Tuesday Night Music Night

Tuesday nights have become music night for me. Doug and I have been getting together now for the past few months one night a week, to shake the rust off and remember what it feels like to play loud music with electric guitars and drums--where there’s really no rudder and we just go along where the music takes us. I play a Gibson “The Paul” that I’ve had since the first time Doug and I played together way back in the winter of 1982. When I met Doug, he was playing a crappy drum set that he had covered in hounds tooth contact paper, and had a propensity for falling apart onstage. Soon after one of those unfortunate gigs he managed to convince his parents to buy him the dark red Tama’s that are still the drums he plays today. Close to when we met each other he put a soft-sticker of Evil-Lyn from the Masters of the Universe cartoon that was popular then, on one of his tom-toms, and I put a green-cloth sticker in the shape of an evergreen tree on the back headstock to my guitar. Both of them are still there and in surprisingly good condition.

I wouldn’t have that guitar today if I hadn’t put that sticker on it.

Back in those days Doug and I played in a band called Natural Causes along with the two Marks, Bader and Holt. After that bands demise, Doug and I moved on to another band, and I bought a new guitar and the Gibson moved back into it case, where it lived for most of my college years. At some point post college, I ran out of money and in an effort to purchase a new amp, decided to sell the Gibson at Sluggo’s. Two years later Doug was looking at guitars and there hanging in the shop was my “The Paul”. How did he know it was the same “The Paul” that I had sold in an unfortunate moment of being poor?

The sticker.

Doug bought it before I even realized how much I missed it. Bought at a time he was flush with cash, he sold it to me years later when he was broke, and now it’s really the only electric I play anymore. Doug hates the fact that he sold it back to me, as it’s one of his favorite guitars as well, but he did, and it’s mine again and I guess he’s learned to live with it.

For the past month, another old friend of ours from the beginning, Heather, has been coming over to play keyboards along with the Prairie Dogs own Dave Stollier to play bass. We’ve been recording everything we do, pulling songs out of the air and working them into some sort of shape. I’m not really sure where this is going to go, or even if we’ll ever know when we get there, but for now it feels good and the creativity is flowing and it’s one of the first all collaborative group of musicians that I’ve played with in more than 20 years.

Last night I looked past the sticker of the evergreen tree on the back of my guitar, right smack into that sticker of Evil-Lyn on the same dark red drum set, and had over twenty years of my life in music flash before my eyes.

Music and life have this one great thing in common. That when you’re at a place where you kinda know where you’re going, but nothing’s really sussed out yet, with no maps or outlines or anything to tell you where your going—it’s a lot more fun to find yourself with old friends who have come all this way with you. All the curves feel comfortable.

And sometimes it’s the little inconsequential things that that tie it all together—little things like a small green-cloth sticker of an evergreen tree on the back of a headstock, or a worn soft-sticker of Evil-Lyn from Masters of the Universe.