Subtitle:  Stevie Ray Vaughan taught me how to treat the guitar.

The first time I ever held an electric guitar in my hands was probably 12 or 13 years ago.  I was in Myrtle Beach with my Uncle Dan, Aunt Dorie and Cousin Rob.  I was sitting at the dining table in the living area of our suite, and my Uncle put the guitar in my lap and tried to teach me how to play “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty.  It’s a memory I don’t think I ever will forget, and I can remember it like it was yesterday.  I didn’t pick up a guitar for the next 3 or 4 years.

I was a freshman in high school and my brother was looking into buying a guitar to play in a band with his friends.  Naturally, I wanted to follow my brothers every move, so I began shuffling through the music catalogs he had, trying to find the right guitar for me.  The guitar I chose was a Squier Standard Fat Strat, color purple.  I don’t know what it was about the color but it was different, I knew it would stand out.  Despite being afraid of people calling me gay for having a purple guitar, I received that guitar for Christmas that year and began taking lessons.

In my lessons I learned a lot of songs and chords, ranging from bands like Blink 182, to Matchbox Twenty, to Aerosmith, and Metallica.  Blink 182 was definitely the band that caught on for me, and I developed a small obsession.  But it didn’t last very long.  Shortly after discovering Blink 182, I also discovered Stevie Ray Vaughan.  This is where my guitar playing took a huge transformation.  I loved his command over the guitar, I loved what I felt when I heard him play and could only dream of what he had felt while playing.  It was an instant connection that has never been broken.

This is a story all in itself, but ever since I could remember, Pearl Jam has been a part of my musical life.  My cousin Dan and my brother Steve were huge fans and so I knew of them and all of their songs but didn’t really attach myself.

On August 24th, 2000, I attended my first Pearl Jam concert ever.  It was at Jones Beach in New York.  I remember driving to the show with Steve, and my Cousins Dan and Rob.  My cousin Mike would arrive later with a friend.  We were blasting Pearl Jam the whole way.  This normally doesn’t happen, it’s against the rules.  You can’t play the band you’re going to see on the way to the show.  But for some reason I got the sense that Pearl Jam fans were different.  I was right.  When we got to the parking lot, it was filled with people tailgating, throwing footballs around, barbecuing, and, yes, blasting Pearl Jam.  It was unlike anything I have ever seen before.

My life changed that night.  It literally changed.  It’s a moment I will never forget.  I was standing next to my brother and watched PJ come out, Ed softly saying “good evening” into the microphone and the band starting into “Of the Girl” a new song off their new album at the time “Binaural.”  “Of the Girl” is a softer song, very toned down.  I can picture Ed dancing.   The song ended, and this was the moment I’ve been talking about.  The band bursted into the intro to “Breakerfall”  which is an obvious omage to “I  Can See for Miles” by The Who.  Out of the intro I saw Mike burst towards the edge of the stage, swinging his head back as if he was looking to the stars for his inspiration.  The lights were flashing frantically.  The music exploded, chills shot down my spine and I suddenly realized that the guitar I had on its stand at home would never leave my side.  That I would be playing guitar for the rest of my life.  I knew that whenever I thought life was taking a shit on my chest, I could turn on some music and be completely lost in it and feel whole again.  I also knew that no band would ever mean as much to me as Pearl Jam does.

The show that night was being broadcast on K-Rock 92.3, and as my brother, cousins and I left for home, they started to replay the show.  And again, as what seems to be against the rules, we listened to the entire show we just saw all over again on the ride home.

It was truly one of the most important days of my life, and ever since, Pearl Jam has been the number one influence in every single thing I do on a guitar, in a band, or even in the designing I do.

