Gone Missing

My younger son, Connor, is a musical theater major at James Madison University.  He is very, very talented.  He has an amazing singing voice, and he dances very well.  Tonight, I saw another play that he has worked on.  Gone Missing, it was a one-act show, based upon things that people have lost.  It seems kind of a thin concept, but the show worked.  Connor tends to be a featured dancer in the shows he is in, and he was chosen to choreograph this show.  I know nothing of dance; but to me, the choreography was good.  It was interesting in that it was the first show of his that he and I got to watch together.  Usually, he is on stage, and I am in the audience.  Tonight, we sat together.  I could feel him wince a few times when people made mistakes.  I have to say, I was unaware of the mistakes, but he, of course knows exactly how everything should go.  All in all, the show was a success.  The audience liked it, the feel was good, and they will fix all of their mistakes.  It is nice to see Connor becoming a man--he runs a huge course load, and his days, with classes, rehearsals, and homework, tend to run from about 8:00 am until midnight.  But at the end of the night, after we went out to get something to eat, he pointed out to me that I had a Bishop Ireton magnet on my car, and a William & Mary dad decal on my car, but nothing that spoke of him.  I was caught a bit aghast, in that I have been down to see him three times this semester, while I have yet to make it up to Pittsburgh to see his brother, Dylan, who is in his first semester of grad school.  Caught off guard because it really seemed to bug him, if only slightly.  He tends to be competitive of parental attention and love.  I have told him over and over that parental love doesn't divide.  It is not finite: I don't have to take from my stores of affection for him to love Dylan, or the reverse.  I will admit, I was a bit annoyed as I drove off, heading home for another leg of one of my Fairfax to Harrisonburg single day round trips.  I have made three of them this semester: once, his wi-fi wasn't working, so I went down and bought a new router and got that set up; once, when vacuums were on sale at Walmart, I bought one and brought it down, and we put it together; and tonight.   This does not include the Summer trip down to the new apartment where we put together Ikea furniture, and swore death to the Swedes.  I volunteered for each of these trips, and made them gladly.  I was not coerced, guilted, or swindled into doing any of them.  They have always been worth the trip.  So I was a bit annoyed that my not having a sign of my pride for him on my car bugged him.  I had one on my previous car, which was totalled on 66 a few months back.  I stumbled upon the William & Mary decal, which I had bought over a year ago, and just hadn't put on my old car.  But still, I have to admit, deep down, that it was nice, in a way, that this accomplished young man, who is just about ready to spread his wings and take on the world, still wants his dad to tell the world how proud he is of his son.  That as he is moving into manhood, and needs me less and less, it seems, he still needs me.  Just for the record, about 15 minutes before I wrote this, I went online and ordered a JMU Dad decal for my car.  I also ordered a Pitt Dad decal.  Paternal love doesn't divide.  It multiplies.

I have been a musician (of sorts) for about as long as I can remember.  It began as purely as it can: my friend, Greg, and I spent a lot of time trying to make each other laugh.  He had some old tape recorders which his dad had let us play with, and we started trying to make comedic bits on the tape recorder.  I very clearly remember a time that we alternated lines with a popular song of the day, and we were (or at least I was) kind of shocked at how well our lines fit back within the structure of the song, timewise.  Then, we wrote our first song; (to the tune of Disco Duck) it was a send-up of the various calls that we came home for dinner to.  Back in those days, us kids spent a lot of time outside, without adult supervision.  I don't know when we switched from comedy to music, if memory serves, we were being musically comedic; once the tape recorder was part of the deal, sound was going to be the focus.  Greg and I weren't the same age: I was a year older, and as I had skipped a grade, I was two years ahead of him in school.  Well, Greg got lots of input from Chip Puscar, who has become quite famous for his role in the tv show Nashville.  Chip was wicked funny, and had a bit more of the "Ham" in him, as I did.  So our ideas would germinate separately; Greg with Chip, and me with my friends at Bishop Ireton, particularly Dave McDermott.
Somehow, we got our hands on an old 4 string guitar, which only had two strings on it.  It wasn't a ukulele; this was some kind of parlor guitar, and Greg figured out how to get the two strings in some sort of way that they worked together, more or less.  But things really took off when we somehow got the idea to put the microphone of one of the tape recorders inside the body of the guitar.  We just put it in through the soundhole.  It made this crazy, overdriven sound, and frankly, I will put it up against any "real" amp today.  Similarly, we found that bopping on an electric space heater had a really cool snare sound.  I've always been a snare sound fiend; I LOVE a groovin' backbeat.   A strong backbeat, with any kind of groove, and you are halfway to any kind of song you want. Particularly if the drummer, and the snare, can swing.  And then, it was only a short step to multi-tracking.  We did it the simplest way you could imagine: we recorded the first track, and then with it playing, we played along, either backing vocals or a second guitar, maybe a solo.  The world was our oyster...

