Wednesday, August 17, 2011
my new podcast, "how did i get here?"
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
music is my savior 2: mark hallman dubs me "johnny"
summer was over the week after my “cheap trick “ revelation and i returned home to the woodlands (a suburb of houston). when my mom picked me up at the airport, i was so excited about my new inspiration. i couldn’t stop telling her how thrilled i was to resume guitar lessons. how i was going to find some like-minded kids at school and start a real band. i had spent my last week in miami shopping for school clothes, supplies, but most importantly, record shopping. that week i bought a couple of new albums (on cassette, of course. i had a boombox and a walkman, at the time) every day. i was really into the new cheap trick, “one on one” and the police’s “ghost in the machine”, survivor’s “eye of the tiger” and a band I had seen on the new channel, MTV called, loverboy! my mom and i stayed up late that night unpacking, listening to my new music and talking about my rock and roll plans. she was excited for me.
a few days after getting home, school started. i returned to knox jr. high a changed man. on my first day of 8th grade, i reunited with my old friend, chris machart. i told him about my cheap trick experience and how I was re-enrolled in guitar lessons and that i was putting together a band. he was blown away. it turns out that chris had also been taking guitar lessons and wanted to be a rock star and was into cheap trick and loverboy and all of the same jams i was into. he turned me on to a new guy, sammy hagar. He loved his album, “standing hampton”. right there on the gym floor, we decided to start a band!
we were so excited! we became inseparable. we had three classes together so we started to talk about our band every day. we had a name, ZEPHYR. i know, it’s horrible, but it really sounded cool to two 13 year-olds in 1982. plus, it had a “z” and “y” in it. we wrote that name on our folders in a very 80’s font. chris’ brother, bruce had been taking drum lessons. and he had a “drum set”. by “drum set” I mean, he had a kick drum, a snare and two cymbals. we put the two cymbals on top of each other and wrapped a t-shirt around them to make a hi-hat. if you thought that was bad, that september, chris and i didn’t even have electric guitars. we had acoustics. we knew like 7 chords. we didn’t even know how to tune our guitars. we had no idea what we were doing, but we were so excited at the prospect of having a band and becoming famous.
my mom had a booth at the renaissance festival. she had it the year before with her friends, scott and brenda mitchell. this year my mom was going to partner with her friend, kathleen, who had moved to austin from colorado. i didn’t want to do it. i was depressed that my next SIX weekends were not going to be spent in the machart brother’s parent’s bedroom working on zephyr, but dressed in tights and a poet’s shirt and those little chinese shoes at the ren fest helping my mom sell crochet hats and beaded fucking earrings. It was the worst thing EVER.
thursday night before the first ren fest weekend, my mom came into my room to tell me to come watch david letterman. it turns out that kathleen’s new musician-husband was going to be on the david letterman show that night playing with carol king. His name was mark hallman.
i went to her room to watch it. WOW! sure enough, there was kathleen’s husband on tv! I couldn’t believe it. he was in a band with carol fucking king! my mom said that he produced her records. hell, i didn’t even know what producing was, but i knew it was important and i was impressed! she said that he also toured playing with dan fogelberg. (that was kinda lame to me at the time) he was a professional musician and i was going to meet him. i could ask him questions about how to do things like, tune your guitar, buying the right electric guitar and amp. maybe this dude knew chords that were more rock and roll than what my guitar teacher was teaching me. i was excited to say the least! i had no idea that our meeting would totally change my life.
two days later, it was saturday afternoon, i had been walking around the ren fest looking for people I might know when i walked through the back of our booth and there was mark hallman, the guy from the letterman show. only now, he was wearing tights, a poet’s shirt, a vest and some kind of swashbuckling hat with a large plume in it. it was an extremely different look from letterman just 2 days before.
he was playing my acoustic guitar. “do you ever tune this thing?”, were his first words to me. “i don’t know how.” i said. “well, i’ll have to show you. what does j.c. stand for?” (j.c. is what my mom and family and old friends called me. everyone in school called me john or goudie.) “it stands for john charles” i said. “you don’t call yourself ‘johnny’? if my name was john, i would call myself ‘johnny’ for sure. my brother’s name is john and i always tell him ‘johnny’ is the way to go. call yourself ‘johnny’. It’s so much cooler than “john” or j.c…. ‘johnny is in so many songs and it’s so rock and roll. you’re ‘johnny’!”. from then on, i was “johnny”. at that moment, mark hallman became my idol and single-biggest influence.
