About Me
It all started in an appropriately named place…ROCKford, IL.The bi-annual Thanksgiving get together for my extended family was coming to a close. I was just about the age where you start to dread going to these things. The adults were sitting around the table with their pumpkin pie and coffee, small talking. Me, my brother Carey, and my cousins who helped make these family parties bearable were hanging out in my second-cousin Rob’s basement bedroom.This shindig was at my Great-Uncle Phil and Aunt Lorna’s house (Rob’s parents). Their house was great for my standards at the time…definitely more cultural artifacts and artistic scenery was around than I was used to compared to where my friends and I lived. Phil was an artist who specialized in nature paintings that were hanging all over the place. They had a baby grand piano by a big window that looked out over a well-manicured midwestern backyard with hilly landscapes, flowers, trees and bushes.While this was all very pleasant and homey, Rob’s room was the place to be. It was exactly the kind of room a 12 year-old kid from Nowhere, IL would consider cool in the mid ’80s, with shag carpeting, cool rock memorabilia and posters, guitars, a stereo, and tons of albums all over the place.As my mom’s cousin, Rob wasn’t exactly hanging out with his crowd on Thanksgiving…he was closer in age to the parents sitting around the coffee table talking about their families or whatever. When I asked my mom why he wasn’t like the other adults, she said something like “Poor Rob. He’s not quite all there. He still lives in my aunt Lorna’s basement because he started running with the wrong crowd and got into drugs. Let that be a lesson to you boys.â€My inner response was that while this may be true, Rob is still cool. He looks kind of like Sting with long hair, he gets this great room at least somewhat separated from his parents, and he doesn’t even have to go to work or school every day. Plus, who would I rather hang out with? My conservative Christian family who just ask me the same questions with that condescending tone about school and if I had a girlfriend, or Rob, who actually treats me like a real person instead of an alien little kid and shows me all the cool stuff he’s got including…His guitar.This was the moment my life changed. I don’t even remember the actual guitar, or the amplifier he plugged it into. What I do remember is THE SOUND. The sound of Rob hitting an overdriven guitar chord absolutely stoned me.My virgin ears had never heard a live guitar, especially not one that sounded like that. That isn’t how a guitar is supposed to sound, I thought. A guitar sounds kind of clean and jangly…this sounds sort of like that, except 1000 times more intense, like you took that sound and pumped pure energy into it until the normal guitar sound exploded somewhere within that amplifier and was then thrown with extreme force back into our atmosphere in a torrent of fuzzy sonic smithereens.I felt the sound come into me like an electric shock that, instead of feeling quick and jarring, felt like an energy transfer, like the electricity was flowing into me, heightening my senses and making the hair on my arms stand up.Ok…maybe that’s a little dramatic…maybe the new energy I felt was coincidentally just the start of puberty. Regardless, it changed the course of my life.
