Musical (and Emotional) Roots

I think church attendance may be part of my genetic code. Male. Brown eyes. Brown hair – originally blond, and in college years, occasionally blond. Average height and weight. Good looking, but not offensively so. Destined to be a church-attendee, through and through.

My parents were loosely associated with something called “the Jesus Movement” of the late 1960s and early 1970s (think hippies with Bibles). My dad’s mom got his family into church for social connections and some moral training. I guess it stuck with my dad. He became a pastor about the time I got my driver’s license. My mom grew up in a religious family, too, but they were religious about different things. Especially her dad, my grandpa. Physical exercise and a devotion to science that was somehow at odds with the existence of a loving God were the defining philosophies. I think she felt that generated a lot of family chaos, and finding Jesus in college answered enough of her questions that she reordered her life around his ways. My parents met at a church service. They were married not long after my dad was drafted into the Vietnam War. He was fortunate enough to be assigned a post in Germany as a medic. Our dusty old photo albums from those days reveal a lot of smiling hairy people who seem pretty grateful for their lives and hopeful about their futures, despite so many things beyond their control. The pictures also document a round baby boy sprouting into a toddler.

I have old photos of Jesus and my mom playing guitars together. Alright, it’s actually my dad and mom. But my dad’s got hippie hair and a thick beard, and if Jesus had worn glasses, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the Lord and my dad back then. He still dabbles with a little guitar, usually the same melodies he’s always played. He has a really nice Folk-sounding voice. Besides guitar, my mom – skinny and long-haired and pretty – also had a fondness for recorders. Those are the clarinet-looking things many of us had to learn to play when we were in the fourth grade. I can still manage the “Star Wars” theme if you handed me a recorder right now. There was a lot of folk and classical music regularly spinning on their Yamaha turntable. They had a record collection I couldn’t appreciate at the time, but would kill for now. While I’m not sure what happened to those big black CDs, I knew that Noel Paul Stookey was one-third of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and that a fugue was a song made up of the same repeating themes played by different instruments. My parents loved music and were deeply appreciative of its role in their lives. But appreciation was the key word, because they never went on to become accomplished musicians. I guess that was all the spark I needed.

The first music lessons I remember were one of those Japanese group-learning things. I don’t know if they even exist anymore. The idea was to get a bunch of same-age kids in the room and teach them the fundamentals of music on the piano. It all probably seemed a bit strange in little Reedley, California, where I was living at the time (think lots of agriculture sprinkled with the occasional stop sign). Reedley, now three times as big as when I lived there, probably owes much of its success to the Suzuki Method. My practice keyboard was – and I’m not making this up – a large piece of paper with a piano keyboard printed on it. Even as a seven-year-old I remember being embarrassed. Serious rock star don’t play paper instruments. Add that kind of embarrassment to my immense shyness at the time and you have a recipe for wonder-killing. I think I maybe went for two weeks.

A couple of years later, I studied guitar with a woman named Kelly Ball. The only chord that stuck with me from those lessons was that wonderful E minor. This was not Kelly’s fault. The guitar I was learning on had a neck twice the size of my hand. I think it was my dad’s 12-string with half the strings removed. Another couple months went by, and when it was clear I was not any kind of guitar prodigy, my parents wisely let me bow out of lessons. I actually ran into Kelly a few years ago at a friend’s wedding. She smiled when I told her what I do.

I dabbled with the trumpet in fifth and sixth grade (Band Geek), and even took private lessons with the music teacher from the junior high down the road. This was my first taste of joy with an instrument. I could actually play the thing! Over Christmas vacation one year, I remember accompanying my parents and their church friends as we circled neighborhoods singing Christmas carols. Nothing announces the coming Messiah quite like an elementary school boy tooting out, “Good King Wenceslas” in the cold and fog. I probably wore a scarf because that seemed pretty rock star to me.

The trumpet got dropped – all of life seemed to get dropped – when a year later three things happened simultaneously: 1. My family moved to Pasadena so my dad could go to seminary and become a pastor. 2. My ex-Jesus hippie parents thought it wise to begin home-schooling my sister and I. 3. Puberty hit. It has taken me a good twenty years and thousands of dollars in therapy to find resolution to all this. I’m not kidding. Not that anyone had a great experience in junior high and high school. Okay, a few did, but they can’t be trusted. Instead, I’ll simply mention that I made only two friends from 7th grade through 10th, Stanley and David, nice young men with old men names. After flunking out of home school, I went to a total of three different high schools in three years, missing a whole semester’s worth of school my sophomore year because I was so bummed about life. I graduated from another little rural school in tiny Oakdale, California, near my dad’s first assignment as pastor. It was the self-proclaimed Cowboy Capital of the World – the perfect fit for an insecure city kid, he said sarcastically. This time around I was so hell-bent on not being a nobody that I ran for Student Body President and won. I think it was because I had lived in LA, wore flip-flops, and had a tan. Maybe it was the ponytail.

There were plenty of good things that happened during those years, too, but mostly they were about survival. Music had become instrumental (sorry) in that survival, though not enough to get me to practice. I think I was the only guy at my third high school with recording equipment, which doesn’t say much about my third high school. And you should hear all the songs I wrote on my Korg M1 and my little Yamaha 4-Track, my world-shaking responses to adolescent angst. Or rather, you should never hear them because they weren’t good in much the same way that Satan isn’t good. But I wrote a lot of them. I just played a couple of them for my wife a few weeks ago. She demonstrated unconditional love by listening politely. Of course she thought they were adorable – all those awkward words struggling to define teenage love and the quest for significance. I had broken into a sweat by the first chorus. They are terrible now and they were terrible then, but it struck me that, even in high school, an identity began to form around the music I made. I wrote songs, and that was kind of cool and different. I occasionally performed those songs – churches, coffeehouses – and I apologize for that now, but it reinforced the identity. Those steps led to that fateful Thursday night when I spontaneously re-wrote “Our God is an Awesome God” in front of my college group. As I look back, I see that music has been part of my identity for a long time - for better or worse - like a friend I never I go anywhere without.