Which brings me to this.  Mike McCready taught me how to play guitar.  I’ve never been the type to learn full songs.  I’ve never sat with an acoustic and learned the vocals to a song.  What I would do every day was turn on a Pearl Jam album and plug my guitar in.  I would just play over the entire album.  I would follow Mike’s guitar parts through the song like they were someone with a torch leading me through a dark forest.  I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew that if I could just find the notes he was using and try to mimic what he was playing, I would be fine.  And that’s exactly what happened.  Doing things this way helped me to have a guide, a teacher, but also helped me develop my own way of playing, because I wasn’t just learning his every lick.  I had to improvise because I didn’t know everything he was doing. Not just his playing either, but his stage presence too effected me.  When you see pictures of me on stage with my head back, looking up at the ceiling, you now know why that happens.  It’s because when I was learning to play, Mike made me believe that the right notes to play are written on the ceiling.

I never got to see Stevie Ray Vaughan play live, he died well before I even knew who he was, but I did obtain ever DVD that has been put out since.  Unlike Mike McCready, Stevie is way harder to feel comfortable about learning from.  He is just too good.  There is something about him that no guitarist has ever and will ever touch.  I did, however, take the same approach with him as I did with Mike.  I would put on his albums and play along to them too, but he was very hard to follow at times.  To this day, I can only follow him so much when I do this.  I can hear a lot of his licks but I can easily get lost trying to keep up.  So it was much harder to learn from him than Mike.  But what I did learn from Stevie was how to treat the guitar.  I don’t mean treat as in wipe down the fretboard after I play it or keep it clean and in it’s case.  I mean I learned how to treat it as an extension of my voice.  What many people will learn from blues players is that soloing is all about space and phrasing.  You don’t want to just noodle, you want to form some kind of phrase as if you’re having a conversation with your guitar.  Most people walk away from this thinking too hard about what notes to end a phrase on and how much time to leave before their next phrase.  But what I learned is a bit different from Stevie.  I learned that the first not you play after a space is the most important note.  I learned that note is the only one you think about when you’re not playing.  Not what lick am i going to play next, but what note am I going to play that will open up a new phrase, maybe a phrase I never even played before.

I am by no means an accomplished guitarist.  I don’t consider myself a great guitarist, I know I have loads to learn still and that I may not even reach my full potential.  I can’t shred, I can’t play a ton of different styles.  What I try to do is play to the best of my ability while always making sure to channel something beyond normal thinking.  I take my chances, prepared to fail, and if a lick sounds good, I repeat it. Formal music education can teach you a lot.  It can ground you technically, as well as in theory.  But the real goods comes from finding your Mike McCready or Stevie Ray Vaughan.  Someone who can teach you more than just pencil marks in a notebook.

In the episode “The Merv Griffin Show,” George is driving in his car with his girlfriend and runs over a pigeon (or was it more than one?).  When back in Jerry’s company they have a discussion about humans having a “deal” with Pigeons… This deal consists of Pigeons moving out of your way and you looking the other way during “statue defication.”  This is very funny but it is definitely flawed.

Number one.  Most birds, when approached by a human on foot or by car, seem to wait til the last minute to fly away.  You always think you might hit them, but you never do.  This is what makes the joke funny.  It feels like you must have some kind of deal with them.  But this does not work for the pigeon.  The pigeon is way too slow for this theory, and they care way less about humans than your average Robin, Cardinal, or Blue Jay.  I have walked through huge groups of pigeons just chillin’ on the sidewalk, not even giving a damn, and they sure as hell don’t move out of the way.

Number two.  The other end of the deal is flawed as well and this one is rather simple to debunk.  Nobody I’ve ever met gives a shit, no pun intended, about seeing a pigeon take a shit.  In fact, if I could help it, I would rather never have to see a bird squirt out that which looks like someone dropped a roasted marshmallow from their skewer.  It’s disgusting and I don’t need to get anything in return for not looking at it happen.

I bring this up because yesterday while walking to the train, I happened to put my head down at the most perfect of times.  I had been about to step on a fully grown, fully flattened, dead pigeon in the middle of the road.  Now, I had been thinking to myself since first seeing that episode of Seinfeld that the “deal” was wrong, but I never had the opportunity to be head to head (me in a car, the pigeon on the street) with a pigeon.  But seeing a flattened pigeon, and I mean flattened like in a cartoon, in the middle of the road, was finally enough proof for me to come out and get this off my chest.

