do. So, considering the fact that both of these two movies were so influential on me, I ought to thank Michael J. Fox for inspiring me to become a musician, and, I suppose, for completely dictating the path my life would take. Thanks, Mike.
Although I knew at the time that Michael J. Fox had a big influence on my interest in becoming a musician, I didn’t realize that it was indirectly Chuck Berry who inspired me to become a musician, as Surfin’ USA is a Sweet Little Sixteen rip-off, and Johnny B. Goodeis, of course, a Chuck Berry song.
I’m not sure when I saw Back to the Future for the first time. It’s a movie that I have absolutely no recollection of not having seen. I do know that I saw it well before the second one came out (which I remember impressed Joe Colletti and some other kids in my town, who only became aware of Back to the Future when Back to the Future II was coming out), and I remember asking my parents if there was going to be another movie, because of the way the first one ends. They told me that they thought the ending was just a joke. I did start saying “Holy Shit!” for a little while, until my parents told me it was a bad thing to say.
Another vivid and exciting memory I continue to have involves me, my brother Jamie, and my neighborhood friend Tim O’Neill circa 1991 pretending to be in a rock band and standing on the pool table in our basement with little instruments we had made. Mine was a “guitar” which I constructed by wrapping rubber bands around a Styrofoam packing device. I used to make guitars in this fashion fairly regularly. They made beautiful music. But I don’t think it was until around 2nd grade that I realized I wanted to REALLY play a guitar.
We should also look at some of the pressures that were building up around me at the time. When I was in third grade, my friend Erin Koen had also started taking guitar lessons. I remember thinking that if he was taking guitar lessons, it was only fair that I should too, since playing guitar was what I wanted to do more than anything else. Another similar example, which might have even been one of the main factors, comes from the television show Barnie, which my brother Tyler used to watch at the time. I can remember an episode being on in which one of the girls in the show takes out a guitar and plays it for people. I remember thinking, “Man, if even this girl from this totally lame tv show plays guitar, I should DEFINITELY be playing guitar.” It was around this time, that I became more insistent with my requests to get guitar lessons. I think my Mother was hesitant at first, because I had a tendency to start things and then lose interest in them. For example, I joined the cub scouts for about a month and then decided that I really did not want to keep doing that. This was the way with many things. But guitar was different. Because guitar was THE thing.
And so my Mother called Ed Vollmer, the local guitar teacher (I come from a small town, in which there is one person per job. We had a town blacksmith, a town shopkeeper, a town apothecary, and a town drunk. Ed Vollmer was the town musician), and he instructed her to take me to Oneida Music, and I got a guitar, some picks, a guitar case, and, I think, a tuner.
From that point on, playing guitar was my thing. My Mother tells me that I used to spend hours and hours reading, and that when I started playing guitar, it sort of replaced reading as my thing.
I was lucky to have a teacher as great as Ed Vollmer too. I’ve had a lot of great teachers over the years, music teachers and otherwise, but Ed Vollmer was certainly the most crucial in my development, seeing as he is the man who taught me to play guitar.
From the moment I got my guitar, even before my first lesson, I began the process of trying to write songs. This is something I have been working on and thinking about since then. It wasn’t until I had been playing guitar for about 7 years that I got to the point where I was finishing songs that I thought worth presenting to other people. But writing music was a pursuit I was completely dedicated to for a long time before that. I think that what eventually led to my ability to finish decent songs was my decision to embrace simplicity. I was trying to write the greatest rock opera of all time before I had even written a simple pop song. A mind shift away from the overly complicated put me on the road to success.
