30 May 2010

Survivors and then some.

My dad always wanted to be a musician. My mom, while having sung in the "glee club" back in high school, couldn't have cared one way or the other. No no no, this will not be that long-ass post about how I became who I am, but I should mention that those of my friends who are close enough to know that music is the air that I breathe and have met my family are often confused as to how I came upon such a way of life. My wife is principal amongst them. Recently, however, she was able to make a little more sense of how I came to be the music junkie I am.

In an effort to spring a birthday surprise on me (which is beautifully becoming more of an outlier than an actual surprise), my dad traveled in excess of 1000 miles in order to just "turn up" at my birthday extravaganza last month. He is one of my most ardent supporters and one of my favourite faces to see in the crowd because despite any longtime hatchets or old wounds still healing, he, more than any other adult in my life during my formative years, made me a musician. He laid the foundation with Harry Chapin eight tracks in his seemingly endless parade of used cars and built the first few stories by surrounding himself (and as a result, yours truly) with musicians and creative free spirits of many an ilk. The two characters who helped most in lending a little more tangible weight to my father's quest to make me a musician were Lee (whom we called Spider) and Bob (whom we called Dr. Bob). These guys were guitar players, singers, entertainers, and improvisers of the first degree. I will never forget the night that I, probably around 10 years old, was allowed to stay up well past my bedtime on my father's second-hand couch nestled into his armpit as a roomful of bikers and/or recovering addicts improvised verses to an equally improvised folk sing-along whose simple refrain was "disfunctionality". I can still hear it in my head. It lives in my mind as a moment rife with the musical ideals I strive for in my classroom and in my home. The organizers/star performers of the evening were the aforementioned Bob and Lee. It was around that time that Lee gave me my first two (and only for 20 years) guitar lessons, only to sort of drift out of my consciousness and conversations when my old man moved down to Florida a year or so later. Bob, however, seemed sorta omnipresent. He had moved down south as well - abiding (and I use that in both the "living" sense and the "Dude-referencing" sense) in Jacksonville to my dad's Gulf Coast. He still seemed to come up in conversations from time to time. A few years back when sneaking down for a weekend to be the last mate to Captain Dad on a fishing tournament/client courting weekend, Bob was first mate and the most pleasant surprise of the excursion. At some point over the course of that short jaunt down memory lane he told me that he had a bunch of old songs he had written but had never been played in public and, based on what my dad had told him about what I was up to at the time, he would love for me to do something with them. I think I asked him to email me some mp3's, but, for whatever reason, that conversation was the last I heard of those songs - until last month.

It was strangely not surprising to see Dr. Bob standing there next to my dad in the divey bar I choose to celebrate my birthday in each year. And whatever surprise may have been present was of the most pleasant variety. All talk of their response to the show aside, we all agreed to have lunch the next day - but a stop up to our apartment would be in order first. I am not sure at which point he was talked into it, but my Dad asked Bob to play me "The Biker Song" (possibly to finish up the conversation we began on the back of that boat a few years back), I handed him my guitar, and he obliged. I was slick enough to record it on my iPhone as to preserve what I somehow knew was going to be a special event, but all the technology in the world couldn't have captured the raw emotion in the room. For the next four minutes or so, we all sat spellbound: My wife taking in the sheer beauty of the event, my dad reliving the memories about which Bob sang, and me flashing back to the late night on my dad's shabby couch over 20 years ago. When he finished the song, we all caught our collective breath, wiped the damp from the corners of our eyes, and my wife simply said, "I finally get it. I never understood how you wound up a musician, but I finally get it". We all just sorta chuckled a knowing laugh and went out to enjoy the weather before getting lunch at the diner.

While I am sure groups of friends and gatherings of folks have heard Bob's songs before, he swears they have never been performed in "public" before. Without getting into which of those "publics" is more important (see my friend Matt's comments on my post from a few days ago), I told Bob that I would do my best to honor his years of hard work and bring his songs to the stage. Here's a video of my first effort:


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