I would also like to say, as a related side note, that I’ve been able to see squirrels up close a lot more recently than I ever have.  They really are adorable animals… And as George states in that same episode, we definitely have no deal with the squirrels.  This is evident by the amount of dead ones you see in the roads.  But getting to know these squirrels more up close has made that way worse for me… If you don’t already know, I kind of hate when bad things happen to animals, especially when they get hit by cars.

So I would just like to say, that although Seinfeld has said some of the smartest, funniest, and absolutely truthful jokes, and has had the absolute best sitcom on television (maybe that’s an opinion but who cares), he was wrong about this one (or at least whowever wrote that, maybe it was Larry David’s idea, but you get my point… it is false.)

One way to get the press to stop being so hard on you is to LET THEM ASK YOU THE QUESTIONS THEY HAVE.  Do you think we don’t get it?  Clearly you are afraid of moments like the Charlie Gibson Bush Doctrine incident.  But the more you hide, the more we question.  The more we question, the worse you look.  But it might be too late for that now anyway.

These things don’t really open you up to any deep nook of my life but are more or less just fun for me to ramble about.

1. I am the messiest teeth brusher you’ll ever not see.  When I brush my teeth, I like to be behind a locked door to the bathroom.  I don’t like anyone to watch me brush my teeth because it’s like watching someone who just swallowed a full tube of Orajel try and eat a bowl of cheerios.  I don’t know if this is a good thing because I’m overly thorough or if I just don’t understand the fundamentals.  I think if I was any neater about it I wouldn’t be cleaning my teeth properly, however I’ve never seen anyone brush their teeth as sloppy as I do.  Sometimes I wish I could be the type to think of something to say to my roommates and come strolling out of the bathroom and into the living room, take my toothbrush out of my mouth where there’s barely any visible foam around my lips or even on the toothbrush and start yapping away.  It just won’t happen because when I brush my teeth, I look like Brendan Frasier in Encino Man when he’s “wheezing the juice” at the mini-mart.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that I draw a large amount of inspiration from Eddie Vedder of the band Pearl Jam.  One thing I know about him is that he always carries around a marble composition notebook.  You know, one of those notebooks you used to be required to get for 5th grade English class.  It’s pretty smart to keep something like that at hand, especially for him since he’s a lyricist.  But, I think for anyone with a creative mind or even just with much to say, it is also important to write down your thoughts sometimes.

So, that being said, I went out and I purchased a notebook and started to write down some things that would pop into my mind at various parts of the day.  I decided to throw some of them up on here every once in a while.  These are short, and aren’t meant as opinions or as discussion topics, rather they are just thoughts, or what I was feeling at the time the notebook was open in front of me.

Here goes:

The big flag waves and I sit under a tree
A slight breeze coupled by the shade from the leaves
Makes me feel as though the sun has gone home for the day
But the light still shines bright
And a blue canvas stands paintless in the sky.
I ponder where I’m going.
I ponder where I’ve been.
I concede to not know,
And that makes my life seem alright.

Lifeguard, in red, can you agree this beach seems a death bed?

A Bishop finally sleeps
After three days of feeling weak
He had his questions
Like “Did I do all God asked of me?”
And “Can you assure me I’ve done right?”
A Bishop finally sleeps
It’s God he finally meets.

There’s something so soothing about the sounds surrounding your silence.

This hole I’ve dug myself into is deep enough to be my grave.

Red Blue Red Blue Red Blue Red Blue Red Blue

Can I borrow your eyes in exchange for my shoes?  I need a new disguise, I need to be just like you.

I’ll try to do this everyone so often, as I fill up this notebook.  Thanks for reading though.

Last night on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno:

JAY: For 1 Million dollars, how many houses do you own?

SEN. MCCAIN: (laughs) You know, could I just mention to you Jay that, uh, in a moment of seriousness, I spent 5 and a half years in a prison cell, without- I didn’t have a house, I didn’t have a kitchen table, I didn’t have a table, I didn’t have a chair. And I spent those 5 and a half years um because, not because I wanted to get a house when I got out.