Before I even started taking guitar lessons, I could, to an extent, read music, thanks to the elementary school music teacher at Hamilton Central School, Mrs. Silver. I have vivid memories of games we’d play in class to help us learn that a dotted half note is three beats, and that sort of thing. We also were required to learn about the great composers, and were tested on them. I recall thinking to myself that I should try extra hard in Mrs. Silver’s music class, “because I like music.” In retrospect, I think I may have been the only person who studied for or aced those tests, because I am continually surprised by how many people don’t know how to say “Mozart.” But anyway, I learned a lot in Mrs. Silver’s elementary school music class. And I was able to apply it to real world situations. For example, one time in elementary school I was watching Jeopardywith my family, and the answer was something to the effect of “Beethoven’s only opera was this,” and without missing a beat, I said, “What is Fidelio,” which was the correct answer, of course, and my Dad sort of turned in his chair with this look that seemed to ask a combination of the questions “How do you know that?” and “Why would you know that?” Mrs. Silver was another person with a guitar, so it’s possible that she was another one of the people floating through my head when I thought to myself, “All these other people play guitar. Why can’t I?”
At some point in high school I remember thinking to myself, “What if I had never started playing guitar?” The question haunted me as I fell asleep that night, and the question still haunts me whenever I recall it. “What if I had never started playing guitar?” The chills it gives me are chills similar to those I get when I think to myself, “What if I had tripped over that ledge and fallen 400 feet into that ravine?” The guitar question leads to more questions. What would I be? Who would I be? Would I have a girlfriend? Or would I just be me without music? I have trouble fathoming what that would be, but I imagine I would be a pretty pathetic specimen of a human being.
Many years ago I was watching some sort of documentary on VH-1. I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember at one point one of the members of KISS was being interviewed, and he said that the only reason anybody learns to play guitar is so they can have warm p**** at the end of the night, or some garbage like that, and that if anybody says otherwise they are lying. That comment offended and continues to offend me on so many different levels that I’m not even going to list them.
In 3rd or 4th grade, my Aunt Linda gave me some tapes by The Kingston Trio, Arlo Guthrie, and Peter, Paul & Mary, which I really enjoyed at the time. These artists (especially the first two), definitely had a big impact on my musical development. I was really into that sort of music for the first couple years I was taking guitar lessons. And, actually, one song that my relatives would have me play whenever there was a family get-together was the song “MTA,” which I knew from the Kingston Trio, and therein may lie the roots of my identity as the guy who sings the funny songs for the small gatherings of people that I had in high school, and especially in college. I think I am probably still perceived as that guy, although certainly no longer through any efforts of my own. In about 8thgrade, I memorized the entirety of Alice’s Restaurant. I performed it for people many times between then and the age of about 20. I apologize to anybody who heard me perform Alice’s Restaurant more than once against their will.
I used to listen to a lot of oldies compilation tapes that I bought in discount racks between, say, 2nd and 5th grade. One particular one that I remember listening to more than others was a tape that claimed to be Billboard’s Top Ten Hits of 1965 (this one may have been a gift, but I don’t remember who gave it to me. Perhaps my Aunt Linda). There was a note on the back saying that The Beatles and the Rolling Stones could not be included because of licensing issues, but there was no mention of why The Four Tops,The Temptations, Herman’s Hermits, or Petula Clark were not included. I believe the ten songs that were on the tape were “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’Feelin’,” “This Diamond Ring,” “Wooly Bully,” “Eve of Destruction,” “Hang on Sloopy,” “Help Me, Rhonda,”“1-2-3,” and “Treat Her Right.” It was sneakily designed to appear to be the top ten hits of the year, but I think that it was really just a collection of songs that had appeared in the top ten. A glance at Billboard’s Top 100 Songs of 1965 shows “Treat Her Right” in 97th place. It also appears that Billboard has nothing to do with these compilations. Anyway, the point is that I listened to all these songs a lot in 3rd and 4th grade, along with many others like them. I also listened to a lot of oldies radio. I used to sometimes tape record oldies radio stations when I wasn’t listening, so that I could later listen to the tape and fast forward through songs that I didn’t like. I think this was a pretty efficient way to be introduced to new old songs.
