One time, at band practice...

For the past few days, I’ve been listening to Elliott Smith’s posthumous album, From a Basement on the Hill, since I got it for my roommate for Christmas. His voice is very soulful and ephemeral, and along with Billy Corgan’s gives me hope that my own voice isn’t too strange to someday record some decent songs of my own.

I was in fifth or sixth grade when I first discovered rock music, about the time kids first started “going together”. Up until that point, the only music I was really familiar with was the country that my dad played in the truck and the garage, church hymns, and the themes to cartoons, TV shows, and commercials that all kids know by heart. The first rock song that really caught my attention was “Shot Through the Heart” by Bon Jovi, although at the time I thought he was saying “Shock to the Heart”. I taped it off Q102, Cincinnati’s pop rock station and the only station I listened to when I had a choice for many years, and brought a tape player to school to play it for a girl I fancied at the time. As I recall, she just shrugged it off, and the lyrics aren’t exactly encouraging for young love, but I only understood about half of them at the time.

One day, when I was a teenager, I was listening to the huge, faux-wood-paneled stereo in the living room (complete with record player and 8-track!), lying on the floor reading something and singing along. I was kind of caterwauling as a goof, which I sometimes did, when my dad walked in and surprised me by saying something like, “One thing’s for sure, you’ll never be a singer!” with a smile on his face. I just smiled back and let it slide, seeing no reason at the time to try to convince him otherwise, but inside I was thinking, “I’m going to prove you wrong.” He didn’t mean anything by it, but the fact was I loved to sing but had never really shared that with anybody.

I got the chance the summer after my freshman year in college, when me and two friends from high school got together to play in the garage at one of their houses. I clearly remember the first time I sang out loud, to Tesla’s “Signs”, as they played along on their guitars to some tabs C had printed off the internet. We continued to get together on breaks from school for a couple of years, and they also taught me how to play guitar as we recorded a bunch of songs on my CD/tape player, especially K since we both went to Purdue and ended up roommates our senior year. I still have those tapes, but I missed our big moment.

On Halloween, 1997, K, one of our other roommates, and a couple of fellow students we hooked up with had a full-blown band and played a show at a house off campus. It was fantastic, but we didn’t tape it because it was our first gig, and it could have been terrible. We did make some mistakes, and even played two songs over again as an encore after our second set, but it went great. The next week, the band completely broke up and we never played another show. I still kick myself for not recording that Halloween show, since we could have erased the tape anyway, but at least I still have the pictures of me in my Australian cowboy hat, singing myself hoarse for probably a hundred people or more and having the time of my life.

Over the years, I taught myself to sing and play guitar at the same time, which was harder than I expected, and even wrote about a dozen songs of my own. In Dallas, I hooked up with a couple guys in my apartment complex who also played guitar, and we tried to form a band, going so far as renting a storage area to practice in, but sadly nothing ever came of it. With another guitarist, I scored one of my short films, and I recorded several songs on my computer with the help of a non-linear editing program.

I lost my singing voice for about a year and a half when I swallowed a mouthful of Coke wrong at work in Dallas and strained the skeletal cartilage in my throat. (How’s that for dumb bad luck?) That was one of the reasons we gave up on the storage area band. Now it’s back, and Austin being what it is, I’m tempted to try again. Hope springs eternal, and I’m not thirty yet.

P.S. I had to rewrite this entry from scratch, because I didn’t take my own advice: always write long e-mails, blog entries, etc., in Word first, so if something goes wrong you still have a copy of it. Good advice, if you can remember it.