The long unfinished history of Gator’s songwriting

Let’s step back in time.  Way back.  Like 1979 back.  I was 12 and had been playing guitar for a year or two, my $35 Acoustic from the MAE store in Ft. Lauderdale.  In 1979 I wrote a song, and played/sang it in music class.  I don’t know what possessed me to do that, but I did…and my friends were amazed at the whole thing.  When I think back, I had a lot of song ideas back then.  I probably was some child prodigy genius to them lol

Alas, it was 1979.  Double-digit inflation 1979.  Stagflation 1979.  Jimmy Carter 1979.  Let’s just say money was tight, and unlike these days people didn’t take any little glimmer of talent in their kids and blow a million bucks trying to make them into the next baseball star or music sensation.  So while I had all these ideas, there wasn’t much I could do with it.  At 13 I “upgraded” to a $50 electric guitar from Sears (with action about as high as a 2 story building), not exactly a shred machine, and after a while I got busy with other things and didn’t do much with it, just messing around from time to time.  I saw some friends going way beyond what I could do so I didn’t see much point then.

I went off to college at 18, and I didn’t take my Sears special with me.  It was embarassing, why bother?  But I met some cool folks in my dorm who played and convinced me to bring that piece of crap up.  I never thought being able to play was a big deal, but to a lot of people it was.  Not that my chops were that great with that beast, but at least I had enough to hang in a jam.  That was my first time actually playing with other people and it was great!  So I started saving my money, and 6 months later with $200 in cash I hauled one of my friends from the dorm to Sabine music to try guitars with me.  It’s hard to try them backwards so I needed a second opinion.  I settled on a Peavey guitar…which ironically I played through an old Gibson amp I had…I was backwards in every sense!

I took that puppy home and swapped the strings to lefty, and man what a change!  I couldn’t reach the upper frets but it played a lot better.  It was fun again.  The next year we got an apartment and would have parties and inevitably somebody would have me pull out the guitar and play while they sang through the stereo.  My first open mic nights!  I had no idea how bad an idea that is.  Guitar was just a thing I did, like skateboarding to class.

In 1989 my life changed forever.  Okay, it changed forever in 1975 when I cut my foot in half in a lawn-mower.  It changed a bit with 3 knee operations, and meningitis in 1988.  1989 was a real life changer though!  For in 1989, I met my future wife and put all these music pieces together.  You see, a friend of a friend had this band, and was looking for a second guitarist.  Oh hell I wasn’t nearly good enough for something like that, I almost didn’t bother.  I asked my roomate (one of my best friends) if he thought I was good enough to do that, expecting him to say “you suck, don’t embarass yourself dude!” and instead I got a very serious “yeah, you’re plenty good enough” which threw me back.  So I tried out with these guys and stuck.  The guitarist told me I needed to go back to Sabine music and get my guitar set up, it would play better.  It did, big time.

We were mainly a cover band, but had a couple originals we played.  Like every cover band, some idiot gets a jones for writing.  That idiot turned out to be me!  I don’t know why, I just had ideas and wanted to work on them.  4 tracks were expensive but I had a cassette deck so I bought another and would record with the bounce between them.  It was tough but for once I was turning my ideas into something I could actually show.  Of course there was no interest from anybody in going down this path, I think it was a little scary for all.  Eagles and Bob Seeger?  No brainer.  Originals?  Man, what if they suck?  Thank goodness money and school got in the way, it was a great excuse for all of us to move on.

Fast forward to 1992.  After a couple very tough years out of school, we finally got far enough over the money hump that I could afford a 4-track.  Sure I was working 2 jobs to get there, but I could now really start writing and recording!  I also bought a MIDI interface and a Roland D-110 which was state of the art or close to it at the time.  I finally got time to record a song I had kind of written around Thanksgiving.  It was simple, a couple guitars and a vocal, but it was real music!  Oh man this is something I could do all the time, I needed to find out how!  But those 2 jobs got in the way and one was starting to become more of a career.  So I put off writing and recording, a little at a time until I figured out I was never going to get to it and sold my 4 track.  I did get to mess around with a friend from time to time in Atlanta at some big studios, so music became an occasional weekend distraction for a few years, but not much more.  I’d write some stuff on the fly and we’d play with the big recording gear.  It was fun.