Growing up, I also studied my parents’ record collection. They had all sorts of great stuff. Some of my favorite acts that my parents had on vinyl were Steely Dan, The Allman Bros., Pink Floyd, Yes, Crosby Stills & Nash, and The Grateful Dead. These musicians were extremely influential to me, along with all the other music my parents had.
Sometime around, I believe, late 4th grade, I discovered the Beatles, who were the biggest musical obsession of my life. My Aunt Poppy around that time gave me a cassette tape of The Beatles’ Revolver and a cassette tape that contained two Bob Dylan albums: Bob Dylanand The Times They Are A-Changin’. Very hip presents to give a ten-year-old. I remember listening to them the first time and not particularly enjoying either of them, but later in the year at some point I developed a Beatles obsession (Dylan took another two years or so). I don’t really remember exactly how it began. I know I had a babysitter who was really into the Beatles, and she told me all sorts of cool things about them, and I have very enjoyable memories of obsessing over the song Here, There and Everywhere, and renting A Hard Day’s Night from my local video store, and taking out all of the books the library had about the Beatles, and then asking for exclusively Beatles related things the following Christmas. My Beatles obsession was at it’s zenith throughout 5th grade, but continued on for a few years afterwards and never really left me completely. I had a good friend in 5th and 6th grade named Julian Bach who also really loved the Beatles. Julian and I use to play music together (he was a violinist, keyboardist, and recorder player. And when I say he played the recorder, I mean he really played the recorder. He had been playing since he was a very young child, and used to do duets with his father, and he was very accomplished). I think there are probably several tapes of us playing music back at my parents’ house. We called ourselves Bach and White. I have a very clear memory of our excitement when we came up with the name. I was saying, “White and Bach would be a good name. Or perhaps…” And then there was a split second pause before both of our faces lit up and we said “Bach and White!”
In 5th grade, my father took me to see The Drifters at Vernon Downs (a harness race trackwhere he and my grandfather worked for many years, both of them employed as president at different times). This is the first time I remember going to a concert, not including concerts on Hamilton’s Village Green, and other events at which there happened to be bands playing. My dad brought me, and two of my friends (Julian Bach and Matt Fuller). I had a great time, and thought it was a really big deal that I was actually seeing The Drifters. I’m reading the Wikipedia article on them right now, however, and I see that there have been 60 different singers in the Drifters over the years, so it is significantly less impressive than it seemed to me then. I really enjoyed the music though. The thing I remember most about the concert was the ride home (which was pretty late at night). I had been reading lots of books about the Beatles, as I have mentioned, and one song that sounded like an amazing song was this song “Hey Jude,” and I decided that it was one of my favorite songs, despite the fact that I hadn’t actually heard it yet. The first time I actually heard it was on the car ride home from the Drifters. It was nice of the song to introduce itself to me right away. When I heard Paul McCartney say “Hey…” at the beginning, I remember thinking “Oh! Is he going to say ‘Hey Jude???’ He’s going to, right??? Is this song going to be ‘Hey Jude???’ Please let it be,” all before he even got to the word “Jude.” And then he did, and then the rest of the song happened, and I really enjoyed it. This must have been at the very beginning of 5thgrade. By Christmas of that year, I think that “Strawberry Fields Forever” was definitely my favorite song. Around that time I was listening to Magical Mystery Tour pretty constantly. Basically, I loved every new Beatles thing that I heard. Going through the Beatles discography for the first time is an amazing experience, and I am extremely envious of anyone who has not yet begun to do so.
My Mother took me and Julian Bach to a Beatles convention in Syracuse in about 6thgrade. That was a pretty amazing experience for me at that time. To be around so much Beatles memorabilia. The Band Beatlemania also performed, as did another Beatles cover band that was probably a little better musically, and May Pang (John Lennon’s lover during his Lost Weekend) gave a lecture.
