Me and my guitar,
Always in the same mood;
I am mostly flesh and bones,
And he is mostly wood.
Never does grow impatient
For the changes I don’t know, no;
If he can’t go to heaven,
Maybe I don’t want to go, no…
— James Taylor
As many of you know, I am a musician. I am an amateur, to be sure, and not as proficient or dedicated as I was in my younger days, but I’m still enthusiastic about my music and deeply attached to my guitars.
What’s the difference between now and my youth? Why was I “more proficient and dedicated” then? Well, in part, back then music was something I did instead of course work. It was a welcome distraction, a great way to procrastinate, and one of my favorite things to do when high. (Hey, you asked….) These days, I have other distractions and I am far more devoted to my writing than I ever was to school work.
More to the point, though, back in the day, I used to perform regularly. Along with my dear, dear friends Alan Goldberg and Amy Halliday, I was in a band called Free Samples. Three voices, two guitars. Acoustic rock — CSN, Beatles, Paul Simon/Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Pousette-Dart, etc. We performed several times a semester, usually at the campus coffee house, but also at special events during which we shared the evening with other acoustic bands.
I loved performing. Even more, I loved rehearsing and preparing for gigs with Alan and Amy. Making music with the two of them defined my years at Brown. I enjoyed my college years (mostly) and made many of my most enduring friendships in those years. I learned a lot, did well academically, grew up (some — I still had plenty of growing up to do post-college). But my fondest memories, my happiest moments, revolved around Free Samples.
After college, we three went in different directions. Alan and Amy were both in the D.C. area for a short while, and while there they continued to perform together on a regular basis. I remained in Providence and performed there a few times before starting graduate school out in California. I performed once or twice in the Bay Area, but my studies consumed most of my time. And then I met Nancy, and life took me in other directions. Amy continues to sing with a church group. And Alan has become a regular performer in the Albany, New York area as the leader of a band called Innocent Bystanders. He has made himself into an incredibly accomplished musician and performer.
Me? I have played regularly over the intervening years, but pretty much only for myself and my family. Aside from a fun and memorable guest appearance with Alan and his band one night some eight or so years ago, I haven’t performed publicly in a long, long time.
Why am I sharing all of this with you now?
Next week, I will be out in Oregon visiting another couple of dear friends from college — mutual friends of Alan and mine. Alan will be there as well, and over the weekend we will be performing music. Alan’s younger son, Dan, a terrific keyboard player and singer, will be joining us. This will be, as I said, my first public performance in years, and only my second since, well, the early 1990s.
Nervous? Why, yes. Yes, I am.
As I made clear earlier, I am not the player or singer I used to be, mostly because I don’t work at it as I once did. And so I’m afraid I’ll sound bad. Alan and Dan have played together a lot over the past several years, including live performances and online concerts they gave during the pandemic. They sound great as a twosome and I don’t want to ruin that. They have terrific on-stage rapport, just as Alan and I did back when we were young. I don’t want to get in the way of that, either. And I have overwhelmingly positive memories of my performing days. I don’t want to sully those recollections with a performance now that is subpar. I don’t want to embarrass myself.
Put another way, I can think of a hundred reasons why this might be a bad idea.
At the same time, though, I’m also excited about the possibilities. Audiences, as Alan has reminded me again and again when I express my doubts to him, tend to be kind, generous, and forgiving. They aren’t there to point and laugh and denigrate. They’re there to have fun, to enjoy good music, to sing along. They don’t care about the occasional botched lyric or missed chord. Neither do Alan and Dan. The insecurities are all in my head, rooted in my own self-doubt. So the moment I get beyond them, I will be free to savor the experience, to bask in the musical camaraderie, to rediscover something that once meant the world to me, something I have missed terribly for all these years.
I’m trying my hardest to build my anticipation around that vision, that outcome. Because if all goes well, this could be a magical event.
Have a great week.
Within moments, I was gliding over lush rain forest, surrounded by a ghostly mist, utterly alone, and, it seemed, in a cocoon of sensation — birds called from the green below me, the air was redolent with the sweet scents of rain and earth and forest decay, mist cooled my face, the green of the damp foliage was so brilliant as to appear unreal. Time fell away. Yes, I was moving. But to this day, I couldn’t tell you how long it took me to float through that segment of the course. It could have been mere seconds. It could have been hours. It didn’t matter. For the purposes of that experience, time meant nothing to me. I had escaped the tyranny of clocks and calendars.
As I say, if you know me, you probably don’t find this surprising. I have spoken and written about my love of the Grateful Dead, my experiences shivering outside on cold nights, in the dark of Providence, Rhode Island winters, waiting at the Providence Civic Center for Dead tickets to go on sale. People don’t do that unless they have already done damage to their prefrontal cortex. I could tell additional stories. It is possible that I (and select others) was (were) high during at least one musical performance that we gave while in college. I might remember playing Cat Stevens’s hit “Wild World” and literally watching my digital dexterity degrade over the course of the song.
I spent this past weekend going through my photos, processing the images, and selecting a few to put in a rotation of favorites that show up on my computer desktop and in my screensaver slide show. And as I work through these images, I have been thinking about photography in general and where the technology that is now available to photography hobbyists has taken us.
Some stores and processing centers were willing to consider special instructions — “please over- (or under-) expose slightly” or some such. But to be honest, I wasn’t good enough at that point to know with confidence that ALL my images would need the same special treatment, and so I just sent my film in and hoped for the best. More often than not, I was disappointed.
Knowing what I do about the history of photography, I now understand how strange that consumer film process actually was. The old masters of photography — Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and most notably Ansel Adams did not leave it to Kodak or Fujifilm or any other commercial entity to develop their images. They held fast to every step of the creative process, from image capture to production of the final print. Photography as an art form was not limited to a mechanical blink of creative inspiration. Rather, it relied upon a complex and time-consuming manipulation of that initial capture, to turn the photo into exactly what the artist envisioned. Adams in particular used an approach he called “dodge and burn,” relying on a masterful understanding of darkroom tools and chemicals to darken certain parts of an image and brighten others. He and his contemporaries would never have dreamed of placing themselves at the mercy of film development labs.
More, I no longer have to decide before going out in the field what sort of film to use. I can take an image that I know will work in color and follow it up immediately with one that I know I’ll prefer in black and white. Converting an image from color to grayscale is as simple as clicking a box. I love that freedom.
