Autobiography - Part One

The first question from the list in yesterday's post reads simply enough, but providing a due answer is a daunting task. After all, I am chiseling away at my 30th year of life, which means I have spun around the sun 29 times and made 10,600 revolutions around earth's axis. A whopping 254,400 hours (or 15,264,000 minutes, or 915,840,000 seconds) worth of history have shaped my life in one way or another.

To reiterate briefly, I posted seven questions on the blog that I have committed to answer over the span of this week. They are the types of queries that require some pondering, some digging to supply an adequate answer. My hope is that in exploring the facts of my autobiography, an artistic approach may come into focus for the final recording of the Redline Project.

Question number one:
Where did I come from?

Let's commence with the DNA. Born in 1981 at a hospital known as Women and Infants (clever and creative, don't you think?), I am the second living child of two native Rhode Islanders. I have an older sister, a younger sister, and a deceased older brother who passed away before I was born.

Dad is a pediatrician, and he has witnessed the entire array of child ailments. I believe that is why he was protective of me. I was a macro-good-kid and a micro-rebel. I was never a stellar student, but I knew how to squeak by. My life was a charmed one: always enough food, warmth in the winter, loving parents (who remain married to this day), and all the Super Nintendo my thumbs could handle.

I had little concept, if any, of poverty or struggle. Dad has always prided himself in his ability to provide for his family, and he lavishly accomplished the mission. I have to hand it to him, he is an excellent dad. Many doctors and other high-powered professionals force their paths of success onto their children. In the score of years I spent under his roof, I never felt such pressure, not even for a moment.

In fact, both Mom and Dad looked for the natural interests in my sisters and me, funding them to a generous degree.

When I was four years of age, my older sister began taking lessons on the Fisher baby grand in the living room. It was easy for my parents to recognize my interest in the curious weekly happening, and they took the small risk of signing me up.

That black satin Fisher was a rickety box with stringy, tinny sound and difficult, loose action. But it was at the very instrument, perched atop the rotating honey walnut stool, that I spent endless hours experimenting with sound, exploring notes, stacking harmonies, stringing up melodies two fingers at a time.

I was only a few years old, but I could remember songs and pick out faint remembrances of them on that old Fisher. I was a child of the eighties, a time in Christian music when churches started to abandon time-honored musical traditions for lighter, folksy melodies. They may not have beenthe most profound of music ever released, but these choruses shaped my earliest musical experiences.

My parents dragged me to Barrington Baptist Church, kicking and screaming on the inside, dressed and pressed on the out, each week. They were devout, which is interesting to note because they were both born into Jewish households and married in the Temple. There is a story behind that sentence, and it is a doozy. But it is theirs to tell and not mine, so I will venture on.

It was one of those classic New England churches: tall, stately steeple on the outside, a stale mix of apple juice, mothballs, and old lady perfume on the inside. The church community was not quite dead, but not quite alive. Piles of animated discussions over the trivial dwarfed any real talk of spiritual growth, unity, or service.

We were a worship-wars church. Have you ever heard of this? Its an illness of far too many bodies of faith where two camps form between the 'staunch' traditionalists and the 'radical' whippersnappers. The opposing forces usually find their troops along the lines of age, with the 'elderly fuddyduddys clinging to their blessed organ accompaniment' and the 'immature charismatics raising hell with their drums and their guitars and their satanic rock lookalike music.'

Wish I were kidding. Churches split over this stuff. Tragic.

I was generally unaffected by all of this. I liked it all. As mentioned in a list of musical heroes a few weeks ago, I loved our veteran organist, Anna Lisa Madeira. She may not have been the hippest cat on the market, but she understood the forwards and the backwards of music. She knew how to take down the house on those fourth verses, reharmonizing the snoozy circle of fifths into angular canticles with all the stops pulled.

And I loved those little, yellow paperbacks published by Maranatha! (That's not my exclamation mark; I usually try to stay away. The company's name actually is 'Maranatha!' - nice and tacky, just like the decade of their heydey.) On the Sundays when the whippersnappers ruled the school, we would sing newfangled tunes like 'More Precious Than Silver,' and 'I Will Celebrate.'

I was even a rotating member of the little worship group called 'Potter's Clay.' (Why does Christian culture lend itself to such blatent cheese?) I delighted in this. The lady leading the revolution had big emotions, and decades of chain smoking yielded soulful tenor pipes that encouraged her cause. Strapped to her Martin dreadnaught, she would really get into the heat of the moment right around the second selection (always of three). Nodding her head 'no' ever so gently, she would lean back, eyes shut, lips barely moving. Wincing slightly, she always managed to hit the high 'E' of 'Mary, Did You Know.'