One of the books about the Beatles that I read around this time was called With a Little Help from My Friends: the Making of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by George Martin. This book was particularly exciting to me because it talked about the music and how it was made, and it inspired me to do all sorts of experiments with sound recording in my bedroom. So when I was in 6th grade I made a lot of bad attempts at tape splicing, and a lot of stretching tape, and a lot of figuring out how to make my cassettes go backwards, and seeing what it sounded like when you played music through a baby monitor in one room, and recorded the sound that came out in the other room, and trying to make use of controlled feedback, and trying to discover ways in which I could overdub myself multiple times in spite of my lack of multitrack recording equipment, and other things of this nature. All of this was done with the cheapest available radio shack microphone, a boom box with a record button, and another cheap tape recorder. I didn’t make anything that sounded professional or that would be enjoyable by anyone but myself, but I had lots of fun, and probably learned a lot. And I assume that a bunch of my creations are still in my closet in my parents’ house.
I also used to spend hours and hours going through Hal Leonard’s The Complete Beatles for Easy Guitar which my Aunt Poppy bought me for either my birthday or Christmas when I was in 5th grade. If you look at reviews of the book on the internet, you might think that it is a lousy music book, but I disagree. Even though many of the songs are in different keys, and a lot of the chords are different from what the Beatles actually played, the book usually provides harmonic paths through the songs that are as accurate as you can find in a music book for beginners. I think that it is way above average as far as “Easy Guitar” music books go. To this day, I maintain that I can play every Beatles song. And this book has a lot to do with that. I would say that it was crucial to my early development as a guitarist/singer.
In 5th grade I also switched to nylon strings. My guitar teacher recommended to my parents that they get me another guitar, and they gave me the choice of a classical guitaror an electric guitar. I surprised them by asking for a classical guitar. I didn’t get an electric guitar until 7th grade. In 8th grade, I got a wah-wah pedal. The electric guitar andwah-wah pedal were both gifts from my grandparents. “What is a wah-wah pedal?” asked my grandfather. “It’s a pedal that you push down on with your foot that makes your guitar go ‘wah-wah-wah,’” I said. Then my grandfather gave an amused facial expression.
But anyway, I think 5th grade was when I started playing classical guitar. I had been doing some fingerstyle things before that, but around that time, I generally stopped using a pick at all. To this day, I still insist on using a pick when I play things like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” or “Day Tripper,” because I think the pick sound is necessary for that kind of playing, but for almost everything else I’d rather just use my fingers.
There were two older kids in Hamilton, whose guitar playing really impressed me, and I thought they were really cool big kids. They were both named Chris (Joyce andJoerger), and they both lived within a half mile of me. Their bands would play on the stage in the Hamilton Village Green, and I dreamed that one day, I too could achieve that kind of fame and coolness.
I also became good friends with a kid named Joe Swain in around 1st grade, and he became the person I talked about music with all throughout elementary school and high school. He had been playing violin since he was, I don’t know, 2. And by the time we became friends, he already seemed like a virtuoso to me.
At some point I taught myself to play some piano, although my fingerings would all be considered “incorrect” by any “real” piano player. The closest thing to formal piano training I have ever had was the time my grandmother taught me to play Chopsticks on her not-entirely-in-tune Steinway baby grand. I’m not sure how old I would have been then, but I assume it was pre-school age. I used to play her piano every time I’d go to her house. But I’d play it my own way. Even though I’ve never learned to play piano properly, I like to think that even in my days as a young child, I always approached it as a musician. I would make up little things on it. I remember at one point, before I learned how to read and write music, I tried to come up with a system for writing things I made up down. I’m not sure how successful I was, but the fact that I was even attempting that at such a young age shows that my brain was working in the right way on some level. Basically, whenever I was in a place where there was a piano, I would play with the piano. At the chorus room at school, at friends’ houses, at relatives’ houses. I never had enough time around pianos to practice and get good, but, to be honest, I am always happy with the sounds I make at pianos, and I might even go so far to say that I am one of my favorite keyboardists.
