If you should find yourself in North Olmsted, Ohio with a few extra minutes, you can drive past the North Olmsted high school. There, if you know where to look, you’ll find a brown brick, perfectly centered between two windows on the way to the soccer practice field at the back of the school. Because it is brown, this brick blends in nicely with the rest of the orange and tan skin of the school. That layer of burnt umber, oil-based paint was applied to the wall on a humid, scorching afternoon in August 1990. At the tail end of my time working on the North Olmsted Board of Education summer maintenance crew, I decided to leave my mark on the school in which I grew up and started the path to adulthood.

For three years, I worked alongside a group of college guys my age and a group of men in their 40s and 50s (“lifers” as we called them) who were the full-time maintenance men for the school system. Each year, our summers were spent sweating our asses off in the Ohio heat, primarily painting classrooms and the exterior trim of the schools. My friend, Jeff, landed me the job and I convinced him to persuade Mike Clancy, the head of the maintenance department, to hire Steve, too. Like I said, I matured during that period. I learned how to be a better friend, an okay boyfriend (which would provide me with the lessons to be a good husband someday) and a halfway decent painter. Those laborious days were full of Diner-esque conversations; lazy, introspective moments; and a lot of good music playing from my Emerson dual cassette boom box. Although there were many songs I grew to love during that time, many of those tunes hold only nostalgic value to me these days. However, one song remains a favorite basement song and it is one I would include in my personal top ten: They Might Be Giants’ “Ana Ng”. (more…)

Like many Saturday afternoons, we found ourselves straightening up the house, the children and I. It was June 2007, it was hot, and they were beginning to bicker. What can you expect? The last thing kids want to do on a weekend is clean up after themselves. While I did my best to make sense of the one thousand toys scattered around the playroom, Sophie and Jacob had the simple task of picking up their toys, shoes and movies in the living room. I’m sure at the time I thought we would surprise Julie, who was at work. However, my two darlings began to argue and my nerves were beginning to fray. Instead of erupting and unleashing anger, I decided to alleviate the growing tension with music.

Our house is always filled with music, whether it’s coming from the stereo, the television, Sophie’s room, the kitchen, or through the voices of my loved ones. Julie can sing like an angel and Sophie appears to have inherited this wonderful trait. It’s still too early to tell what kind of singing voice Jake will have, but like his sister, he has a natural talent for keeping the beat (something from the old man, I suppose). I sprang into action and threw in Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full, which had recently been released, skipping the first track and going right to my favorite song, “Ever Present Past.”

The driving rhythm of the song’s opening immediately captured the kids’ attention, especially when their father decided to revisit the high stepping of his high school and college marching band days.  Jacob cracked up, his cheeks full and eyes squinting, while Sophie broke into a gorgeous wide open grin that lit up her deep blue eyes.  “Follow me!” I commanded and we created our own parade, weaving down the hallway, through the kitchen, around the playroom and back into the living room.  At the song’s bridge, I shouted, “Crazy dance!”  The three of us twisted and turned, jumped and wiggled like loons.  When the instruments suddenly stopped just before the final verse, we froze until the music restarted.  Our parade picked up once again moving through the house.

And then it was over.  Two minutes and fifty-six seconds of pure bliss created a memory that will stay with me a lifetime. (more…)

The death of Stevie Ray Vaughan struck a deep chord in me. Back when he was making his breakthrough in the early ’80s, an upstart Akron radio station, WONE, became an early supporter of the guitarist and his band, Double Trouble. I had listened to ONE since it took to the airwaves; therefore, I quickly became a fan of Stevie Ray and his remarkable talent. As his legend grew and his life story became available (this was before the Internet, so whatever information you learned about your favorite artists generally came through the voice on the radio), I soon learned that Stevie Ray had an older, less flashy brother, Jimmie, the longtime axe slinger for the Fabulous Thunderbirds. The T-Birds were enjoying their own wide success in the mid-’80s, with their “Tuff Enuff” single and album. As I found out more about the Texan brothers, I became fascinated at how the Vaughan brothers it mirrored my own life in a small way.

