beautiful, funny, sad & true

I just found out that today is World Accordion Day, which means that I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some pictures of my contribution to the cause.

Last night, I was co-hosting my friend’s really cool radio show.  While driving home, I was stopped by the police on suspicion of a DUI.  After being questioned, taken to the station, passing all the various tests, and being kept awake all night, I was cleared and released at ten o’clock this morning.  I got home by eleven and took a nap for an hour and a half.

This afternoon, I sold a keyboard case on Craigslist to a really nice guy who plays bass for churches in West Linn and Vancouver.

This afternoon, a lady came by to try (and hopefully buy) one of the two accordions I’m selling.  She had a third one to look at elsewhere first, so she wanted to try that one before she settled on one of mine.  She told me she’d let me know after she saw that one.  Totally fine.  Let’s hope she buys mine.

This afternoon, I wrote out the complete version of the police story here in BFS&T, in order to capture all the details as best I could remember them.

This evening, I played accordion with PolishCellist and our violinist friend at a swanky downtown venue with a North African theme, as part of a gigantic bellydance event featuring the most famous bellydancer in the world.  She’s so famous that even I know who she is.  The venue was full of elaborately clad dancers, cabaret performers, musicians, photographers, and a host of other interesting people.  It was loud, frenetic, and beautiful, and I’ll remember it for a long time.

Just now, I got home from the bellydance event and wrote down this short synopsis of the day’s  events, in order to capture all the details as best I could remember them.  The ironic, caricatural nature of the day’s highs and lows, and the significance of the juxtaposition between them, was not lost on me.  The whole time I was enjoying the gig I kept laughing to myself and thinking, This morning, I was in jail.

My eyes won’t focus anymore.  I’m finally going to collapse in bed, so that I can be ready for rehearsal at ten o’clock in the morning.

Life is weird.

How was YOUR day?

This morning I had a dream that I can’t seem to shake off.  It was a very long dream, with multiple sections, most of which aren’t worth sharing, but the disturbing part is one in which I’m playing cello with two musician acquaintances; we’ll call them L. and A., since those are their real first initials.  A. is also a cellist, and L. is a violinist, at least in the dream.  I don’t think L. really plays the violin, but she is an excellent and fairly well-known singer and songwriter around town.

So we’re sitting in a room in A.’s house, playing through a tricky piece of classical music.  It isn’t a piece I’m familiar with in real life, and I’m not exactly struggling with it, but I’m certainly not playing at my best, and we’re all aware of that fact.  A. is prepared to overlook it, but L. puts down her violin and glares at me.  “Would you get it together, please?” she asks, crossly.

“Sorry,” I say.  “I’m still warming up.  I’ll improve, you’ll see.  Do you have any suggestions?”

“You always have questions about everything,” she snaps.  “Just play better.”

“Uhhh, okay,” I say, a little bit on the defensive now.  “I told you I’ll get better as I warm up.”

She ignores my response.  “What are you wearing?  A cube? Really?”

“What are you talking about?”  I look down to see that I’m wearing a perfectly good outfit of jeans, an orange crewneck sweater, and a black hoodie. “What’s a ‘cube’?”

She rolls her eyes, then turns back and launches into me.  “Why do people hire you? I thought you had a good reputation for playing drums, or piano, or something.“  She pauses, choosing her words for maximum damage.  “Do you really think we’re ever going to call you again? This is a total waste of our time.  And why do you dress that way?”

“What ‘way’?  I’m dressed fine.”

I’m angry now, and I decide that this has gone on long enough.  I gently place my cello on the floor, stand up and walk across the room to gather up my instrument cables, jacket, and cello case.  A. picks up my cello and holds it out in front of herself so she can inspect it.  I walk back toward her and crouch down to see what she’s looking at.  There are two metal clasps on either side of the back (cellos don’t really have clasps on the back) that are hanging loose.  I tell A., “I’ve never seen those before, but I’m guessing they’re supposed to be tightened, aren’t they?”  I reach over and tighten the one nearest me, and A. tightens the other one.  I notice out of the corner of my eye that L. is glaring at me with a look of disapproval.

Next, A. pulls out a long piece of white twine and starts to thread it through the back of the cello, making a square pattern that is raised about an inch above the back of the instrument.  “What’s that for?” I ask her, which makes L. scoff loudly from across the room.  A. finishes with the twine, and I take my cello over to the case and put it inside, avoiding L. as much as I can in the process.

The dream’s location changes, and the three of us are in A.’s yard.  She is walking across the lawn toward L. and me, and she says, “I carried your cello to your car for you.”

“Oh, thanks.”  I put my hand on the back of her shoulder.  “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I don’t mind.  It was nice to play with you,” she says.

I don’t entirely believe her, but at least her attempt at platitudes is better than L.’s blatant hostility.  “Thanks, you too,” I tell her.  “See you around.”