All of my piano dabbling was ungrounded in any traditional music theory until one particular guitar lesson I had when Ed showed me how chords were built, and had me memorize all the triads (By the way, memorizing all the triads is an important task that all musicians should do when they first start learning about music theory. It will make everything else much easier. You can start by just memorizing the Major ones, and then use them as a reference point for the other kinds). I remember making up little phrases to help me remember the triads. For example, the G Major triad was “Good Boys Die,” my own macabre variation on “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge.” After I had memorized all the triads, I began playing them on the piano. At some point I had learned where the notes were, so it was a simple matter to combine this information with my knowledge of triads. And since I also learned what chords appear in any given key around this time, I very quickly was able to play songs by ear, come up with chord progressions, and do the basic little things. It has recently come to my attention that I can often play things by ear on a piano better than actual piano players can. I think the best way to start playing things by ear is to take a I chord, a IV chord, and a V chord, and sing traditionalAmerican folk songs, while trying to put the right chords in the right places. This approach to introductory ear training is far superior to what they’ll start you off with in music schools.
I guess I became somewhat proficient at whatever method I use for playing piano pretty early on (meaning that I was probably about as good at the piano in 5th grade as I am now), so that when Ed told me to choose a Beatles song and learn how to play it from my recently acquired The Complete Beatles Scores (a book I highly recommend acquiring after one has become dissatisfied with The Complete Beatles for Easy Guitar), I decided to try to pick out the Beatles piano part that sounded the coolest and most impressive to me:Martha My Dear. Ed seemed impressed when I came in the next week and played it for him, and he encouraged me to start taking piano lessons from someone (an idea which never came to fruition). And he pointed out that the fingerings I was using were completely different than any accepted piano practice. However, I have continued to this day to use whatever the hell fingers I want when I play piano, and I doubt that this will ever change.
I also learned to play the recorder in elementary school music class. I think this might have been in 4th grade, but I’m not sure. Although I’ve never gotten to the point where I can play in any key other than C, I like to think that I’m pretty good in that key. I am particularly fond of my trills.
I started playing trumpet when I was in 5th grade. I played the trumpet all through high school in the school band. I never practiced much, but I was good enough to be in all-county band. In 6th grade I was able to hit High C without too much trouble. I am told that this was impressive. Mr. Keith definitely appreciated my high C, although later band directors didn’t seem to care, and Betsy Crumb was always a higher chair than me until she quit band. I could sometimes hit notes a little higher than C, too. However, I was told by the next band director, Mr. Greene, that Ryan Hoopes (who was in the class above me) was sometimes able to hit Super C (an octave above High C), which was ridiculously impressive. Actually, I have just noticed that both of those notes have beverages named after them. Jazz historians say that before Louis Armstrong, everybody thought that high C was the highest note you could play on a trumpet. I find this very hard to believe, based on my experiences in middle school and high school.
I’ve always loved picking up a new instrument and trying to figure out how to make music on it. That’s one of the most rewarding hobbies, because at any level of experience, one can find a way to play something musical on it. There’s nothing unmusical about simplicity. And lack of training often inspires new modes of creativity. If you can only play two notes on a saxophone, you can still use the creative part of your brain to try to turn those two notes into something beautiful. Limitations give birth to new musical contexts. When Schoenberg decided he wouldn’t repeat a note until he had gotten through all 11 of the other notes, or when Stravinsky decided to limit a piece to 3 different pitches, or when Handel decided to write counterpoint following a rigid set of rules, they were putting themselves in situations similar to the situation someone is in when he picks up a Styrofoam rubber band guitar that can only play 4 notes, none of which are in tune with each other. These are just different, equally valid examples of people making music within different parameters, and each situation or new set of rules creates a new musical universe in which to play around.
Billie Holiday, perhaps the greatest jazz singer of all time, had a range of just over an octave. Does this limitation add to the appeal of her voice? I think it does. Imagine a Billie Holiday with a three-octave voice. It ceases to be Billie Holiday. It becomes just some jazz singer with a big range. The voice would lose its ability to so successfully convey such a range of emotions if it attained a virtuosic pitch range.
