Published: August 28, 2008

“You know where I’ll be found”

There was a time when music was simply a mechanism to uphold my recently found identity, a reason to get home from school as fast as I could. When I was young, full of energy and life besides school was simply ‘free time,’ a song could change my attitude about things: about girls, my family and, most of all, about my sense of self. The lyrics didn’t have to be meaningful or emotionally penetrating, because at the time I was more concerned with the volcano-sized pimple on my nose than the intellectuality of the lyrics to a song. See, I went through puberty relatively early, and I went through musical puberty even earlier. This was not by choice, not through effort, but by inheritance. The first concert my father brought my fraternal twin brother and me to was James Taylor when we were eight years old. It was the spring of 1994, and I vividly remember sitting anxiously in the top balcony section of the Universal Studios Amphitheatre in Hollywood, California. We sat in what my father jokingly referred to as the nose-bleed section, and sang along with the mature-sounding dot on the distant stage, an artist my father held dear to his heart. My father bought my brother and me matching three-quarter sized electric guitars a month later and paid for professional lessons for us. Besides the awesome feeling of having our own guitars, we weren’t interested, and we grew increasingly weary of practicing the basic chords and scales for our instructor, a young man in his early thirties who wore thick, square glasses and still had a subtle but noticeable ’80s looking mullet. It is easy now to see why learning a musical instrument was hard at the time, and why we would rather have played hide n’ seek in the avocado orchard behind our small Montecito cottage or rode our bikes to the BMX course we built at a public park nearby. Nevertheless, we were exposed to an eclectic variety of music and to musical instruments early and often.

Every young boy quietly dreams of being in a rock ‘n’ roll band, and every young man energetically tries to fulfill this underlying, anxious desire at one point or another. Musicianship can come as a sudden urge in your first year of college, a breath of independence from the constraints of your family and hometown friends, or it can come earlier, in jr. high when your best friend, who is a year older and five inches taller, gets a guitar and tells you that YOU can be in his new punk band. The latter is more like what happened to me, and suddenly I was begging my parents for a bass guitar and although I had to wait nearly a month for Christmas, I finally got one. It was big, black, and had a sparkling, white pick guard that twinkled when under a strong, fluorescent light.

The first band we formed in the summer before entering high school we simply called the “Garage Band” even though we practiced in my parents’ converted basement. We didn’t even have a garage. The basement was home to a large water heater that hung like an oversized stripper pole in the center of the room, and there were pipes hanging from the ceiling, partially exposed, that would occasionally make swishing and swirling sounds above our heads creating a reason to laugh breaking the silence between songs. The pipes gave a rugged ambiance, and the carpeted floor allowed us to feel comfortable dancing around barefoot while we played. We felt free in the cluttered room, and all I cared about was that we were a band. We played punk-rock covers from our favorite groups such as Pennywise, Nofx, Blink 182 and No Use for a Name. But after butchering their simple bar-chord-heavy tunes, we would improvise. For some reason it was always when we started to attempt to write our own songs that my father would come home from work and enter our “studio” to listen. He would put up with the noise we called music and the music we called noise for a few minutes, then would say, “You guys sound great!” and slowly exit, gently scratching the growing bald spot that was extending his reddish forehead. It was my father who had been forced to listen to our expanding musical taste. For years, his car didn’t have a CD player, so in the morning on the way to school we had the choice of what we had on tape. My brother and I, products of the compact disc revolution, only owned two cassettes, Green Day’s “Dookie” and Boys II Men’s self-titled album, which we had bought a year or two earlier in elementary school. My father had an incredible collection of tapes, but we were not interested at the time. We were skateboarders, so we hugged on tightly to the cliché and liked punk music.

“I heard you cryin’ loud”

One particularly boring night that summer, the summer my friends and I decided to become rock ‘n’ rollers, my father came home early, and when he arrived he came downstairs to find my brother and I sitting in front of the TV. He said hello and left the room. A moment later we heard the sound of a distorted guitar echo loudly from the basement. The chords were muddled, but the song was easy to make out. Then we heard a voice that sounded nothing like my father’s. It was a voice that sounded like it came through a clogged nose, not someone’s throat. It sounded like a pissed off, sick teenager. It sounded like Billie Joe.

I heard you cryin’ loud,

All the way across town

You’ve been searchin for that someone

And it’s me out on the prowl…

He was playing the song he had endured listening to in his car for the past few years. He was playing the song that had initially made me want to be a rock star.  It was loud, simple and in your face. My brother got up and then I did, leaving the TV on. We walked quickly down to the basement. Casey kicked in with the drums, driving the intensity of the sound up a hundred notches, and motivating my dad to turn up his amp. I waited for the next verse and came in with the bass, following my father’s hands as he strummed each bar chord two or three times in a downward motion. His hair was all screwed up and the baldness of his forehead disappeared as his ruffled hair fell down, out of place from the top of his head. My brother was using every pocket of the song to practice his fills and as we played, his rolls grew tighter and tighter. I sang the chorus with my dad on the mic he had set up for me before we came in the room. The singing turned into a near-screaming sound, but still came from our noses.

“I heard it all before”

Green Day had once been a rebellious sound for me. In the sixth grade, it was a sound that screamed, “Screw this and screw you!” to my teachers, to my parents and also to girls; a subject of growing attraction that would only seem hurtful and confusing, at least early on. My friend Bummy had his Walkman with him at lunch one day. Bummy was the kind of kid other kids looked up to. He was calm, almost stoic, and his competitive nature made him the best at everything we did. He had long sandy blond hair that was dark brown underneath the top layer. It almost appeared as though the sun only hit the top layer of hairs on his head. He had an older brother, Nick, and that’s where he got the Green Day tape. We listened to it for an entire lunch period, singing along, tapping our hands on the pavement like we were drummers. We hated school, we hated our teacher, and, most of all we hated going to church every week and singing their boring hymns. I had heard them so many times growing up that they were ingrained in my head, and I wanted them out. Green Day was like a delete button, a replacement. It was my outlet; it was our escape.

Two years after I had first heard the band, and after putting my parents through hell in their cars, my father knew all the lyrics to the song. In the basement on that summer day, we played the song all the way through without stopping. At first I was embarrassed for my dad. He was singing lyrics that had a forced continuity and really meant nothing when read alone. They were just words that sounded all right together; they were just words from some punk kids who never went to college, but played gigs in the right scene, around Berkeley, California in the early ’90s. I was embarrassed that my father knew the lyrics, but I was also glad that he did because it meant that my robust rebellion as a pre-adolescent was unsuccessful and no hard feelings remained.

“You can’t force something if it’s just not right”

My first band only really lasted for that summer. We wrote many songs that I can still remember. Some were decent, others were catchy, but most were pretty awful. Yet, we were young and our musical adventures, however intense and important they felt, were just a loud, eventful way to pass the time. When fall came around, so did school, and our practices grew more and more seldom. Our lead guitarist, Kyle, got a possessive girlfriend whose stare scared us all away. Our other guitarist, Walker, who was older than the rest of us, began to hang out with an older crowd of jocks at school. I started playing the acoustic guitar and ditched the bass. Throughout high school my musical taste changed. I still had some remnants of the punk attitude, but I guess I couldn’t fake being a pissed off, tortured kid anymore, so I stopped pretending. I still like and listen to “Dookie.” After all, Green Day will always be the band that introduced the words “masturbation” and “fuck” into my vocabulary.