Did I put myself on a path to ruin?
My epiphany. Contemplating life as if for the first time; an addict evaluating his state after the initial moment of sobriety.
It wasn't a bad question in '03. That was the year of electric guitar. Exclusively. Anything else was white noise moving about in the background. Sounds took residence in my skull like they bought real estate, furnishing remote nooks and crevices for which there had been little or no use. This wasn't about drugs, yet like an addiction, the instrument and its music had engulfed me.
The epiphany was during a math exam I was in the middle of flunking. That time was because I couldn't stop thinking about Jimi Hendrix's improvised contributions to the last track of his Electric Ladyland album, "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)."
The path to ruin started with Kazaa, that free downloading software making mp3 accessible as porn. My father told me to download "Sympathy for the Devil." "I think it will grow on you," he said.
I started listening to the first three quarters of "Sympathy For the Devil"--to me, a bongo section underneath a sketchy anecdote about Bombay and troubadours. I had no idea what the hell was going on. But then, cue the fuzz-tone guitar break. Something in the distorted pentatonic scales. I was envious of the fingers making it all possible. I wanted my own to be able to do this. Although hard to pin down exactly what happened to me at that point, sitting in Dad's swivel chair in front of the XP Processor, I was sold. Just like that.
"Sympathy For the Devil" might have been the gateway drug, but Led Zeppelin II was what cleaned my clock. Sludgy blues breaks as demonstrated by Jimmy Page in "The Lemon Song," "Whole Lotta Love"--to name a few--went on to occupy my mind for months. Dad tried to show me some fluffy stuff by Chicago and Bread, but I just wanted that crunchy lead guitar sound.
I'd fallen down a rabbit hole, and the Kazaa downloads kept their coming. Zeppelin. Sabbath. Aerosmith. The music was only half my trouble. I was still able to focus in school at this point. It would be my fourteenth birthday, when I got the Squier Stratocaster, when shit would hit the fan bad.
Let's go to April tenth. I still wouldn't have the Stratocaster for three days, so it's the acoustic Aria that's across my lap while sitting in the Medford School of Music.
"Davey Glad, never sad." That's how he introduced himself to my mother and I. His real name was Dave Gladkowski, co-founder of the band Neversad. Dave Glad had that hairstyle where whatever could still grow was long, and whatever couldn't was bald. He wore torn black jeans and played a black electric guitar with no tuning dials.
Thus commenced the best half hour of education of the week, when I first saw all of the white noise for what it was. It turned out much of this white noise had been free-floating within the confines of the local educational institutions.
In the beginning of Annie Hall, Woody Allen says that those who couldn't even teach gym populated the staff of his grammar school. Little did he realize how accurate such commentary would be in describing Medford Memorial Middle. So many personal issues stuffed inside one public place.
I'd be sitting in Language Arts class, fantasizing about notes and chords, while Mrs. Davis is digressing from prepositional phrases to a lecture about how her students can no longer think for themselves, all apparently due to the misgivings of spoiling, doting parents. I wished Mom and Dad could've spent a day under her instruction, and report back to me with field notes.
Middle school is a nasty medicine all must take, its three years encompassing a rite of passage wherein the young submitted are exposed to the spectrum of personality types, to learn how to tolerate, possibly learn. The quicker learned, the better off you were. Mrs. Davis's antics were pedestrian in the overall denominator that was Memorial Middle School.
My Language Arts teacher was right in one respect--my peers had succumbed to the increasingly powerful control of Hollywood, an entity fueling the need to be cool, to "have the right designer label on the hip pocket," she would say. To maintain such status was to plow through those who weren't like-minded, making most musician types like me a no-brainer. I resented them, and used my new skill to shield myself.