Why did I start playing music?
Unlike some (un)fortunates, I wasn't made to play at an early age. I recall being young, in the north, a day shortly after my parents had purchased my brother and I an electric guitar. It was gun-ship grey. White hockey tape had been applied to the body by its over-enthusiastic former owner.
I sat in my room and looked out the window, at a fading light, and I held my guitar with trepidation and awe and fear. I was making a leap of projection, I was wanting to believe with utter earnestness that some objects could be holy if one just sweated and clenched and shook one's energy into a thing. A molecule of me still subscribes to this awkward faith.
Zeus, give me the strength I need, and may I do on your earth whatever you desire me to do. May I excel in this one thing, the playing of this guitar.
The storm-clouds of the North stretched into the Eastern horizon and the wind busted up against my bedroom window. And after a spell of gusts, the sun beams broke through the purple roughage, and all light fell onto my fingers, a guide, a sign from the sky, nay, the very universe, to strum.
I started plaintively strumming strings, moving my un-calloused fingers around the neck. I deigned to turn the amplifier on. I felt the amplified discordance ripple into the small of my back. What a curious sound. The more discordant the wave, the more the wave shook, and the more I liked it. And the more I liked it, the more the sun shone into my strings, and shone onto my pick, and into my blessed and innocent eyes. I was lost in the swirl of Ekstasis. The divine mysteries were riding on a chariot, they were over Prince George now, they were racing towards me, now over Burns Lake, I could almost see them. I just had to keep on strumming.
After a few minutes courting the rapture, a boot burst open my bedroom door. My father strode in. He grabbed the guitar, twirled it onto his trunk, and began a righteous Clapton-solo for about five minutes. He then looked into my puzzled eyes.
"That's how you play the fucking guitar."
Then he left. My amp was smoking from the heat of the shred.
And the sun was dipped into the darkness of my adolescence,
,
,
,
dipped by some unseen, punishing hand.
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Years pass, and I take to painting. I am a horrible painter; abstract squares, blobs of mustard and purple, salon Pollocks. I am 15. I can lay the paint, I can let it settle like a soft cloud settles on the mind, but I am not a painter. I take it seriously though: "Fuck you, I am a painter."
At fifteen I have no friends, a pariah, but then during the weeks before Halloween I light a fire-cracker off in my hand, by accident, and the purple blood blisters look so intense that D doubles me back to the school nurse. I attempt jokes--his humanism has relaxed me a bit. I can speak. I can talk. It's the first time in a while.
This essay is deliberately purple.
D and I become friends, and I become friends with R, his reclusive friend who lives up on the hill. We go over there after school. There is a happy-hour for adolescents, that golden-yoke period when school is over, but parents are still at work: utter freedom, but utter safety. R's parents were food hoarders: their freezers held frozen burritos and frozen pizzas. Their cabinets contain Stoned Wheat Thins. We make initiation dares around the tin can of Vienna sausage that we have come to love and celebrate, a love borne out of familiarity, over the many years of opening the cupboard and seeing, amongst the wealth, a can of tinned Vienna sausage. The tin can is not opened until we are in our twenties, and it contains 3 jellied dinks, all slathered in fat and salt. We refrain for years from alcohol, all throughout our teens, and instead binge on mounds of nachos and hold secret pork chop parties. Our world was not horses, nor politics, nor literature, nor architecture, nor city streets, nothing adult, nothing teen, just the laborious intervals between eating periods.
The only outings we made were funded from the return of pop bottles, purchased by his parents, and drank by us. We gathered the pop bottles, and demanded that his father drive us to the gas station. Then we refunded these bottles, caught the bus into that outer-ring of actual town (never once going into an actual urban core), and walked to our sacred temple of over-eating: an all-you-can-eat: "Uncle Willy's". We would eat for hours, eat pounds of sodium-infested D-grade meats, and then catch the bus home. By the end of that journey we would need, immediately, a frozen burrito for sustenance.
I was wearing a rayon shirt the first time we went to R's house. Lucky chance, my best shirt, for he assumed, based on the rayon, that I was part of some inner-circle, so inner that he did not even recognize me, and he groveled and served us whatever we wanted. Food paradise. This dynamic is not immutable.
