27 - Chapter One

October 2010

"Fire. Before there was Television, before radio, before books and magazines, mankind had fire. They'd bundle around an open flame, roast their meals on it, and tell stories, and not just ghost stories, but stories of all sorts. Tales of dead ancestors, of great warriors and terrible men who went before them, of generals and monsters. As the smoke would rise, so would their eyes, peering into the great expanse of the night sky. Cosmically designed illustrations hanging in the sky... the first constellations. With heads uplifted and the legends of the heroes and ancestors growing with each telling until the first Gods were forged. Today, people do not hear stories about their late Aunt Gladys on the television, nor do they gaze into the heavens, nor do their imaginations run wild connecting the dots. The individual is not asked to memorize a sacred tale anymore, nor are they asked to create new stories. These days, the lost art of storytelling is reserved for children before bed, and for scaring boy scouts while roasting marshmallows."

 

"Today, in this post-modern world, a couple hundred people living in their own private la-la land called Hollywood pool their imaginations are shoveled into our brains at 30 frames a second. We hear about other people’s fantasies and myths over the radio, in the movies, or on the b**b tube. We are no longer asked to create anymore, as we should be asked... instead we are expected to keep ourselves busy with the unimportant stuff, only to realize too late the correlation between the decline of spirituality with the rise of the media. Is it any wonder that Christianity was at its peak during the Dark Ages when literacy rates were horrid?" rambled my father.

 

He finally paused to drink some of his jack and coke. These kind of talks around the fire pit in our backyard were pretty commonplace every time I'd mention wanting to watch the latest episode of some show I was following. This time it was 'I'm With Stupid', a run-of-the-mill sitcom about an intelligent woman from New York who married a country bumpkin from West Virginia and they have to cope with living together in his parents basement.

 

"Son, I've done my best to raise you to be a free thinker, someone who is creative and intelligent, I just don't want to see you waste what little precious time we have alive on this rock, listening to stranger's stories, when your eyes should be transfixed on the moon and the stars."

 

That was my Dad at his best. At his worse, he was a drunkard with a fixation on the blues. He raised me on a strict diet of the musical artists he deemed ‘The Masters’. John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and the Three Kings of Blues: Albert King, Freddie King, and B.B. King. At the age of 5 I was put into piano lessons so that I could be taught the fundamentals of music. To him music was the only thing that seemed to give life meaning.

 

One of my earliest memories was of him and his band, ‘The Mean Red Spiders’ (named after a Muddy Waters tune), practicing in our garage. They weren’t anything amazing looking back on it, but I remember being fascinated watching the five of them playing their individual instruments and it meshing into this unison of sound. They seemed to feed off of each other, Uncle Bruce, on the standup bass plucking those big thick strings, could give a glance at Uncle Tommy on the drums and they’d change up the rhythm from a swinging walking bass line to a boogie. They seemed almost like five fingers of a hand. Dad would play the honky-tonk piano and sing on about half the songs they did. I remember him seemingly to play better the more people were watching, like he needed eyes on him to really play to his fullest ability, something I have always admired about him.

 

When I was 14, I convinced Uncle Bruce to give me some bass lessons, all I asked for that year at Christmas was a bass of my own. Sure enough, come December under the tree was my first bass, a 4-string Sammick Precision Bass, it was electric with a nice sound for a cheap ax. My first amplifier was a little bit bigger than a box of cereal, but we had some good memories together. At 15, I saved up and bought my first acoustic guitar, a Yamaha. During the day, when Dad was passed out, I’d set about learning rock ‘n’ roll classics from Buddy Holly to the Rolling Stones; at night, when Dad was awake, it was a strict regiment of Elmore James, Muddy Waters, and Lead Belly. I was horrible back then, but learning blues slide and all the chords I’d ever need from the early days of Rock music were the foundation I’d rise out of. He approached parenthood as a teacher, he expected perfection from me, he’d quiz me incessantly, he wasn’t the nurturing type, which might explain why his passing felt more like a lifted burden than a great loss. I know that’s horrible to say, but I felt like I finally was free to be me.

 

The first thing I did after his death was go to the Moody's Music Shop off of Orange Avenue to buy my first electric guitar. It was an Epiphone SG-2 and it was sexy. It was solid black, with two demonic looking points. Its dual humbuckers gave the beast a heavy, muddy sound that begged to be distorted and played way too loud.

 

I was only 16, nearly 17, when he passed... Mom didn't know what to do, Dad had always been a bit of a househusband, taking care of me, being the cook, making sure I did my homework, handling the discipline, while she worked. She owned her own little shop in Winter Park, one of those joints where middle-aged, middle-class ladies go to spend a fair amount of money after spending a fair amount of time walking around Oooh-ing and Aaah-ing. Running a shop was a full time gig, especially when her staff consisted of two girls that were attending college and were a bit unreliable, especially on the weekends. Ashley and Kristin, I remember them well.

 

Ashley was a tall buxom blond, not dainty at all, but not chubby either, just very well built. Kristin was a different type, maybe 5'6", 105 pounds at best, and she wore these colored contact lenses that made her eyes seem as blue as the deepest sky blue you can imagine. My favorite color mind you. Needless to say, after Dad passed away, I had no objections when Mom told me I had to hang out at the shop after school every day. Ashley was a clever girl, but that doesn't mean I didn't pick up on her scams quickly. She would often give customers discounts and not tell them, then pocket the savings. Kristin however was not all that clever, but thats what I was around for. I started writing her college essays for her after school, in exchange for... let's say... favors. I was so nervous, I had always been a bit shy around women and had barely even had my first kiss, yet here I was. She'd invite me back to her dorm room, and make me finish every sentence of the essay before any payment would be given. I remember her writing music of choice was Sublime's 40 Oz to Freedom. She'd stand behind my chair as I typed away, massaging me with her hands, whispering where she wanted the essay to go into my ear at the same time, all the while filling her little hash pipe with green, taking a drag, and then pressing her mouth to mine and breathing it into my lungs. Needless to say, I became quite a proficient writer, I think my typing speed went up about 30 words per minute that year.

 

I'd usually get home around 7 pm, and devote at least 3 hours a night to learning my new guitar. All I had to use still was my little amp, but if I plugged a pair of headphones into the amp, I could play all night and no one would be the wiser. Uncle Danny would come visit us at first about once a week, then every other weekend, then at best once a month, but I always looked forward to his visits. Danny had been the lead guitarist for The Mean Red Spiders, and so he'd teach me a new chord or two every time he'd drop by. By the summer before senior year, I was starting to even write a few of my own tunes, most of them sounded like bad outtakes by a drunken Led Zeppelin at best. I bought a Tascam 4 track cassette recorder, it was shoddy audio quality, but it was something, and it was only 400 bucks, which was just about all I had. But I could finally start to play along with my own instruments. I could record the guitar on one track, then go back and play bass on the next track, then go back and hum a melody or play a little harmonica on the third, and on the fourth just pat out a beat. It wasn't the best sound ever, but it was a good start.