
CHAPTER 2: CHOOSING A PATH
LOUIS L’AMOUR, BASS FISHING AND THE NBA
In 1995 my family was in America; It was the year after I’d graduated high school and I was deciding what to study at University the following year. I chose Biology, mainly because I had visions of myself out in the bush somewhere being all manly, alone and at one with nature. I had enjoyed Biology in school and had been good at it. I also knew that I didn’t want to work in an office. I had no interest whatsoever in marketing or managing or business.
I think that what I was really interested in was not Biology but the freedom and romanticism that it represented to me. As a teenager I read a lot of Louis L’Amour novels. All of his books are essentially the same: There is a main character who is tough. As Mr L’Amour would say; his characters have ‘sand’. This main character is usually a rambling, gambling, cowboy who knows good horse flesh when he sees it. He was always a gentleman but he knew how to fight with his fists and shoot guns. In fact he was usually a really fast draw when it came time to whip out a pistol. He could fashion a travois, a lean-to, a dug out canoe or even a cabin with his bare hands and a good hatchet. He slept on willow branches under starry skies, surviving on hard tack, jerky and coffee. He could read the character of a man in a glance as if he were a signpost. What he lacked in senses out in the wilderness, his trusted horse made up for with it’s ability to sense danger, blood or water in the air. He was wary of casual women and always fell for a strong, plain one who was a no-nonsense type. She could make a mean biscuit and also break wild horses if need be. The woman was often a widow who was in immediate danger of attack from Indians or evil cattle ranchers looking to steal her land and livestock, and probably kill her in the process. At some point in the story the main character would be stranded in the desert and would have to survive by his knowledge of the land. He had a map of various arroyos, buttes and plateaus in his head and he knew the ancient Indian trails and thus would be guided to secret watering holes at the eleventh hour when he was minutes away from death. Miraculously, he would make it back to town and be nursed back to health by the aforementioned widow and would regain just enough strength to shoot all the bad guys in the final showdown. Finally he and the woman would kiss and live on to fight other battles.
I wanted to be those men! I wanted to be the guy who wandered about gambling and fighting, surviving in wild America and saving women from certain death. The character of Tristan Ludlow, played by Brad Pitt, in the movie Legends of The Fall is sort of like the guys in the Louis L’Amour books. Brad plays almost the same guy, Paul Maclean, in A River Runs Through It. These characters were strong and untamed and I wanted to be them.
For me , Biology was a path towards living that wild and romantic existence; conducting research in Africa somewhere, living in a tent, surviving by my whit. The realities of life, and especially of life as a Biologist, hadn’t yet dawned on me and I was attracted to the idea of spending lots of time away from cities and jobs and people. It hadn’t occurred to me that these men were lonely and socially dysfunctional. So in 1995 I sent in my application to study towards a Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Environmental and Cell Biology.
The truth is that, at the age of 19, I really didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with my life. I hadn’t yet discovered my true self and I hadn’t ever really loved anything enough to want to do it as a job for the rest of my life. I do remember fantasizing about playing basketball in the NBA when I was in high school. I practiced free throws a lot. I had a pretty decent shooting average as long as I was just shooting in my driveway and wasn’t playing a game. As soon as the whistle blew and I was in the middle of the action everything became a blur and I never really knew what to do with the ball when I got it. I had no poise. Mostly I would dribble some and pass it off to someone else.
I was one of the hardest working players at practice though and I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason I was chosen for the first side during my senior year. Honestly, none of us were incredibly good players but I was definitely not the shining star of the lot, except for maybe in the “positive attitude” area. When the coach said, “Run!”, I ran and I did so with as much guts as I could muster. I tried my best and never complained about drills or fitness training.
I told my dad that I wanted to play in the NBA and he told me that I wasn’t ever going to be good enough. That probably wasn’t the right thing for him to say but it was definitely the truth. I’m a 6 foot, 1 inch, modestly athletic, white man who mostly got beat in one on one.
