(This is a piece I wrote months ago for a magazine that may not ever materialize. The central metaphor, though, is something you might find relevant or useful if bands are an important part of your life.)
I gave up on being good in middle school. It was hard: I had really wanted to hold on to that one. It took a while for me to finally let it go.
That decision, of course, forced me to seriously re-prioritize and I did what I think most people do: I started to believe in love. My first lover was a gorgeous musician— loyal, empathetic, and ever-present, and he helped me through a tumultuous adolescence, one rife with consistently unreliable, occasionally abusive, ever unimpeachable authority figures. That whole era of my life seemed to veer uncomfortably close to the seventh circle of hell with sickening regularity. I am instinctually suspicious of all breeders to this day. This boy, though: he was living proof that there were other people on the planet that weren’t completely retarded, and that I might even get to meet some of them.
Looking back now, though, I can see that as much as I lived for our time together, it wasn’t really what sold me on the idea of living. Love is a fine thing, of course, probably one of the finest— but it’s no secret how weak you get when it’s the only thing you believe in.
It was a different gorgeous musician who really sold me on living, I think— one I never actually met. Somehow, though, I came to feel that I knew him better than I knew most of the people around me… people who lived in my house, even. It was easy to find him in the things he made, and he made a lot of things. It was uncanny how undeniably present he seemed whenever I had him in my headphones, a sharp contrast to the increasing distance I felt towards the lot whose company I had to suffer arbitrarily.
I wasn’t sure if he was rich— he didn’t seem like it, but he obviously didn’t have another job, and the flamboyantly unique and ever-changing character of his work convinced me that he wasn’t much concerned with money. At the same time, he wasn’t quite famous— almost no one at my school had heard of him— but I knew there were at least a handful of people scattered around the world on point enough to recognize the legendary caliber of this gorgeous man’s work. This was proof of something very, very important: this was a future worth sticking around for. In a way I suppose it’s just a different kind of good, but this kind was different enough, so much more tangible than the old good, the vague trap I had once tried in vain to preserve. This good, the good of this man, it inspired and animated me. It gave me energy, more than I’d ever felt before. I felt all kinds of things I did not feel before this man made me believe in the power of music.
The web, at this point in history, was still just one well. Aside from his actual compositions, there was little supplementary information to be had about my idol. He did not seem to take interviews seriously at all— which, of course, made the few that he did quite amusing. I kept a scrapbook, but never let anyone see it. The level of obsession required to maintain this scrapbook was not reflected in its pitiful brevity. Most of what I knew about this guy was raw feeling, communicated without media mediation, communicated in that one mysterious way still known to man that bridges any distance to trump words and tongues and talking entirely.
There was one hard fact, though, one bit of biographical data that appeared, in various ways, in nearly all of the articles I had collected: my idol believed the most important thing he had ever done, the biggest influence on his work and his whole outlook on the world in general, in fact, was a walk. Apparently, once upon a time, before any of us knew about this man or the fountain of beauty held within him, he worked at a shopping mall. One day he was taking some trash to the dumpster and a city bus pulled up right before him and opened its doors. Unsatisfied with the job, and his life in general, and willing to believe at least temporarily in destiny, my hero dropped the trash and boarded the bus. He sat on the bus waiting for another sign of some kind, but it was not forthcoming, he and ended up riding to the end of the line, to a part of town he had never visited before. It took him a few hours to walk back home, but when he got there, he began writing his first record.
I had kicked around the idea before he died, but it was minutes after I heard that news that I really promised myself I would do it, I would make the same walk. The mall was named specifically in most variations of this anecdote, so it was fairly easy to figure out which bus was the one he spontaneously boarded. The final destination of the walk had since become a somewhat infamous group house where a steady procession of younger artists and musicians continued to live and do shows. Using internet maps and my scrapbook I came up with a pretty meticulous hypothesis of the exact route he had walked on that day. Here’s the kicker, though: my brother’s mom worked for an oil company, surveying or something like that, and she had this handheld GPS locator. I borrowed it and converted my hypothetical route to GPS coordinates. I can honestly say I had never been as serious about anything in my life at that point.
I was just a few steps shy of the last coordinate when I began to wonder why I had done it, what I really expected to result from such an undertaking.
There was a show at the house that night and there were a lot of people in the yard when I got there. Before I had sorted any of it in my head, I was talking to somebody else about something completely unrelated— probably new bands.
The show turned out to be really, really fun. Luckily I knew some people who brought a case of Boh because I didn’t bring any money myself. I don’t think I thought about the walk again that night. This one guy played who had more guitar pedals than I’d ever seen. After him there was another guy who was super funny and good at talking to the crowd. In Cuba a couple hundred of our greatest enemies were shackled and sore, still wondering what any of it was for, while here the funny guy reminded us about Bugs Bunny and Mr. T and Cap’n Crunch and other characters from our culture’s rich pantheon. We laughed again and again. Before the show was over, the funny guy told us about some more fun shows coming up. There was maybe never a better time to be a young artist.
