Hold this image in your mind for a moment: 12-year-old me, with a full head of curly hair, struggling to strike a power chord on the stage while screaming, prepubescent Jewish girls attempt to rip off my clothing.
This never happened, of course. In fact, I never even imagined it happening. But that was because I came to my rock’n’roll dreams relatively late in life. While most people in high school were fantasizing about being Bruce Springsteen or J. Geils, I was the president of the Latin Club. Or something like that. Sure, I knew about rock’n’roll – I was a Cars fan out in Cleveland before most of you sloths here in Boston had even heard of them – but, being mostly a classical pianist and composer of really, really sappy teenage love songs, rock’n’roll was entertainment for me, not an activity.
My rock’n’roll dreams were born around midnight in a late November evening in 1982, I think, on the floor of my friend Jack’s bedroom. We were hanging out in the dark, thinking late night thoughts, and for some reason, my raison d’etre crystallized for me, right then and there: I was going to be a rock star. But, alas, time had passed me by – I was already too set in my ways to hit the road and live in my car, even as a sophomore in college. I worked on my dream until 1993 or so, when I finally admitted that I was a homebody – and hated the smell of beer, urine and cigarettes (which is sort of the Chanel #5 of the club scene). So instead of retreating to Boston with my tail between my legs, after getting ripped off by EMI and falling off the stage in Sheboygen in an Ecstasy-induced haze while opening for “Hall and Oates, the Geritol Tour”, bitterly biting the heads off gum-cracking tweens looking for the most recent Lady Gaga CD as I man the counter at the last independent CD store in Allston, I get to entertain you lovely folks with tales of my adversarial relationship with plants (see last newsletter).
I indulge in this Proustian reminiscence because of the band Momentum, which opened the Amazing Things open mike this past Thursday. The drummer for Momentum is a fetus named Sam Baler, who is the son of local music dynamo Ruthann Baler. I can’t tell how old they are – everyone under the age of thirty looks like they’re in middle school to me nowadays – but they’re definitely younger than I was when I started dreaming. And here’s the thing: they’re not too bad. Their singer has a genuinely good voice, and their tempos were OK, and nobody lost track of the arrangement (well, almost nobody), and they seemed to be having a decent time. Now, they’re not going to win any prizes for their stage show yet – they’re still a bit too busy consulting with each other to pay attention to the audience – but they’re learning.
I wish I’d started performing when I was young. Sure, I got on stage to give speeches of various sorts, but my first public musical performance was in college, and my first solo performances here in Boston were, in a word, abysmal. I’ve spent the last 13 years figuring out how to keep you lovely people entertained – and while I feel like I’ve learned how to do it pretty damn well, I’ve gotta say that figuring it out at my advanced age has its drawbacks. Sure, I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer – but if I were the regretting kind, I’d sure regret waiting as long as I did.
So rock on, Momentum. By the time you’re as old as I was the first time I got on stage with a guitar, you’ll be grizzled veterans. And all you folks out there, with kids who want a drum set or an amplifier: there’s no substitute for starting young. Just soundproof the den and get the hell out of the way.