Who Am I, Uninterrupted
A brief history and existential musings
The question
Who am I, uninterrupted? This is the question that has been loudest in my mind since stumbling across it on Instagram via Felecia Hatcher a couple of weeks ago. Who could I have been without all of the obstacles that forced a change in my path? Who could I become if I get out of my own way and step boldly forward?
In the beginning
Music hit me hard in the second grade. My teacher, Mrs. Ball, played guitar and sang folk songs and taught us all the words to One Tin Soldier from the movie Billy Jack. I loved the sound of the guitar and the feeling of singing and experiencing music in my body.
I began playing music seriously at age 11, spending 3 years as first violin in the school orchestra. There were 3 first violin chairs, and they were always filled by me, Pam and Jimmy in varying order depending on the latest round of recitals. Jimmy and I were certain we were going to be concert violinists when we grew up, and wagered on who would be the first to own a Lamborghini - as you do when the world holds nothing but limitless possibility. But I was soon to hit my first obstacle.
My parents were divorced when I was pretty young, and my sister and I lived with my mother, who had remarried and had another child by the time I was 8. Life at home had become almost unbearable by the age of 12, and at 13 I finally escaped to live with my father. But my new school didn’t have an orchestra, so my days as a violinist were done.
I began playing keyboards at 14 under the guidance of my uncle, who was also a musician. My uncle introduced me to little bits of R&B and funk, but most importantly he introduced me to improvisation. I talked my dad into buying me a Korg Poly 800, and after my uncle went to prison, I was charged with caring for all of his gear while he was away. I spent all of my afternoons locked away in my room playing with synthesizers and drum machines, and figuring out how to sequence tracks on my Commodore computer. I was sure music was going to be my life.
Something to fall back on
I did pretty well in high school and was chosen to be a Governor’s Scholar, which resulted in a scholarship to Eastern Kentucky University. I was seriously burned out my senior year of high school and barely passed, but managed to graduate due to the grace of my teachers. I wasn’t ready for college and wanted to take a year off, but my dad wasn’t having it. He believed that if I took a year off, I would never go back to school. He may have been right, because the reason I finally ended up going was because I didn’t want to be away from my friends who were going.
It was my plan to be a music major, but my dad was pretty adamant that music wasn’t a viable career path and that I needed “something to fall back on”. Ultimately, I caved and chose computer science, signing up for calculus and a bunch of other classes that had nothing to do with music.
I tried out for my first rock band a few weeks after starting college, having met the singer at a mixer and mentioning I played keyboards. I spent my tryout realizing I knew absolutely nothing about playing keyboards in a rock band, while simultaneously being completely enthralled with what the guitarists were doing. I knew at that moment that guitar was my future, and within a couple of days I had bought my roommate’s SG and was teaching myself AC/DC tunes.
I was still burned out from high school, and it quickly proved pretty impossible to drag myself to boring early morning classes after late night drinking or D&D games. I did switch my major to music after a few months, but having to re-take all the classes I hadn’t completed my first semester meant I still had no music classes, and I ultimately just lost interest, and my scholarship.
Plan B
With the looming prospects of employment ranging from truck driver to factory worker, I decided to pay a visit to the Army recruiter. Shortly after my 19th birthday, I headed to Fort Benning for basic training. I ended up in Germany with a mechanized infantry unit, and that’s where I spent the duration of my enlistment (minus 4 months in Kuwait and Iraq during the first Gulf War).
I bought a guitar and a cheap Marshall practice amp and started jamming with a drummer friend at the base recreation center. One day, a band that had the room booked after us heard my playing and asked if I wanted to hang out and jam with them. An hour later I was officially in my first band. We played covers of songs from bands like KISS, AC/DC, and early Judas Priest, and did our first official gig on base to a couple dozen GIs and their girlfriends.
Once our singer’s time in Germany was up, we went through a slight change of members and moved into heavier fare ranging from punk to thrash, playing gigs at local German clubs to audiences of a couple hundred people. Finally, I was a bonafide rock star, jamming the South of Heaven riff on my black and gold Les Paul Studio through a Marshall JCM800 half-stack, center-stage under blue lights and fog, while the wireless-equipped second guitarist danced on pool tables and our muscle-bound bass player spewed flaming whiskey onto the dance floor.