I also went through a serious bass-fishing craze and wanted to be a fishing guide. Fishing for a living seemed like a dream job. If I’d been raised in the South near a huge lake and if my folks had had a bass boat sitting in the driveway it might have worked out. As it was I had to rely on buddies with boats and cars if I wanted to go fishing. During college I had a couple of friends who were weekend warriors of the lake and the three of us annoyed everyone we knew with our private jokes and fishing talk. We referred to ourselves as Team Shimaiwa, which was a conjugation of the two brands of fishing tackle that we perceived to be the best, namely, Shimano and Daiwa. We were incredibly entertaining if you happened to be one of the three of us. I actually kept a fishing journal in which I would write about what lures I was using when I caught a fish. I would notate the weather conditions and the time of day and any other potentially important factors so that I could improve my catch rate. In the height of the fishing frenzy, I and my friends went wading, chest deep into the sharky waters of the Durban harbor, wielding 9 foot, graphite fly-rods, with a thunderstorm rolling in on the horizon. There was a channel that had been dredged out of the sand and the legend was that if you caught it at the right tide it was teeming with predatory fish that would hurl themselves onto your fly. The thing is, I’m still not convinced that any of us actually knew where that channel was. None of us ever did catch a single fish from that harbor. We did a lot of fishing in those days and had many awesome adventures to lakes and rivers but somehow the fishing bug ran it’s course. I woke up one day and realized that I probably wasn’t going to fish for a living and I was o.k. with that.
The NBA and fishing aside, there was never really anything that got me very excited. Certainly not excited enough to think I’d found my path and career in life. By the time I’d finished high school and had to figure out what I wanted to study I was ill-prepared to do so. My choice of Biology was kind of like when you have to choose between a couple of movies that you don’t really want to see but you’re on a date, so you pick one. Choosing Biology as a course of study, I was saying to the world, “I guess this will do.” I wasn’t aware of any of that at the time. I was just in a place where I had to do something and Biology seemed like the natural choice for me then.
DISCOVERING THE RHINOCEROS
During the first semester as a Biology student I discovered that I was bored. I was having a hard time imagining a future in which I made a living doing biological things. I didn’t like the day to day of it and I didn’t really like thinking of myself as a Biologist either. So, of course, I resolved to see it through to the end.
That same year I started learning to play my dad’s guitar. He’d fiddled around with it over the years and had written a couple of songs. Anytime he played I was drawn in and awed by his ability. I remember lying in bed at night listening to him playing in the downstairs lounge. My initial attempts to learn to play myself were overcome by the assumption that I couldn’t play. I became easily frustrated and would give up. But I kept returning to it and eventually became proficient at a few chords.
I’d been playing for a few months and I only knew a few chords when I began writing songs. Something about that felt natural. It made sense. I’m not saying that my early attempts at songwriting resulted in great songs but it seemed like something I just knew how to do. It seemed like it was something that I should have been doing long before I ever started.
What’s more, I found the process of songwriting to be exhilarating. Starting out with a blank page and a melody in my head and working out a few lines to go with it was exciting. The challenge of getting the message down and fitting it into the form of a few verses and a chorus was something that I enjoyed. Often it wasn’t even a case of working to create something specific, but was instead a process of discovery: I wasn’t sure what I was writing until it was on the page as a finished verse or chorus. Finishing a song and playing it for the first time was more fun than watching t.v. so I’d often just write songs instead.
I was thinking a lot about my future that year. I was wondering what to do with my life. Most of the time that process left me in a kind of haze. I just couldn’t imagine any kind of normal job that I really wanted to do for any length of time. But I was aware that I’d discovered something in songwriting that felt very important to me.
I am in the habit of retreating to comforting activities when I am not enjoying other areas of my life. So during that first year of Biology I would often come home and go to my bedroom and play the guitar for a while. It was a way to switch my brain off. One of those afternoons, somewhat suddenly, I knew without hesitation or reservation that writing songs and playing them for people was the only thing I’d ever want to do. I knew it! Without any doubt in my mind, I knew it. I wasn’t prepared for it. I hadn’t had the necessary training. I hadn’t put in the required practice. I was completely naïve about it. But in spite of the doubts about my abilities I knew that there wasn’t anything else I wanted to do. That moment stands as one of a very few moments in my life when I was completely and utterly certain.
I remember watching the Challenger space shuttle exploding in 1986 on my Grandparents television set in Knoxville, Tennessee when I was 9 years old. I remember, years later, watching the airplanes crashing into buildings on September 11th, on a different television set, at our home in South Africa. When that happened I’d been at work and my brother called me to tell me a plane had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. I watched it happening on CNN later when I’d gone home. Those events felt momentous and surreal while they were happening and my memory of them is somehow more resonating than that of other things that have actually happened to me personally. But that is how I remember that afternoon in my bedroom too. At the time it didn’t feel as newsworthy as space shuttles exploding or planes crashing into buildings. It didn’t feel very significant at all. Nothing really happened that afternoon except that it was the first time in my life that I knew what I wanted.
I knew what I wanted without a shadow of a doubt. It was simple. I could verbalize it. There was no vacillating between wanting one thing and another. I was steady, confident and calm and there was a peace in knowing with such surety exactly what I wanted from life.