Some of the best songs ever written for fingerstyle guitar are John Lennon’s Travis picking songs on The White Album (Dear Prudence, Julia and Happiness is a Warm Gun). He had only just learned to fingerpick, only knew one fingerpicking pattern, and, judging from the outtakes of those songs, he struggled just to play that one fingerpicking pattern correctly. In the guitar parts, he seems to be focusing so much on hitting the right strings, that there is little use of dynamics, or feel, or anything like that, and as one listens to the songs, the only aspect of the guitar parts that changes as the song goes on is the chords. They are brilliant chord changes. But I think the simplicity of their expression adds a lot to them. And I think that if John Lennon were a more proficient fingerpicker, these songs would have ended up being less good.
I frequently try to paint myself into corners, and then force myself to escape them. For example, I rarely change the keys of standards when I sing them, because I feel that if I were to fit every song into what I think is the best part of my range, every song I sang would end up sounding the same, and I wouldn’t get to make use of different parts of my voice for different songs, and the songs I sang would have less variety to them. I might even end up singing all songs in the same key. Sometimes I find myself in a situation where I am singing a song, and I need to hit a note, and that note is out of my range. What do I do then? Well, my friends, that is exactly where the music gets interesting and I am forced to make musical choices. I can slip into falsetto; I can just scream the note out; I can go down an octave; or I can pick a different pitch to sing. That’s a lot of things to choose from already, but what do I do after I have made my choice? If I have gone into falsetto, do I continue in falsetto? Or do I go back? A million new questions like these appear that wouldn’t have appeared if I had simply transposed the song into an easy key and gone through the motions.
I believe that a lot of the world’s improvisational music arises from mistakes. Suppose a piano player is playing Body and Soul from memory, but doesn’t know it too well. And suppose he makes a mistake. Oftentimes, “jazz” is nothing more than the version of Body and Soul that appears after the mistake. Because where is the piano player to go after the mistake? It would be in bad taste to continue on as though the mistake had never happened. It is best to use the mistake; to follow it down whatever new path it seems to be plowing. A lot of the pre-bebop jazz records sound to me like this is exactly what is happening. Someone is trying to basically play the melody, but because they don’t know the melody well enough, they make up their own melody for parts of it. This is where the artist’s own personal musical identity emerges: in the aftermath of their mistakes.
Jazz singing is often what happens when the singer forgets the words. I personally often intentionally leave lines blank in my songs, forcing myself to just do something on the spot when I get to them. I do this because every piece of music needs some spontaneity, and I might as well insert a requirement for spontaneity right into the song. I also know that if a really good lyric seems impossible, then any off-the-cuff lyric will almost definitely be better than a pre-written mediocre lyric.
An out of tune guitar can be a great thing to play on. And one of the beautiful things about it is the infiniteness of possible out-of-tune tunings. I have always taken advantage of string-changing time to experiment with playing a drastically detuned guitar. And these sounds have always sounded great to me.
I love to try to make music with any new tool that may happen to come into my hands. And this urge has been going on my whole life. But fifth grade was probably around the time when I started having some music theory with which to mentally organize my musical adventures.
I think that 5th grade was also around the time I performed for the first time. I remember the first song that I was really excited about being able to play was “Blackbird.”When Ed said, “You can definitely learn to play Blackbird,” and gave me the music for it, it was a very happy moment for me. And, I think in 5th grade, he had me perform at a coffee shop at which he was the guitarist. The coffee shop was in Earlville, which was a town near Hamilton. He allowed me to pick the songs I’d play, and the two I wanted to do were “Blackbird,” and Ed’s guitar arrangement of “Eleanor Rigby” (which is a great arrangement). These, I thought, were my two strongest songs. He suggested that it might be a bad idea to do two Beatles songs, because people might think that was the only thing I could play. But he agreed to let me do them anyway. I got really nervous before performing that night, and tried to get my Mom to let me back out at the last minute, but she, rightly, knew that if I were to perform it would be for the best. And so I did, and the audience of strangers loved me. And I haven’t experienced stage fright since.
