Lawyers, Soccer Moms and Rock Stars: Thoughts from the Road

Recently my oldest daughter had a weekend soccer tournament in Rochester, Minnesota, a pleasant city with a population just over 100,000 located about an hour and a half south of the Twin Cities by car.  It is the lesser known of the Rochesters, known by name only to Minnesotans and nearby Midwesterners, but known indirectly the world over as the home of  Mayo Clinic.

Years ago, before I took my law practice in-house, I used to do legal work for Mayo Clinic.  The law firm I worked for represented Mayo in the occasional medical malpractice lawsuit brought by an unhappy or unlucky patient.  Although I never thought medical malpractice defense was an area I would practice in, the cases were interesting and even better, the client insisted that we take the strong cases (which was most of them) all the way through trial.  For a budding litigator, this meant I had several opportunities early in my career to participate in real, live trials before real, live judges and juries.  We worked long days, up early, full-day in the courtroom and then back to the hotel for a long night of reviewing that day's events and preparing for the next.  (I would later understand that the sleeplessness that accompanies trials is rivaled only by the early days of motherhood.)

The doctors we worked with and represented were some of the best in the world.  Spending time with them so that we could learn their field of medicine and understand the methodology of diagnosis and treatment was challenging and stimulating.  Imagine finding some of the best tutors in the country on a subject, but instead of you paying them, they pay you and are even more motivated than you are to get you ready for the test.  It was a heady time full of excitement but also the pain and fatigue that come with rapid growth.  One of the things I remember most from that time is not a particular doctor or specific piece of acquired medical knowledge, but rather the physical and geographic journey that bracketed and facilitated everything else:  the numerous road trips down to Rochester to develop and prepare each case well before any trial date was even dimly rising on the horizon.

Being a world-class medical facility (or collection of medical facilities, really) there are no slacker night-owls at Mayo (or, if there are, they have absolutely no ability to influence the schedule of operations whatsoever).  Business opens, surgeons start scalpeling and doctors start doctoring at 7 a.m. sharp.  While meetings with lawyers are never preferred, if they must occur the preferred time to schedule them is also 7 a.m.  Says the obliging law firm, "sure, no problem.  We can meet you at 7.  It's no trouble at all."  But to drive 81 miles, park, navigate the Mayo tunnel system and find your seat in the inevitably obscurely located conference room by 7 a.m. translates into a Twin City departure time of 4:45 or 5:00 a.m.  In my lexicon this is also known as "the middle of the night."  It is not morning or even early morning.  It is not time for exercising or reading the paper or really any activity whatsoever that requires vertical movement and consciousness.  It is nighttime.  It is a sacred time meant only for sleeping and to be left alone, quiet and undisturbed.  This truth is further corroborated by the fact that in Minnesota for a good chunk of the year it is pitch black at 5:00 a.m. and visibly indistinguishable from its predecessors, 2, 3 and 4 a.m.   (Indeed, for part of the year it is nearly pitch-black at 8:00 a.m. in Minnesota, but the sadness of that Northern story is to be deferred for now.) 

Despite the realities of divergent biological hard wiring, the time for meeting with clients is whenever the clients say it is.  Furthermore, associate attorneys' concerns in these matters aren't even accidentally considered by the senior partners.  In sum, not even a humanitarian mission designed to better the lives of abused, neglected and malnourished infant lawyers would take on the cause of accommodating the circadian rhythms of oppressed associate populations over the declared meeting-time preferences of a paying client.

And so, I found myself impossibly setting my alarm for a time not very much in front of 4:45 or 5:00 a.m. and struggling to remember what I was sure I knew only hours before about the properties of gravity and caffeine and getting dressed, then standing just inside my front door listening for a honking sound from the street.  Upon hearing this unnatural interruption of the stillness, I would open the door, move through the darkness, exchange brief greetings with a shadowy figure and take my place behind the wheel of the car, which was, to be very clear on this point, not my car.  For, you see, the only way that getting-up in the middle of the night could be made to be any worse (aside from having to immediately exercise, which I tried once but then stopped when I found myself at risk of vomiting) would be to add driving a senior partner's car while trying to stay awake to the mix.  So, of course, that is exactly what I got.  In retrospect, I can now appreciate that the nerve-wracking anxiety associated with driving your boss's car through the early black hours that were sometimes salted with blinding snow had the positive benefit of minimizing the likelihood that I would dose-off and veer into the ditch.  No matter what Starbuck's has told you, adrenaline beats caffeine every time.

The reason that I would drive the senior partner's car while the senior partner relinquished control and enjoyed the calmer, more serene "ease your way into the day" perspective of the passenger seat was so said partner could review documents during the drive in preparation for the meeting.  And, if you must know, I never crashed the car or got fired, though for several years I was convinced that I was just one head-bob away from both.

What I remember from those drives, aside from the repeated torture described above, was that once we cleared the Twin Cities and passed the ominous and alien looking Koch Refinery on Highway 52,

The internet tells me this is now called the Pine Bend Refinery, though we always called it the Koch refinery.   It is owned by Koch Industries and the same Koch brothers whose influence with the governor of Wisconsin was recently in the news.

the landscape opened up and the rolling farmland that lured adventurous Scandinavian settlers all those years ago laid itself out before you:

I thought about all of this recently as I passed the Koch Refinery once again, though thankfully at the much more reasonable and amply-illuminated hour of 9 a.m.  I was relieved to find that the farmland persists and still enchants with its pastoral simplicity and incredible greenness.

Because my daughter was watching a movie in the back seat, I couldn't listen to or sing-along with my playlist as I usually do in the car.  This unexpectedly forced me out of my routine.  I found myself alone with my own thoughts in the mostly silent car except for the muffled action of Toy Story that occasionally spilled out of the headphones behind me.  I was immediately aware of the strangeness of having a long stretch of time in front of me with nothing to do but think. 

The first thing I thought about was how many ruts we let ourselves get into without realizing it.  We all have certain habits and routines that we are fully conscious of; everything from eating Wheaties for breakfast, to driving the same roads to and from work, to work itself.  Many of these habits are inescapable or maybe even comforting.  I came to realize that because my commute is short, because I nearly always use the time for singing, I had developed and fallen into the rut of "what I do in my car" without even knowing it.   But now here I was, quite unexpectedly, in a little mobile thinking pod that looked just like the car in which I often engage in musical practice, but this time without any ability to leverage the radio or my iPod and with no one to talk to.  Without the distractions and soothing comforts of routine my internal restlessness loomed and gathered.  But, since no one was looking, I resolved to let my brain go streaking for a bit across the countryside just to experience the exhilaration of feeling the wind on usually cooped-up, wind-free parts.

Band Names

So, maybe this is just me, but my newly loosed brain did not immediately leap at the chance to recite memorized poetry or attempt to develop a unifying economic policy that would solve the budget crisis while also extending health care to all Americans and ending world hunger.   Instead, it started with what it already knew and liked.   As a result, thanks to the mileage between Minneapolis and Rochester, I'm now working on a theory that driving around on roads you're unfamiliar with is a good way to generate possible band names.  This activity is akin to travel bingo or tracking what states' license plates you've seen: it's not important whether you have a band or that it needs a name, it's just a form of entertainment.  When you're driving a road that you don't know well, you pay much more attention to the signs and roadside attractions.  You notice the names of towns, like Zumbrota, and rivers, like Vermillion.  You notice the "House of Coates" establishment in Coates, Minnesota and think, "House of Coates -- that could be a band name."  And then you think about how many bands have already used this formula.  Of course, there are the likes of Boston, Chicago, Kansas, America, Asia, Europe, Alabama, The Bay City Rollers, The Oak Ridge Boys and Berlin, to name just a few, but some of my favorites are the more creative applications like The Rural Alberta Advantage, Pert Near Sandstone and Fountains of Wayne.  You can play this game for quite a while, actually, trying out each new location or roadside attraction and imagining it as announced by your favorite DJ: "And now, the new single from Pine Island."

