About me.
I am a 37 year old 20 year old. I know it sounds strange, but it is the best way for me to describe where I am at in my life right now. I was born in 1970 in Mountain View, California. My family moved to Idaho when I was very young, about 4 or 5 years old. I have been here ever since.
Being a kid growing up in Boise was a great experience – Boise has a lot to offer a budding young family – good schools, great neighborhoods, recreational opportunities abound, and it’s still (even today) a fast growing town trying hard to(and succeeding in) keeping it’s small town identity and personality intact.
As a teenager in the 80’s, I discovered punk rock early on. Not quite old enough to have discovered it when it was fresh and new in the late 70’s, but the punk rock I found was at a turning point in punk rock – when it discovered it had a social conscience. I was an angry and angst-driven youth, head rife with artistic and social rebellion, and punk rock bands like the Dead Kennedys really rang a bell in my head. These were people speaking out against what they found objectionable in the ways people relate to each other in the world. Face it, people can be pretty shitty – especially through the eyes of a teenager who is already distrustful of authority and mass media. I decided at age 15 that I should start a band of my own. I had no talent that I knew of at the time – and I played no instruments. Another thing that early 80’s punk rock taught me was that this was not as important as just doing it – so I hit up some friends and found one with a cheapo drumset. He said he knew a bass player and my friend Bruce had a guitar and could play some power chords. Next thing I knew, we had a band. We called ourselves “Therapy OD.” We were terrible, but we had heart. Other, more established bands around town started flexing towards us right away. Instead of welcoming us into the fray and taking us under their wings, they spat at us and made fun of us and even rallied an occasional audience against us. “Who would you rather hear – The Grind? or these guys?” I remember it very clearly. The dissonance this created in my head was fierce – now I was not only angry and distrustful of people, but I also had good reason. This gave me enough fire inside to continue to press on despite the resistance we initially encountered as a band.
Through the years I have been in many bands – Therapy OD, Godzoundz, Size of Alaska, Caustic Resin and a few other weird projects thrown in the mix. The inner anger that I harbored had begun to subside by the time I left high school, if through no other means than my spilling it out upon any unwitting listener that may have happened to be within earshot. Partially also because I had figured out that there was more to this than bitching and complaining – I had in fact discovered a purpose within myself that seemed to run entirely of it’s own accord. I continued to learn to play music- I got better and better at it. I was playing the drums and the guitar now – both self taught and learned on crappy thrift-store instruments. It didn’t matter to me as long as I could do it. I bought a two-track reel-to-reel tape machine with an echo knob at a thrift store for $7. I recorded hundreds of hours of weird, crappy music – teaching myself how to overdub – this was a major learning development for me. I could record one guitar track and then play over the top of it. Soon I was buying 4-track cassette machines and learning all of the tricks – recording things backwards and playing them forwards/slowing down tracks and speeding them up again with the pitch knob/adding reverb and delay, etc. I made alot of weird sounds, and my mom thought I was crazy down there in the basement. I can’t believe she just left me to myself down there and tolerated all the noise, but she did. What a trooper.
I met some really strange people playing music. Acid-damaged freakazoids and social misfits the likes of which most people just cannot even imagine. Some of them went on to become very close friends of mine while others just kind of dried up and blew away.
We had an art gallery showing in our apartment one weekend – we had all these insane drawings and paintings and weird music playing and siren lights flashing in the bathroom, and a poetry reading outside in the yard. It was really badass, actually. Not a simpering, limp-wristed poetry reading, but a good old fashioned ruckus of a reading. The turnout was pretty awesome – I remember a local artist that I had respected quite a bit back when I was doing fanzines (he was a few years older than myself) named Sean Wyatt showed up and even signed the guest list. It was a great success, for what it was. The local media never reported on it, or anything that our group was doing for that matter. We lived in a vacuum where the only people into what we were doing were people who had some kind of direct link or connection to us. This number was growing little by little, but we eventually hit the bottom. Friends got into harder and harder drugs – I did not follow them there. Some of them died, some of them moved away and disappeared, and some of them just cleaned up and left us crazies behind for prosperous careers in whatever.
I never got a career. I never made any money. I never did get famous. I never did give up.
I continued to play music and make art. Rough music, rough art. People in Boise didn’t catch on. I began to feel like I was stark-raving mad and standing on a street corner shouting to the oblivious masses rushing by. I formed a sort of “busking group” of friends with acoustic guitars – we performed regularly on a downtown street corner. For a brief period of time, it was our only source of income, really. We were even hired by the city at one point to be paid street performers for a weekend and we would be paid $268. They gave us a little plaque/sign that said we were sponsored, and sent us off to do what we were already doing. The cops were called on us twice that following saturday (they were often called on us by crabby merchants who were sure the reason they weren’t prospering was that we were outside their stores, rolling in the gutters and chasing people down the street making up songs about them. What were they thinking?), and each time we showed them the sign and they left us alone.
Here I am now – 37 years old and I just graduated a 2 year program in graphic design at a local chain college. I attained my associates degree with honors. My decision to go back to school at age 35 was an agonizing one. I had in recent years, started painting houses for a living, and while I was a good painter, I wasn’t much of a money-maker. I had no business sense, and a pretty crappy work ethic because I hated what I was doing. For many years I subsisted in this way – the flexibility of the job (a result of my own lack of exuberance for selling) allowed me to leave town at the drop of a hat and be gone for extended periods of time. I did a lot of touring with Caustic Resin during this time – a million miles driven just on I-5 alone. Up and down the west coast. I did a nationwide tour with them in 2004 – we were on the road for almost two months, in a chevy van – just barely scraping by. Each time when i got back, I had to figure out what in the hell I was going to do to make money again.
I grew so tired of this “working out of necessity” philosophy of mine that I decided that at long last I needed to get some real skills for the real world because this nickel and dime shit wasn’t panning out for me any more. So I went back to school.
Graphic design was a natural fit for me, in that I have always been artistic and I could draw and paint and I understood the basics of good composition. Plus sitting on my can in front of a computer beats the shit out of standing on a ladder in the hot sun with paint chips and dust flying in my face.
The school was good – but pretty overpriced. I had to borrow a lot of money to do this, and it made my gut ache. It still does when I think about it. Thankfully, the bill only comes once a month so I don’t think about it a lot.
+++TO BE CONTINUED+++
Tags: Art, Artist, Design, freak, Grapic Design, Music, Punk Rock, SEO, Street, Street Art