I move, in paths of friendship, from D to R, as if D was an angel of transmission, or a giant man-carrying eagle, or a ferry operator who, for his living, moves hope-wracked souls out of minor hell, and up out of the swamps and onto less infernal ground.
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We all followed the currents into skateboarding. A friend from our suburb who knows Townies made us a mix-tape. It has some of the following artists on it:
Nirvana (Bleach!)
Dinosaur Jr.
Descendents
All
Firehose
Sonic Youth
Dag Nasty
Minor Threat/Fugazi
NoFx
Operation Ivy
Thrash and strum. Rattle and sneer. Skate-Hate. What great noise. Food becomes not quite so important.
This wasn't really a movement of rebellion. My dad wore Sex Pistols T-shirts, and drunkenly took a piss on a cop car outside of a Clash concert. The real rebellion was of the Alex P. Keaton variety. My heart of conservative darkness. This essay has nothing to do with that. A later essay will speak about my time as a Christian camp counsellor.
The common thread of the mix-tape was, of course, the absolute ruling of the distorted electric guitar (with the exception of Firehose, which drew the ear first to Watt's bass). It was played, on this mix-tape, in an expressive and proletariat fashion. It raged. This mix came to rule our lives, and since we are mimetic creatures, R bought himself an electric guitar. It was helicopter blue, with strips and stripes of white tape. It transmitted the vibrations of the strings through two raw and bared humbuckers, snarly pig-teethed pick-ups. It was called a "Blazer." I played it too.
After a time, I could make A-minor chords, but not power chords. I could sound a little like Neil Young, or Kurt a bit, but not at all like Metallica...
I could make a little noise. Not really like Neil Young or Kurt, just open and out of tune.
What great fun. We lived to jam. D knew this mysterious friend, G, from "town". He was a bit Bonham. We lured him over a few times with food. I had been in the orbit of R's cupboards for so long that I had an almost proprietary air with the food, the way a mayor, in a small town in southern France, might feel about a Cezanne painting painted near his town, or the way the mayor of Salzburg might feel when he or she hears a Mozart piece--connected, but for no reason whatsoever.
So we had trays of tater-tots and mounds of pork-chops and fresh smoothies to offer, and in turn this wonder-kid would whirlwind around the drums, and we would thrash about on our instruments, awkwardly shaking our hips, awkward as a cop-band playing its one reggae song. I brought an old bass amp in, from the garage, and plugged a microphone in. I probably sang something like "Don't tell us what to do!", monotone-ing a challenge to a nameless authority that was intent on telling me what to do.
Curious now: that bass amp, now that I think about it, belonged to the not-until-years-later bass player for Hot Hot Heat, a popular Nu-Wave act from the early 00's. He lived down the street from us. He loved Morrissey, claimed to be celibate, and was good at stationery lip tricks and grinds. Things fall apart, people grow apart. I wonder if he still loves Morrissey. That would be something to talk about.
Years pass, useless years. I could barely read. R and I read all of the Executioner novels, an epic tale told by the American author Don Pendelton, of Mack Bolan's one-man-war-against-the-mafia. This reading absolutely destroyed our ability to read anything else. I continued my bullshit charade of "painter". We try a bit of drinking. We continue to play guitar. R, when alone, if no one is looking at him, can play "Enter Sandman". He's getting pretty good. I can thrash around. I love open strings.
More years pass.
Straight-edge makes a resurgence in our city. It wasn't violent, but it was very strict. S and J, famous skateboarders and violators of public decency, are at the core of this community. There are rumours about them that reach out even to our suburbs, that (said in a hushed tone) "they are weird, and they do things to each other!" I am proud to say that even this many-tongued robe of rumour did not scare me away. Proud liberal with his weird friends, what a world-changer! He deserves a medal.