Life on the Road

From band names your mind may eventually wander and consider what life would be like if it were in this situation all the time; that is, if you spent most of your time covering miles and miles of American pavement.  Of course, many people have already mapped-out this subject in great detail and to much acclaim.  One thinks of Kerouac and other explorers like Hunter S. Thompson, Ian Frazier and Anderson Cooper.  But my brain being what it is, it took the topic on a more mundane and literal level and wondered what it would be like to earn a paycheck driving for a living.  Not out of choice or some grandiose notion of manly "because it is there" adventure, but because that's the job you could get.  So you drive a big-rig or a UPS truck or do whatever it is that has to be done to be a cab driver (despite personal experience to the contrary, I'm led to believe that there is some sort of qualifying requirement before one can become a cab driver, yes?) and then you spend the majority of your time thereafter enjoying all 10 cubic feet of your work space.  Every morning, (and most likely during the "middle of the night" part of the morning) you rise, swill some sort of caffeinated beverage or ingest a bennie or two and take your seat -- for the next 8 to 12 hours, or more.  Ugh.  My unexpected hour of rut-awareness-via-forced-solitude suddenly seemed practically playful.

But there are other kinds of life on the road.  It's not just literary types, 60's radicals and blue-collar workers out there.  There's also a good chunk of the "Who's Who of Rock 'n' Roll" logging miles over the endless ribbons of highway.

I happen to be reading Bob Mould's newly published autobiography, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody.  I'm not finished yet, but I'm more than half-way through and well past the early Husker Du years with staggering stories of life on the road as part of the exploding punk rock scene in the late 1970's and early 1980's.  Sleeping in vans, electrocution by improperly wired microphones and a lack of sufficient funds to afford anything we would recognize as food and lodging.   The apprentice years of rock, it seems, are far from the make-believe world of an MTV video.   Even today the one and only Henry Rollins recently wrote a column for L.A. Weekly about the grind and odd social dynamics of an artistic life lived in transit.

I don't know how many burgeoning rock stars I passed or trailed on Highway 52 that day, but odds are that some band or another was making its way to Rochester for a gig that Saturday night.  Then I wondered if the rockers ever thought about who else was on the road; if they ever realized that probably a startling majority of the vehicles heading south that weekend were under the steady hands of soccer moms and dads, logging miles so that their progeny could extend their season, test and sharpen their skills and experience the anxiety and thrill of deliberately expanded boundaries.

The Bucket List

Thinking about who else is on the road and what their personal stories and situations are might lead one in a myriad of directions.  My thoughts flitted briefly from wondering how many rockers were behind the wheel to wondering how many different social, political and religious perspectives I was sharing the road with to then wondering when my next chance would be to travel a new route with unhindered contemplation as my companion.  Maybe the next soccer tournament, except that no more were on the calendar.  

This led me to one of the forbidden fantasies I harbor: the solo road trip.  This fantasy is forbidden not because of any intended lewd or illegal conduct that is implied by the mythology and Hollywood portrayal of such things, but because of my current station and responsibilities in life.  I am a wife and mother.  I have a healthy career.  I am not supposed to want to take-off and let whim and some good tips from the American Automobile Association be my guides.  I am not to supposed to imagine and wonder what it would be like to take a few months and just wander around, by myself, across the lesser-known parts of America, finding all of the rock venues and baseball stadiums and national parks I've always wanted to see along with whatever else is in between.  

In my fantasy, the car is not important, though it is not a van or large, cumbersome vehicle.  It's just a nondescript, regular car or sometimes, if the whether is hot and sunny in my imagination, a vintage convertible.  I invariably imagine more southern and western climates and Photo-shopped landscapes rolling by.   (No Koch refineries, thank you very much.)  It's not that I want to get away from anything, but rather that I want the chance to really see facets of life in the modern world that I wouldn't otherwise be likely to encounter and at a pace that certainly only comes without an itinerary.  To go to the next place that seems interesting and spend the amount of time there that my interest dictates.   Perhaps its just my mental antidote to a harried world that seems busy, but not often engaged.

This always leads me to the Bucket List: the list of things I'd like to do in my life that aren't likely to happen unless I point myself at them and apply focused effort.  I have an actual list in written form on my computer, but I mostly did that just for the discipline of the exercise.   To see what I would really write down.  I hardly ever look at the list and can't recall for certain everything on it, but I like knowing that it is there for me to find in the future if I should otherwise forget about it.  The key items are in my head.  And while it's easy to come-up with a long list of things that seem like they would be fun or interesting to do if time, money and physical dexterity were no obstacle, I think the best approach is to limit the list to just a few items at a time and to items that you actually intend to make an effort to address.  If the list is really meant to embody aspirational yet achievable objectives, then the weight of too many lessens the likelihood that you will knock-off even one.  

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of mine was to "sing with a band."  Now, depending on how you judge such things, I either have or have not accomplished that one.  But I maintain that the details and outcome are far less important than the process.  I will never be a rock star, but I don't see why that means I shouldn't dabble in music if I want to.

I watched the road and the now increasing suburbanization of the landscape out my window and thought of some of the other items on the list and how they might be accomplished.  The paths to some are clear and to others much less so.  

And then, just like that, the real world caught me by the tail and stuffed me back into its bag.  Rochester was before me and the time to review the directions regarding which exit to take was now.  Master-control brain once again took over and the pondering mists receded again to wherever they came from.  

Hmmm.  "And now, here's the new single from Pondering Mists."  Nah.  No good.  Guess I'll just have to keep looking.

Everyone Needs Band Practice

I've been thinking about what my next post should be about for a while and not coming up with much.  (Believe it or not, a blog this incisive and profound requires more time and effort than the superficial appearance of hastiness and poor judgment would lead one to believe.)

The band has been at it a year now and the novelty of each new threshold crossed has gradually given way to increasing comfort and familiarity.  Where once I trembled nervously in anticipation of singing into a startlingly serpent-like microphone for the very first time, now I regularly volunteer any number of sounds, some of which might not be altogether unpleasant. This is not to say that all nervousness and apprehension has dissipated.  Far from it.  But it is to acknowledge that at least the habit of showing-up and taking a whack at it has taken root.  Why should it be my concern if Jim and Andy have an unusual tolerance for bad singing and beginning tambourine?  If they can handle it, I can too. 

Admittedly, I am still struggling on the guitar and tambourine fronts, but these things are known to take time.  Still, the novelty of attempting to learn guitar or write a song or endure listening to one's own voice as part of the recording process has already been mined for blogging ore.  (Here we shall carefully avoid analogies to the yield from said mine and whether the investors got taken.)  And while I'm sure it's just a matter of time and a smidgen more practice until I can reveal what it is like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone and traveling the world in support of a new, critically acclaimed album rapidly rocketing to platinum status, until that moment actually arrives the band simply continues on from one week to the next, practicing, refining and steadily adding new covers and original songs.

So what's a blogger to do? 