I grew up worshiping my older brother, Budd, especially his drumming skills. He is a more nuanced drummer than I ever was, and much better technically. Budd had a knack for playing any song thrown in front of him, be it Rush, Chicago, Missing Persons or even the fusion jazz of Maynard Ferguson. You name it, he had the patience and diligence to master what was on the record before making it his own. That he was always a beatkeeper first, choosing his moments to display his own pizzazz, speaks volumes about his personality: Finish the job at hand before showing off and having fun. I, on the other hand, never met a drum fill I didn’t love, or an empty space in the music to place them. It would be years later before I would appreciate what Max Weinberg and Stan Lynch were doing with the E Street Band and the Heartbreakers, respectively. You can see how I would correlate my life with Stevie Ray’s: Younger brother who lives in the shadow of older, more talented brother, goes on to become flashier musician, maybe even trying to outshine the sibling. That’s not to say I was bitter. Hardly. Like Stevie Ray, if anyone asked me who my influences as a drummer were, at the top of my list was Budd (just like Stevie always mentioned Jimmie as one of his).

On August 27, 1990, Stevie Ray boarded a helicopter to fly to Chicago after finishing a gig with Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray and Jimmie. The helicopter crashed in the dead of the night and Stevie Ray Vaughan died at age 35.

(more…)

Late. I was late getting to the damn airport. If I hadn’t stopped by the library to renew that Le Carre book, I would have been on the road already. During the long drive on the constricted freeways, I spun the music of Neil Finn. It was the spring of 2007; Finn’s solo works and the music of his underappreciated band, Crowded House, had been providing me the soundtrack through a terrible three-month depression. I had experienced dark clouds over my head many times in my life, but nothing like this. I could not shake my sadness. Each morning, I awoke on the verge of tears. Not a day went by when I didn’t feel like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, having to find a secluded spot at work just to cry for a few minutes.

I wanted it to end, yet I couldn’t figure out how to make it end. I had my music, yes, but the melancholy melodies of Neil Finn and company only seemed to open the floodgates. One particular song accompanied my spiral downward and was there when I felt the weight of the world begin to ease, when I could feel myself beginning to heal. That song was “Last to Know,” from Finn’s second solo album, One All (or One Nil, if you bought the original release). It’s just about one of the most beautiful tracks you’ll ever hear. It seemed to capture the exact way I was feeling. The way the music shuffled around was like the way I got through my days. I wasn’t so much alive, but just shuffling about. And when Finn cries out during the bridge, that was my like my aching soul trying to break free.

But it was Finn’s composition, through repeated listens, and a surprise visit by my closest friend, Steve, that helped ease my pain and lift me from that dreary haze.

I had not seen him in several years; the last time was during a Christmas trip to Ohio. His unexpected visit came on the heels of a conference he was attending up north. He opted to fly down to Los Angeles on a Friday night and stay the weekend with our family. We were to take in a Dodgers game the night he arrived, and a large gap in time existed between when his plane landed and the first pitch. We’d have some time to kill before fighting traffic through the heart of the city. Of course, I was running late. In the stop-and-go surges of rush hour, I cranked the volume on Neil Finn. I wanted whatever sorrow lingering inside me to push itself out. Luckily, Steve’s plane was later than I was, and I parked the car a mere few minutes before my lanky pal walked into baggage claim. Man, he was a sight for sore eyes. There are people in my life that, when we get together, we don’t miss a beat. It’s like we saw each other yesterday, and when they leave, it never feels like a true goodbye. It feels like I’ll see them tomorrow or the next day. That’s how it’s always been with Steve. (more…)

The first full-length screenplay I wrote was a semi-autobiographical account of an out of control party I threw in the summer of 1987. My script was an attempt to capture a time and place, much in the same way George Lucas and Richard Linklater had done in their wonderful films, American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused. That summer in ’87 was my first taste of independence. While my parents were vacationing in Hawaii, my brother (a recent college grad) was the sole adult supervision. Needless to say, I came and went as I pleased, cruising around in The Whomobile and consuming as much alcohol as possible (between work hours at The Original Cookie). The trouble with my screenplay wasn’t so much the dialogue or the plot; rather, I never quite achieved capturing the mood of that summer the way I’d hoped to.

