A Life Beyond Climbing: Music

I feel motivated to write this today in an attempt to persuade you the reader that yes, indeed I do have a life beyond climbing.  So I figured I'd cobble together a history of music's influence on me.  My earliest experiences with making music were probably banging on the old piano at my parent's house as a child.  I took piano lessons for several years when I was younger and the love of music was ingrained.



Over the years I played several different instruments and was once the lead singer in a short-lived band towards the end of high school (1996).  We were called Spline.  I have no idea how the guys really came up with that name.  After our first gig, playing at Stephens City's (VA) Newtown Festival, I was asked to learn rhythm guitar.  Our lead guitarist helped teach me some easy power chords and then I just took off with it.  I scraped some money together and bought an Ibanez electric guitar from the Guitar Studio in Winchester, VA.  It was cobalt blue and I loved that thing.  Unfortunately, buying an amp was outside my means of funding so I could only plug-in to an amp when I was at our rehearsal spot: our drummer Matt's basement.  I'd sit in my room back home picking away, imagining what stuff would sound like through the amp and with distortion.  I remember hanging out in a few music shops drooling over amps and thinking somehow I'd be able to get a really nice one at some point.  

That band was never really going to last though.  The last gig I remember was a Battle of the Bands at Sherando Park.  We definitely didn't suck, it was just that our musical tastes were very different and writing styles ended up being a mish-mash.  I was definitely into the grunge music of the 90s and had a lot of influence from heavier metal like Metallica and Megadeth.  But honestly there was this whole other completely different genre of music that I much more readily identified with, that of the singer-song writer types.  So I left the band and within a few months I traded in the Ibanez on a red acoustic Washburn that I still play today.

Most of my early musical influences came from dad.  When I was growing up, my dad worked for the local radio station, WINC.  I remember being around a lot of the pop music of the day as well as lot of older stuff from his generation (50s and 60s).  Every now and then I'd go with my dad to the studio and watch him make commercials on the old reel-to-reel setup.  It was really cool to see him work the dials and sliders, see the needles jump every time he spoke into the mike.  The next studio over was the main broadcast area.  I would go in there and hang out some times as long as I could keep quiet when the DJ was "On-Air" (Ever hear of Barry Lee?  My dad and him were really good friends.  He has one helluva a chili party every fall :-).  So I was picking up on everything from Johnny Cash and Roger Miller to the Hollies, the Eagles, and a host of 80s artists that made airplay on WINC.

About the time I left the band I ended up talking with one of my old Scout leaders about music.  I stopped over at his house (the next street over from my parents old place) one day and he played a bunch of old tapes for me.  Lots of that stuff I'd heard on the radio before but never knew who was singing it or I just hadn't heard all this other stuff that the artist had written (this was before the days of iPhones and Soundhound).  Jim Croce and the Eagles were two of the big ones I remember picking up from him.  In addition, I somehow got hooked on Billy Joel...probably because I'd played piano and heard some of his stuff.  Once you hear someone that sounds pretty darn good you want to see if the rest of their stuff measures up.  It was the same way with Jimmy Buffett.  I heard Margaritaville on the radio one day when I was at work and asked a co-worker who was singing.  I asked dad about it and of course he knew of Buffett...couldn't believe I didn't.  I was hooked and instantly became a Parrothead.  I picked up a bunch of his old music and starting playing that.  The music was easy, but Buffett was never really about intricate music.  He was telling a story.  And as it's quite obvious, I like good stories. :-)

So with all that, I had quite collection.  I listed to a lot of music back then...it was just part of my life.  Climbing wasn't anywhere near a serious endeavor at that point (I played soccer all through high school and that was pretty much my life as far as sports goes).  The guitar went with me as well for my 2 years to finish up college at Radford.  I'd go through spells of playing here and there.  Mostly from back at that time I have a couple notebooks full of half finished songs or just random thoughts on how something could sound. 

I never learned to really read sheet music for guitar like I could for piano.  Reading tablature (tabs) for guitar was just seemingly so much easier.  Of course, you have to know the strumming or picking patterns in order to play, but most are easy enough to figure out.  Learning solos or specific riffs takes a bit more time, but with practice you can pick those up too.  Somewhere along the way I learned to fingerpick fairly well.  That definitely took some time and effort to learn.  But as with anything you want to be proficient at, practice, practice, practice.

I never was really all that comfortable playing in front of people, but I did have one recurring "gig" throughout a few of my years working at summer camp.  Somewhere I picked up a copy of altered lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind".  They were changed to have a Boy Scout theme.  But I knew that if I really wanted to play that song like Dylan I needed the harmonica too.  Fortunately I had taught myself to play harmonica years earlier and was fairly good at it.  So it was just a matter of putting the two together and getting that little over-the-neck holder for the harmonica, just like Dylan.  I was nervous as hell the first time I stepped out there to play in front of the entire camp at the Sunday evening campfire.  But I somehow pulled it off and got a rousing applause.  Surprisingly I figured out I had some actual talent.

These days I have binders full of tabs of music from a rather wide variety of stuff.  Some recent ones would be "I Will Wait" by Mumford and Sons (has a rather difficult strumming pattern that took a few hours of practice to get down), "Gracious" by Ben Howard (has some interesting chords and a really nice challenging fingerpicking rhythm), "Further On Up The Road", originally by Johnny Cash (more recently popularized by Bruce Springsteen on his album, 'The Rising'), "Let Me Go"  by Cake (just has a really cool riff to open the song after the initial intro), and "Jumper" by Third Eye Blind (it was just stuck in my head one day and I decided I wanted to know how to play it).

For now, I still play that old Washburn acoustic.  But I'm thinking it might soon be time to pick up something else...something electric again.  I've always wanted a nice Les Paul and I've looked at several different models.   Picking up a nice tube amp would be good too.  Tube amps just sound better with the kind of music I like to play.  I mostly play covers but I do have some of my own stuff.  It's been awhile since I've written but who knows...maybe I'll be inspired by something or someone to write some stuff again.  Since it's fairly late this evening as I'm ending this entry, it's only fitting to leave you with a quote of my favorite song for ending an evening of playing:

"Goodnight you moon-light ladies.  Rock-a-bye Sweet Baby James.  Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose.  Won't you let me go down in my dreams.  And rock-a-bye Sweet Baby James." - James Taylor