A bit of background--I was born in 1964, in Arlington, Virginia.  I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, in the close-in DC suburbs.  The first album I bought was Station To Station, by David Bowie.  It's the album with Golden Years as the single.  It's Bowie in his Thin White Duke phase, and it's a really good album.  The title track still has my favorite guitar solo of all time.  Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Graham Parker, and Tom Petty were the musicians that blew my head off.  They are the reason I became a musician.  To my young mind, everything at that point in the 70's was denim, big hair, guys with lots of facial hair, and overly cheesy, drawn out songs.  It seemed that every guy was trying to prove how sensitive he was, in a really schmaltzy way, (think David Soul, winged hair, and vans- everybody had their custom van).  And then I heard My Aim Is True.  Elvis Costello's first album.  My sister, Sheila, had bought it, and I had mocked it at first.  The songs were too short, I thought.  I was looking at the jacket. It was the usual sibling taunting.  But when she played it over and over, it really kicked my ass.  We came to it late-- within a month or so, his second album, This Year's Model, came out, and when I heard Graham Parker sing "So all of you be damned, we can't have heaven crammed, so Winston Churchill said,  I could have smacked his head" on the song Protection, from his album Squeezing out sparks, I was IN.  Those records were kind of my Ed Sullivan moment, in the way that you hear older musicians say that when they saw The Beatles, or Elvis Presley, MUSIC MATTERED. This was also just about the time that my friend Greg Ruff and I had gone from making "comedic" bits on a tape recorder to trying to make funny songs, to making real songs.
 

I saw an article today about how millenials HATE Bruce Springsteen.  I have encountered this many times, working, as I do, in bars, where young people congregate.  There is a certain shock, almost, when I mention that I LOVE Bruce. And I will lay it out here for you now.  I understand that nobody wants to dig the music that their parents loves.  My ex-wife and I have, what I consider, as a musician, really good taste in music.  In the car, (and I was a stay-at-home dad, back before that was considered cool) I was the DJ for my sons. What did I play for them? Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, They Might Be Giants, Talking Heads, Graham Parker, The Clash, John Hiatt, Joan Armatrading, The Minutemen, Squeeze, The Sugarcubes (Bjork's old band), Nat King Cole (He is probably the greatest singer ever), Calexico,  Patty Smith, of course The Beatles and Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Muddy Waters, etc...   All of this stuff that is really amazing, cool, and fun.  And that brings up one question: what do you do when your parents listen to this type of music?  You go elsewhere.  It is part of the natural process to either disdain or actively hate what your folks like. It is what every generation does.  It needs to find itself. My two sons, weaned on all this music, listen to vastly different things than I or their mom did.  My older son listens to INCREDIBLY fast Japanese technopop.  My Younger son listens to showtunes.  He is majoring in musical theater, and he has schooled himself on the history of that music.  My friend Woody, with whom I have played music for a bazillion years, has one son who is turning into a fine musician.  He is into the arena rock that both his father and I have hated forever.  No child worth his salt can come up exactly loving what his parents loved.  My children never got in any of the trouble I got into as a youth.  They had to establish themselves as themselves somehow.  Eventually, my hope is that they will come to see the value in the music that I have loved.  Certainly, I think that they will do what I have done since my father's death, which is to try and understand and know the person through these things we leave behind. My father was not very communicative: I have been trying to get to know him now, after his death.  It is like trying to find something by echolocution. While a very stoic man, I now realize that he was VERY sentimental, and felt very deeply.  So now, as I go through his things, I agonize over how much I didn't know him, or his heart.