L. stands and silently watches me grab my remaining things and walk across the grass toward the dirt road where my car is parked.  For some reason, it’s not my current car, which I also have in the dream, but my first car instead, an ancient blue Toyota station wagon.

I notice that it has a new dent on the driver’s side, where someone has attempted to pry the door open.  The back hatch is raised, thanks to A, and the car and its contents are covered in a thick layer of dust from when cars have driven past on the dirt road.  I throw my belongings in the back, slam the hatch and open the slightly mangled front door.  I brush the dust from the seats and steering wheel, sit down, start the car and drive aimlessly for a while, until I realize that I’ve left a small bag of cables and music gear at A.’s house.  I’m not at all excited to go back over there, but I need my things, so I turn around and head back, with a sense of dread and foreboding.

That’s the point at which I wake up, so you can imagine why I’m stuck feeling kind of blue today.

Like most kids, I spent the first decade or so of my musical life listening to my parents’ record collection, which consisted almost entirely of classical music, with the barest minimum of rock (The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Mamas and the Papas, etc.) thrown in for good measure.  My dad’s rare ventures into so-called rock included easy listening stuff like the Carpenters, which made my brother and me cringe.  By the time I was about twelve years old, I finally discovered that I could have a radio in my room, and that radios had stations that could be changed.  I quickly found out about NPR, because they played a radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I still think is one of the funniest and most brilliant books ever written.  I also found out about heavy metal, which was popular at the time, and which changed my life forever.

There was a late-night (ten o’clock is late-night when you’re thirteen years old) show called Metal Shop, which introduced me to a whole new style of music that I would call my own for the next few years.  The show has a newish online presence, albeit without the original host, but it will give you an idea of the kind of bands they played.  The ones I that knocked me out early on were Dokken, Ratt and Twisted Sister, but I eagerly devoured most of what the show offered up each week.  My brother dutifully followed suit, and before long, we were listening to all the metal masters of the day.  I got my first electric guitar a month after my fifteenth birthday, and this is about all anyone saw of me for the next two years.

I’m happy to have a scanner, finally, so that pictures like the one of my brother in Kiss makeup can finally see the light of day.  I’m sure he’ll be thrilled about this.

I’m sharing it here because A) it’s priceless and I love it, and B) he’s standing in my doorway, so you can see that I had corkboard panels covering my wall, and the entire thing was covered with pictures cut out from magazines like Hit Parader and Circus.  From the top down, they are pictures of Aerosmith, Ratt, the Scorpions, Eddie Van Halen, and Kiss.  You’re welcome.

All of this presented a problem for our mom, who was becoming more and more conservative as the years progressed.  She was worried about the state of our souls, and she would give us books by Christian authors like Bob Larson, who was most famous for his theories about the supposed practice of the ‘backward masking’ of hidden Satanic messages that only appeared in songs when the songs were played in reverse.

Bob is still around and doing his thing, and his focus these days seems to have shifted from the evils of rock music to the exorcism of demons, but back in the day he would spend all his time decrying heavy metal and playing song after song while he did so.  He would compare the supposed innocence of the regular version of a song, but as soon as he played the record backwards, its subversive and insidious ‘real’ meaning was revealed.  One of the most famous examples was “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen, which said, upon reversal, “Decide to smoke marijuana.”  Or DID it?

The best times on the show were when he would open up the phone lines and take callers.  He would argue passionately with the ones who found his claims ridiculous, and he would ‘save’ the ones who felt they needed to repent, right there on the air.  It made for hilarious and riveting radio.   When a caller would say, “But, Bob, [insert famous musician’s name here] wears a cross all the time,” Bob would reply, “I bet he doesn’t even know what that cross means.”  Our favorite quotation of his was about the leather-and-studs clothing that Judas Priest introduced, which was quickly adopted by a lot of the other bands.  Bob made it very clear that “leather and studs are symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community.”

Who’d have thought at the time that Rob Halford of Judas Priest (in the picture above) would, in fact, come out of the closet and announce his homosexuality a decade or so later?  Who’d have thought that he spent much of his free time in gay S&M clubs, and that he would fashion the entire look for his band after the style of clothing that he’d seen and worn in the clubs?  The mind boggles.  All I can say is, when my brother and I were young, ideas like ‘the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community’ would never have crossed our minds if it wasn’t for Bob Larson.  We liked the music enough that we didn’t really care what people looked like, with the possible exception of Vinnie Vincent, who looked even more feminine than most of the other glam rockers at the time, which put him up against some serious competition.

At some point, I’ll have to write a separate entry about Vinnie Vincent, because his is a very interesting story, and a bit of a rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags one, too.  That’s neither here nor there, at least for the purposes of this story.

It was never our intention to emulate the rock-and-roll lifestyle; we were mostly well-adjusted kids who just wanted to listen to the music.  One day, however, our mom decided that she’d had enough.  She marched into my brother’s room, where he had a large poster of Poison on his wall.  The bass player, Bobby Dall (I didn’t even have to look that up!), had a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth.

