Memoir Draft #2

Jake Pavlica
Composing the Self
Memoir
2nd Draft

The Wall of Plaid

Finding music was like love at first sight. Better yet, fining music was love at first sound. Like meeting eyes with a beautiful stranger in a crowded place, I became intoxicated with playing music. Before any tangible memories took hold in my mind I can remember being in a dank, hazy bar. My father was on stage, blocked by the swaying hips of the lead singer. I was sat at a nearby table next to my mother, watching the purple stage lights flash across my dads golden cymbals. “The wall of plaid” he used to call it; in reference to the fact that his whole career as a musician had been spent behind people, holding down the groove and keeping the tempo. As a child I felt that this as some normality. I didn’t know anything other than it. I would go to these clubs to watch my dad. I would see the audience dance and sway like blades of grass as the different songs would take hold of them. Beyond of the flash of the guitarist, the sultry bellow of the bass, and the charismatic timbre of the singer was my father. He was the engine of the vehicle. His role in the band was to set the mood. When he played loud, the other band members met his ferocity. When he played slow, the band played slow.
When I was about eight or nine I decided to give music a shot. I had never been attracted the organized sports, though I had done them all. I never like being put on a team that I didn’t pick myself. I didn’t have the fire for it that other kids did, so I turned to the only thing that stood out to me in my short life. I started of with guitar; appealing to some egotistical sense of wanting to be the big, impressive rockstar. I found out that I had no patience to learn scales or learn the intricate finger movement that are an obvious necessity. Frustrated, I turned to the piano, hoping to be able to grasp some of the melodic elements I had hoped to find in guitar. I was met with he same frustration. It then occurred to me that I didn’t need to spend money on lessons, or this other equipment that I didn’t need. I turned to the drums, and I fell in love. The childlike, primal release of hitting something really appealed to me. I liked the noise. It was the first thing I listened to when a song came on the radio, because it was the only thing I would watch at my dads shows. My dad offered to show me some of the ropes. He taught me how to keep time and how to subdivide my body into different, independently operating parts.
I grasped the basics and set my eyes on the greater picture. What is a drummer without a band? Basically just atonal noise. A arrangement was made where a few of my fiends, who had the same fondness for music, and myself would get together with one of my fiends dads to learn songs. Through this I learned how to work in a unit and how to feed of the playing of others. When a song called for a solo, I would lay back in “the pocket” and give the spotlight to the soloist. The glory of drums is to be the mortar that holds the bricks together. When we had all gotten comfortable enough and felt that the experiment had run its course, the group cordially operated so that we could pursue our respective passions.
I set out to form a group of my own. I wanted to find the camaraderie that I saw in other bands as well as the creative environment in which I could express myself and write songs of my own. In a guitar class I was fortunate enough to find just that. The five of us were cut from the same cloth. Different patterns, all of us, but with enough common group and diversity to embark on something special. We rehearsed tirelessly, trying to find out what we really sounded like. We played covers in hopes that we would achieve the level of virtuosity that our idols had. We argued about our direction and the influences we would incorporate. My upbringing swayed me toward classic-rock, like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, while some of my other band mates skewed more to modern music. We started a trial by fire; to just sit down and write an original in hoped to unveil it at an upcoming concert for our school music program. We worked tirelessly on it, directing every piece and practicing it over and over until we could hardly stand the sound of it. When the concert rolled around we were reluctant to even play it. We ascend dot the stage and went through the usual setlist of cover songs we had leaned, all the while dreading what we would do when it came time to bust out the original. We ended our last cover song and stared into the crowd. My drum sticks were slick with nervous sweat as the five of us locked eyes and I counted us into the original. In that moment something clicked. Everyone hit their parts and not a note or beat was out of place. My final cymbal crash hit and the audience erupted into applause. In retrospect I know that the song was really no good, but the feeling of letting people hear a apiece of yourself was so gratifying that I knew we had tapped into something.
For the next four years we were a machine. We rehearsed once a week at a local studio for two and a half hours. We ran through old songs, wrote new ones, returned to old ideas in hopes to forge them into something worthy of live performance. We has fire in our bellies waiting to be expelled. I myself had expanded my scope of music to outside classic rock. I began listening to fusion, jazz, R&B, soul, and funk all in hopes to discover some new tool to put in my arsenal.

To be continued…