One option, of course, is to really comb through my memory and ensure that I am telling you absolutely everything that goes on . . .  Like, did I mention the time that Craig Finn and Bob Mould happened to be walking down the street outside Jim's house in Edina (I know, right?!  Those two guys?  Together?!  In Edina?!) and were so struck by what they heard coming from the basement that they knocked on the door and insisted that they be allowed in and then we all jammed together for, like, ten hours, until they called their respective labels and insisted that they sign us on the spot, at which point a bidding war broke out and we had offers going back and forth and then Bob and Craig got in a fight and we had to break it up?  No?  I didn't tell you about that time?  Huh.  It must have slipped my mind as a result of the trauma of seeing those two guys brawling in Jim's basement.  Plus, they each wanted to do a duet with me on our original song, "Sun" and they were being so petulant about the whole thing that I told them both they had to go home and think about how they behaved and couldn't come back until they were ready to say they were sorry.  I must have been more stern than I realized because I haven't heard back from them yet.  I guess they're still thinking about their behavior.

Or another option for future blog posts would be to go the reality/confessional route blazed by such revered journalistic pioneers as "Intervention" and VH1's "Behind the Music" and pull back the veil on the sordid personal lives of the band.  There's Jim's generosity and type-A achievement issues that need to be addressed and Andy's all-around agreeableness that just has to be a front for something much more disturbed and sinister.  Clearly I could get, like, a year's worth of posts out of all that raw material.  Thankfully, I'm pretty much all good and able to hold the band together and serve as your impartial observer.

Any of those routes would be likely to increase readership and maybe get me a book deal or a byline in The National Enquirer.  But, as it turns out, I kinda like the routine of band practice, in all of its plain, non-newsworthy ordinariness.   And although the event of band practice no longer stands out as new or unusual, what happens at band practice is far from mundane.

Band practice is a black box built from the rare wood of spare hours joined together with latent and implausible fantasies.  Inside this box, magic happens.  Lawyers and account managers and finance guys transform into singers, songwriters and rock musicians and the universe of unseen possibility stretches out infinitely, paradoxically all within the confines of an otherwise unremarkable suburban basement.  There are no bosses to impress, no clients whose needs must be paramount, and no financial returns of any kind whatsoever to even begin to contemplate.  (Indeed, the cost of beer alone has the band in the red and I'm afraid the trend shows no signs of abating anytime soon.)

We own all of our own stock.  We are both management and labor and we have only ourselves to answer to and negotiate with.  Indeed, it is the sheer freedom of band practice that constricts most tightly.  With no external limits, you have only yourself to look to for shape and form.  It is one thing to perfect the art of pouring oneself into various professional molds, ensuring that each curve and crease is filled and the content evenly distributed within, but it is another thing altogether to be mold-less.  (At the moment, we also happen to be Bob Mould-less, but I expect that to be resolved very soon.  Bob's always been a very sensitive, contemplative guy who just needs time to work through things.)

If you could do anything and no one would know, what would you do?  If you could sing a song, bang on the drums or, for the more daring out there, attempt to sing while also shaking a tambourine -- would you do it?  Of course you would.  You do it already in the privacy of your head and in those rare moments when you are alone in your own home and no one knows if you drink the milk out of the carton, scoop the jelly out of the jar with your finger or decide to watch the last 45 minutes of Beaches that you stumbled upon on Lifetime while changing channels.  (I'm just passing along the reports I've heard on the internet that some people do these things, not that I would know anything about that kind of clearly deviant behavior.)

This is the beauty of regular, ordinary band practice: the protective shield of the black box.  No matter what has happened in the outer world, band practice exists in a different dimension.  At least for me it does.  Somehow the simple physics involved in driving 10 minutes to Jim's house and walking down a flight of stairs really messes with time and space in a way that even Stephen Hawking can't explain.  I might have had a bad day or a sad day or an alarmingly boring and unremarkable day, but band practice allows me to step sideways, slip out of my skin and take on another form.

Most importantly of all, I think, if I have the courage to really try, band practice provides that rarest of all opportunities: the chance to try and fail without serious consequence, save a few bumps and bruises to the ever delicate ego.  How often any more in this stage of life does one really have the luxury of experimentation and failure?  Certainly it has not been recommended as a path to success in the legal field or most others for that matter.  You gave catastrophically bad legal advice to your last client?  Excellent.  You're hired.  Likewise on the home front.  Parenting in particular is fraught with the stress of trying to "get it right," whatever that means. 

So along comes band practice, offering the opportunity to ditch the real world for a few hours and see if I still know what it means to step off the ledge, push myself past my comfort zone and allow myself to do and try -- and fail.   And yet it is so much harder than you think it will be, even in the black box.  I don't want to sing badly.  I don't want to write a lousy song.  I don't want to fail.  But I have done all of those things and I have felt the heat in my cheeks when confronted with these small, uncomfortable realities.  But each time, I also feel a bit more sure that despite how it feels, it is actually forward progress.  That each time I fail, I also succeed.

So now that I've gotten that off my chest, managed to punch out one more blog post and give Oprah a run for her money (I hear there's going to be an opening in that area pretty soon that I might want to apply for), here's the Reader's Digest version for those of you who don't have the time, like Craig and Bob, to really contemplate your behavior: go out there and find a way to try something new and really fuck it up.  You'll be glad you did.

Confessions From The Living Room Floor

As has been clearly established without meaningful rebuttal in numerous episodes of  CHIPS, Hill Street Blues and Law and Order, when attempting to solve a crime it is useful to understand the origins and motivations of the criminal you are seeking.  This frequently involves talking to the former high school teacher, the neighbor across the hall who never really saw the suspect because he mostly kept to himself, the cheerleader's best friend who insists that "she was just a normal girl, like everybody else" or the junkie on the street corner who reflexively tells all to anyone with a formidable squint.

But just what causes an otherwise unremarkable and mostly-law-abiding middle-aged woman's sudden and unforeseen crime spree against all that is good and holy in the world of rock 'n' roll may never truly be understood or explained.  Still, perhaps if we retrace her steps, canvas the neighbors and menace the junkie, maybe we will find the hidden clues that were there all along.  Maybe if we can deduce the faint trajectory of deviancy early enough, if we can spare other friends and families the embarrassment and despair -- if we can save just one life -- perhaps, just perhaps, the bits and bytes of the grizzly MP3 carcasses that have been tossed so callously onto the shoulders of the Internet superhighway where any unsuspecting tender soul might inadvertently come upon them, perhaps they won't have died in vain. 

 *****

I remember the stereo cabinet my parents had when I was a kid in the '70s.  It was a big, long piece of furniture that must have been all in vogue at the time with it's burnt umber finish, California meets Baroque styling and deftly concealed hinged opening in the center of the top that revealed the secret compartment for the record player.  The speakers were cleverly ensconced behind the mysterious mesh that peaked through the flourished, doily-like wood carvings that comprised the doors on either end of the cabinet.  To my mind, the secret stereo cabinet was on par with Maxwell's sneaky shoe phone on Get Smart, except the cabinet won out because it was actually a real thing in my very own house.  Plus, you could tell it was fancy just by looking at all the swirly carving involved.  While the console pictured below isn't the way I remember ours, it gives you the general idea of the kind of craftsmanship we're talking about.

In no way aware of or deterred by the abundant design sins committed by a single piece of living room furniture, my favorite thing to do was to get a pillow from my room and lie on the ochre-hued shag carpeting in front of one of the speakers so that I could hear the music as loud as was possible in the days before Walkmans and iPods.  I felt the vibrations in my head and belly and it was easy to get consumed by the sound.  And, before I got older and developed that relentless self-consciousness that unfortunately seems to be part and parcel of getting taller (not that "tall" is any place that I've ever been),  I used to sing along.  Judy Collins, Peter, Paul & Mary, The Lettermen, the Kingston Trio and The New Christy Minstrels were in regular rotation and I loved them all.

