Grrrrr Pt.

Turns out that the great computer crash isn't entirely my fault. Some kind of killer worm was eating its binary guts out. We won't talk about where the worm came from, a gentleman doesn't kiss and blog.

Grrrrrrr!

Home computer is in the shop, and it was my fault it ended up there. Not comfortable blogging at work. May I say grrrrrrr?

Excuses, Excuses

The recent technical difficulties seem to be under control. Computers bah!

As far as I know, no one heard the broadcast. Not even my mother. Hell, despite setting my alarm I didn't hear it. I assumed that 3am Vancouver broadcast time would be 4am my time, surprise! Caught the last five minutes. Ah well, not in it for the fame.

I did learn a lot from M when he helped with our recording. Some very basic things that I was doing wrong. (note to self, gear from Radio Shack is never a good idea) I'd say we're 2/3 of the way through getting a decent 3 song demo. Demo for what exactly still remains a mystery. But hey, life is mysterious isn't it?

As soon as I get some time I'll write the next installment of "What the Hell Was I Thinking..." in which I damage my hearing and quite possibility my ability to father children.

Fame at last! Well, not really.

In a bid to make this blog non-anonymous:

The band is getting played on CBC Radio 2 at...wait for it...wait for it....I said WAIT damn it...
3 AM on Saturday night. I figure there'll be all of 4 people listening which is about how many hits I get in a week. The tune they're playing is F ranky and J ohnny.

On the CBC page the link to listen in on the right bottom. If you're up at that hour, tell me what yah think. Kay?

Musical Milestones; or...

...What the Hell Was I Thinking; Part 2/B The "Fame" Years: Out With a Fizzle.

You can either be a good musician or a good student, that's the essential paradox of music school. It's all about time. Unless you're a prodigy or a genius you can spend as much time as you have becoming a musician. Everyone at the college who was a good musician was already one when they started. Sure they got better, but it was incremental.

I wasn't a musician when I arrived. I spent most of my time learning my instrument. The rest of my school work suffered. Of course it didn't help that I got mono from my girlfriend in the first semester. It wasn't the flat-on-your-back-for-months type of mono, but it left me without much energy. Add to that the depression I was battling and, well, I really wasn't an exceptional student.

I failed bunch of courses in that first semester. The second went better, indeed, I kicked ass in the few courses I had. My load was much lightened because I couldn't take the continuations of the ones I'd failed. Third semester I tried to take the regular load plus the stuff I'd failed. Bad idea. It was really down hill from there.

I hung on for a year and a half before surrendering to the inevitable. In that time I got great marks in guitar. I think those marks were influenced by the need to make the fledgling program successful. Be that as it may, I worked really hard and possibly deserved them for that reason. Despite my guitar marks the performance aspect of it was no better than it had been in highschool band.

In fact, recitals were much, much worse than highschool concerts. I was no longer one of a crowd. If I simply didn't play my flute no one, other than the conductor and possibly the people sitting next me, would know. This by the way was the technique I used in choir at college.

The first choir class I hung out with Bobby. He was another classical guitar student and unfortunately a tenor. I'm a bass.* A true bass as it turns out. We did a few exercises and scales at the start of the class. Karl (yup, him again) came over and listened to us. He put me over in the basses.

After that we developed a pattern, a system really, that made choir go smoothly. I would open my mouth to sing and he'd cut us off. "Just the basses." he'd say, looking at me. I'd look back, shrug or smile and stop singing. The class would continue. It was efficient, and eventually I made it more efficient by not singing at all. Of course you can't take choir for years without learning a little something, eventually I would be able to sing little bits here and there.

Back to recitals. You had to do one recital a semester. They were attended by your classmates and maybe a couple of bored students from other faculties. If I was nervous in a band of 30 odd, imagine how bad it was sitting on stage, in a spotlight, all by myself. Hell. I was seeing psychiatrist by this time. At the suggestion of my guitar instructor I asked him for some beta-blockers. They're a drug that inhibits the production of adrenaline. They work. You still get nervous and can make mistakes because of it but your hands don't shake, your heart doesn't race and you don't get the flop sweats.

The only time I remember taking them was for a master class I attended. Master classes are where you do a lesson in front of an audience. Yah, it's fun. Nothing like playing in front of an audience made up of other guitar students then being criticized for it by a professional who you've paid a lot of money. Bah. I think I didn't use them again because on leaving I found I could barely walk up the stairs. No adrenaline to help with the extra effort. Unpleasantly like having a heart attack.

To be fair it wasn't the total misery-fest this account portrays, there were great times too. It's just that they don't stick in my memory the way the bad stuff did. The musical one that stands out came in my last semester. I had just done my last recital ever. I knew it, my money was running out and my girlfriend (not the mono-giver) was moving to E dmonton and I was planning to go with her. I decided to pull out all the stops, really ham it up. The piece I played was a Romantic* one by a Spanish composer. It was very melodramatic and I decided to milk it. I played it very broad and what I though of as over the top. The adjudicator tracked me down at my private guitar lesson to tell my instructor how well I'd done. She said that it was the first time she saw that I might have what it takes to be a musician. So her phrasing could have been better, but by that time I was used to the faint praise that everyone on the faculty there damned me with.

So what the hell was I thinking? I can't remember. As I sit here I can't think why I continued on. I never gave up. I never dropped a course before the deadline, I always thought I could pull it off. There must be something perverse in my nature to go through with it all and not bail. I really did feel pretty hopeless much of time. But I never gave up. It's a conundrum.

Part of the answer was my friends. None of them were in the music program with me, but most were at the college. I think their acceptance sustained me. I certainly didn't know it at the time, but looking back I find I owe them a lot.