Let’s skip to 1999.  I moved to Kansas for a high profile job, which left no time for music let alone family.  Lucky for me my wife stuck with me as I rode to the top of the tech bubble in 2000 and down the slide after that.  I had huge success in 2001 despite the crash, only to find my execs decided to ignore me when it came time to take care of the people behind it.  I was madder than at any time in my life but stayed stoic through it all, until I got home one night and had to get it out.  I didn’t feel like drinking, screaming or beating something.  For some reason I was compelled to write a song.  It was the strangest thing, like I was a puppet that had to do this.  I had a nerve issue that made my fret hand feel like it was stuck in a light socket, but something forced me to write this song on the guitar.  So I went down to the basement, found my guitar, and wrote.  When I finished I realized there were a lot of things in life much more important than winning a $1B deal, or getting my just due for it.  It was a wake up call, that one day I’d wake up and it would be too late to do the things I valued.

Fast forward-it took 3 years for things to stabilize and for me to find my way out of that mess!  In 2004 I moved my family back to North Carolina.  Step 1, live where I want to.  Check.  My new boss was a guitar player, and we started having fun conversations about gear and bands.  I wasn’t a gear head and things changed so much since I last cared (that would be 1992 BTW).  I saw this magic bean called a “PODxt” that sounded too good to be true, but the sound samples were amazing.  I picked one up on Ebay in 2005 and was thrown back!  This was the freakin’ sound I had in my head when I was 12!  Damn!!!

When I registered the PODxt they sent an offer for something called “RiffTracker” that you could use to record with.  I checked it out and it looked pretty easy, so I threw the $99 at it.  I decided after all these years of writing songs that I should at least record them, and this would let me do that.  I did a couple goofing around recordings to get the hang of it and it was great.  Before I could get the first song done, work bit me again.  I closed a major deal that had to be delivered by the end of 2005, and unfortunately it highlighted everything that was broken in all our processes.  Things got worse every day, and one day I joked that if it got any worse somebody would write a song about it.  The next day things got worse, and I said I would write a song about it.  Off I went and 2 hours later there was a song about it.  Freaky.  It was a big hit around the office!

February 2006, one weekeind I got some time to record.  I started on the first song I wanted to do and it went great.  The odd thing was I got 3 other ideas recording that song.  The next song I started to work on ended up coming out as a different song idea.  Every time I started to record an old song, a new one came out.  It finally hit me after all these years that this was something I need to do, and it’s been there all along!  At that point I decided I had to see what my potential was to do this “for real”.

Now it’s 3 years later and we’re caught up.  I haven’t come close to recording all the ideas I have, and new ones pop up all the time.  I like to spend hours writing, but life doesn’t give me blocks of time that way.  So I spent a lot of time re-acquainting myself with studio engineering and working projects for others, a lot easier at an hour at a time. 

I’ve been a Taxi member for just over a year, although I haven’t recorded anything new in about 6 months.  Taxi has shown me in no uncertain terms where I stand and what I need to work on…and that without working on this I’m going to stay on the “edge” of success forever.  Unfortunately life has it’s own ideas and so I’m slaving away keeping my family well fed instead of working on songwriting-deja vu!  I don’t see any reason to give up though, the time will come I’m sure.  Whatever talent I have, it’s still in there and just needs that extra bit of work.

And now to summarize:

- The guitarist was a guy named Ed.  Ed ended up owning a very successful studio for several years achieving lots of hits for his clients.  I recently hooked back up with him, and it amazes the crap out of me when he sends his mixes for me to check.  I guess I spent too much time getting up on studio engineering.  Good to have Ed back, btw.

- The guitar set up was done by a guy named Charlie.  Charlie used to play in Blackfoot.  Still the best setup I’ve ever seen.  I flipped it back over for my son, and even right handed it’s still the best I’ve ever seen, and it’s 20 years later.

- Remember 1979, because that’s what they’ll be comparing the economy too in about 18 months.  Barack Obama will replace Jimmy Carter in sentences.  But I’ll set my kids up with good guitars and instruction regardless!

- In 1989 I met my future bride.  She was the singer of the band I joined.  We were married 16 years ago today, and I owe it all to that guitar and Paul McCartney songbook I got in 1979.  Happy Anniversary Kerry!

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