The Garden King (Part I)

I didn't have the most traditional college experience. Sure, I gained weight, grew facial hair, and tooled around in my parents' absence, but I wasn't into drinking, drugging, being overly promiscuous, or staying up all night to participate in any of the preceding vices. That all being said, I did go to college in a "college town" (Princeton), so I got to mingle, for better or worse, with local merchants, students from other colleges nearby, and, most important to this story, "townies". For those of you who went to college in a big city or didn't go to college at all, a "townie" is, quite simply, a resident of a college town whose day to day existence has nothing to do with the university or college with which that town is associated. In light of its usual negative connotation, townies have been portrayed as stoners, dullards, or curmudgeonly types in most movies and television shows in which they have appeared, but those who I chose to spend my time with were nothing of the sort. (as a matter of fact, the aforementioned connotation makes me feel bad for even using the term, but other words like "locals" or "natives" just don't have the same pizazz) It might have been because Princeton was a fairly well-off, artistically-minded, and liberal town, but all of the locals I befriended were incredibly kind and interesting. I guess that's why, to my wife's continual confusion, I knew so many and actually maintained active friendships with those who were often considered personas non grata to the other students at the surrounding colleges.

My ability to meet my townie friends was, in no small part, thanks to my friend CJ. Performative, charming, and gregarious - nay - socially fearless, he allowed me to essentially be his sidekick and eventually "partner in crime" on our adventures "into town" at the dawn of our college experience. With the Princeton Coffee House, probably the least hip coffee house in town in retrospect, as our homebase, we would essentially hold court for fellow Westminster students on their way into town or back to campus, all the while improvising the rules to backgammon and flirting with Donna behind the counter. We used an evening hang there as an informal and unwritten social litmus test for anyone who wished to become part of our little crew. These having been the days before cell phones were widely owned, it was tough to keep tabs on people or make last-minute plans, but if you wanted to find or make plans with me or CJ, you could simply head to the Princeton Coffee House and we'd start from there. This was the place I learned to enjoy coffee (starting off with kiwi lattes - I KNOW!), would come to wash dishes for free as a way to clear my head, and, due to its somewhat odd location and the number of other more popular cafes in Princeton, our own little hangout. It's where we met, and befriended a large number townies. I count the evenings spent there among my most dear college-era memories.

We often stayed until Steve, the owner, closed up shop - a signal that it was either bedtime or, depending on the amount of caffeine we'd imbibed, a starting point for any number of real or imaginary collegiate adventures. On one evening in particular, we met and befriended a townie named Nam. I had (and still have) the strong sense that we knew him prior to the evening in question, but as that's the first specific memory I have of Nam, and since I am telling the stories here, we'll just go ahead and say that's when we met. We had obviously become acquainted shortly before closing as I vaguely remember still doing introductions as we ambled out of the shop as Steve locked the door and settled on the floor right outside. One (or more) of us had a guitar and we immediately started swapping songs as it was apparent that everyone in our crew was a musician. Lucas (who was along for the evening), CJ, and I were already generally familiar with songs that one of us had written and/or were comfortable playing in public and it appeared that Nam, his friend Steve (not the same Steve who owned the coffee shop, but this guy did play a mean guitar and sitar and worked at the record exchange. Whereas Nam had shorter hair and a seemed to be, at root, of a very "suburban" type, Steve reeked of the stereotypical "townie"), and another friend or two of theirs seemed to have something of a collective songboook as well. To this day, I always come off foolish in these situations as I never feel as though my serious songs are up to snuff with the stuff others present (the continual manifestation of this complex has recently led me to believe that my songs are, indeed, not as good as I think they are) and, thus, resort to the comical. I played "The Squirrel Song" (a spoof lament for a dead decapitated squirrel I had written with my then band, The Gravity) and some other silly little tunes in an effort to keep my ego and newly forming reputation afloat, but the death knell continued to toll with each song my new friend Nam played. Fingerpicking with a precision and rhythmic fluidity I still can only aspire to, he rolled off whimiscal songs in a beautiful baritone about the posters on his wall and a "slow motion" girl. While only a few minutes prior, these new friends seemed to be roughly our age, perhaps a year older, as their collective and intimate knowledge and ties to a town which were only then becoming a part of emerged and, more importantly, as Nam unfurled his brilliant songbook, I suddenly felt childish - not young - but juvenile in my understanding of community, musical narrative, and lack of earnesty. While the floor we sat on was grey cement, the walls and ceiling were made of 12" brown matte ceramic tile. Coupled with the odd design of the building (a multi-business, split-level-like affair wherein it was all open and mall-like - as in you would enter the confines of the physical structure but still be in the open air, and would need to either go up a few steps or downstairs - still outside - to enter individual businesses like our coffee house upstairs or the 24 hr. Kinko's downstairs), these tiles made for a particularly pleasant reverb. His beautiful and simple performances and inherit warmth of his songs rang out in a way that made them seem simultaneously intimate and gigantic in that space. After stumbling upon the one song we all knew well enough to sing along to (The Beach Boys' "Vegetables"), I retreated - not only returning to campus, but also sticking my guitar in a case and not touching it for a few days.

