Playing & Writing Music Changed My Life

Thinking about this past Friday’s Video Fridays post, The Last Repair Shop. I don’t know how people who have never had a personal musical outlet survive into adulthood. There was always music in my household growing up. No one played an instrument but the radio was always on and someone was always singing. Mom and day grew up with Big Band Music and Frank Sinatra and we had the Beatles, the Momma and the Papas, CCR and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. So, music was there, but it wasn’t quite mine.

1960s walnut creek: joyce, matt, joe, mich & kats smallest to tallest — **1960s walnut creek: joyce, matt, joe, mich & kathie in her beatles hat and me in the middle arms out ready to sing(?)**

Like one of the narrators in The Last Repair Shop, when an opportunity to learn a musical instrument came up in elementary school, we didn’t have the money to participate. Granted, I wanted to learn to play the drums and THAT might had influence my parents’ decision. Thinking about it, we were noisy enough without me adding drums to the mix. Damn.

In high school my girlfriend played guitar and I had a best friend who also played guitar, so I got in the habit of picking up their guitars and goofing around, basically making noise, but no one thought to offer me a little instruction on how to really play the thing. Then at one fateful Christmas party, while my parents were busy socializing, I wandered into a room and saw a guitar there and naturally picked it up to make my usual noises by myself. One of the daughters of my folks’ friends walked in and asked me if I knew how to play. I admitted that I really didn’t and that night she showed me how to play chords. I don’t remember how many, like at least three or four and that changed my life.

After that, my girlfriend gave me copies of some guitar music like Simon and Garfunkel or House of Rising Sun, but it didn’t quite reach me. It was probably more like I couldn’t quite connect with whatever Paul Simon was writing about in NYC.But when my buddy, Jim, told me that he was writing his own songs, which at first were just adding his own lyrics to other’s music, I started toying with the idea of writing my own music. It was the mid-70s, I was 15, I’d gotten involved in the Jesus Movement and my hormones were driving me just a little bit nutty.

Musically it tended to come out as some downbeat end-of-the-world song, not that I knew anything about the end of the world. My buddy, Jim, on the other hand, tended to write the more upbeat stuff. It got to the point where one time when I was playing at home mom could guess which songs were his and which ones were mine. Moody adolescent musings… it was pretty horrible trite stuff, but it was an emotional outlet that I very much needed and got me through a lot.

I continued to play and write songs when I went to university at LMU in Los Angeles and got to interact with fellow musicians and song writers, some pursuing music academically but most, like me, using music as our safety blanket. My first public performance was at a Friday night student event where I paired up with a fellow Christian musician who accompanied me on the Rhodes keyboard while I played one of my songs and I think I played one of his. It was fun and nerve-racking. We played together a couple times and there were jam sessions at church. It was important to me, but I couldn’t see how it might become something more. This would be an ongoing theme with all of my future creative endeavors.

From LMU I transferred in my junior year to Biola University and went from Catholic Charismatics & my Culver City Foursquare church to Protestant Fundamentalists and Calvary Chapel acolytes. I continued to play and write songs, found more fellow musical travelers, formed one short-lived band, did mostly solo concerts, and jammed a lot. I think Biola had a “ministry” requirement and I managed to use my solo and band work to fulfill that requirement. Thinking back, it seemed with school and church, I participated, but seemed to always be just outside any official channels or controls or commitments. When I got my job with the phone company in 1979, I took a break from Biola, got a bit more autonomy and transportation which meant that it was easy for me to take (and fund) small tours or play at different churches around Southern California with one tour in Colorado and another in the Seattle area. But my faith was changing and I began to feel like what I wanted to write about wasn’t fitting into my limited musical skills or the church concert scene. Not long after I got married I just stopped writing songs and focused on other forms of writing. In the end I penned 66 songs, and recorded about a dozen. There is only one that I still play or have played in public over the last ten years.

Images from “those days”:

1990-06 COMM217 B/W Photography: Self-Portrait - Guitar Dude

Playing music is still a part of my dreams, literally. It’s been a consistent recurring dream, but it’s always about the hours or moments leading up to some usually big performance, and just like that scene in the Spinal Tap movie, I never make it to the performance. I’m sure some psychologist would have a field day with that one, something about after decades of playing guitar I’m still waiting for some grand performance that approaches all this potential, only to know that it will never really happen. Was that too dark?

I think when people think about things “changing their lives” they assume that having access to a musical instrument as a child then would have led to stardom as a Grammy winning recording artist or some such thing. But the reality is more like having access to a musical instrument gave me a more socially acceptable way to explore and express my adolescent confusion and angst that was only mildly annoying to those around me. I know when I was married I played the same three or four songs, some with no lyrics over and over and over again. That had to be “great.” But one of the thing about writing music, I learned how to work within extreme limits to try to find just the right words with the best punch and color. In that way, music changed my life.