Music of My Mind

One good thing about music. When it hits, you feel no pain. (Bob Marley)

In an interview, jazz impresario Pat Metheny once said, “You can’t learn melody.”

He noted that you can go to school for four years to learn rhythm and harmony, “But you can’t go to school to learn melody.”

Without discussing the three branches of Western music, he meant that melody is innate, like a sixth sense. So what’s the point?

Good question.

As a writer, I’ve always had a natural lyrical flow, duly noted by a high school teacher who suggested a career in journalism to no avail. When I accidentally stumbled into songwriting in my mid-20s playing in the Canny Brothers Band, melody also came to me naturally.

I remember the moment.

The band was gearing up for its first gig, and we had a late-night rehearsal at Master Blend Studio in Brooklyn. We invited some Bay Ridgeites and turned the jam into a party with various libations, “The more you drink, the better we sound.”

We played til the midnight hour. I got back to my apartment much later and crashed around 4 o’clock. A couple of hours later, I heard music blasting, thinking it was my clock radio.

But the radio wasn’t on, and I’ve never used an alarm clock.

It was a song blaring in my head. The only thing to do was pick up my guitar and play. Ten or fifteen minutes later, I had written my first tune. Talk about an epiphany. It was almost a Keith Richards moment.

It was a thrill until my landlord started pounding on the floor above my basement apartment with a baseball bat, yelling, “Shut the hell up.”

It wouldn’t be the last time someone yelled shut up when I played!

At the time, I had been struggling to find my voice. I tried taking a creative writing class or two through NYU’s continuing-ed program, but nothing stuck. Besides, I had always been a terrible student — I hated school, buildings, buses, blackboards, cafeterias, desks, lockers, pedantic teachers, and Marxist college professors. It was like a social prison.

Writing that song revealed a talent I didn’t know I had.

Of course, talent isn’t everything. But I started pursuing it with vigor. And here I am today, still looking for my audience and hoping to find it on Medium.

Nonetheless, music fired my imagination, which began as a kid when melodies were my trusted companion and words would flow in and out of my mind like a radio.

The Sounds of Sinatra

When I was growing up, music always filled our house. At first, it was mostly my parents’ music, which wasn’t a bad thing. Though arguments over taste are not arguments, my folks had excellent taste in music — rock-n-roll, country and western, and the Great American Songbook.

My dad grew up in the Bronx in the 1930s and 40s. He would go to double features at a local movie theater. During intermission, Fats Waller would come out and tickle the ivories.

Imagine that.

Mom and Dad also saw the rock-n-roll pioneers of the 1950s multiple times before they were legends — Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, the Platters, and all the rest.

And being Italian in name only, there were the Sounds of Sinatra. My first vivid musical memory is hearing Ole Blue Eyes.

I must have been four years old, playing with my toy trucks in front of my parents’ Grundig stereo system. Sinatra at the Sands was playing — the landmark live recording with the Count Basie Orchestra.

Frank introduces a new number, The Shadow of Your Smile.

It stopped me in my tracks, a melancholy moment that overwhelmed my preschool brain. “Wow, what a sad and lonely song,” I thought.

Perhaps something was wrong with me. But I’ve never forgotten it.

Meet the Beatles

It was impossible not to hear the Beatles when I was a kid. They were everywhere, and I knew the words to much of their songbook by the time I was 12. Then there was the Beatles cartoon on Saturday mornings, filled with offbeat Brit humor that went right over my head.

I also remember the day the band broke up. I was in the back seat of Mom’s car, returning from a quack dental appointment, and WABC Radio 77 was playing. The DJ came on and announced that the Beatles had broken up.

“Wow! Wasn’t it supposed to be the Beatles forever?”

I was fortunate to see Paul McCartney at Giants Stadium years later after scoring floor seats in the 30th row at face value days before the show, taking my kid sister Laura — now a badass marketing exec and talented photographer — to finally see live Beatles and Wings music. What a night!

And I will never forget the night John Lennon died. At the time, I was a freshman at Potsdam and had coincidentally played side one of the White Album before hanging with some friends for a “buck a buzz.”

We had the college radio station on — the DJ came on and said, “John Lennon was just shot and killed in New York City.” It was devastating; I stopped listening to the Beatles for months afterward. No reunion, no forever, no eternity.

Long Live Rock

By the time I got to middle school, I was listening to a lot of Dylan and the usual classic rock fare of the day, as well as R&B — digging the Soul Train on Saturday mornings with my older sister Donna — the once and still Stones fanatic. We were, without a doubt, the only white kids in our town tuning in.

I was also taking guitar lessons with crappy teachers who knew nothing about music. It took me years to unlearn all the bad habits they taught me.

But I started growing weary of rock in high school. My musical knowledge was limited, but there had to be more, no?

And then Steely Dan dropped Aja. The day the album was released, I raced to the record store across the railroad tracks on my green Stingray bicycle to buy it with savings from my paper route.

The title track was otherworldly, with those long musical breaks by renowned session players like Wayne Shorter, Michael Omartian, and Steve Gadd and that memorable bass line on Peg.

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker broke all the pop music rules by not touring and infusing their music with jazz melodies. Today, some marketing Bros classify Steely Dan as “Yacht Rock.” What a load of crap, like “Baby Boomers” or “Millennials.” These are just some bullshit words made up to sell people stuff they don’t need.

Anyway, that album was instrumental in nudging me toward jazz.

And All That Jazz

WPLJ 95.5 FM was the go-to station for album-oriented rock. I tuned in through a transistor radio under my pillow at night when I should’ve been sleeping. I also remember delivering the Newsday from a stolen shopping cart on Sunday mornings, hearing the Brothers Johnson Strawberry Letter 23, which was far more funk than rock.