Despite my laying low in fear of bumping into my new idol-cum-nemesis, one of the songs that Nam had played that night stuck with me for weeks. It was a cute number (though faaar more clever than any of my "cute" tunes) sang from the perspective of a "Super Villain" to a girl he's holding captive. "...And you and I will rule the world, a Super Villain and his girl", went the chorus. While not very harmonically or melodically inventive in retrospect, the almost vaudevillian chord progression and melody coupled with the lilting rhythm was incredibly appealing to me. Having only begun to break out of the pop/rock formula I was compositionally tied to, the song seemed like something of a breakthrough. I almost resented its freedom. I honestly thought that my going to fancy-schmancy conservatory and studying Mozart and the boys would somehow (be it through intense scholarship or osmosis) inject a new level of quality into my budding catalogue of songs, yet here was some townie! (with none of the musical pedigree I had recently bestowed upon myself and seemingly little of the training to which I was beginning) who could write me under the table. I was simultaneously presumptuously furious with my own inflated sense of ego and lack of songwriting chops and curious as to how I could write on that level. I had to go to the source.

So rather than avoid town all together, I decided I was better off just befriending the guy. He was sweet as hell and didn't intend to make me feel "small". After all, I was in college and I wanted "experience life" or something. Reading back over those sentences, it sounds as though I aspired to some sort of usury. That really wasn't the case, but I truly did put this cat on a pedestal and always did hope that he I could glean some info on his creative process. So over the next several months I spent time with Nam in dribs and drabs, often playing music or talking about music and art and whathaveyou. I found him to be infinitely interesting and incredibly curious and sincere. He always wanted explanations and he always seemed to want you to go deeper. In turn, he was always incredibly philosophical in his own ideas and explanations of them. His speech was always slow and measured (not to be confused with sounding rehearsed) and his aforementioned silky baritone made each statement he made seem some how important or "true" in a larger sense. His curiosity was also astounding. If I or one of my choir college chronies made some reference to a composer or piece of music that he knew nothing about, Nam, still quiet and contemplative, wanted to know everything we could tell him about the subject. I found his aura of absolute wisdom/authority and his lack of shame about his childlike enthusiasm to understand all the things he didn't know created a larger picture of coolness. There were even times that I thought one of the two sides of this juxtaposition was some sort of put-on, but his intense sincerity continually reminded me that this was the real Nam I was dealing with. I honestly cherished every moment we shared.

Here's the interesting thing: I never made plans with Nam in all the years that I hung around with him. I never knew his address, or his phone number, or his email address. We always just sorta found one another. Now: this has nothing to do with fate or anything "bigger" - or does it?! ; ) - it actually speaks more the community of young, non-Princeton University students who bummed around downtown Princeton in those days. I don't want to paint it as though it was like Haight-Ashbury in 1967, but there were plenty of late high school/early college aged kids who wandered aimlessly and harmlessly around town in their thrift shop clothes with books of poetry in their hand or guitars on their backs. Nam and I were both cut of that cloth, so we often bumped into each other (usually me with CJ and him with a friend or two as well), and would spend the rest of the day "experiencing life" together. Some days we would head back to my campus and play around on pianos and organs in the basement practice rooms. Some days we would just sit in the coffee house and chat. I vaguely remember some more adventurous trips into the the $1 bins at the Princeton Record Exchange or out to "the battlefield", an old, uh... battlefield-cum-park where people would laze about, drink wine, and play music... or frisbee.
At some point it stopped being about my idolizing and wanting to learn from the guy, but the days I ran into him and got to spend time with him still exist in my most exciting (the kind of exciting only freshmen in college can understand) and exquisite watercolor meories that tell me it was always spring when I hung around with Nam.

At some later point during my freshman year, Nam recorded a four-song demo and either sold or gave me a cassette copy. While it was long ago swallowed by the sarlac bit that was my best friend Luke's then-girlfriend Wendy's dorm room (she loved this tape almost as much as I did), I remember the black and white, grainy, photocopied insert/cover featuring my friend Nam (using the pseudonym William Ether) holding a mirror up to a mirror so that the cover image itself was blasted into infinity. It might have been the folky leanings of the songs or the added "record player" effect on my aforementioned fave, "Super Villain", but it surely sounded not only old, but instantly timeless. While I knew people that had recorded stuff in studios and given me copies before, this was not only the most professional looking and sounding independent music project I'd yet come into close contact with, but this was certainly the most artistically sturdy. To be quite honest, I don't remember all four tracks on the tape, but I know that in addition to "Super Villain", it also closed with (I think it was last) an absolutely haunting track that I had not heard Nam play before. Beginning with an ostinato almost baroque in its conception and ending with a sound collage made up of a rain storm and electronic effects, "The Garden King" was a revelation to me. "Come out creatures of the night. The Garden King is in the clearing...", is an opening lyric that I count among my all-time faves.

These two songs alone were enough to change my life and direction as a musician. Not only had they been produced independent of pie-in-the-sky dreams like record companies and whatnot, but they had been done so without so much as an ounce lost in artistic weight and quality. The very fact that I had a physical artifact representing Nam's artistic vision - one that I could pour over and suck dry of musical marrow - was priceless to me. Suddenly, Nam, like the Beatles, Weezer, and Elvis Costello before him was emulable.

To be continued... stay tuned for "The Garden King (Part 2)"!

(I intended to include an mp3 to accompany this blog, but I gotta get me some hosting and then I can start doing so. In the meantime, you can check out some of Nam's stuff here.)