The Back Numbers

Dad?

Hmm?

You've got a lot of songs in you tonight.

Joann laughs.

There's a new song title for you.

Or at least a new blog topic.

And he was right. I had a lot of songs in me that night.

We used to have this routine following dinner. Joann would ease her way into the kitchen to start cleaning up the mess I made while cooking. I would ease my way to the couch, place the guitar on my lap and play. Calvin would run and get any one of the number of guitars he had laying about his room and we would play together until it was time to take a bath. It was a good routine, but like all good habits, this one broke under the stress of indifference. Music was left on the sidelines while video games and trashy paperback novels took its place. Netflix on demand didn't help either.

But last night was special.

Special because I had an idea.

Not a new idea. Just an idea that was starting to blossom.

But in order to fully appreciate the idea, we need to go back a few years.

Oh, lets say, a rainy winters day sometime in the late 1800s.

The scene: a library.

Our protagonist: Mark Twain.

The subject: Old Newspaper articles.

While trapped in the library on a rainy winters day, our protagonist sits in a quiet corner of some fancy library leafing through fifty year old newspapers when his genius is struck by the kind of lightening bolt that strikes genius hard.

Following some nasty business with his publishing partners, our protagonist has decided to invest his money in the only sure thing he knows. Namely, himself. In doing so he has decided to take on the mantel of publisher and weed the sticky fingered middle man out of the equation.

But in order to do it right, he has to some research.

Hence the library on a rainy winters day.

Hence ye ole newspapers.

And while leafing through stories on yellowed parchment, he discovers how fascinating it can be to read history in its present voice. Not just some scholarly write up of the past, but the telling of the tale through the urgency of those writers who are living the moment.

See the chief complication of magazines in that or any other era is how to get the readership to read from cover to cover. Readers want the sensational story, the weapons of mass destruction. And what could be more tantalizing in a voyeuristic age than sensational stories back to back with the guilt free knowledge of the future.

Notice how I referred to that time as a voyeuristic age? Well, every age is voyeuristic. And if you don't believe that, then you probably think porn was invented by the internet.

Which it wasn't.

Images of naked ladies predate written language.

You just don't see that side of the wall during the documentaries of french caves.

Anyhoo,

With idea in mind, our protagonist proceeded to name the thing.

He was to call his magazine "The Back Numbers" and it was to be filled with nothing but sensational stories. And would be read cover to cover. And it wouldn't even need writers or an editor. That part had been done. It was brilliant. It would work. But even our protagonist, with all his superstardom powers, couldn't get that humpty dumpty back together. And then the rain stopped.

Flash forward 100 years to 1991.

I was fourteen going on fifteen.

And had written my first song.

It was just a little guitar instrumental, but it had a beginning a middle and an end, and I was proud of it.

In the years that followed, I would write a few songs here and there, sometimes maybe three or four a year. After high school, I began writing in earnest so my little band could play stuff. It was the grunge era, but me and the boys were trapped in our classic rock roots, and having cursory knowledge of musical theory, we hated non-harmonic tones just for the sake of non-harmonic tones. We did own a lot of plaid shirts. And didn't wash our hair. And smoked a lot of pot. But we were more buddies than a real band. And we had seen Spinal Tap enough to know that drummers die in spectacular ways and we were too polite and socially conscience to allow that to happen to any of our friends.

It was during this era I wrote a song called "A Lot of Things" after a particularly embarrassing breakup.

It was the first song I ever wrote that other people seemed to like.

Flash forward fifteen years.

Joann is in the kitchen and I'm on the couch noodling on the 12 string. For giggles I start to play "A Lot of Things"

Crazy how I could still remember all the chord changes and lyrics. I must have played that song so much in the nineties that it had imprinted on my DNA.

What song was that? She asked.

Just a stupid tune from my teenage years. I replied.

I really like that.

Kay.

Later that week, during a show, I decided to try the song out again. I, of course, prefaced the performance by saying that his was a throw back to my early years, and to not take it too seriously.

I really like that song. My best friend said to my wife. He should record that.

And the sudden interest in a stupid old song of mine sparked an idea for the distant future.

Side note: When I day dream, I dream in four tenses. The past, the future, the distant future, and death. My mind is seldom in the present.

But the idea occurred to me that once I am finished with this project, maybe a fun follow up project would be to scour through the weather beaten gems of my past and recreate them with my more wizened ear.

I'll call the album "The Back Numbers"

Patent pending.

So yesterday with the wife taking a nap, Calvin fighting ninjas with his light-sabor, the eighteen year old adrift in the social networking ether, and me with no desire to be productive but needing something to do, I began to scour.

A box of old tapes. An ancient cassette recorder plugged into the computer. A hot cup of tea proceeding a couple of vodka tonics, I began the digital remastering of my past.

And now I believe in God.

With a capital G.

Out of more than thirty recordings of various songs and arrangements, there was not a single hint of the songwriter I would one day become.

At best the songs were derivative. At worst they were outright plaguerisms. My eighteen year old voice was harder to listen to than the eighteen year old voice bellowing Christina Agulara in my present day kitchen.

Oh sure, there were some fun moments. They way Aaron and I experimented with harmony. Jon's guitar solos. And it brings me a certain amount of joy to remember the promise of those moments. I can still see every recording session. Every performance and every painstaking note that we would comb through. My old man teaching me how to write a lead sheet, showing me how to use equipment, sitting on a stool and believing in me.

But here's why I believe in God now:

Had I heard then, what I hear now, I never would have continued.

I would have donated my guitar to the nearest homeless shelter and taken the road most traveled. Never would I have come here, to this moment. I would not be who I am, and the last fifteen years would not have had their chance to mark me as they did.

That is some divine intervention that is.

Or maybe it wasn't god. Maybe it was fate. But that's just another word for god. Or maybe it is just a genetic predetermination that's keeps my closeted CPA boxed and buried beneath old clothes.

Either way, just like Twain's genius idea never made it to print, my sorta interesting idea will never make it beyond an iTune's playlist.

And maybe I should be a little more forgiving of my own eighteen year old son, as my dad was to his. Because there is a lot of life for him to live between then and now. And maybe there is a sparkle of who he is to become in that obnoxious coat of many colors that we all seem to twirl at that age and my eyes are too dull to see it.

Hell,

maybe Calvin could be a ninja jedi after all.