1996

High School!  Left behind the innocent junior high days to enter the real world - one of cruelty and social climbing, one I still won't enter to this day.  I liked the football team, I liked playing nintendo with my friends.  We played a lot of paintball.  Mike Amling turned 16 and got a car.

We drove around repeatedly listening to Easy-E's "187 Killa," repeatedly.  Throwing fountain pop "big buddys" out the window at other cars and looking for girls.  This was back before 9/11 when American teenagers just drove around town all weekend because it was what everyone else was doing.  I was doing well in school and working at the pool.  I was trying to read in verbatim this huge Armed Services edition history of World War II book.  I thought maybe I should join the air force after high school.  But I was obsessed with poetry and romanticism.



Mr. K our English teacher took us through a "Romeo and Juliet" unit and he was recently graduated from the University of Northern Iowa so he listened to Pearl Jam and would write the lyrics down on the chalkboard and discuss the significance.  My first girlfriend broke up with me for a "more normal" guy and I became very emotional about love and love poetry.  I would be distracted during lectures and write the lyrics of the songs in the margin of the notebook as the music was just blasting in my head and my soul all day long.  I made Mr. K and some of the other  students well-up when I read this poem I wrote that he assigned me and I played Pearl Jam's "I Got ID" in the background.  I found that song in a mixtape I stole from my brother that had Phish and Toad the Wet Sprocket and Cracker and the Toadies on...  Turns out one of my best friends Chris Welzien's older brother Bryan made the tape.  Oh yeah it had Oasis on it too now that I think of Welzien.

Chris and I spent a lot of time together working at the pool or on the swim team or reading "Combat and Survival" volumes the crazy Boy Scout neighbors would lend us.  We would shout "Oasis Rules" as we jumped off the starting blocks in our swimming relays.  We'd drive around Cedar Falls and Waterloo recking stuff and yelling at people.  One of my favorites was driving by the car dealership and yelling, "don't buy it!  it's a piece of shit!"  I heard somewhere that people thought we were a gang or something.  I guess we were lucky the Crips and Bloods didn't find us then.

I was a good high school football player and that's about it.  I went out with girls I didn't even like and it seemed like the ones I really wanted were always out of reach and to be within reach of them I would need to turn into the ass-kissing social climber I never could turn myself into.  That always confused those girls and my parents too.  They must have always thought - you're smart and athletic from a rich family - just be normal and cruel and you could be the king of this high school!  I didn't want anything remotely like that, ever.  These were mostly wasted years to me until one fateful day.



Sailor Craig was a young, idealistic, and too astute of a math teacher to be working with us disrespectful pricks when I met him.  Seriously, he should have been teaching at the college level, but must have smoked too much pot or listened to too much Jane's Addiction because there he was my sophomore year trying to teach us Algebra 2.

But being the old hippie he was, one day he got out his acoustic guitar and boombox and had a "love-in" day where he played Jane's Addiction and Ben Folds songs and discussed the lyrics as well as played some songs we'd recognize on his acoustic guitar.  He explained how plucking the string creates a sound-wave like the sin-waves or co-sin-waves we were graphing and studying.

He started playing Green Day's "Good Riddance" and I couldn't help but to just start spontaneously start singing and all the students mouths in the room dropped, even the cute girls who were a year older than me and thought I was some sad loser.  I was blessed with a good, strong voice from my mother who loves to sing and would sing in church with all her family.  I also was always good with doing impressions of people and making my voice sound like their's, so I probably sounded just like Billy Joe Armstrong to everyone.  I know if the punk purists could read this, they would hate me forever for starting with "Green Day," but it was right then and there I resolved to be a rocker forever.

My folks having come from the fun of the late 60s and 70s had two old guitars sitting in the basement storage closet and I started trying to play them.  Dad's was a nice old Alvarez 12-string with flood damage from Illinois or something and mom's was a cheap Spanish classical that I was given the clear to play with.  Dad's 12 string was one of those "respected" family heirloom objects.

Josh Lizer who came to our class when Mike Amling did was the best guitarist in our high school.  All of his family studied music assiduously and Josh was so good he taught guitar lessons on the side mostly to elementary school children at $5 a pop.  So either the summer of '98 or '99 I would go to Josh's house every Wednesday for a half-hour lesson and he would show me how to make my fingers stronger and how to press down with the tips and tremolo picking and what each note was in standard tuning - you know more than anything he just showed me how to hold the thing and I love him for that and I'll always be able to see his family's farm in the sweet summertime.

 More-so the internet taught me how to play guitar through tab files and "OLGA" and chord files. And to this day I got some wheres around 300 songs just sitting in the back of my mind ready to play, not knowing a damn thing about keys or notes or scales.  And it's strange now I realize that I know all the keys without knowing them - I can write songs and know what chords go with what just from all the songs I learned.  It's weird when I play for hours now down on the street the chords and keys themselves lead to other songs in their similarities and give you the notion to play the next song in an endless stream.

So yeah. things are going musical as went my life.  I coulda been some air force pilot with my grades and athletics, but I really shoulda quit everything right away and just played music.  But because of my own indecisiveness and vanity I trudged into college to pursue something and wasted a bunch of my parent's money that I apologize to them for.  I did learn.  I did pass.  But that's another story.  In the words of Matisyahu "I just kept hearing that melody."  But that's another story, a strange story.  A mystical story and I'm gonna need a break before I can write it down.


You see, this really isn't that crazy of a life, with all the right decisions... I'd like to say I listened to all the right bands from the start, but I didn't. I was a sad, lost spoiled little teenager and I'd rather tell you that exactly how it was, the ugly way. I wish I could say I was into Elmore James and Willie Nelson from the start, but I probably just made fun of them in a joke to Jay or Chris like when high schoolers make fun of me on the corner playin' the blues these days. I was just a sad, spoiled teenager.