Be careful of whom you idolize, you may become them.
A recently retired friend, who had a lifetime of serious academic and theological study, has resolved to “catch up” on popular culture by binge reading the biographies and autobiographies of a host of 50s-70s rock stars. I have been the unwitting and, mostly, unwilling recipient of many of his books after he’s finished them. First, I try to avoid books made from paper. I am old, but not so old that I feel the need to “smell the pages” or any of that nonsense. I don’t have a manual typewriter, adding machines, cassette tapes or floppy disks, a VHS or Betamax player or tapes, but my wife does still keep phone books. I do have a “home phone,” but it’s a VOIP (OOMA) system and it is way cheaper than a cell phone and OOMA’s software does a wonderful job of screening out the scammers who want to sell me overpriced life insurance, windows, a cemetery plot or cremation plan, and security updates for my Windows computers. I do read a lot of books, but I mostly read “books” on a pair of eReaders (a KOBO and a Kindle). The Kindle is for library books I will get around to, eventually, since as long as it isn’t connected to the internet (in “Airplane Mode”) I can keep library books “checked out” indefinitely. Second, after reading a loaned copy of Keith Richard’s “Life,” I have been trying to scrub those stories and images out of my skull with a metal scouring pad for almost a year. Likewise for The Ox: The Authorized Biography of The Who's John Entwistle and Phil Collin’s Not Dead Yet: The Memoir.
[Admission: I did enjoy This Wheel's on Fire, Levon Helm and the Story of The Band, and even bought a copy for my KOBO reader. I’d believe Levon over anything Robbie Robertson said about any subject, including guitar playing. Having heard as much as I could stand of Robbie Robertson’s solo work, it’s obvious that his “creative” output was on the business side of The Band. There isn’t a single Band song that wouldn’t be improved by the deletion of Robertson’s predictable guitar solos.]
I was not much of a scholar during my early semi-adult years and I don’t have any drive to “catch up” on what I missed. Mostly, I’m happy to have avoided most of the bear traps society set for my generation of skeptics and creative people. I avoided drugs, mostly thanks to the examples set by friends and artists I knew who didn’t. I lucked into a career that supported my family and our hobbies and habits for almost 60 years and left Ms. Day and I with a decent retirement and a modest home in a small Minnesota town. We’re debt-free and our kids have been self-supporting, functional adults for more than 30 years. On the other side of that, I have lost friends and family to drugs and alcohol, suicide, poor choices and just being in the wrong place at the wrong time that resulted in their lives being wreaked by the highest incarceration rate among developed countries and a “justice system” that only “works” for the rich, powerful, and white. I was on the technical support sidelines for a lot of musical careers and a lot more failed attempts at that brass ring. For a lot of years, I was a lot more interested in the gear in recording studios than the people on either side of the glass. Still am, in many ways, but I don’t believe in the “magic” behind pretty much anything claimed by anyone pretending to possess “golden ears.” Engineering and technology have come a long ways since the supposed “golden years” of recording and music and old gear mostly leaves me cold, unless you’re willing to pay me my old $225/hour rate to repair it.
I have also been blessed to know a few brilliant people really well. I was lucky enough just to have been in the room when other brilliant people were talking, creating music, inventing, teaching, or just being their incredibly nice selves. In my life, I have found that the best people are “best” in every way that matters. That experience beats reading the edited version of lives, usually mostly written by either ghost writers or fans. I found that doing a lot of stuff, often wildly unrelated, accidentally brought me into contact with people I never imagined getting to meet. George Massenburg, for example, was a keynote speaker at a Students’ Audio Engineering Society conference in St. Louis and I was a faculty AES advisor. During an instructors’ dinner, George and I hit it off a bit and I hope to remember those conversations until I die. Thanks to Mr. Massenburg, I have multitrack copies of a couple dozen classic rock recordings for which he was an engineering participant and I have learned a lot just from playing with re-mixing those recordings. While I was in California in the 80s, I met several dozen almost-famous musicians, a few famous-only-to-musicians musicians, and a couple of “stars” that most people might recognize. Some were assholes, some were incredibly humble and decent (talkin’ about you, Larry Carlton and George), and most were no more special than the players, technicians, and engineers I worked with in every other area of my life and work. Luck has as much to say in success as talent and being lucky enough to be born rich makes pretty much everything a whole lot easier.
I especially appreciate listening to music I had some part in creating. I rarely listen to any radio, outside of NPR for news and interviews, but when I’m in my car I listen to a 256G USB stick full of my favorite music and a fair bit of that is music I’ve had some part in recording; either as a player or a recording tech. I often get a perverted kick out of knowing that, out of 8B people on the planet, I’m likely the only person listening to that song at that moment. There aren’t many of those people who I don’t admire on several levels. Nobody will ever write their biographies and, if they have written autobiographies, few will read them, but they are every bit as “special” as whoever is at the top of the charts today and I appreciate their talents, their generosity and courage, and their music.
