[Author’s note: normally I would edit this type of entry to tone things down, but it is so chock full of facts that accurately reflect the true situation that I have left it intact. This was also around the time I began to get more than irritated about other musician’s complaining about their lot. By comparison they’ve had it so easy they don’t know.]
The Hippie called early to do a laundry party. We still go to that rather expensive place in Dania Beach Mall. There are no coffee shops nearby, but there is the bank, library and two grocery stores. I have my 11:30 so I can’t do nothing until this afternoon. He also wants to go over a few tunes. You know, I once studied all those musical modal patterns. I still don’t know what they are for, or how to string them together into bass lines. Forget about even getting original because I do not know [these patterns]. There can’t be much to it because, well, for instance The Hippie has played Happy Birthday the wrong way for half his life.
I wonder what it must be like to sit down at ten years old and discover you can sing and play guitar? I was ten when I took my first music lesson. My teacher was Enid, Dr. Frobb’s daughter. I never could understand why a doctor’s daughter had to work. I struggled with lessons for another five years. I admit the three reasons I took music were to get women, to make money to get women and because I felt if I didn’t, I would get left behind and somebody else would get the women. Less than three years later, I organized and created a small ‘rock band’, which was any band that wasn’t a country band back then.
One day I’ll have to write that story just in case anyone thinks it was done under familiar circumstances that anyone could relate to. No. I had to learn each instrument listening to an old Beach Boys 45 rpm record and teach some often unwilling local farm boy it was okay to ‘listen to The Beatles’. I had to work against adult opposition, most of it from my own family. I’ll never forget Brian Hanson, a kid who showed his father a catalog of amplifiers and gingerly asked if he could have a small one. His father threw a fit, but not like my father. Brian’s father went out and bought his son the biggest amplifier, no son of his who showed initiative was going to have anything but the best.
By contrast, I remember John Campbell and I grabbing my amplifier and running across the frozen school grounds at night to hide it in his garage. We’d been warned my father had gotten drunk again and was going to ‘kick the speaker out’. You think that is funny? I don’t, and I was there. When we first started, we were not and could not have been very good. My father, knowing this, made us play in front of his cronies to have a laugh at my expense. That is the kind of help you could expect from my family, who to this day do not understand why I left and never went back. It baffles them, because they are perfect in every way and could prove it if you would only listen to reason.
I often had to walk around town at night begging older boys, like Billy Reuther, to help us move the band equipment in his truck whenever we had a “dance” that Friday. (I was too young to drive by several years). I guess if I had become musically famous and you did not know the facts, all of this would now be part of folklore. My family tried everything they could to embarrass and sabotage that band, because they didn’t like looking lazy by comparison. (They were too bull-headed to know the whole damn town plus every town we’d ever lived in already knew that, except for me, the whole bunch of them were lying, back-stabbing no-accounts and empty talkers.) My family have always maintained that they were 100% behind my bands and did everything they could to help. That is another big lie among many big lies.
There, I feel better already. Some people tend to forget that I still to this day often reach for things that aren’t there because they should be. Let’s look at some events on the positive side as the rest of the day progressed. My 11:30 was over but fast, the easiest money I’ve made in years. Marilyn does not do her homework, but this is very typical and not a lack of dedication.