Later there came doubts and questions. Too many doubts and too many questions! I couldn’t verbalize all of those. Though my desire was simple, the resulting cacophony of reasoning and questioning and self-doubt that began was deafening. Surely, I couldn’t really do this thing? Not me. Someone else with more talent, maybe. Someone else with more verve and a more gregarious nature. Someone better looking perhaps. Maybe someone with a better voice and a better guitar and a better ability to play it. Someone with better songs and more to say. Someone with more anger and more angst and more rage and more passion! Surely there were lots of people who should rather want to do this thing that I wanted to do. But I couldn’t speak for them. I could only know myself. Sure, maybe I was right: Maybe I didn’t deserve this thing. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. But, dammit, I did want it!
THE TENSION OF WALKING TWO PATHS
The elevator in the Biology building at the University of Natal was reserved for professors and honors students. It wasn’t a rigidly enforced rule but most of us undergrads didn’t relish the idea of elevator chit chat with any of our professors so we were quite happy to take the stairs. On one of the landings between floors there was a rhinoceros skull. The thing that struck me every single time I passed it for four years was the sheer size of it. The skull was the size of my torso. It looked like an alien face with bones that were 3 inches thick. No wonder they’ve always got their heads low and look upset… It’s surprising they are able move around at all! Much like the slow and calculated movements of the actual animal, the rhinoceros in me took it’s sweet time making it’s presence, identity and enormity known. It took a few years for me to appreciate her fully.
From the moment I wrote my first song I was planted with my feet on two diverging paths that would fight for my attention and time. Biology was the career path and the “plan B”. It was the thing I just “had” to finish. It was stable and safe and sensible. But I knew in my heart even then that music was my “plan A”. It was dreamy and dumb but I knew it was what I wanted to do.
Not many people other than my close friends and family knew that I even played guitar but it was something that gave me an inner confidence. It was like I had a little secret skill that I could pull out at any moment, put it on display and inspire awed wonder in those who happened to be nearby. The problem was that I was way too shy to ever break it out and use it. Nevertheless it made me feel good to know that it was there. That little secret allowed me to start re-inventing or maybe just re-discovering myself from the inside out.
Until I started writing songs the question of who I was or what I wanted to do always led me to respond, “Geez, I don’t know. That’s a good question.” “Songwriter” was a great way for me to think of myself though so that’s what I started doing. I imagined myself as an artist with a bent for writing; a poetic, soulful dreamer. It was a really comfortable identity for me to be trying on. The “biologist” identity became something I wanted to be rid of.
Every time I wrote a new song my dad, who is a pastor, would encourage me to play it at church. I wasn’t very confident in my abilities at that point but secretly grateful for the opportunity to play. I felt like a church crowd was a forgiving audience and that they didn’t really matter in terms of giving credible feedback but it was still practice for real live people. Without my dad’s support and encouragement, which bordered on pestering, I might never have branched out any further than the four walls of my bedroom.
My dad is also a drummer. He and I would often jam in our garage. A friend of mine from church, Marcus Thorpe-Fairall, played guitar better than anyone I knew at the time and I used to hang out with him and get him to reluctantly teach me. He could listen to any song and figure out how to play the basic chords; something I hadn’t figured out how to do. I’d sit and watch him play and stare at his fingers and try to memorize what he was doing. Marcus’s sister, Penny, was a singer and the four of us, along with Lauren Forsythe on keys and Marcus Beirowski on bass formed a church band called “Fish n’ Coin”. We practiced once a week in our garage. Being in the band forced me to learn a lot of music. We’d practice a new song one week and I’d fumble my way through it and then work on it all week so I could actually play it the following week.
We played a few church functions and travelled to other churches in the area and played a bit here and there before fizzling out. Marcus Beirowski and my dad and I then formed “Hybrid”, a three piece, Christian-contemporary band. We entered a battle of the bands and placed second in the World Music category. We were beat by an afro-jazz band and I remember thinking that they were pretty awesome. At that point in my musical career I was grateful to be allowed on a stage anywhere and was pretty surprised that our band had made it through the elimination round, let alone place second. It helped me believe that I might not be crazy for wanting to play music for a living. I wasn’t ready to go telling anyone what I was thinking but it gave me hope that I, at least, wasn’t crap.
Neither of those bands did much of anything except practice in the garage but we always had plans to do shows so I continuously practiced. My dad and I would jam a couple of times a week and I was playing and writing on my own all the time.
The first four of years of college sailed by pretty quickly. When I wasn’t studying or going to classes I was practicing guitar or writing songs. I was doing well in school and gaining a lot of experience musically. The two paths were developing and tension between them was slowly building.