Next up, Part 4: The Electric Years

*Bass is the lowest male singing range. Typically the bass section is the weakest in the choir because voice students tend to be tenors. We won't talk about sopranos, the whole soprano section were voice majors. Mind you, it was the sopranos who gave Karl his stroke. Seriously. We were rehearsing and Karl cut us off. When he stood to go to the piano he fell over. 35 or so people stood there and gaped. He rolled over, sat up. Hung his head for a moment or two and then went to the piano. Hung over it for a while, then banged a key "Sopranos, there's your note, from the top." He finished the class, went to the hospital where they found he'd had a mild stroke. The guy really was wound too tight for his own good.

Musical Milestone; or...

...What the Hell Was I Thinking? Part 2/A. The Fame Years: An Inauspicious Beginning.

The summer I graduated from highschool my mother took me and my brother to visit relatives in Africa. It was an incredible trip, full of new experiences and sights. Unfortunately it was also full of people asking me what I was going to do with my life now that I'd graduated.

My mother was keen that I go to University, my brother didn't look to be headed that way and as Mom had two degrees she thought it was important. I did too, sort of. Truth is, I was burned out. I barely made it through my last year of highschool. I wasn't a very happy student. Indeed, I wasn't a very happy person all round.

To say I was depressed, in a clinical sense, would be true. The doctors thought so anyway. I felt I needed a break, some time to catch my breath before moving on. That didn't appear to be an option. I was under pressure to decide what I was going to do. Add to this a parade of people asking me this in front of my mother, I had to say something.

I remember saying "The only thing I enjoyed in highschool was music. I think I'll look into that when we get back." Why I said this boggles my mind. As addressed in the previous post, music wasn't exactly a pleasant experience for me. For what ever reason, that became my rote response. I didn't really mean it, I expected that by the time I got back to Canada it would be too late to register.

The day we arrived home coincided with the delivery of the weekly free newspaper. I hadn't even unpacked when my mom handed me the paper. There, buried in a middle section was an ad from the local community college. They were looking for students for the Bachelor of Music transfer program in guitar performance. Yikes! It was a two year program with a transfer to a major university for the second two years. I didn't panic, I still thought it would be too late.

I called and they were still accepting students. Damn! But what's that? You need me to do an audition and theory exam? Hooyah, year off here I come! My audition was awful. Classic guitar is played with the instrument propped on the left knee. I played in typical rock fashion with it on the right. The one classical tune I knew was very basic and I didn't play it well. Karl (the mad Pole) said "Well, I can see you don't play Classical." This implied something I didn't realize until years later. He thought that although I didn't play Classical guitar, I could in fact play guitar. He was wrong.

The theory exam didn't go any better. I'd been taught minimal theory in highschool music class. The school's emphasis had been on winning competitions and the players don't need theory for that. The exam was three pages, I completed one of them. The rest of the questions stumped me, what on earth is a "third"?* To be fair, the questions I did answer I got right.

Karl checked my exam and grunted "Well, you know the real basics." and then left the room. Just like that, no explanation, just walked out. I thought, year off here I come! When he came back he had a text book. He opened it, circled three chapters and as he handed it to me said "Learn those chapters over the weekend and I'll see you in harmony class on Tuesday." Fuck.

I was literally stunned. I was so sure I'd fail that I had no response to this. I walked out to the front office. The secretary gave me my schedule. I managed a weak protest, "Choir? But I don't sing." "That's ok" she said, "It's marked on attendance. You don't play an orchestra instrument and you have to have an ensemble credit. Choir it is." Oh. Of course I was too confused to notice that choir was on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 8:20 am. A good mark turned out to be trickery than anticipated.

At the time I just accepted my fate and did my best. I never really questioned what had happened. In retrospect it was obvious. That year was the first time the offered a Classical guitar program. They were desperate for students. It didn't hurt that Karl was mad. Really.

The harmony class he taught that first semester was Baroque counterpoint.** In the first week he didn't teach so much as reminisce about his time in Russia. Our first assignment was to write four melodies in the Baroque style. When he handed them back he was looking a little odd. His nose was red and he said, "I couldn't pass any of them. I feel I'm a failure as a teacher..." and started to cry. How does one respond to that? I remember wondering if all upper education was going to be like this. Fortunately it wasn't.

Thus began the Fame years. So called because on good days it felt something like an episode of the 80's tv show about a highschool for gifted artistic kids. There were people practicing in the halls and jamming the class rooms. There were regular recitals and of course just about everyone had a band on the side that we all had to go see gig.

To make it even more interesting at the same time I had met some people who changed my life. A group of friends, all a little older than me, who accepted who I was and made me welcome. Quite a change from highschool. I can't call any of us punk exactly but we went to one punk club a great deal and because of that and them my musical horizons broadened. By day I was studying opera and all the great classical composers, by night I was going to gigs. Gigs where three chords might just be one too many and dancing involved physical contact but had nothing to do with sex. I loved it all. (Indeed right now I'm listening to Richard Hell and the Voidoids and next week the LUC and I are going to a Puccini opera)

So, what the hell was I thinking? Initially I was thinking that I didn't want a conflict with my mother. After that I mostly just went along with what was happening. Don't get me wrong I don't regret any of it, despite how it all turned out...

*a third is the basic construction block of western harmony. It's the distance between one note and another of 3 or 4 semitones, 3 being called a minor third and 4 a major third. Or, on sheet music, any note and the one above or below it one line and one space away. This notation is why it's called a third. Counting the first note as one, the next line or space would be two and the next after three. It took me a while to wrap my head around this, maybe as much as a year. Shows what state of mind I was in at the time.

**The Baroque is a time period in history. The time of J. S. Bach and Handel, from around 1600 to 1750. Counterpoint is a style of composition where two or more melodies are being played at once.