You can see the video here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032553/vp/26407284#26407284

It is MSNBC so don’t watch the end if you aren’t into biased journalism. However, I think they have a point.

I’m 23 years old. I haven’t even been through some of life’s toughest times yet, and I have never been in the military, and I don’t plan on it. The way I see it, if I’m going to put my life on the line, it will be for my family and my closest friends first. After that, there better be something worth risking my life for. I’d be happy to fight for a cause that I support, but let’s just say this war is not that cause.

Now, I do have unmeasurable amounts of respect for those in the military who will put their lives on the line every day for whatever reason their commander-in-chief gives them. It takes balls of steel to do what they do, especially knowing that these days theres a good number of them who are fighting completely against their own beliefs. But they still do it. That’s something to look up to, I think.

John McCain put his life on the line for reasons I am not aware of, and I don’t need to know to have respect for the man. I know that he was a POW for 5 and a half years, and I can’t imagine what that feels like. All I can say to that is thank God he survived that and was able to overcome some of the mental effects that a great deal of veterans suffer post-war.

Lately it seems that John McCain has been exploiting this hard time in his past, using it more for sympathy than what he really should be using it for. When I experience a tough time (and thankfully I have not been through something as tough as being a Prisoner of war), I try to do two things. First, I give thanks to God and those around me who helped me get through it. Second, I try and reach out to others who may have faced similar problems and help them. The one thing I definitely try not to do, is use unfortunate times in my life as a way of getting ahead.

As Americans, we all come from different places and are faced with great obstacles to overcome to get where we want to be. Frankly, some people don’t make it to where they want to be. But many push on and make great leaps and bounds to get further and further in their lives and I bet the last thing on their mind is to relive their harsh past.

I don’t like to pick at specific votes that the candidates made in the past because bills are not as simple as the average American thinks. But John McCain did write off the new G.I. Bill as “too generous.” Now, I don’t know about you, but if you do a “favor” for someone, thats one thing. Them mailing you a thank you card is nice of them. If you put your life on the line for you country so each and every American can keep their rights and freedoms, not just 1 time, but up to 7 separate times in Iraq, that is no longer a favor. And we as Americans who don’t put our lives on the line owe these military men and woman way more than just a magnet on our car. We owe them the right to a college education that most of us earn during the age that you generally fight, we owe them good health care, we owe them job training, the list goes on.

What should be something that every American involved in this election views, regardless of party, as a heroic experience in a true American’s life, is becoming a line of defense for any grievance someone of an opposing view has towards him.

When Hillary Clinton was asked on Jay Leno about her sniper fire comment, she didn’t say “you know Jay, in all seriousness, my husband cheated on me multiple times in the public square. You could say that hit me like a bullet coming out of nowhere.” Instead, she joked.

John McCain has been trying his best (and frankly its been working) to paint Barack Obama as out of touch with the American people by telling them he’s a celebrity, someone who cannot be on their level.

Don’t you think it’s fair to say that if you have a rich wife, and together own so much property that you don’t even know how much that really is, without crunching some numbers with your staff, that you could also be a little out of touch with “working class America?” You know, and this goes for both candidates, there are people who never forget where they came from, and then theres people who do seem to forget. So just because you grew up middle class, doesn’t mean you automatically remember where you came from and can relate. So every candidate has to prove that they not only grew up like the average American, but they are proud of it, and will never forget where they came from.

John McCain, lately has been using his POW story for all the wrong reasons. It’s time he stops defaulting to that story every time a tough question is asked, or even a joke for that matter, and start giving answers that may be relate able to those who haven’t been a POW for 5 and a half years.

In his 2000 Campaign for the Presidency, the Republican Candidates were asked this at a debate:

What area of American international policy would you change immediately as president?

This is what he answered with:

KING: Senator?

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: China is obviously a place where this — one of the signal failures of this administration. Although there are certainly many failures throughout the world.

