My life is built on three creative pillars– Music, Words and Imagery. This is the story of…Music
Warren stood near the wall in the dimly lit section of the social hub. Dressed his black pea coat, he watched the passers in the basement venue called the Lair. I promptly said hello.
Halloween decorations and fake spider webs blended with birthday party favors, booze and cupcakes. Angelus Errare’s band mom Tawnya was celebrating another trip around the sun. Tawnya has been there since the band started. She is pretty much as good as family as any other that I have had.
Warren and I nodded in beat to Will’s celebration playlist. Will, Angelus Errare’s drummer and Tawnya’s S.O., picked a great selection of music fueled with nostalgia and groove. We all went from moving like Chuck E Cheese pizza animatronics to tenured Russian ballet angels as each song faded into the Æther.
Warren is half of the Dollhouse, a synth pop duo in Laramie who somehow fits well with every other musician on the bill and never quite fits in with anyone at the same time. We are kindred spirits in that sense.
During the conversation, we made our way to how we started playing music.
He had a memory of being a small child and playing some notes on a beautiful Steinway piano, those notes formed into his first original melody. Like an addict, he’s been making melodies since. It’s a compulsion he’s has since he can remember. That’s sort of how writing came to me. But music? No. Music didn’t arrive until much later for me. In fact, I never even thought about why I started playing guitar until we sipped drinks during Deee-Lite’s classic, “Groove is in the Heart.”
Slash was the first guitarist I watched who made it “seem” cool to play guitar. The November Rain video mesmerized me time and time again watching him hammering notes in the isolated church. It was cool. It beautiful, and even though it was magic, it didn’t speak to me. No, it wasn’t until I saw Nirvana play MTV’s Live and Loud on New Years Eve that I felt a spark. I sat on my bed amongst sugar drinks and snacks with my junior high girlfriend Crystal, who had all my time and attention, and my best friend Tim, who had me laughing instead of getting A’s in class. We watched as the tube television flickered in the darkened room–enchanting and enveloping me.
Somewhere in the grand finale of “Endless Nameless” I witnessed a merging of chaos and controlled noise. Yes, that is what inspired me to get my first guitar months later. This was a useless nameless instrument that couldn’t be intonated for anything. It didn’t matter though, I was completely tone deaf. But I was tenacious.
When I was cool kid age of 13 I had to have a cholesteatoma, a cyst that caused me chronic ear infections my whole life, removed from my right ear. The procedure slices off your ears most of the way, scoops out the offending skin cells, then stitches and enough bandaging to get you rejected from most of the reindeer games in junior high. Before my surgery I was in advanced classed. I excelled in everything. But…then I missed classes, too many classes to keep up, so I got placed in the normie classes. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was how I turned and began to hate the education system.
And when I was 15, I got to relive the procedure in my other ear. But this time I lived in Cheyenne and met my fellow freaks. Crystal, Roxanne, Tim, Janelle, Jordan, Kevin and other faces that got lost in the filter of time. Tim told me he had a guitar, and he hated the guitar, it had just crushed one of his pet mice. It also crushed his heart.
So I had this guitar, and the strings were so high above the neck they took the strength of a gorilla army to hold them to the frets. It didn’t matter though, because only a month into owning this guitar I sliced the tendons in my left hand.
It was a late Christmas Eve, and I was working at McDonald’s, probably a year after I had watched that Live and Loud concert. In a dark basement with real cobwebs, I slipped on an absurd amount of grease caked on the floor. As I slipped, I tried catching my fall. I reached for the nearest shelf. It happened to be the sharpest shelf as well. Perhaps it was Ginsu branded, I’m not sure. But I remember seeing my knuckles, uncomfortably from the inside, as they turned from white to flush with blood.
I had surgery Christmas day. My hand was wrapped in a cast. My digits stabilized to keep them from moving. A week or so later I began physical therapy.
“Move your fingers,” they said.
“I can’t,” I replied with the fear of thinking I could never play guitar. Days and weeks would go by.
“Move them.”
A wiggle here, and smile there. They would massage the scar tissue, and I was on the path to healing.
Crystal and I were no more as junior high romances tend to die. Tim was about to drop out of school, and I wasn’t quite hanging out with the punks yet.
So I began to try guitar again when I was about 16 and with a plethora of free time. It was sad. My dexterity in my middle and ring finger on my left hand was nearly completely gone. The guitar I had was pretty much mocking me. I took it into Amazing Music, a small mom and pop shop in central Cheyenne, to see of they could fix it and tune it. They charged me five bucks to tune it and told me it was unfixable. But they were a music store, and the next thing I knew I got an beautiful green Ibanzez, likely bought with most of the money I got from a measly settlement from worker’s comp.
So I began playing an instrument that worked. Repetition and tenacity. I eventually learned how to tune the guitar without breaking a string. I eventually learned how to work around my busted fingers. I built strength. I built dexterity.
And years later, I found my way in a basement dancing to Depeche Mode with a room full of people I would not have met if it weren’t for tenacity and an evening concert.
Tenacity- 8/21/2021
I picked up the guitar
at 16
while the tendons
in my left hand
were still healing
three years after my third ear surgery
to remove the cysts
that damaged my hearing
I learned by reading inky magazines
and begging people to explain
the mysteries of sound
-It was never easy
But punk rock said I could do
anything
if I tried
if I believed
If I had the tenacity
and so I played….
so much
the steel in my calloused fingertips
set off the the metal detectors
on every Rawlins visit I made
And I still play
years later
partially deaf, bruised and broken
because the waves of noise
drown my fears
numb my pains
and remind me
I can always try
I can always believe
If I have the tenacity