“That’s disgusting,” my mom sneered.  “Take it down.”

“What?” my brother asked.  “No way!”

“Yes,” she said firmly.  “Look at that; he’s got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.”

“So?  You think I’m gonna start smoking just because he does?”

“Well. . .maybe.”

“Oh yeah, right.  Why do I have to take this down?  Come here.”  He ran into my room and pointed at a huge poster of Yngwie Malmsteen dressed in black, wearing a huge cross around his neck.  “Look,” he continued, sarcasm dripping from his tongue, throwing Bob Larson’s quotations back into Mom’s face.  “He’s wearing a cross. . .I bet he doesn’t know what that means! And all these guys are wearing leather and studs, which are the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community!”

At that, Mom came bursting into my room, saying, “WHERE?”

I collapsed into laughter, and my brother was still consumed with rage, but after a few seconds he started to laugh too.  He wasn’t about to take down that poster, though, especially since I had an entire wall devoted to all the same people, and I certainly wasn’t going to take anything down.   Mom stood and stared at my wall, seemingly for the first time, and she didn’t like it one bit.  The symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community were everywhere, and so were the symbols of hedonism and satanism.

“I want this garbage taken down,” she said.

“No.  Why is this such a big deal all of a sudden?  These pictures have been up here for two years.”

“Well, take them down now.”

“No.  I like them.”

My brother and I won that particular argument.  I suspect that Mom realized it was a phase we were going through, and that we’d grow out of it soon enough.  Or maybe she just gave in.  Either way, we won, and the posters stayed up until we moved into our new house a couple of years later, by which time they had been replaced by world maps and posters of the Beatles.

In my experience, if you tell somebody they can’t have something, it only makes them want it more.  When I was in college, there was a pathetic demonstration of some sort (I don’t even remember what the issue was) that involved people waving signs that warned other people not to burn the flag.   One of my friends said, dryly, “I never wanted to burn a flag until they told me I couldn’t.”  Also, I worked at a record store during the time that 2 Live Krew’s Nasty As They Wanna Be came out.  That turd of an album sat untouched on the shelf for months at a time, and we couldn’t pay people to take a copy of it.  As soon as it got banned, however, we couldn’t order copies of it fast enough.  People who didn’t even like rap were buying them just to see what the fuss was about.

The point of all this, to the extent that there is one, is that kids turn out fine most of the time, and the music they listen to is the least of their problems.   Pick your battles, parents, and stay involved with their lives, but be careful not to make mountains out of molehills.  If you do, you’ll only make the kids more likely to rebel, which will exacerbate the issues you were trying to eliminate in the first place.

By way of a denouement, here’s a classic Bloom County cartoon I had on my wall back then, from when Apple introduced the first Macintosh computers.  I figured it would tie in nicely with this particular discussion.

Craigslist strikes again.  Or, rather, L.A. strikes again on Craigslist.  Things like this are what keep me checking in on it so regularly.

Music Industry Intern Needed

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Date: 2011-02-03, 9:45AM PST
Reply to:  [deleted]

Los Angeles based singer/songwriter is looking for a driven individual seeking hands-on experience in the music industry. This internship will give you first hand experience in music venue booking, artist management, public relations, and high level communication with managment team. This individual must have knowledge of local Portland music scene. We are only interested in individuals that are willing to commit to atleast six months of service. Must be interested in pop/acoustic/folk music.

Though this is an unpaid internship, we will compensate the individual a percentage for any booked gigs. Further details are available.
Please attach resume to replied email.
School credit is available.

Thank you.

 

Riiiiiight.  This kind of ad may fly in L.A., which is where the person posting the ad is from, but Portland is definitely not L.A.  Any ‘driven individuals’ who are likely to have that particular set of ‘high level’ skills are most likely going to be other musicians, who will already be using those skills in order to further their own careers, rather than doing all of the busywork that musicians everywhere hate doing for themselves.

I hope the ad works for them, and that they find some poor, unsuspecting college student who will do what they want.  I just can’t imagine anybody being fooled by the spin, that’s all.  The L.A. schmooze machine drives me up the wall.  A musician from New York would never post an ad like this, with that imperious tone, as if they’re doing someone a gigantic favor by allowing them to experience the behind-the-scenes of the music industry by doing a bunch of thankless, shitty tasks.  Give me a break.

Maybe I should place an ad like this on Craigslist in Seattle, asking for someone to help carry my instruments around whenever I play up there.  “Although this is an unpaid position, the individual will be compensated with a drink ticket for every two instruments schlepped.  Must arrive hours before each gig to accommodate sound check.”  Maybe I should just pack up and move to L.A.  If I’m lucky, I might get to learn what the music industry is like by doing somebody else’s work for free.  If the stars align in just the right way, perhaps I’ll be able to have my own music career, and then, God willing, I can dangle the carrot of college credit in front of someone, so that they can call around and find places for me to work and play.

This is gonna be great.  I can hardly wait to start my new life.