But my all-time favorite, bar none, was John Denver.  I knew all the songs, even the sad ones that made me cry, like the one about the young lady who somehow got killed when the horse she was riding tripped.  ("Darcy Farrow" is the song, in case you can't immediately bring it to mind.)  I sang that song holding back the tears like a stoic Bette Midler sending Johnny Carson off forever with "One More for the Road."  (Sometimes, in my more emotionally unguarded moments, I let the tears out a bit; sort of like John Boehner giving a speech about anything to anyone.)  I loved "Grandma's Feather Bed", "Rocky Mountain High", "Calypso" and, of course, "Take Me Home, Country Roads":

Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze


Country roads, take me home
To the place, I belong
West Virginia, Mountain Mama
Take me home, country roads

Wikipedia: Take_Me_Home,_Country_Roads

As it happens, I had a case at work a few years back that required me to go to West Virginia on four separate occasions.  Each time I went, I contemplated the sentiment lodged in my brain by Mr. Denver decades earlier that somewhere out there it must surely be "almost heaven" - - just not where I happened to be.  I was prepared to trust John about the heavenliness and leave it at that when I discovered, ahead of my last excursion in the spring of 2010, that The Hold Steady would be playing in Morgantown during my stay.  Conveniently, Morgantown happened to be just 2 hours away from where I was camped out in Charleston -- nothing a rental car, caffeine and Mapquest can't get sorted out in short order.  So, I bought tickets online, hit the road and made the show.  Morgantown, being the home of the University of West Virginia Mountaineers, had the expected energy and character of a college town, which must be why THS chose it as one of the first stops on the tour for their then new album,  Heaven is Whenever.  There were maybe 125 people in the tiny bar and, frankly, it was pretty darn close to heaven if you ask me.  See, John Denver knows his shit.  I'm just sayin'.

From singing Denver on the living room floor, I eventually stood up and moved on to my own room with my own record player proudly purchased at Sears with my very own money.  My first records were the ones I saw on t.v. advertised by K-Tel.  One of the early purchases I still remember was called Expressions. It was a collection of love songs and break-up songs and I played it constantly.  It had a swirly, misty cover of pink and blue with "Expressions" in a curlicue font across the front.  What's a fifth grade girl not to love?



Then there was the teen idol phase of Shawn Cassidy and Andy Gibb that ran simultaneously with The Captain & Tennille phase that overlapped a bit on the Bee Gees Saturday Night Fever soundtrack stage that gave way to the Breakfast in America period.  Grease and Olivia Newton John were, of course, paid their due as well.

I also remember making lists in 6th grade of my top-five favorite songs and passing them to my friends in class with the understanding that I would get their top five in return.  Ring My Bell  made the list as did Eddie Money's Two Tickets To Paradise.  That was all well and good until the subject turned to boys (not at my suggestion, I might add).  Having successfully passed notes on numerous prior occasions, I dutifully penned my "Top 5 Cutest Boys" as requested and deftly passed it to my neighbor.  Or so I thought.  In what I have come to refer to as the "Horrifying Boy Incident of 1978," my list of the five cutest boys got intercepted by the teacher and read aloud to the class.  The reverberating and profound mortification from that experience still registers on my mental seismograph even today.   Jeff Simpson, Mark Sayer, Matthew Brown, Jamie Gilmore and a mysterious fifth boy that I have never been able to recall, I hereby, though quite belatedly, apologize for any objectification you felt as a result of my careless and insensitive note-passing.  I fully respect the unique qualities and complexities of each of you as individuals and never intended, in any way, to demean you or your gender by ranking you in order of physical attractiveness.  Really.  I think it was Stephanie Engler's idea anyway.

Being the first-born, I had no older sibling to show me the ways of hip or cool or "in" and "out" in terms of music or anything else, really.  My clothes were from Sears, my bruised shins from my younger brother and my haircut and wheatgerm-infused lunch from my mother.  Musically, I just took what I could find and was happy to have it.

By junior-high I graduated to the Columbia Record Club, as many of us did, which involved moving into the slightly harder drug of cassette tapes.   (Small, portable, playable in automobiles, the cassette-tape opened-up whole new vistas for music consumption and surreptitious, parental-free listening)  Of course, the 10 records (or cassettes) for a penny part was pretty easy, but that $17.99 price tag that followed immediately upon the failure to return the record of the month card  -- which, without any irony whatsoever, was how you were meant to tell them you did not want the record of the month -- was really hard to take.  ("If you want the selection of the month, do nothing and we'll send it to you in 14 days!")  Especially for a 13 year-old in 1980 dollars.  (This practice, by the way, is fondly referred to by the Federal Trade Commission as "negative option billing."  FTC: Negative Option Plans)

Needless to say, this "club" was the subject of many disputes with my mother, though to be fair, just about everything was the subject of many disputes with my mother.  Still, in this one instance I can see that she had a point.

I hit a heavy metal phase briefly in 7th and 8th grade.  I flirted with Molly Hatchet, ZZ Top, Van Halen, Pink Floyd and ACDC.  Back then, there were dueling metal stations in L.A.  Metalheads could choose between 94.7 K-M-E-T or 95 1/2, K-L-O-S.  KLOS had these cool bumper stickers with an oblong shape and bands of color around the edge and they could be seen all over town: 

KMET's stickers weren't quite as cool, though it was the more hard-core of the two stations:

But all of that changed toward the end of 8th grade when I was introduced to the up-and-comer from Pa-sa-de-na: K-R-O-Q:

 

KROQ (pronounced K-ROCK) was a phenomenon that shaped a generation of Angelinos.  It was L.A.'s very own Sputnik that shot into the stratosphere and dared others to follow.  Dr. Drew got his start there as did Adam Carolla, and Jimmy Kimmel.  Heck, even Elvira had a gig on KROQ.  But aside from the line-up of future late-night TV personalities, revolutionary format, and ground-breaking willingness to find and play music on the edge, what this station really offered was a chance to be part of something as it was happening.  It was a busted fire hydrant of music and energy that gushed into our heads unabated.  To me, it confirmed that I was not alone in my belief that music really was a door to another world.  Without a steady income or even a reliable allowance and with a mother who frequently displayed the same willingness to accommodate burgeoning individualism as, say, Stalinist Russia, KROQ was revolution delivered to your door -- free of charge.  I learned about bands like The Clash, Dramarama, Black Flag, The Alarm, The Dead Kennedys, The Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies and X when they were just breaking out.  And I was a nice girl from Pasadena who did her homework. 

In addition to the up-to-the-minute music that KROQ provided, I also embarked on a home study course in The Classics throughout high school.  Together with my best friend, Melissa, (though I called her "Mel" and she called me "Bob") we spent innumerable afternoons in my room, with the same record player purchased at Sears years before, exploring The Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Don McLean, and Neil Young to name just a few.  Somehow, we felt obligated to fill in our ignorance of the original revolutionaries as best we could.  I remember literally listening to music for hours, pulling records out of their sleeves and trying to get the needle down on the favored song of the moment without any skipping or scratching.