But I would also look very — revise our policies concerning these rogue states: Iraq, Libya, North Korea – those countries that continue to try to acquire weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. As long…

KING: And you’d do what?

MCCAIN: I’d institute a policy that I call “rogue state rollback.” I would arm, train, equip, both from without and from within, forces that would eventually overthrow the governments and install free and democratically elected governments.

As long as Saddam Hussein is in power, I am convinced that he will pose a threat to our security. “The New York Times” reported just a few days ago that administration officials worry that Saddam Hussein continues to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Congress passed a law a couple of years ago, called the Iraqi Liberation Act; the administration has done nothing. We should help them with arms, training, equipment, radio and a broad variety of ways. Until those governments are overthrown, they will pose a threat to U.S. national security.

Well, he didn’t get to be President, but Bush sure did take care of Hussein.  So what is next?  If McCain becomes President this time around, will he finish the job?  Will he develop a military ready to overthrow governments whenever he feels like it?  What will his lies be to get the American people behind him?  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

America really makes me sick sometimes… Sometimes I feel like I need to leave for a while so I can maybe regain some appreciation for the freedoms I have. Just right now I feel like throwing this computer in the garbage, tossing my wallet off of a bridge and pulling a Christopher McCandless (into the wild). You can call me whiny if you want but you would just be lying to yourself. It’s like we’re in a choke-hold, held up against a wall and have nowhere to go. We are all greedy, selfish, judgmental, mean people. Myself included. I’m trying despearately to hold onto the values that my parents taught me growing up but it gets harder and harder everyday, when I can’t even feel like I can be involved in important, life-shaping decisions without getting disgusted. We can’t even have an adult discussion in this Country about who will lead us. We can’t just give without receiving anything. Even when we tell ourselves that we are, in reality, we are hoping for something in return. Don’t tell me you’re not like this. I am like this, you are like this, we all are. And money… out of all the things in the world that we just have to deal with…things that will never change and we just have to accept it, money is the absolute worst. I guess it made sense in the beginning, but it didn’t have to. If we all just took what we needed and left the rest for others, we wouldn’t need money. If we all could just share things, we wouldn’t need money. Before money existed (which I know was very very long ago), we would eat what satisfied us, and the rest was up for grabs for whoever else needed to eat. But one day someone took all the corn, leaving none for the next person. And when that next person came along, they said you can have this corn, but only for something in return. Pretty selfish and disgusting behavior if you ask me….thousands of years later and you can’t even go a day without spending a penny. Not because you want to, but because you NEED to. It just gets to me… because I believe I truly am the type of person who would take what I needed, and love to see other people enjoy what I left behind.

Goodnight

Here are the first CD’s I’ve ever owned. I bought them/got them for Christmas all around the same time, sometime in 1994. They were all released that year or in 1993. These were not my introduction to music, in general, because I had plenty of cassettes and listened to the radio, but when I received my first CD player and was able to start becoming a true listener, this was the start of it all.

Enjoy a bit of my personal musical history.

Mariah Carey - Music Box

Green Day - Dookie

Weezer - Blue Album

Candlebox - Candlebox

Oasis - Definitely Maybe

Cranberries - No Need to Argue

Cracker - Kerosene Hat

Throughout school, teachers, friends and family have all been feeding you the same lines. In grade school we were told to do our homework and to “get used to it” because this was a preparation for middle school which they said is much harder and the teachers were much more strict. But by the end of 7th grade, only one thing had changed…and that was just a little bit more hair in some funny places. The teachers weren’t any harder on you and the work wasn’t any more than it was in grade school. What did happen though was that you had to take more classes that you had a feeling would be useless in your life. However teachers told you differently. “These are important classes and they are good preparation for high school,” they’d say.

Then came high school. For eight years teachers have been preparing me for that moment I stepped into the doors and they couldn’t have had it more ass-backwards. High school was a joke. Let me say that I did not finish top in my class or even close. I was your average student, with a below average/average SAT score. But I can’t say that I really worked hard to achieve this. I did what most kids like me did. Homework for the morning classes on the bus on the way to school, in homeroom, or before class started. Then homework for the afternoon classes at lunch. I did my fair share of cheating, but for the most part I was pretty good at being an honest student.