Somewhere along the way, I drifted down the radio dial to WKCR 89.9, where I discovered Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and my first guitar hero, Pat Metheny. “Jazz fusion” was becoming a thing — another Madison Avenue term. I was loosely familiar with several numbers but didn’t know much about him.

Then, one day, I was browsing through the record bin at TSS and spied the “American Garage” LP. The front cover had a photo of Airstreams in a trailer park, and the back had a picture of the first incarnation of the Pat Metheny Group jamming in a garage.

“Well, this looks pretty cool,” I said and bought the album sight unseen. It was serendipitous.

Metheny was the first musical artist I discovered on my own. I quickly tuned into his other recordings at the time. The early years of the PMG became the soundtrack of my life — I even cribbed the name Watercolors for my still-unpublished chapbook of verse.

A few short years after the TSS incident, I saw the band at Hofstra College in a small auditorium. It was a life-changing experience. At the time, my father had taken ill with a misdiagnosed heart ailment. Things looked bleak.

I met my crew in the parking lot shortly before the show, and they were already burning, but I declined, bummed out over Dad’s health scare.

The band played for two-and-a-half hours and blew the roof off the place, and my mind went with it. I left that show naturally high as a kite and temporarily relieved of my distress.

While music had been an essential part of my life by then, that performance revealed how powerful and elevating it can be. I’ve seen the now-defunct PMG multiple times and Pat Metheny in various incarnations since then.

Coda: Metheny said in a recent interview with Rick Beato, “Compared to Bach, we all suck.”

I can’t argue with that.

Dead Ahead

By my junior year, I had slowly come around to listening to the Grateful Dead. I largely avoided them until then because of deadheads.

I remained unconvinced, however, until I got to college and met this red-headed cat from the Albany area named Paul — who’s now a falconer somewhere in New Mexico — two guys with completely different backgrounds but somehow the same thrill-seeking mindset.

We had many excellent adventures taking trips to Dead Shows across upper New York in the 80s when the band was at its peak — before Garcia’s heroin use grew out of control and took him down.

Luckily, I saw the Jerry Garcia Band in 1983 at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City without all the extracurricular hoopla. The promoter oversold the venue and packed us in tight. A fire marshall did a walk-through beforehand, threatening to shut it down, but they must’ve greased his palm.

Garcia was at the peak of his powers. The show was beyond comprehension. I had never seen or heard anything like it. Unleashed from the confines of the Dead, Jerry let it rip; the crowd was in a frenzy, elbow to elbow, sweat flying in the air.

To this day, it’s the best live guitar performance I’ve ever witnessed, and I can say that with confidence since I was straight as a pin that night– another momentous musical moment on my yet-to-be-revealed writing journey.

Playing in the Band

I started my so-called career working for an investment bank, intending to attend law school, but fate and common sense intervened. It was the days of junk bonds and the likes of Michael Milken and Ivan Bosky. Rubbing elbows with white-collar criminals and self-hating lawyers was a life lesson.

And I was still on the bus at the time, going to Dead shows and being a prankster in the office, much to the dismay of everyone.

“Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke” was my ethos and bad for my career advancement.

One day, I was walking down the hall singing Hesitation Blues with an Obit for Elizabeth Cotten in hand to make a copy for my pal Paul, and I remarked out loud to no one in particular, “Damn, Elizabeth Cotten died.”

Suddenly, some guy sitting in a cube popped his head up and hurried over to the copy room. “How do you know about Elizabeth Cotten?” he asked. So I mentioned Freight Train and the Dead and all that jazz.

Tom of the Canny Brothers Band mentioned earlier, and I became fast friends — a rare friendship that endures to this day.

So, we started having semi-liquid lunches and a few laughs at Ohara’s, just steps away from the long-gone World Trade Center Tower 2. One day, Tom mentioned that he and his brothers Steve and Mike were jamming in the studio and invited me to come down and sing.

“Sing? I’m not a rock-n-roll singer,” I said. “I’m going to law school.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he replied. You’d be a great frontman. Just get up there and clown around like you do in the office,” or something similar.

Frontman? I certainly don’t have the rocker look — more like Willy Wonka on a bad trip.

But it didn’t take too much convincing. We played Hey Joe by Hendrix, Neil Young’s Down by the River, Midnight Hour, a few Dead tunes, and who knows what else. After that first jam session, I was hooked.

Playing in the band was a turning point in my life. Nothing compares to making music with your friends. Several months later, I had my 6 a.m. songwriting epiphany and never looked back.

The Melody Maker

Years have passed since I played in the band and had a stint as a performing songwriter at dive bars and church basements in and around New York City. Those days of playing out and attending hundreds of concerts pushed me along the writing trail and infused my mind with music.

Along the way, my career took twists and turns, and my personal life went through ups and downs, like everyone else, but the constants have been music and writing. Even when I’m not penning a tune, I think in melodies when I write.

After doing it for so long, it’s safe to say I’ve got “chops.” Whether they will pay off is uncertain, and the hour’s getting late.

An old friend with writing aspirations reached out recently, looking for inspiration. Given my status as a content marketing writer by day and an unknown blogger, amateur lyricist, and free-verse poet by night, I can’t advise anyone.

What I do know is that writing is not a magic trick. As Natalie Goldberg put it, it means digging through hard times and writing down the bones. Ultimately, it takes writing in a way that resonates with your audience without losing them.

It’s what you leave out that keeps them coming back for more. Just like that musical cliche, it’s not just the notes you play but the ones you don’t.

And like melody, that’s something they don’t teach in school.