The next song that I remember being especially happy about learning to play was Purple Haze, which would have been in, I guess, 7th grade. I also learned to play with my teeth, which I thought was a pretty cool thing to do in live situations. In 8th grade, Ed put me in a band with some other kids in town. It was the first band I was ever in (not including Bach and White). We were called No Flies on Frank, which is the name of a fairly obscure John Lennon short story. A year or two later, when we were playing our last gig, which was at Le Moyne College, somebody who worked at their radio station said, “You guys are called No Flies on Frank?” And I said, “Yeah.” Then he handed me a cassette tape with that name printed on it. We listened to it on the ride home. It turned out that there was another cover band called No Flies on Frank somewhere in Pennsylvania. That’s when I learned the lesson that EVERY possible band name has been taken.
One of my fondest things to remember from my childhood is watching things on television with my grandmother. I used watched a lot of old movies and documentaries at her house (exactly the kinds of things that I have always liked to watch), and she would provide commentary which gave me all sorts of insights that you can’t get from books. I remember watching a PBS documentary about FDR, and she gave me all sorts of extra bits of information. For example, I think that most history books tell you that the American public didn’t know that FDR was a cripple. According to my grandmother, it was something that people in general were aware of, but in general they didn’t talk about it. I first started watching the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope Road pictures at my grandmother’s house, and when I asked her what her favorite movie was, she told me that it was Going My Way. So my love for Bing Crosby (which people seem to think is not only unusual, butweird for someone of my age) is probably somehow tied in with my love for my grandmother. I’ve gone through the songs in her sheet music collection many times. It appears that she was lucky enough to be at the right age to appreciate both Bing Crosbyand Frank Sinatra when they were heartthrobs.
In the summer between 5th and 6th grade, my Grandma and Pa took me to New York City. I think this was the first time I ever visited Manhattan. Perhaps this is surprising, as I had always lived in New York State, but I wasn’t really very close to New York City. In fact, I think Hamilton is about halfway between Toronto and New York City. Anyway, I went to see Les Miserables, went to the Tavern on the Green, The Natural History Museum, and a big exhibit of Edward Hopper paintings at the Whitney. One of my favorite dining experiences that I remember took place at the top of the Marriot Marquis, where we were staying, when I dined with my grandfather at the restaurant on the top of the hotel, which was a restaurant that revolved while you dined (I think it made about one complete turn while I was there). For the meal, I had some sort of dish that was basically lots of different kinds of seafood thrown together. It was perfect. I remember mussels and clams, but everything else is kind of blurry. For dessert, they came around with a cart, and one of the things on the cart was a cheesecake with a chocolate grand piano on top. The piano was incredibly detailed, with white chocolate for the white keys. The lid of the chocolate piano could be lifted, and on the inside were cherries in some kind of cherry sauce. The cheesecake was surrounded by little red dots of something (in the way they tend to decorate plates at fancy restaurants). I obviously had to order the piano cheesecake, since I was a musician. At the Whitney, I happened to wander into a screening of Vertigo, which is a movie I had seen before and loved, and I think this is the first time I ever got to watch, for even a little while, a non-animated classic film projected onto a screen. The result was intoxicating. My grandmother sat with me and watched for a little while, but she soon tried to usher me out, because we were in New York, and there were better ways to spend time than watching movies. However, she promised me that we’d rent the movie later on and watch it together. This never ended up happening. Following that trip, there were several occasions when my Grandmother went all the way to Oneida to get movies at Blockbuster (the movie rental selection in Hamilton was somewhat limited) for us to watch together, but because she was starting to be sick at that point, she didn’t feel up to watching them with me. On one occasion, she picked up Casablanca and Notorious. Casablanca was one of her favorite movies, and she used to tell me that she was “one of those people” who went to see Casablanca a dozen times when it was in theaters. Notorious was, she told me, her favorite Alfred Hitchcockmovie (I was a big Hitchcock fan in elementary school. It started with watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents on Nick at Nite from about kindergarten through 3rd grade. In 3rd grade, I watched Psycho, which was a pretty amazing experience at the time. That was the first of his full-length movies that I saw, and soon after that, I watched all of his other movies that were at the local video rental places. In 4th grade, I was Norman Bates’ mother for Halloween). I ended up watching the movies at my house instead of watching them with her, because she was starting to get sick. Anyway, what I’m getting at here is my fondness for old things. I’ve always liked old movies and old music. And at the same time, I’ve always believed in being progressive. The only thing I ever dislike is the status quo. I like what came before, and I like what has yet to come. But whatever is going on now tends to seem boring to me. I prefer interacting with ghosts and dreams to interacting with people.
