In late 1993, as I was finishing up High School and considering what my seemingly limitless future might hold, I stumbled across a tremendous creative outlet that would serve to ease me through those awkward final years of adolescence with a feeling of deep satisfaction and accomplishment.
I joined a band.
David Dean, a family friend who I only knew in passing at the time, played guitar, and was looking for musicians who could match his passion and dedication to the craft. I played the drums, annoying my parents who only put up with me because they knew there was some real talent there.
When my Dad told Dave he should jam with me, he laughed it off because I was only 16 at the time, and he was 26. But since he was persistent, Dave decided to invite me over to get my Dad off his back. He handed me a tape with four songs on it and told me to learn them cold before I arrived.
I did.
The songs were not difficult, but they were fun to play:
- Alone Again by Dokken
- 18 and Life by Skid Row
- Little Suzi by Tesla and
- Operation Mindcrime by Queensryche
When I got to Dave’s house, his expectations were low. But from the opening cymbal flourishes of Alone Again to the closing bass triplets of Mindcrime, I had those songs down solid, and it blew him away.
I’m sure it was primarily the fact that he didn’t expect me to have bothered learning them, because I’ve never been a spectacular drummer, but I’m competent, and I was probably a little ahead of my age group at that point in my life.
So, we immediately began planning our next jam session, and he put out feelers for a bass-player who could fill out our sound. Before we got back together to play the additional six songs we added to our playlist, he had recruited Jason Baczynski, a jazz-trained bass guitarist with musical tastes that fell right in with Dave’s and mine.
We gelled immediately and started on our path toward world domination.
Over the next 18 months, we solidified a list of over 40 cover songs ranging from the original ’80′s power ballads we started with, through the entire first Van Halen album and on to Rush’s 2112 in its entirety before beginning to noodle around with original works.
I was thrilled to start bringing my pen into the work because I still loved to write, and I had been experimenting with verse during my Junior year in High School. With “Betrayed,” I began a new stage in my writing life, eventually producing 22 original lyrics that appeared on four different self-recorded albums over the next three years.
The lyrics were nearly always autobiographical, although I remember insisting at the time that they were not. Looking back at them now, I can see some recurring themes that define where I was at that stage of my life: concern over the future and how my decisions would effect it; an almost paralyzing fear of regret; the search for love and companionship; the desire for independence mixed with the fear of being alone.
Some of the love songs were purely fictional, especially early on, but they were idealistic pictures of what I was hoping for. Later lyrics touched closer to reality. For instance, “Closer” was a message directly to a girl I dated briefly only to realize she had further to grow. And “Reality in Dreams” ended up being the song I sang to my bride on our wedding day before our first dance. She had those words inscribed on the inside of my wedding band.
In all these cases, their therapeutic value aside, writing these lyrics was just plain fun. It got the raw feelings out as effectively as published poetry would have, but with the softening improvement of really great musical accompaniment.
We never truly pursued making anything of our musical career, and we all ended up getting married in 1998, making “Space Monkeys” our final album as life got in the way. But what remains is an enduring and fun record of those formative years when I needed a creative outlet and Dave and Jason helped provide that for me.
- Taken from “Sanity is Boring“, Part Two: Random Sample Lyrics