The records themselves were acquired slowly and steadily in many pilgrimages to perhaps the greatest record store there ever was.  Poo-Bah's Records occupied every square inch of an old Pasadena bungalow on Walnut Street.  It was Mecca for music lovers, except without all the kneeling and praying and facing East part.  It was open late, had every kind of music ever recorded, encyclopedic staffers, and intriguing and obscure music playing in the background, all in an atmosphere of your uncle's attic -- creaky floors, posters on every surface, and the sense that if music really was a portal to another realm, then Poo-Bah's was the mother ship that would get you there at warp speed.  A genuinely independent record store, it essentially did no marketing, other than selling t-shirts like the one pictured below, and relied on the exuberant proselytizing of its extremely loyal patrons.  Some days you had to wait in line to get at certain album stacks.  Plus, they sold new and used, which was particularly helpful to those of us with six bucks to spend on a Friday night. 


 





[Note: this is a photo of the old Poo-Bah's from the Internet.  I don't have any idea who this guy is.]

Transportation to Poo-Bah's was most often provided by my friend Tom, without whom our egregious ignorance of rock's forebears likely would have gone unchecked until college.  (This may be the time to note that both Mel and I were young for our grade, meaning that we were literally the last two people in our class to get our driver's licenses.  Tom, you're the best!)  Once inside, the evening's entertainment was at hand -- a maze of albums through which to wander, posters to peruse, conversations to overhear and people to watch.  Cap it off with a midnight run to In-N-Out or Tommy Burgers and it was Pasadena perfection.

*****

There's not much more to the story after that really, officer.

College happened which took me to Minnesota and right into the sweet spot of the Minneapolis sound.  So much has been written about the bands coming out of the Twin Cities at that time that its pointless to try and say anything more.  Bands like The Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum and The Wallets were just lying around all over the place like snow in the Minnesota winter.  (Not to mention that purple dude who was pretty big at the time too.)

I don't really know why we all like music so much, or at least most of us do.  Music loving varies, of course, not only by preferred genre but also by frequency of listening and depth of response.  Still, you don't come across many people who say, "I don't like music."  Whatever it is, it seems at its base to be a secondary communication system.  A way of evoking passion and contemplation that unaccompanied words struggle to equal.  Now, truth be told, I am not illiterate and I love books and reading.  I have been brought to tears reading a book and I have laughed out loud reading a book, but it's not quite the same.  Music, when done right, reaches its invisible hand right into the middle of you and grabs your guts -- usually in three minutes or less.  (It should be noted, however, that with some bands this can result in nausea and vomiting.  Once you have identified the bands that have this effect, however, they can usually be avoided without much difficulty, except, maybe, when one of their songs becomes the popular anthem for, say, the San Francisco Giants in their bid for the World Series championship.  I'm just sayin'.)

Now, I know after all of this you're wondering what the thing is, so here's the thing: it seems to me that our ability to access and respond to music or [insert the passion from your youth here] too often gets pushed aside as we grow older.  Our sources of optimism and inspiration get boxed-up and put away with the other tokens of childhood and adolescence in the name of even-keeled maturity.  Goodbye Kool-Aid, no more Nancy Drew and see ya later air guitar.  And while I like red wine, The New York Times, and a nice salad of beets and blue cheese over organic micro-greens just as much as the next liberal, urban professional, I think it is a mistake to discard so much of what made us who we are in the belief that things loved in childhood must be childish.

Like most of us, I have worked hard to hike to the top of Mt. Middle-Age, but I've found that while the view is very nice and certainly shouldn't be missed, the air is a bit chilly and there's mostly just a lot of standing around and looking at things.  I, for one, think it ought to be o.k. to hike back down every now and then and splash around in the stream where its warm and sunny and there are picnic tables with jugs of Kool-Aid and an iPod blasting someone's idea of good music.  Because, frankly . . .

I can't fight this feeling anymore
I've forgotten what I started fighting for
It's time to bring this ship into the shore
And throw away the oars, forever

Gotcha.

Salt, Sugar and Plastic Bags (And Other Reasons You Don't Want Me To Drive You Anywhere)

When you lose your shit, as I have, there is a wide swath of collateral damage.   In addition to the front and center risk of making a fool of yourself for attempting to start a rock band after 40, there are various and sundry other items that get folded into the insanity batter inadvertently while the baker's attention is fully devoted to finding the right kind of chocolate chips.  One little moment of inattention and you've switched baking powder for baking soda or added a cup of salt and a teaspoon of sugar, and well, you have a real fucking mess on your hands.  (Still, if you get the chocolate chips right you never know.  Maybe it could be good.)  In any event, the point is other stuff can sneak-up on you and escape your notice while you're busy focusing on finding the chocolate chips in your life that you're pretty sure are stuck somewhere in the back of the cabinet if you just look hard enough and move the whole-wheat flour and molasses out of the way.  In my own search for the misplaced chocolate chips, I confess some weird shit went down with the batter.  Normally, I would care about these kinds of things, but given that I can feel the chocolate chips just at the edge of my grasp, the mix-up with the salt and the sugar really doesn't concern me at the moment.  In other circumstances I would be a bit sheepish about revealing the additional evidence that shit has, in fact, been lost, but given what's already come before this, what's a little bit more?  

(1) I sometimes sing along to songs I don't know and try to guess the lyrics. 

By this I mean I literally attempt to anticipate the rhythm, tempo and next line of a song that I have never heard before or only partially heard before, but that has caught my interest.  I am terrible at this.  Happily, I have decided not to let this bother me.   My success rate has no deterrent effect on my behavior at all.  (Which also shows that the death penalty makes no sense, though you may nevertheless wish that it be extended to cover musical crimes before this is over.)  So, for example, I will keep trying to figure out both what Tapes 'n Tapes is saying in the first place and then what they are going to say next.   I am never right.  Ever.  It has occurred to me that this is the same phenomenon that goes on in front of slot machines and blackjack tables across Las Vegas and in Indian casinos everywhere, though I will quietly distinguish myself from my gambling-addicted, AARP cousins by noting that I'm not usually wearing polyester pants and holding a plastic cup full of coins when I'm playing this game.  Also, this is why it is so universally joyful when you finally get to the chorus of a song, because most of the time the chorus is the part that repeats, so your odds of getting it right increase the second and third time it comes around, making you feel like you might just have a few psychic powers up your sleeve after all.

The only time I ever have any success outside of the chorus is when my kids have taken over control of the dial and, although I am driving the car and sitting just inches away from the stereo and all of its operational parts, I am in fact hostage to Top 40 radio.  In these circumstances, I bat about .300.  And while Joe Mauer may not be satisfied with that, it's nothing to sneeze at.  The hazard, of course, is that the predictability of these songs is what makes them terrible and is the primary reason why you don't want them stuck in your head, which, unfortunately, they will be after you have correctly guessed that Enrique Iglesias is going to rhyme "situation" with "nation" in his chart-topping song "Tonight."  Also, because I have actually listened to the lyrics of these songs while trying to guess what will come next, I have noticed in great detail how much I dislike them.  This caused me on one occasion to engage in the following exchange with my children:

Scene: suburban mom driving two young daughters somewhere while Katy Perry's "Firework" is heard coming from the radio.

Radio and children together:  "Do you ever feel, like a plastic bag? . . ."

Me: Hey, guys?  

Children and radio:  ". . . through the wind, wanting to start again."  Yeah?

Me:  Um, if you ever actually feel like you're a plastic bag . . . I mean, you know, you wake-up one day and think, "I don't feel good.  I feel kind of like a plastic bag."  I want you to come tell me immediately.  Because that's going to involve a trip to the doctor.  It's not normal and just doesn't make any sense.