All good things
Of course, my band of army buddies inevitably got pulled apart, and I soon found myself back home in small town Kentucky. I taught guitar in a local music shop for a while, but ultimately couldn’t stand living with my stepmother. I sold the gear I had and boarded a greyhound bus headed to Seattle with just an acoustic guitar and a duffle bag of clothes.
I had started writing songs after leaving the army, and now living in a bedroom of a buddy’s condo and working part time at a Circle K, I was pretty focused on becoming a singer/songwriter. I took a couple of voice classes at a community college and eventually started 1 on 1 sessions with a prominent vocal coach. Soon I was playing small gigs at local shops and coffee shops, and even found my way onto the side stage at a local festival.
I was recently married to my second wife, who had a good job and was supportive of my music, allowing me to focus full time on making music. I was gigging at least weekly and writing a lot. Unfortunately, another obstacle would soon completely change my course.
Grow up and get a job
My first marriage was a roller coaster mess that didn’t end quickly enough, but did result in my first child, who remained with my ex after the divorce. Maybe a year into my new marriage and singer/songwriter career, I received a life-changing call informing me that my child had been removed from the custody of my ex, who was bound for prison with her new husband for the violent abuse of his 2 year old daughter. Within days, I was on a plane back to Kentucky to figure out how to get custody of my child.
My ex’s sister-in-law fought me for custody under the guise of “keeping the children together” resulting in me spending several months staying with my mother awaiting legal proceedings. When I finally got the opportunity to stand in front of a judge, he wanted to know what I did for a living. What followed was one of the most humiliating experiences of my adult life, as the judge loudly echoed my father’s earlier assertion that music wasn’t a viable career path, and that I would need to grow up and get a real job if I expected to get custody of my child.
My current wife (at the time) was also feeling a little less supportive of my musical endeavors given her sudden entrance into unexpected parenthood, so I was forced to begin forging a new career path. I begin teaching myself HTML out of books while I was still at my mom’s house awaiting another hearing. After outlining my new plan of being a web developer to the judge, I was soon on a plane back to Washington with my 7-year old child. Within a few months, I had my first 3-day contract, which turned into 4 months of employment at an ad agency.
That was 24 years ago and I’m on the third decade of my programming career. Although I’ve made an extraordinary amount of music in that time, my profession isn’t musician or artist, and maybe it never will be.
What could have been
So back to the question, it’s easy to wonder what my life might have been if any number of events had played out differently. What if my early childhood had taken place in a safe, loving environment, and I could have continued my orchestra career into high school, college, and beyond? What if my father had been supportive of my passion for music, and I had entered college as a music major? What if I could have stayed in Germany and made it big with my rock band? What if I had been able to continue as a full time guitar teacher? What if I could have continued my professional singer/songwriter career?
Who can I be?
Of course, it’s a pretty depressing exercise to dwell on those questions for too long, and the better framing of the question is, “who can I be, uninterrupted?”. Is it too late for this 52-year-old to make my way into a full-time pursuit of music? Do I really have to wait for retirement, if that’s even possible in this economy? Is a music career even viable anymore, given the state of the music industry? No one buys music anymore, Spotify pays pennies, AI is coming to replace us all, and anti-trans laws make anything resembling touring seem extremely dangerous. Even playing out seems less than safe in this are-we-really-post-Covid era.
There are a number of other realities in play, as well. I really do enjoy my quiet home life with my partner and our four-legged family. The direction my music has taken over the last decade or so puts me in corners of the music realm that are far from commercial. And honestly, I have no desire to perform as entertainment for drunk bar patrons.
I do, however, have a ton of musical ideas to share, and I’m perpetually driven to explore the boundaries of experimental music, especially as it relates to guitar.
So that’s what I’m going to do here.
Looking forward
I’m extremely fed up with the state of social media, and Bandcamp limits the size of my posts. I tried Medium for a while, but I’m just not feeling the community there. I am hopeful that Substack will prove to be a better platform for my ramblings. So you’ve got that to look forward to.
In future public posts, I plan to discuss general artsy musical stuff and dig a little deeper into some of my releases. For paid subscribers, I will probably delve deeper into the theory and technical parts of my experimental music practice, including my own system of harmony and scale naming, my fairly unique guitar tuning, and my approach to producing music on iPads.
I look forward to sharing with you.