The first couple drafts contained a scene that took place in a Denny’s restaurant, some time in the early morning, after the party had ended. The scene was drawn from the many late nights my friends and I hung out in the local Denny’s, idling away the wee hours of the morning on Friday and Saturday nights. Back then, smoking was still permitted in restaurants, and even though I was a non-smoker, several of my friends had the habit. This meant that we all wound up sitting under a two-foot cloud of cigarette smoke devouring our Moons Over My Hammies, drinking Cokes or coffee, and trying to make each night last until the sun came up or until someone collapsed from exhaustion or drunkenness. In the best of all worlds, had my script been produced, the film would have featured the immortal Otis Redding singing “Cigarettes and Coffee” under the scene. Redding’s soulful ballad was able to do everything I was trying to do in 100 pages, but in a mere 4 minutes. With its plodding drums, dreamy horns and Otis’ impassioned singing, this song sounds like it really was recorded sometime in the AM, with a microphone set up in a corner booth and the wait staff standing by to pour another cup of joe.

I had just discovered Redding’s music during the winter of ’86 and ’87, so it felt new and fresh, despite having been recorded twenty years earlier. Coming of age in the 1980s, actually hearing Redding’s catalog on the radio was pretty unusual. With all great ’60s soul relegated to the “oldies” stations that were suddenly taking over the frequencies of former AOR stations, the best you might hear from Redding was his posthumous triumph “(Sittin’ On the) Dock of the Bay.” Moreover, most of the Stax label masters like Sam & Dave, Wilson Picket, Carla Thomas and Joe Tex received little to no airplay ( “Soul Man” on occasion, or “Land of 1000 Dances”). What you heard was the Motown sound of soul. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but once I unearthed the rough, gritty soul from Stax records, Motown felt a little… safe. (more…)

I’m not sure when my brother, Budd, brought home his copy of John (then) Cougar Mellencamp’s Uh Huh. The cassette showed up in the basement one summer, a year or so after its release. Like most of America, I was a big fan of “Pink Houses,” and I was thrilled that I now had a copy of it and his other big hits from that album, “Crumblin’ Down” and “The Authority Song.” At this point in his career, Mellencamp was establishing himself as a “legitimate” artist, hence the use of his real name (the record label wouldn’t allow him to ditch the “Cougar” until years later, for fear record buyers might get confused….huh?) In addition, there was the radio staple (at least in Cleveland), “Play Guitar,” on Side Two, which borrowed heavily from Them’s “Gloria” (Mellencamp often slipped the “G-L-O-R-I-A’s” into his concerts during that number).

The rest of Uh Huh is filled with more of the same ’60s garage band rock that Mellencamp still champions, as well as one of Budd’s favorite tunes, the John Prine co-penned “Jackie-O.” As a drummer, listening to the masterful Kenny Aronoff wail on this album was one of the greatest pleasures of my adolescence. You don’t even have to be a drummer to appreciate someone who plays so damn well — Aronoff is truly one of rock’s best drummers, and helped define Mellencamp’s sound. Another thrill was hearing one of the band members mutter, “Hey, what the fuck” at the start of the second to last song on the LP, “Lovin’ Mother for Ya.” That song, with its obscenity, driving beat and timbales (you have love the timbales) gave me good reason to jam each and every time it came on. And having wailed on my own drums to “Lovin’ Mother for Ya,” I’d cool down and unwind to what would become one of my favorite basement songs: the last track on Uh Huh, “Golden Gates.” (more…)

Damn right, “My Sharona.” The Knack’s one monster hit, co-written by lead guitarist Berton Averre and singer Doug Fieger, has kept my heart pumping and my hands pounding on steering wheels, tabletops, and drum sets for nearly 30 years. While some may write it off as slick corporate new wave rock, the drive and sexuality of that song has always been appealing to me. Even as a prepubescent kid growing up in northeast Ohio during the late ’70s, something about this song felt… primal. I’m sure it had something to do with Fieger’s panting and moaning. And then there’s the drum part:

“Dum dum thunk, dumdum thunk, dum thunk, dum dum thunk, dum dum dum thunk, dumdum thunk…”

The moment you hear Bruce Gary’s drums and the Prescott Niles bass line, this infectious song gets into your head and under the sheets. Is it any wonder I listened to this song over and over again downstairs in my parents’ basement, and later, in the musky basement bedroom I called home in college?