i spent that day showing him around the ren fest, picking his brain about rock and roll and telling him about chris and bruce and zephyr. i told him about girls liked at school and that i was thinking about becoming an actor as well. he listened intently. he gave me advice about zephyr and girls. he told me to give-up acting because music was so much more fun and you could do it alone. (i stayed in it until “college”, but i never really gave it enough energy to get great at it.)
he was the most AMAZING person I had ever met! he was so cool! and he just hung out with me the WHOLE weekend. he taught me some stuff on guitar. i picked up his lingo. he used words like, “happening” to describe something cool. he would get “good vibes” or “bad vibes” or he’d just be “vibing” on something that was “happening”. it was heaven!
i collected my new musical knowledge, new lingo and life advice all weekend and when i returned to school that monday morning, i went straight to chris machart and told him everything i had learned. by lunch-time, chris was calling me “johnny”, getting “weird vibes” from our science teacher and describing the school-lunch pizza as “happening”. i was electric with excitement and the prospect of hanging out with mark hallman every weekend was making me feel like I had purpose. It’s funny. It really did.
for the next five weekends, i grew closer to mark. he was incredibly generous with his time. we would spend the weekends walking around the ren fest, talking about everything from starting bands, school, what it was like to tour, my girl issues and his upcoming solo e.p. release. he would teach me chords, songs, and tricks on guitar. as well as hipping me to what bands i should be listening to. at that point i didn’t know weather i should be a “metal guy” or a “new wave/skinny tie” guy. (*** see foot note***) he treated me like we were friends. this friendship gave me an abundance of confidence. the coolest person i had ever met thought that I was cool. by the end of the ren fest’s run, i was sad to know i wouldn’t see my new friend/hero every week. they lived in austin. of course, this was just the beginning of our friendship and mark’s profound influence on me…
***footnote***
when i was in junior high and started to play music, the people that played music were either metal heads or new wave guys. everyone in the woodlands at the time was into metal. you would see the metal guys in their garages after school and on the weekends practicing “crazy train” with like four dudes standing around worshipping them. their scene creeped me out because they seemed gross to me. they always wore black t-shirts. they smoked cigarettes and weed. they talked slow and seemed dumb. plus, if there were any girls around them, they were skanky. needless to say, it was not my scene.
i went new wave. i liked the music better. plus, there were really hot girls into duran duran and adam ant and people like that. i had grown up on the beatles, bowie, the stones and t-rex, so it was only natural for me to ally myself with these new bands that included everyone from tom petty and the pretenders to thomas dolby and the fixx. anyway, i wanted to use this footnote to explain how I ended up liking new wave and song bands and not taking the metal route.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
music is my savior 1: robin zander showed me the light.
when i was in 7th grade, i was lost. i only had 2 really good friends (they're still my friends), i was terrible at sports, terrible in school and uncomfortable in my own skin. extremely uncomfortable. my mom put me in guitar lessons and they were awful! i was also terrible at guitar. i didn't like it. i was in drama. i liked acting, but i didn't really feel it. it was an extremely awkward entrance to puberty.
on my last week of school and summer and miami, they invited me to see cheap trick with them at the sunrise musical theater in hollywood, florida. i was excited because i was going to get to go out with other people and especially maria. we took our seats in the auditorium. we sat through acts like "axe" and "krokus" i think. terrible. all terrible.
when the show was over, i was high. not just from the weed people smoked in the sunrise musical theater, but from what i had just experienced. it was a BAND! It was a lifestyle like i had seen in the beatles movies and cartoons. they looked like friends. they traveled together. i imagined them hanging out and picking up chicks together. it was four guys with thousands of people in the palm of their hands. the joke was, they were having fucking FUN! i was a huge cheap trick fan going into it, but as of that moment, i drank the fucking kool-aide. now i was a Fan! i had always loved rock and roll, but i finally understood it.