The Story of Geoff: Ch. 4

                                  Chapter 4: Music

Songs

I started a singing group in third grade. Ellee Loffler and Erica Beggs and Mary Hornig were in it. I named it The Bad Girls, and wrote our first title track, appropriately named after the band. The refrain repeated, "We're the bad bad bad-bad girls, We're the bad bad bad-bad girls." I added verses composed of clever rhyming depictions of ways in which we would torture unsuspecting other girls if they didn't watch out for us.

This was presumably the development of some alter-ego I formed shortly after I realized I was not going to be popular. I was smart enough to understand what being left out and bullied felt like, and it seemed a harmless enough outlet for expressing my feelings. Ellee and Erica and Mary were good sports. I choreographed dance moves I'd learned from after-school fame dance lessons my mother took me to and wrote maybe two other songs, three in all, and talked one of the older school aids on the playground into letting the four of us girls use the auditorium stage for practice on rainy recess days. Our group lasted all of three weeks, if that, then fizzled out, like most bands and great ideas later in my life did. But it served its purpose for the time being. I had a creative outlet for my momentary childhood rage.


Piano

My mother put me in piano lessons at the age of 5, probably to stop me from banging out heart and soul already on the household Wyman. But after coming home in tears week after week, entirely disenchanted with how the ivories and ebony had been reduced to nonsensical two finger exercises called "ping pong" and the like, mother pulled me out. Thank God. Back to heart and soul, and on to the feather song from Forrest Gump and the love song from Titanic and other melodies I could hear and emulate. What a mystery, to play by ear, and the satisfaction thereafter of matching up the notes just right. It brought me such joy. Much more joy than ping pong. What a joke that was. What was mother thinking. Or that piano teacher. I felt sorry for her other students.

But later on I came to envy my cousins and friends in school who could open up more advanced piano books in school and play beautiful scores, and songs I could not play by ear. They baffled me, these rhythms and riffs. I hit a wall at an age of 10 or 12 and stopped playing piano altogether. I joined the middle school band and played flute instead.

Come high school I couldn't play flute very well either. I never did learn to hit the high C. My cheeks were too fat to tighten them and blow any solid note really. And when I tried, I felt goofy and smiled, and ruined the seriousness which was necessary to blow. I fudged recitals, All State competitions, and even band practices. Maybe that's why my band teacher who became superintendent fired me so easily years later when I took pictures of fifth graders' art projects and posted them on FaceBook. He remembered that I couldn't blow my flute notes and didn't take band as seriously as he most certainly did. He never so much as smiled, as even practice was war to him. He sweat globs of perspiration down his sideburns while conducting full band rehearsals with his tiny baton. He would be soaking wet from head to toe by the end of performances, bowing a long time after each ensemble as if he'd written and performed it himself.

I did try to learn piano chords from my mother so I could play in church during my teen years. On a handful of Sunday mornings, when services were short an entire worship team, I offered to lead, and had to learn to play instantly, and my mom came to the rescue. I would choose a few songs with three chords and learn how to play them that very morning. I knew the words already and by the grace of God managed.

In eleventh grade I joined a high school rock band. There were three guys who played guitar, bass, and drums. They wanted a female keyboardist who sang. That was me. I did a Sheryl Crow and Janis Joplin song and a few others. Natalie Imbrulgia. Some harmonies with the guys. I can't remember everything. But it gave me my first real experience playing in a band. I went on to play with a few more bands in Rhode Island but won't delve into that here, other than to say it happened and isn't worth mentioning. One was a loser basement band with a few old men who wanted a lead singer who could shake it. That went terribly wrong at our first paid gig and I quit. For starters I have nothing to shake. The next was a lesbian rock band and I did not get along with the angry lesbian lead singer and didn't like rocking my keys to her lesbo lover rocker rage lyrics. The end.

I also tried a duo with my friend Fred, who I devote a later chapter to. He's the best piano player I've met, and also my best friend. Fred. I really should write a book about him.

In the Bloomingdale Ave house where Geoff and I and the bird resided after I graduated college, I really learned to play keys. I bought my first real keyboard, which I still have today. A Yamaha Portable Grand, 76 keys, light as really heavy feather, and purchased a sustain pedal and stand and padded foldable bench to go along, and let it sit in my bedroom for about two months before attacking the damn thing.

Yes, Geoff and I had separate bedrooms in the Bloomingdale Ave house too. Maybe we weren't meant to be after all. I'm beginning to wonder that as I write this book. Maybe these chapters are meant more of a farewell than as a fetching fare for him. I digress.

The first song I decided to learn to play, of all songs, was a ridiculously difficult one, by Journey, called Don't Stop Believing. I looked up the riff on YouTube and got busy. About a month later I had the right hand down. Then came the left bass riff. That took all of one day. Then was putting both hands together.

I cried like there was no tomorrow. My brain just became mush when combining these left and right hand parts. It wasn't going to happen.

But then one day, maybe a week later, out of the blue, it happened.

But then I had to sing the words along with it.

Oy Vey. Another two weeks. And then I had the whole thing memorized. Left and right hands together and words. I was afraid to stand up from my keyboard after the first time playing it through flawlessly, like I might unglue my brain from it's knowledge by lifting my hands and going to sleep that night. But the neurons and synapses had fixated themselves, had solidified something in the neurotransmitter nonsense in my mind that still exists today somewhere up there in the electricity upstairs, so that whenever I sit down to play, even after a year or more of playing that song, I can place my hands and bust out that tune. I know I can. It's a song I'll take to the grave, watch me.