Like so many, I first heard “My Sharona” when it was a radio staple back in 1979. I loved the melody and had no clue what Feiger was singing about. I never caught the line “runnin’ down the length of my thigh, Sharona”; apparently my parents never caught on either, because they never switched the station when we were on a long-ass cross country vacation and the song began playing. Among the disco beats and soft rock ballads of that time period, Averre’s masterpiece was a breath of fresh air, even if it felt like derivative bubblegum (albeit soft-core) pop rock. The song was so huge, it even propelled the follow-up (and dirtier) single, “Good Girls Don’t,” into the top 20 and made The Knack’s debut album, Get the Knack, a smash success, spending five weeks at Number One. This band was destined for greatness. Or not. (more…)

And so, for no real reason besides pride and misunderstanding, my best friend, Steve, and I had a falling out when we were 17. It wasn’t your typical bloodied knuckles, black-path fight after school that drove us apart. I’m sure that Steve inadvertently brushed me off in favor of his high school girlfriend and that I took it the wrong way. So I decided that I would wait. I would wait for him to initiate the next time we got together and and instead drank warm Bud Lights or kicked back in the basement and idled away the hours listening to music. I was a stupid teenage guy and I let my own self-importance get the better of me. Face it, friends, when faced with the option of hanging with your bud or possibly getting to third base with a 17-year-old cutie, a guy’s going to choose the latter. What should have been resolved within a day or even a week went on for months. Another long, dreary Cleveland winter passed and the two of us did not speak, not even cordial “hellos” in the hallways. Silence. When asked by mutual friends what happened between us, I could only reply, sadly, “I don’t know.” In truth, I really didn’t know. Back then, I wasn’t wise enough to understand that people don’t have to speak every single day to remain close and important to each other. Alas, that was high school, though. I don’t think I knew any kid my age with the wisdom of an adult, John Hughes films notwithstanding.

One Saturday night, we wound up at the same small get together in someone’s living room. In the background, the television was tuned to MTV and the Pete Townshend Deep End Live concert special. Townshend’s presence was strangely appropriate. He was an artist that Steve and I had discovered at the same time, admiring his long history of introspective lyrics and ear bleeding guitar chords. Steve was a great fan of Quadrophenia and Empty Glass, while I enjoyed the anthems on Who’s Next and White City. We both agreed that All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes was his finest work as a solo artist. That night, as we sat uncomfortably in the same tight quarters, I wanted to nudge him and make a comment about drummer Simon Phillips or about how David Gilmour’s guitar playing really suited Townshend’s theatrical music (Gilmour was playing lead for this show). But we kept our distance and the rift continued. When we would eventually reconcile, it would actually be an obscure of Pete Townshend song, “Life to Life,” that would give me the courage to take the extra steps needed to make sure our friendship healed.

Soon after the shared Townshend experience, I approached Steve during our high school’s winter formal. Something inside of me, perhaps the realization that I’d been an ass, compelled me to break the ice.

“We should talk sometime.”
“Yeah.”
“Cool. See ya around.”
“Sure.” (more…)

Slow dancing. It was something Julie and I did more frequently in the early years of our marriage. There we’d be, alone in our apartment, holding each other and swaying to the music of Bonnie or Shawn or Bruce or Ella. As one of our favorite artists sang, we could hear the helicopters flying over North Hollywood or rowdy neighbors in the courtyard below. In those moments, the outside world would fade away and it just the two of us in our own paradise. As our lives became busier with work, school and children, those simple times became more infrequent. These days our nights together are spent filling in the details of our spent days. We catch up with each others’ previous twelve hours before sinking into the couch for an hour of mindless entertainment on the television. With the kids asleep in the next room, playing music rarely occurs. The days of dancing seemed far gone, until we heard Patty Griffin’s beautiful “Heavenly Day.”