Radio and me together:  "You just gotta ignite the light, And let it shine, Just own the night, Like the Fourth of July . . ."

Children (with great pain and irritation audible in their voices):  M-om!  (Much sighing and rolling of the eyes occurs.) Can we listen to the song now?  And can you please STOP singing?!

Me:  O.k.  Just wanted to be sure we were clear on that.


(2) I keep a camping headlamp in my nightstand and regularly strap it around my head it in the middle of the night.

For those of you who do not already own a camping headlamp, I implore you to immediately go to REI or REI.com and order one.  If you're not familiar with headlamps, they are the functional equivalent of a flashlight taped to your forehead, but they are more ergonomically designed and easier to put on and take off.  They generally look like this:





For those of you who already own one but, for some odd reason that I will never understand, keep it stored away with all of the camping gear you never use, you are going to want to seriously consider relocating your headlamp to your nightstand.  Here's why:  when you have what at least initially appears to be a brilliant idea in the middle of the night, you are going to need to write it down.  Unless you are gifted with night vision or are willing to chance that in the morning you will be able to read the long-awaited follow-up to Coleridge's Kubla Khan that was scribbled furiously in the dark (and trust me, that never works out), this will require some light.  Instead of flipping on the bedside lamp and waking the cats and irritating your spouse, however, you can just reach for your handy headlamp and strap that sucker right on.  Then, with the simple push of a button right in the middle of your forehead you have perfectly focused, hands-free light.  Of course, one thing I have learned over the years is that the headlamp does not improve, in any way, the quality of what you are writing down.  Still, if you're like me and you're playing the odds that one of these days you are going to guess the lyrics right (as referenced above) and one of these other days you are actually going to have a brilliant idea or capture the greatest rock 'n' roll lyrics of all time before they are lost forever on the edge of a rapidly receding dream, well then, of course, it's all worth it, right?  This is what nightstands were made for -- to hold your headlamp, notebook and pencil in the event a worthy thought or idea unexpectedly comes your way.

(3) I sing in my car.  Loudly.  Even when waiting in traffic while others are looking.

Because my daughters will not tolerate any amount of this in their presence, I can only do this when I am alone in my car.  Thankfully, that happens at least twice a day on my way to and from work.  Unthankfully, my commute time is about 8 minutes, unless there is weather, in which case it bumps up to about 12.  Every morning as I am backing out of my driveway, I go through a little ritual.  First, I turn on the stereo and surf the local radio stations for something singable.  This can range from indie rock to classic rock to soft rock depending on my mood and the nostalgia meter reading on that particular day.  Some days its Boston, other days its The Black Keys.  If the radio strikes out, as it often does, I turn the dial to the iPod that is connected in the glove compartment.  I have equipped this iPod with numerous playlists full of songs that I enjoy singing.  The advantage of this option is that I will get 8-12 minutes of singing time without any time sacrificed to DJs, commercials, or an atrocity of a song rotating in.

As I have mentioned, I have recently gotten a lot more comfortable with singing in front of others (others, of course, being two people in a basement).  This has carried over and emboldened my automobile singing as well.  While I have been singing in my car for decades, I would only do so while traveling at sufficient speed that no one could really see or hear me.  Thus, when a stoplight would be reached, I would inevitably taper off, attempt to sing quietly and without moving my lips, and wait for the light to change.  As the good folks along Glenwood Avenue in Minneapolis are now viscerally aware, however, this is no longer the case.  I will now continue to sing, loudly, while stopped at a traffic light or stop sign and sometimes even in front of the people waiting for the bus just yards away.  I no longer care.  (What was I supposed to be adding next?  Salt?  Sugar?  Whatever.)  And while no one has ever clapped, neither has anyone ever thrown their bag lunch or pounded on the window and asked me to stop, for the love of God.  So, I haven't.  Turns out most of them have iPods in their pockets and earbuds in their ears anyway, or are secretly masking their own singing in the car next to me while waiting for the light.

As for the batter, who knows what will come of it.  I'm not even close to being finished with it yet.  But, just to be safe, you may not want to eat any cookies I bring around for a while, you know, in case they are a bit salty and hard as rocks.

Clearwater Rock City

As it turns out, there are times when music and mid-life crises must take a back seat to the mechanical obligations of the hard-earned real life that makes my fantasy world possible; the job that pays the mortgage, buys groceries, equips my oldest daughter with a bass guitar and puts gas in my car (provided I remember to stop by the gas station in time), with some dollars leftover for guitar lessons, Mac laptops and copious purchases from iTunes.  On occasion, this job requires that I travel to some spot or another for some reason or another, though it usually involves paper fights, also known as litigation.  As a result, I've had the good fortune to see the jaw-dropping wonders of a two-week trial in the Bronx, to compare and contrast the differences between mediations in San Francisco and San Diego, to ask the upright people of College Station, Texas to fairly compensate my employer for the consequences of a taking by eminent domain and to go toe-to-toe with elected officials in Topeka, Kansas.  And, on occasion, I get a boondoggle to some resort destination that lures winter-abused Northerners down for conferences so they can swap temperatures in the 30s (or worse) for temperatures in the 70s (or better) in the name of continuing education and networking. 

So, I found myself attending a retail law conference at a Marriott in Clearwater, Florida last November that conveniently came equipped with a sparkling ocean out front, less sparkly development for miles on either side, and some pretty awesome bridges across which a Minnesota runner could run and take it all in without need of Thinsulate.  One afternoon after dutifully attending both general and break-out sessions in Conference Rooms That Could Be In Any Hotel Anywhere and before the scheduled dinner event, I laced-up my running shoes and headed south towards one of the high-arcing bridges I had spotted on the way into town.  Having successfully located the bridge and hauled myself up and over it, I was pleasantly rewarded with a small park and public-access beach area waiting for me on the other side.  It had preserved native wetlands, indigenous vegetation and included, I soon discovered, a small but peaceful bird sanctuary.  The boardwalk trails beckoned, so I headed in to see what I could see.  Before long, I encountered an observation area with a few benches, a view of the remaining wetlands and a lone old woman.  I slowed to do some of the recommended observing and noticed the cranes, herons and other water fowl scattered about like motionless plastic lawn ornaments, (though in this case it would be a lawn that had been badly over watered and turned into a pond.)  As I slowly passed the old woman it became evident that she was no tourist or retiree come to spend a few minutes with the birds.  Rather, the over stuffed plastic bags nestled on either side of her and incongruous layers of tattered clothing betrayed the fact that, in all likelihood, the bench or some nearby make-shift shelter was what she called home.  She and I were the only human visitors in the park from what I could see.  I sat for a few minutes a couple benches down from her and took-in the refreshing island idyll that was managing to keep its metaphorical foot firmly planted between the rapidly closing double-doors of neighboring condos and hotels.  I watched the birds, then the old woman, who, I found, was also watching the birds.

After a few moments, I was up again and on my way, but now with a shiny new marble of a song idea rolling around in my head.  It struck me as a worthy parable of sorts that the homeless woman with so many wants and needs was the one with the time and interest in taking-in what little natural beauty was still left to be found while the tourists and retirees hurried by barely noticing the scruffy-signed park with few modern amenities.