When I was in about 7th grade I remember putting on a record of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, mainly to hear the Ode to Joy part, which was something I thought of myself as liking simply because it was a melody that I could recognize. However, when I put it on, long before it got to the final movement, it got to the second movement. And the second movement of the 9th symphony was one of those pieces of music that came as close as anything else ever has to moving me in the same way that Surfin’ USA did in 2nd grade. It made me extremely excited and from that moment on I considered myself a lover of classical music, and set out to study it. I think that might have been the moment when I made up my mind that I wanted to be a “composer.” A “composer” is, I think, the most honorable occupation a person can have. He or she is the person who comes up with the music. Who wouldn’t want to be a composer? Think of the glory! Since then, my notion of what a “composer” is has changed in many ways (in fact, I would now say that I’ve always been a composer). But today, I think of myself as one, and claim to be one, and every action I take is, I say, an act of composition. When I make breakfast, that is a composition, because I am a composer and I say that it is. When I scratch my nuts, that’s a composition. When I sing a Gb, that is also a composition. However, in spite of this broadened definition, to this day, I still think of Beethoven as my favorite composer. In fact, I probably also still think of the Beach Boys as my favorite band. I haven’t really changed all that much. I like a lot of different things that I didn’t like as a child, or wouldn’t have liked as a child, but my childhood favorites are still my favorites. Mark Twain, Beethoven, The Beach Boys. These are some of the constants in my life.
This is around the point in the story where my life becomes less interesting. I originally went on for many pages after this, but around here it turns into “Then I started writing songs like this: ____” and “Then I wrote this song: _____” and “I am awesome because _____” and nobody wants to hear that garbage. Or, at least, nobody wants to hear that garbage about anyone over 13. So we will end my autobiography in middle school. It’s better this way. Perhaps I should provide you with a brief summary of my musical education after that point, however:
I went to high school at Hamilton Central School in Hamilton, NY. Much music was made; much music was listened to.
I went to college at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. Much music was made; much music was listened to.
I graduated from college, and after spending a summer at home, moved to New York City. Much music was made; much music was listened to.
One consistent trend over this period of time has been an increasing tendency to enjoy more and more different kinds of music. I think this is a good trend. It seems to me that there are two different kinds of musical educations one can have: a) the kind in which one learns to look down on and dislike more and more kinds of music, and have more “refined” taste, and b) the kind in which one learns to like more and more kinds of music until one eventually loves everything, and learns from everything one encounters. I think that the latter path is definitely preferable to the former, and I like to think that I am on it, thanks in no small part to all the great teachers I have had.
I’ve
been reading a lot of autobiographies lately (in the past 6 months
or so, I have readMalcolm
X’s, Mark
Twain’s, Gandhi’s, Steve
Martin’s, Harpo
Marx’s.
I highly recommend all of these, especially Harpo Marx’s),
and it occurs to me just now that this is probably why I seem to
have gone off on an autobiographical tangent.
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