Like so many, we became fans of Griffin’s music after her first album, Living With Ghosts, was released in 1996. With just her guitar and voice, that record ranks as one of the best debuts in modern rock history. Griffin’s songs “Every Little Bit,” “You Are Not Alone” and the tragic “Poor Man’s House” received minimal airplay on the L.A. radio station we listened to back in the mid 90’s. After the station was sold (and changed formats) and Griffin’s subsequent albums were ditched in the corporate downsizing of A&M Records (who dropped her after Universal bought the label), finding her music became a challenge. Luckily, there were champions of Patty Griffin out there, including Emmylou Harris, the Dixie Chicks, and some dude named Jeff Giles. She found a new home at Dave Matthews’ ATO Records, which has allowed her a chance to continue growing and succeeding as an artist. What I adore about Patty Griffin is the conviction with which she sings every song. Few artists can match her intensity and soul both on record and in concert (where she excels). Since signing to ATO, Griffin has released three stunning albums: 1000 Kisses (2002), Impossible Dream (2004), and Children Running Through (2007), the CD where you’ll find “Heavenly Day.”

The execs at ATO are savvy enough to realize that the old models of getting a musician’s work into the public’s ear have fallen by the wayside. Thus, they bombard music supervisors for film and television series with their artists’ repertoire. It was while watching a quirky little romantic series called Side Order of Life that Julie and I first heard “Heavenly Day.” Among other topics, this Lifetime series dealt with one character’s battle against a brain tumor. During the final moments of one particularly emotional episode, this character decided to take charge and cut off her curly locks just before starting chemotherapy. She would not let her disease control her life. However, when it came time to cut her hair, she couldn’t lift the scissors. Her best friend, standing by, lifted the shears for her and proceeded to start the cutting. Against these images, “Heavenly Day” played. While the images were sad to watch, Griffin’s lyrics provided an optimistic tone and perhaps revealed the ill woman’s inner optimism. (more…)

Around this time last year, I was in the throes of a terrible depression. It was unlike any wave of emotions I’d ever been through in my entire life. For four long months, I would struggle to get through my day without turning into Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, having to sneak away and cry for ten to fifteen minute jags. I never analyzed the cause for my mental woes, but I have a pretty good idea what was weighing heavy on my mind. Every year at this time, as we approach the CF Great Strides walk, I can’t help but get a little overwhelmed. 2007 just happened to be particularly difficult.

I wrote the following Basement Song entry while I was slashing through this depression with a dull butter knife. This week, I wanted to revisit this entry because a) I never had a chance to actually share the song with any readers and b) most of the emotions I wrote about still exist. This song, “The Greatest Gift,” continues to move me whenever I hear it, especially the intricate guitar playing by the late Kevin Scott MacMichael (formerly of Cutting Crew). What I poured into this entry came out in one twenty-minute sitting. I decided to repost it as originally written without any further edits or polishes. I hope you enjoy it (and the song).

What can you say about a song that is like a parasite? It latches into your brain, your heart, your soul, and grows tendrils, sucking the life out of you. It becomes everything that you are, everything you think about, everything you want. A song like that is what I find so wonderful about music. A song like that is what loving music is about. It’s not something you can explain. Good song. Bad song. It’s your damn song, so who gives a shit what everyone else says. A song like that is magic. A blessing and a curse. A song like that is the definition of a basement song.

Last week, I received a copy of Robert Plant’s Fate of Nations album, released in 1993. I was riding a wave of euphoria — life felt good after several weeks of depression. For those of you who keep up with the blog, you know why I’m depressed so much. You may not understand it. I don’t even understand it most of the time. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but I continually find myself sinking to such depths of despair that I don’t know if there is a way out. For the first time in my life last week, I actually saw how a rational person might think taking their own life could be a means to an end. I would never do that, but I understood how they could feel that way. (more…)