They have this band, a band whose name people speak as one speaks a litany: Breakwater. I'm serious: music lover's faces glowed and shined when they spoke of this band. It was curious to behold. It made me curious. Oddly enough, the singer of this band was Dave Wenger, who later formed Daddy's Hands, a band that is important, if you think that the people who influence other people are important. This was, quite honestly, emotional music. I remember hearing it, finally, and I did not know whether to scoff or cry. Rather than resist, I dove right in. What a sound! His guitar was so biting, and yet so sad, so dripping in purple melancholy. I have not heard this music in at least a decade, but I remember this original unit of three very fondly.
It is an immeasurably wonderful thing to be a teenager, to be a young person, and find some music that is made by your peers that speaks to your heart. It is a kind of validation of self, and also a temporary negation of every shit-indignity that a shovel heaps on a young person. A shovel is made to heap.
But bad news, scene! Bad news, music lovers! Wanger's splitting. He can't deal with this "emo" crew. He wants to drink Ballantyne's and fuck around with white noise and pianos. This seemed so weird at the time. They had a "tour" booked at the time. In America! My guts burned with jealousy. What luck! And this dude wants to fuck around with white noise and saxophones?
So he left, and in his place he left a curious and unanswerable question mark, an un-replacable void.
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I had kind of wormed my way into this scene a bit. Scenes, I sigh, I sigh...
...
...
Why has my life been ruled by scenes?
Where will I go when I have no scene left?
Will I crawl into a new scene?
Do old people have scenes?
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My comedy routine at the time was to declare myself Straight-edge, and then as soon as 5:30 hit, I'd start shot-gunning real, hard-core brews. When stunned X-ers complained, I would answer that "Straight-Edge was my job, like a fucking carpenter, and just cuz you're a carpenter don't fuckin' mean you're hammerin' nails day and night. And fuckin' speaking of nails", and I'd pull out a nail and shotgun a Molson XXX.
I think, given the strictness of this scene, and S and J's predilection for offensive and defiant behaviour, that my defiant and stupid joke seemed interesting. They were like, "Who is this rabble-rouser?"
We became friends. The tour date came closer. Would they cancel? Would they go? Who would they replace Dave with? I convinced them to drink. Although, as is common with young men these days, it didn't take much convincing. J puked up his Key-Lime Pie (vegan) outside of Denny's, a popular Vegan hangout, though it sounds beyond absurd to type. The community was scandalized. Questions were asked. Answers were declared. People were blamed. I was blamed. I was hated. I was leading these brave saints down a path of vice. Fuck this gravy-slurping asshole, they cried. I had only been Vegan for 2 weeks. I was a mocker.
The close proximity to musicians had inspired something in me. I thought, "if these misfits can make music, then why not me? If these social deviants can do it, then surely I can do it."
I was writing songs, not songs like Nilsson, but repetitive little angular jags that ended with some screaming and then got quiet again. You know: emotional music. Emo. Teenager's music.
Everyone says "emo, emo, this music is emo." But then everyone also says: "Emo? All music is emotional! Ever listened to the fucking 9th? Or the fucking 5th? Or the fucking 3rd?"
I think I agree with this critique. For music to work, it must walk along a tightrope between sense and emotion. I think that the idea behind our music, at the time, was to then be super-emo, ignoring Aristotle's council and turning the Emo-meter to 12. This invited a lot of scorn, of course. From future me, but also from you and your dad.
Emo was also, in its finest hour, a direct challenge to that Macho-Pig-Rollins, Fuck the World, Fuck Fags and Fuck Chicks and Fuck Feelings ethos that had ruled punk in our city for years. I suppose this confrontation of masculinity is why, in machismo cultures like Mexico, Emo is not laughed at. Boys start painting their nails and reading Rimbaud and Verlaine (I am making this part up, I think), and drinking Dubonnet (another dream of my mind), and adopting a state of being that is girly. And fathers and brothers and uncles adopt a furrowed brow, and attack. "Emo Wars" is good for a Vice-laugh, or a cheap, shallow laugh, yes, but the furies safeguard something that Emo softly challenges.
But no adult can stand to listen to puffy teenagers cry. It's nearly unbearable.
Anyways...
End of Part 1. Part 2 of a 3-part journey coming soon.