I made it my task to take this weekly buffet of music and tuck it away somewhere in memory. After I had been excused from Chicken Casserole or some other tempting long-cooked dish, I would hammer out that week's collection on the baby grand. It was the natural thing for me to do, as if speaking a native language. Apparently, those around me thought it left of average.

So my dad bought me a trumpet. Why? Because he wanted to play the trumpet, and yes, he picked up one for himself too. He even bought us a little book of duets so we could entertain house guests with charming numbers like 'Ode to Joy' and 'Danny Boy.'

Lessons with the wrinkled man from Pawtucket lasted a grand total of two weeks. Spittle flew from his lips when he talked, and the music room he converted from a garage smelled like decades of poker games.

Next we gave Miss Blumstein a try. A puffy float of a woman with nine himalayan cats, Miss Blumstein had some trouble fitting through doorways and in social situations. I suppose she was a fine enough teacher, but I was too busy thinking shallow, judgmental thoughts about her to notice. I especially liked when she wore her mirror-finish Ray-Bans. Smokin.

By this time, I had matriculated to middle school and moved with my family from the city of Providence to the bayide suburb of Barrington. This exclusive town was filled to the brim with Volvo-driving, Polo-wearing Joneses who all tried to one-up each other with their clunky car phones and swanky country club memberships.

I attended primary school in a supposedly rough neighborhood of Providence. Living up to its fitting name of Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary, this urban institution was well-integrated, in both the population of the pupils and the diversity of the faculty.

Miss Bailey, an African-American woman of about sixty, taught general music to everyone in the school, and she also ran an elective chorus program. I enjoyed both tremendously. A wispy, stern woman, Miss Bailey knew how to sing. I had no appreciation then, but now realize how rich of a musical experience we elementary students were given. She was trained in the European classical tradition, and she had a mile-wide soul that was in love with field songs, spirituals, and the blues. She taught all of the above with a passion so strong that I still remember her voice, her manner, her enthusiasm.

Barrington was a different animal, with its floppy-haired, creamy-skinned pretty youth all enamored with Vuarnet France t-shirts and Levi Strauss jeans. I was a curly-headed shrimp with Jewish double-helixes wearing the black Lees and flourescent Bugle Boys my mother acquired at the Vanity Fair outlet. Middle school was rough.

There was, however, a fantastic upside to the move. I managed to make friends with the two boys living next door to our new house. They were a classic, wealthy family. The dad worked far too many hours at an office as much about status as it was earning a buck (or several). The mom, a sweet lady completely bored with life, didn't know how to tell her children, 'no' and would lavish them with boats, and airguns, and video games, and puppies, and a drum set.

This was pivotal, a huge moment of my life. When that maroon 1975 kit of Ludwig drums appeared in the basement next door, I knew I had found something of great importance, something for which I did not know to look. All glistening and sparkly, adorned with a complete set of Paiste cymbals; it was nothing short of love at first sight.

My friendship with the neighbors increased dramatically from that day forward as I sought every opportunity to run over and bang out a few rhythms. I started to scour the classified ads for deals on used drum sets, and I began requesting trips to the local music stores.

Had my mother been one to express what she was actually feeling, she would have said, "Hell no." But she is a beautiful human being of decency and candor who shudders at words like butt, fart, and crud.

"No dear, I do not want a drum set in my house. I'm sorry." More or less verbatim.

A character trait that has always been mine: It is impossible to motivate me artificially, but when I do become inspired to work toward something, I will not stop until it is accomplished.

Unbeknownst to anyone in my family, I began to play percussion in the school band. Off I would go to the bus stop, trumpet in hand, only to stuff the brown, faux-leather case in my locker until it was time to return home. You can imagine the surprise my parents must have experienced when my band teacher called to explain the ruse. I would later learn that my teacher encouraged them to let me pursue my love of percussion, commenting on the rhythmic talent I must have been displaying.

Though I didn't understand what made the winds shift, I was elated the tides had turned. I scrounged together $150 worth of allowance and odd jobs over the course of the next several months to purchase the most horrendous set of drums ever manufactured. The heads were wrinkled, the rims were dented, and the cymbals were little more than anodized paper plates. It was my most cherished possession, and I gleefully banged away for hours at a time. Life as I knew it would never be the same.

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A stiff neck and two antsy legs are all screaming at me to call it quits for the night. Look for the continuation of the story in tomorrow's post.

In other Redline Project news, there is a half-baked recording of a new song that is showing some promise. I have a good feeling that it may end up on the final product, should it fit with the album concept. This one, like the other finished tracks to come, will stay under wraps until the official release date of this project. You'll just have to wait.