Back in Minnesota a few days later, I cursed the declining weather to no effect.  Winter and band practice, apparently, must go on.  At the end of our next practice,  Jim and Andy were energetically working on one of Andy's latest guitar bits that had set Jim in motion on the keyboards like a whirling dervish but with maybe slightly less whirling, though I'm pretty sure there was still some amount of whirling that did occur.  As they discussed the structure of the music and how the keyboard piece and guitar would work together, I sat on the floor with my notebook, listening to the progressive iterations of the melody being born.  I thought back to the homeless woman in Florida and my pencil suddenly got moving, words pouring out on the page like stale beer spilling from a bottle kicked across the floor at First Ave. after a show.  When I could get a word in edge wise, I informed Jim and Andy that I might have just come-up with the lyrics to the song.  Not too long after that, we recorded the following, again as insurance against the probability that our aging and overly-taxed brains would not remember what we had done from one practice to the next:



I won't repeat the disclaimer referenced in an earlier post because if you are still hanging around reading this blog you either have no common sense and therefore warnings are of no avail or you are of hardy enough stock that really you can take just about anything, no matter how egregious.  So, we shall proceed then and get straight to the final version of the song which, if you like it, is to be credited to Jim and Andy and if you dislike it, well, then you're computer isn't working right and you should probably take it in for a tune-up and while you're there pick-up a nice set of headphones so that you can really appreciate the art involved here:



As for Clearwater, I'm thinking if our band ever makes it big, we might have to include a stop in Clearwater on our first tour.  I know some conference rooms in a hotel there that really need something interesting to happen to them before they die.

The Easter Bunny Gets Down At Easter

I will get back to songs and songwriting stories in the future (as the clamoring from the blogosphere is getting quite loud, unless that noise is just my washing machine getting off-balance again during the spin cycle), but I thought I would take a post to pause and discuss the process of learning to play the electric guitar at the age of 42.

I know the revelation in the last post that such efforts were underway was startling, especially given my history with the tambourine, which most experts agree is a simpler instrument to master, though I'm inclined to debate that.  Well considered or not, I did indeed embark on a quest to learn to play guitar way back in the early days of my rock career, which would be about last May.  Actually, thinking back, my 10 year-old daughter, Audrey, is really to blame for this folly.  See, the genetic defect that has me hanging-out in basements and recording songs (when I should be spending my free time running calculations about how much more money I need in my 401k before I can retire to Hawaii), has manifested itself much earlier in Audrey's case.   It just so happens that a few of Audrey's friends also decided to form a band last spring.  Two of the other girls had extensive experience with guitar and piano and a third one at least owned a set of drums, so most of the bases were covered except for one -- the bass base.  In need of a bass player, they drafted Audrey for the task and she eagerly accepted the challenge, mostly because she thought guitars looked cool and was keen to own one and put a bunch of stickers on it.  Being the open-minded, music loving mother that I am, I said "no."  We had no history of bass players in the family, no bass and it seemed clear that the "learning to play it" details were conveniently to be determined at some vague point in the future.

But, of course, she persisted in a way that was deviously calculated to cut me off at the knees; she said "please" 1,014 times, pointed-out that it involved music and then, in a stroke of brilliance, agreed to take lessons.  Check mate.  I had no answer to this, other than the fact that bass guitars don't grow on trees and, therefore, cost money, which we also know does not grow on trees.  (Though as a side note, I have to say that in modern society, the "grow on trees" retort really doesn't have much sway anymore.  Unless you own or operate an orchard, there are lots of things like apples, oranges and bananas that do grow on trees, and yet the orchard-deprived among us still have to pay for them.)  Still, she had at least earned herself a trip to Twin Town Guitars wherein reluctant mothers can become better informed about how much non-tree-growing bass guitars actually cost.

www.twintown.com 

Well, you all know the end of the story and certainly you are desperate for it to be here.  Yes, she got a bass guitar, and a strap, and a cord, and some picks and a small amp. Oh, and a case and a tuner and a regular lesson time on Monday nights.

The scheduling of said lessons caused me to realize that unless I did something about it, I would be sitting and waiting in a perfectly good guitar shop for 1/2 hour every week, learning absolutely nothing about guitars except how many different things there are to buy for them.  So, I signed myself up for lessons too. Which, of course, required me to buy a guitar for myself.  And a strap, and a cord and another amp and some picks and a tuner.  Thankfully, it came with a free case.

Which brings us to the Easter Bunny.  In your first guitar lesson, you get oriented to the guitar and its relevant parts.  There is the neck and the fretboard, the nut, the head stock, the tuning pins (I just call them the knobs) the body, and, of course, the all-important strings.  On an electric guitar there are also things called "pick-ups" or "humbuckers" which register the sound of the strings as well as some knobs for volume and tone.  All you need to know about the knobs is that they should usually be turned all the way up.  As for the pick-ups, you just need to have them in order for the guitar to work. 

Back to the strings.  There are six strings on a guitar and they are generally tuned to certain notes, namely, EBGDAE.  For people who care about music theory and really want to understand the structure behind music, it is helpful to learn the default notes for the strings. (I'm not in this group, but I didn't know that at the time of my first lesson.)  Also, it helps in tuning your guitar if you know what note each string should register at on your tuner.  The easiest way to teach young children and middle-aged lawyers how to remember the order of the notes of the strings is via a mnemonic device.  In this instance, the Easter Bunny Gets Down At Easter.  This conveys the fact that the first string on the guitar (which is the bottom one, not the top one) is tuned to E, the second to B and so on.  This is what I learned in my first guitar lesson, and I will never forget it.  Obviously, it is culturally insensitive and inappropriate if you don't happen to celebrate Easter or if you are bothered by the idea of His Holiness the Easter Bunny getting down, and yet, it works.  No doubt there are other mnemonics for guitar strings, but don't even bother to tell me about them.  As far as I am concerned, the Easter Bunny Gets Down At Easter and that is that.

In fact, my brain and the hamster therein seems particularly well-suited to mnemonic devices and other memory aides.  Not only will I forever remember the order of the notes for the strings on a guitar, but I am able to recite the entire alphabet to this very day just by singing the song in my head.  (I cannot recite it backwards because I did not learn a song that does so, though I've heard one exists.)  The Great Lakes can be remembered by HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior) and my children memorized the clockwise orientation of North, East, South and West through the phrase "Never Eat Soggy Waffles."  And, thanks to They Might Be Giants, we can forever remember the colors of the rainbow as ROY G BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet):



Additionally, I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance from memory and, with the help of Schoolhouse Rock, the Preamble to the Constitution.  So, if you learn nothing else from this blog, you should at least come away thinking that the next time you need to remember something, memory aides are the way to go.  In other words, remember that memory aides aid your memory.

From the Easter Bunny, you quickly move to fingernails.  This is the other thing you learn in your first guitar lesson: fingernail length matters.  In order to hold-down the strings on the fretboard (hopefully in the shape of a chord that will produce a pleasing sound) you need to use the pads of your fingers so as to best control the location of your fingers and the pressure on the string.  It's sort of like typing.  If you have really long press-on nails, it gets tricky.   So, your instructor will encourage you to keep the nails on your non-dominant hand as short as you can.  Accordingly, the nails on my left hand now look like this:

This was a big adjustment for me, as you can imagine, because the fingernails on my right hand generally look like this:

Then, there is naming your guitar.  Now this is generally optional and not required.  In fact, most guitar players that I know don't have a name for their guitar.  Certainly there is B.B. King and "Lucille," but most of the immortalized female names in rock are song-related, not instrument related.  There's "Beth" by Kiss and Clapton's "Layla," Elvis Costello's "Alison" and, of course, Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon."  No doubt there are countless others that I'm not remembering due to the lack of a mnemonic device.  Regardless, I'm not really a fan of naming guitars, but in this instance I felt it was necessary.  To the extent I ever call my guitar by name, it's name is Hal, which is short for HAL 9000, the empathetic, sentient computer system that warmed your hearts in the Space Odyssey movies.  The reason for this is simple: Hal is undoubtedly smarter about guitars and how to play them than I am.  Eventually, I expect that Hal will become frustrated and impatient with the incompetence of his owner and seek to take me out in the name of higher directives.  Below are photos of Hal, a Fender Telecaster, that you can provide to the authorities some day when they find me mysteriously strangled by my 7-foot guitar cord while alone in my own home with no signs of forced entry and my amplifier making strange, happy humming noises.

