In 1973, I saw myself disappearing. I was a grammar ghost, a sentence-writing cipher with barely a byline to hang my rent on. I knew what I wanted to do – write about music and the people who made it – but I didn’t know how to go about getting there. I decided to send out concert reviews. I couldn’t send an interview because I’d never done one. But I could buy a concert ticket, go see a band, and write about it. That was within my limited financial and professional means.

Magazines did respond; they passed me over. Rolling Stone. Circus. Guitar Player. Creem. Crawdaddy. The memento mori of a career that would never be. Death head rejection letters. I was turned down by the best. There actually came a point when receiving personalized rejection notices made me feel like I was getting closer. After all, someone had to read the story in order to comment on how shitty it was. Did it matter that the work really was wonky? That I was sending live reports to publications that didn’t run that type of article? That I hand-wrote the stories because the letters a and y on my ancient Underwood manual didn’t work? The y wasn’t a problem. But you try and conjure words that don’t contain a certain letter – a vowel nonetheless – and all you can think of are words that do contain the vowel. Anonymity, shine your dim light down upon your stupidest son. I was fading like Levi’s.

Youthful exuberance and blissful ignorance is a heady potable but it will only take you so far. I needed to go farther. Change. A road trip. At that moment, changing who I was on any percipient level seemed about as likely as being published. But I could change where I was and the summer after high school, I embarked upon the wandering nomad-does-Europe incursion. I stuffed a backpack with a pair of jeans – my best faded Levi’s – a couple shirts, my best tale-telling writing pen and Kerouac’s On the Road (what else would you take?) and spent three months in Europe trying to find and lose myself. (more…)