That moment

So somewhere in you're life ,if you're lucky, you had a moment where some piece of work hauled off whacked you between your eyes and opened you up to the idea that you wanted to do that. Or something much like it.

I've had a few of those moments so from time to time I'll share. Hopefully someone out there has an experience or two they'd like to share as well.

Let's get something straight, I love music in general, and  I am by and large not a genre snob, but rock and roll will always be the form closest to my heart. As an emerging adolescent it helped to give me a means and path to take all that emerging energy and put it into something mostly positive.  Like playing the guitar.

To me music had always been some sort of mystery, in junior high I played the saxophone, but while I was an okay player I felt no real connection to it. It was a chore like any other. Those people on the radio or TV obviously had some sort of mystical connection to music that I at the time lacked.

Then the local university began doing a series of one dollar movies at their theatre. So each week I would go and get my mind warped by some new film I would never see on broadcast TV. (Remember it was the early 80's people in town had cable but we didn't.) So I would watch foreign films, horror movies and others that broadened my mind.

So during a summer day I plopped down to go see the latest movie in the series. "The Kids Are Alright" which is not the film about Mark Ruffalo and a lesbian couple, but a documentary about the band the Who.

Now we all have bands and music that touch us and shape us, but my love of the Who borders on religious adoration. Their album Quadrophenia to me was the thing that kept me from going completely nuts on way too many stressed out adolescent nights. So to actually see even a film of them performing was an amazing night for me.

The ending of the film was the moment for me. They're playing "Won't Get Fooled Again." And just after the quiet synthesizer part and Keith's drum solo the venue lights in the film come up as Roger screams "YEAAAHHH!!!!" The camera is at the side of the stage and Pete Townshend is sliding on his knees across the stage which on a movie screen looks like he's about to land in your lap.

To borrow a phrase from UK English I was Gob smacked. It had an energy that to this day still makes my skin turn to gooseflesh.

My dad picked me up and I was losing my mind about this movie. He was always cheerful and quite nice about his son's latest obsession. Then I remembered, my dad had an old sears harmony acoustic guitar in the closet which he hadn't touched since the late sixties.

"Dad can I borrow your guitar?"
"Feel free." He said.

He never got it back. This was at the start of the home video boom, and we had a VHS machine. My folks would rent movies, and I'd rent concerts. One day my dad saw me watching a David Gilmour concert and rewinding the tape over and over so I could learn how to play a part in one of the songs.
That's when he figured this was for real, and started shelling out for lessons.

I still play it to this day, pick it up and play, not just to learn songs but simply to blow off some steam. I lay reasonably well, but in my mind I'm Pete Townshend blasting power chords and writing truth in song form.

It also got me started into writing and art but that's a story for another occasion.

So for the moment I spoke of go to this link and just go to the 7 minute 45 second mark on the video below.


Won't Get Fooled again