On a final note, it seems that as with most things in life, practicing is key to developing skill and ability on the guitar.  Picks, amps, Beatles Songbooks, and guitar chord charts taped to the wall don't actually get you anywhere unless you put in the time.  Unfortunately, the quality 10-20 minutes a week I am able to spend with Hal (aside from my now bi-weekly 1/2 hour lessons) makes for a very slow climb up the competency ladder.  This is why I fear Hal will someday blow a humbucker and plot my end.  So again, a word to the wise (and this blog is nothing if not a protracted cautionary tale) if you decide to pursue your rock 'n' roll fantasies in your 40s, remember to find time to practice.  Perhaps this mnemonic device will help: POD.  It stands for Practice Or Die.

Pssst . . . Over here.

As you can probably tell from the information that has been revealed in this blog, I have logged some time in the world of rock 'n' roll over the past nine months.  Countless hours have been spent in the inter-galacticaly renowned Sonic Goat, additional hours stoking the creative fires of song-writing, an unquantifiable amount of time watching the experts on stage at First Ave., and at least a good 45 maybe 50 minutes trying to master the art of the electric guitar.  (Do not get distracted by this revelation.  I will elaborate in another post as necessary.)  In doing all of the above, I have been allowed into, or perhaps obtained unauthorized entry into, the inner sanctum of rock and have learned or otherwise absconded with the secrets only insiders know.  These are the super top secret, juicy tid-bits that the likes of Dylan, Hendrix, Plant and Gaga have gone to great lengths to keep under wraps.  But, well, because we've gotten to know each other and you look like a nice sort of person who can be trusted, I'll let you in on a few things -- but you didn't hear them from me.

First, a few tips for singers and songwriters:

1.  It is better to avoid using the word "pharmacy" when at all possible while writing rock 'n' roll lyrics.   Unfortunately for me, I came across this sage piece of advice the hard way.  Indeed, I committed the classic rookie mistake of incorporating the word "pharmacy" into a set of lyrics.  As a result, I can now explain first-hand the reasoning and collective wisdom behind this rule of rock.  First and most obviously, if you are using a song structure  that involves rhyming, you've just set yourself up for a doozy of a task.  True, there are options, such as "occupancy" or "frequency" or maybe even "narcolepsy," but really, it's a tight corner to get out of.  Thankfully, I avoided that hazard as I installed "pharmacy" in the odd line that wasn't rhyming.  But still, it doesn't exactly roll of the tongue when one is singing.  Also (and here's where the true inside information comes in) it is likely to produce an overwhelming urge to want to sing an alliterative "fucking" right in front of "pharmacy."  This is especially likely to occur once you have realized that you've committed this cardinal sin and are nevertheless trying to salvage the song.  As you might guess, this in turn makes it tough for the band to get through the song or to ever really hear it without a phantom "fucking" running through everyone's heads.  So, just remember, when you hit that point where you are tempted to write a song and you hear the siren call of "pharmacy" pulling you towards the rocky shore, just plug your ears and row hard the other way.  You'll be glad you did.

2.  It's incredibly easy to write a rock song.  Again, those on the outside might think that songwriting is difficult and only for those who can channel some spirit world of lyrical advisers who will spin out yarns of mystical intrigue, obscure literary references, elaborate metaphors and maybe even some of those things mixed together in a rhyme scheme (all while avoiding, of course, the previously referenced temptation to interject "pharmacy").  Or maybe you think songwriting is reserved for people from Liverpool who can incorporate "ob-la-di, ob-la-da" into a kick-ass song without anyone really noticing. (Not to mention such topics as meter maids, savoy truffles, vengeful raccoons and walruses whose identity is at issue.)  But that is so not true.  As has been demonstrated in a previous post in this very blog, bad songwriting is incredibly easy.  Van Halen did it with "Jump" and "Panama."  Starship (previously Jefferson Starship, previously Jefferson Airplane -- clearly they were so distracted by naming their band they didn't leave enough time for lyrics) did it with "We Built this City," and Aerosmith most definitely knocked it out in under five minutes with "Dude Looks Like a Lady."  And that's before I've even plumbed the depths of bands whose entire catalog seems to have taken advantage of this trade secret.  Bands like ABBA, Hall and Oates, and Foreigner.  So, you see, you too should feel free to give it your best shot.  Don't give up.  Keep on fighting.  Don't stop believin'.  You can make it if you try.  Might as well jump.  Go ahead, jump.

3.  If you close your eyes when you sing, watch out for the mic.   Gaga warned me about this last summer during her stop-over in the Twin Cities, but I just didn't listen.  It's not the kind of hazard you would think about because so many in rock make it seem so effortless, but the dark reality is that if you close your eyes when you sing and move at all, it's quite possible that you will find your teeth hitting the microphone, and, well, it just doesn't make for a great sound or really polish your rock 'n' roll image when that happens.   All the intensity and focus pretty much evaporates instantly when you taste the metal and get that weird sensation in your teeth.  I really don't recommend it.  (I'm pretty sure there is a divot in one of Jim's mic's from this very phenomenon, but let's just keep that between us.  I'm not sure how much of that he saw at the time.)

 Now, a few tips for the Jimmy Page wanna-bes in the audience.

1.  There are things designed to keep your guitar strap from coming off at inopportune moments.  You should get them. 

2.  Keep your guitar pick where you can find it.  Even if you are not the lead guitar player in your band -- in fact, even if you don't actually really know how to play the guitar at all, except for one section in one song where your band mates have taught you a pattern you can play using only the 5th and 6th strings -- you should keep your pick someplace accessible.  In the world of rock 'n' roll, the back pocket of your jeans is not as accessible as you might think.  While it is a perfectly good place for wallets, cell phones, condoms and gum, it's not nearly as accessible as you assumed it would be when you have four counts to find your pick and start playing.  I've heard they make devices that attach to the microphone designed just to meet this need for accessibility.  I recommend looking into those.  You're welcome.

3.  Size matters.  I'm not talking about the guitar or any physical attributes of the guitar player.  I'm talking about the cord.  The one that you will plug into your guitar on one end and, with any luck, an amplifier on the other end if your intention is for people to hear your instrument.  While the length of the cord, as far as I can tell, has no impact on the sound produced, it has everything to do with street cred.  See, if you show-up with a 7ft cord, you're pretty much telling the world that you don't really rock hard or even at all, because if you did you would need a much longer cord to accommodate your floor slides, lean-outs to the crowd at the far ends of the stage and your show-stopping stage dives.  If you're lucky like me, though, your band mates will point this out for you during practice before it could ever possibly matter.

Given the risks I'm taking by disclosing all of this inside information, I think I'm going to stop there for now.  But if you demonstrate that my trust in you was well founded, as I know you will, I might be willing to share some more tips with you down the road.  Because despite my rock 'n' roll identity, deep down inside,  I'm really just like you, stickin' it to the Man whenever I can, even though, in this case, that Man is the anti-establishment rock establishment, you know?  Right on.