Everything else came somewhat easy after learning Don't Stop. So I didn't. I looked up chords on the internet, blues progressions mostly for songs not involving complex riffs, and simply placed my fingers in position and remembered. I bought a mini spiral notecard flipbook I still have today with all my song notes on it for about 50 cover songs. Carol King, White Stripes, Carly Simon, Ben E King, Elvis, John Prine, Regina Spektor, Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan, Van Morrison, Indigo Girls, Beatles, Counting Crows, Coldplay, Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson, Grace Potter, and John Lennon. There were even more. Dolly Parton's Jolene though White Stripes did a version, too. And there was House of the Rising Sun by The Animals. And Breaking Up Is Hard To Do by Neil Sedaka, which I learned for a Josh Hartnett film I was once cast in as a bar room singer, but then a promoter pulled out of the film last minute and the movie was never made.

I would have learned more songs - Elton John and Joni Mitchell and Fiona Apple and Tori Amos and Stevie Wonder and Natalie Merchant and Christine McVie were just a few personal idols and bar room requests I'd get from time to time. But alas I couldn't please everyone, lest myself, mostly because I was pursuing work and pleasing Geoff and often times playing in a band where somebody else chose the tunes. Learning a song well enough to perform took me a good week or two, and getting down 50 tunes was a feat in and of itself, and I kind of sat on that flip book for a while and retired. Today though I feel like going back and learning a few more.

I also spent a few years writing songs. I wrote my first piano song, Bottle of Tears, on my Yamaha, at the birdhouse on Bloomingdale Ave. I went on to record a full length piano song album with a record studio in Rhode Island shortly after moving there, having written most of my remaining songs for the album at the cottage on Matunuck Beach. They were mostly sad songs, but Geoff helped me record demo's and get them up on Myspace Music, and a music producer in the state found me online, saw potential, and reached out. The rest was history. He and I spent the past eight years working on the album, which is in mastering this winter. The songs are beautiful, and he is the only man in my life besides my dad who has never given up on me. Rob. He's believed in me more than any other person ever has.

Rob introduced me to other artists he worked with, including a world renowned folk singer named Virginia Dare, who tells me to this day her greatest compliments come from her song Mother Mary, on which I sang harmony with her for the album Divine Mother.

I'd taken a fairy out to Block Island one day with Rob and just scrapped the sheet music handed to me since I couldn't read it anyways, and made up my own vocal harmony line, often discarding the actual lyrics for oohs and aahs, and Virginia loved it, and so did Rob, and six hours later we called it a rap. I was even paid several hundred dollars for my effortless attempts at coloring this song of hers with my voice.

On the fairy ride back to Point Judith, Rob told me I was special. He gave me a high five and said, "Good job Erin. You really are something."

He also said, "You know what else, Erin? You're going to make it someday. And this whole thing with Geoff. Don't worry about it. You're going to make some guy feel really special. And that guy will be really lucky to end up with you."

Rob always had a way of making me feel like I mattered. I really did feel special that day. Rob's one of my most special friends, maybe even as special as Fred.


Guitar

My late grandfather bought me an acoustic Roy Clark Signature guitar for $100 and gave it to me when I graduated high school. I took it to college and wrote two songs on it right away. They were called Distractions and Hey, Hey. They were inspired by a break-up with a high school sweetheart I'd dated for only two months, but shared some firsts with. I won't share his name here, because I feel his family would be sensitive to that if reading, but he was a special first boyfriend. And I was depressed leaving him behind. He'd applied to St. Lawrence and didn't get in. But I did. It was the most bitter bittersweet thing I'd gone through, that break up. But the two most beautiful songs came out of it.

I played those songs all year, and even competed in an open mic with the song Distractions, beating out a local artist at the time who often played in the Brewer Bookstore, named Grace Potter. But I gave up guitar after writing those two songs. I got depressed, put my depression into writing poetry and throwing up my food and starving myself, but then met Geoff a year later, and took to letting him play guitar for me. Music as I knew it, my love for it at least, went on the back burner for about 5 years after that. Those two songs though, sit in my mind as if I wrote them yesterday. Like little children that never grew up. I like it that way. They stayed just the way I liked them.

Maybe someday I'll write more songs on guitar.

I did come to inadvertently acquire another guitar. Geoff and I competed in an open mic competition in Matunuck Beach. At the oldest Irish Pub at the end of nowhere. Where Geoff and I drank Guinness and left the day behind.

For nine weeks finalists were narrowed down from twenty some-odd musicians to somehow, just Geoff and I. A strangely competitive match-up, but I thought a fair one. We were the best. Some slightly competitive talent had chosen poor songs for this older Irish whiskey-drinking crowd. Other performers had poor stage presence and audience interaction. Surely the judges were using some sort of rubric.

Geoff and I played songs we'd played before, at non-competitive open mics, that we knew would be crowd pleasers here. I saved Don't Stop for this epic finale performance, and won. Geoff felt slighted by that, I could sense, but I was too happy to care. I'd played it with all my heart, and a drunk man told me my foot was going wild. I took that as a compliment since I'd marveled at other keyboardists whose playing would get so wild their non-pedal-using-foot would start dancing around like a puppet on strings. And mine had. What a cool night I'd had.

Geoff mostly played it. Really I barely touched the thing. But when we split 3 years later, he sadly gave it back to me.