By sophomore year I had began to really figure the whole thing out. I figured out how to get by with barely doing the work needed, and certainly doing half the work that my past teachers had said I would need. Procrastination was my friend and I mean literally my friend. I knew that procrastinating would never effect my grades so it was a pretty simple system.

By senior year, I was checked out. I don’t remember doing a bit of homework at home, or even at all for that matter. I can’t even remember clearly enough to tell you if I even had homework to do. I had survived “the toughest and most important year of high school-junior year.” I had gotten into college and now all I had to do was just not get into any trouble that would keep me from walking at graduation.

The message from teachers in high school was clear. “This is a preparation for college.”

Of course, College was pretty much exactly the same as high school. The only difference was that I had to do more homework and especially on my own, and I was living on my own. But all in all, the teachers were the same, you either got a lazy asshole or a really cool efficient one. But the more time you spend there, you start to familiarize yourself with ways to get around doing work and finding new ways to just “get by.” If I wasn’t in music college, I don’t know if I would have gotten my dad’s monies worth. Lucky for me I actually wanted to do well, so I took it pretty seriously, unlike high school. But after the classes I was into started to end and I started feeling like it was just becoming high school all over again, I took it for what it was worth, and I dropped out. I couldn’t watch myself slack off for another 2 years and risk wasting credits and my dad’s money.

So now let me tell you what I think all of this means.

In grades K-12, it was never a learning process. I strongly believe that not one thing you do is in anyway a preparation for your next round of classes. Obviously it’s helpful to learn how to add/subtract so you can move on to multiplication/division, but there are plenty of things you learn that will never apply to your life. In fact, can you even remember what you learned in those grades?

But I’ll tell you what those grades did for me. They provided me with emotional lessons that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. And it seems sad, but it’s the truth. Being an overweight kid for almost my entire life, I faced plenty of teasing. And don’t you know that I cannot remember a single math formula that I learned or date in World History that I learned, or even the plot to any books I was made to read. But I can’t even count on my hand the names of those I remember calling me fat, the words they used, and in what spot in the school building it happened.

I recently began to hang out again with someone who specifically did something to me that I will remember for the rest of my life. And the funny thing is, I can almost guaruntee that this person doesn’t remember it. This person is a fun person to hang out with now and although I don’t see this person often, I certainly don’t mind seeing this person when I do.

I also recently added someone on facebook that I can remember at least three different times when they made comments to me that were pretty shitty. I haven’t talked to this person in about six years and I wonder what it would be like to talk now. Would this person remember how mean this person was to me? Or would this person still think the same way and hold this prejudice against me?

It’s really hard to say because you meet the same kinds of people in every grade. You would think that people would mature. But there are always the same kids, from Kindergarten to Seniors in college. There are those who are assholes and don’t even care or maybe they don’t even know.

With all the classes that don’t matter through the years, you would think that schools could replace one of those classes with a new class. A class where an open discussion can be had about emotions and how to treat others. We go through life thinking that if we have problems we are supposed to talk to a close friend, family member or a doctor. We are made to feel like feeling bad about something, or being upset is something that should be kept private and told to someone behind closed doors. But yet if we are feeling good, we are supposed to openly show it. In school if you are upset about something, you are supposed to see the school counselor. So you get to feel like a loser and like you have some kind of medical problem, and nervously spill your guts to a strange school social worker, and the root of your problems (most likely other kids in your classes) never have to talk to a social worker about what they feel, because they don’t feel bad about what they do, they don’t know it really hurts people, and they don’t know enough to care.

But I wonder if some of those kids from my school would realize now, some almost 10 or 15 years older, that what they said really hurt me, when they hear me recall the things they said to me as clear as if it were yesterday. I wonder if they would apologize knowing that something they did would be with me until the day I die.

Currently Listening to:

The Hold Steady – Stay Positive