BUILDING A HOME
1972: A blond 2-year-old toddler, chubby from baby fat, is in the tub, being bathed by his father. The scent of Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears shampoo fills the small bathroom; the bar of Ivory soap bobs in the choppy water amidst a small fleet of toy boats. The father, who seemingly knows thousands of songs, is currently serenading the boy with a mutual favorite of theirs, a tune already nearly 70 years old even then:
Oh, the bulldog on the bank
And the bullfrog in the pool
Oh, the bulldog on the bank
And the bullfrog in the pool
Oh, the bulldog on the bank
And the bullfrog in the pool
The bulldog called the bullfrog
A green old water fool
Singing Tra la la la lala la lideeoh
Singing Tra la la la lala la lideeoh
Singing Tra la la la lala
Singing Tra la la la lala
Tra la lala, tra la lala
Tra lala lideeoh
Oh, the bulldog stooped to catch him
And the snapper caught his paw
Oh, the bulldog stooped to catch him
And the snapper caught his paw
Oh, the bulldog stooped to catch him
And the snapper caught his paw
The pollywog died a-laughing
To see him wag his jaw
Singing Tra la la la lala la lideeoh
Singing Tra la la la lala la lideeoh
Singing Tra la la la lala
Singing Tra la la la lala
Tra la lala, tra la lala
Tra lala lideeoh
Said the bulldog to the bullfrog,
“Oh, what’ll you have to drink?”
Said the bulldog to the bullfrog,
“Oh, what’ll you have to drink?”
Said the bulldog to the bullfrog
“Oh, what’ll you have to drink?”
“Well, since you are so very kind,
I’ll have a bottle of ink”
That last line is the big payoff; the little boy has been waiting excitedly for it and, as always, laughs uproariously at the absurdity of a frog drinking ink.
The surveyors arrive, set up their equipment, and begin measuring.
1974: A 4-year-old boy, still towheaded, but scrawnier now, due largely to his dedicated regimen of Big Wheel riding and running full speed whenever possible, sits at a table at Cassano’s Pizza in Troy, Ohio. He’s there with his two junior-high-aged cousins and a few of their friends. They look like grownups to him, all flares and perms and denim jackets, and he regards them with the awe unique to little kids who feel as if they’ll be little forever. The jukebox is playing: “The Night Chicago Died”, by Paper Lace. The song is about a fictionalized showdown between Al Capone’s gang and the Chicago Police Department, but the boy, being four, doesn’t get the references. In the noise of the room and the din of the definitely-not-adult teens, he conflates the lyrics into a tale of how the narrator’s mother died, which strikes the boy as very sad subject matter for such a happy-sounding song. He may be confused, but he’s also transfixed.
Lumbering yellow excavators scoop up mouthfuls of earth, emptying them into a parade of dump trucks.
1976: A Kindergartner, feverishly fascinated by Happy Days– The Fonz in particular– is given a battered and scratched stack of 45s by his mother; they had belonged to her and her sister, the boy’s aunt, when they were girls. The boy plays them on his little portable record player, and enjoys almost all of them, but one song in particular grabs him and won’t let go: Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up”. He plays it over and over, obsessed. The boy has never seen a photo of Elvis, but he’s sure he looks just like Fonzie. His imagination is surprisingly accurate.
Forms are placed. A lattice of rebar. The foundation is poured.
1980: The boy is 10 now. The hair has now turned fully brown, hugging his head in a bowlcut, and he’s as thin as a whisper. The boy and his sister had recently gotten their first portable cassette tape recorder, and their Aunt (the same one who had shared original ownership of that crucial stack of 45s) has given him a Christmas present: a dubbed cassette of selected songs from her old Beach Boys records: Beach Boys Concert. All Summer Long. Shut Down, Vol. 2. That tape (the first of countless mix tapes in his life) will provide the soundtrack to hours upon hours in the basement, at his little workbench, in paint-festooned jeans and hand-me-down MUHS Bulldogs sweatshirt, building airplane models, inadvertently learning how to sing harmonies.
The first truckloads of lumber are dropped off and sit in the churned mud, bound by steel strapping, oozing sap, waiting.
1982: We’re back in a pizza joint. This time it’s Godfather’s in Piqua, Ohio, the site of many Friday night family dinners. The boy waits in a dark alcove for the pizza to arrive, captured by the pale light of an Asteroids game. He’s no good at video games, and quickly burns through the ration of quarters his mom gave him, but he lingers in the tiny arcade as the jukebox pumps out little audio postcards from an exotic place, foreign to his Beach Boys, Smothers Brothers, and Kingston Trio-tuned ears: Joan Jett & the Blackhearts’ “I Love Rock & Roll”. Foreigner’s “Waiting For a Girl Like You”. Rush’s “Tom Sawyer”. The Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic”. Shortly after, he gets his first clock radio- his passport to AOR and the Top 40. When the onset of adolescence deals him hands he’s ill-equipped to play, he retreats to his room, flops on the bed, and little microdose hits of Styx and the Rolling Stones and Stevie Nicks and AC/DC take him to a place where he’s effortlessly cool and always knows what to say and how to act.
Framing begins. Joists and studs. Bottom plates. Top plates. The skeleton starts to take shape.
1983: The boy is in Middle School Music class. The teacher, Mr. Stitz, is a slight, bug-eyed, balding, allergy-plagued little man, the archetypal geek from all outward physical appearances. But Mr. Stitz contains multitudes. Mr. Stitz is hip. Mr. Stitz plays the class “Several Species of Small, Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict”, from Pink Floyd’s 1969 double album Ummagumma. The boy’s mind is blown, and he talks his parents into getting him his own copy of the record (in retrospect, the weirdest possible entry point into Pink Floyd’s catalog). The opening track, a live version of “Astronomy Domine”, melts down the shards that “Several Species…” created in the boy’s mind and sculpts them into an entirely new way of looking at music.
A stairway is framed in, leading to a whole other level.
1985: The boy, now 15, his lanky frame wrapped improbably around his childhood bike, is riding down the road to his first real job- mowing his neighbors’ vineyard. The property is big enough that he’s able to mow every day; by the time he finishes, the area he started with needs mowed again. To pass the time, he sticks the detachable earpieces to his Walkman into his shooting-range hearing protectors and spends hours and countless sets of AA batteries listening to his small collection of cassettes- small, but steadily growing, thanks to his new source of disposable income. Jimi Hendrix’s Smash Hits. K-Tel’s The Story of the Stones. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Chronicle. Joe Walsh’s The Confessor. Van Halen’s Diver Down (the entire Roth-era Van Halen catalog, really). Soon, he will splurge on The Beatles’ White Album and spend entire months living inside it, memorizing every single sound on that sprawling masterpiece.
The window openings are cut out of the plywood paneling, letting the light in.
Around this time, a common rite of passage for those in the throes of unfocused teenage angst: the boy discovers The Doors.
The doors are (literally and figuratively) installed.
1986: The boy, still alarmingly skinny and trying hard to grow his hair out, has a driver’s license now, opening his world up to the heavy metal concerts rotating through Hara Arena. His first is the night before Thanksgiving: Yngwie Malmsteen’s Rising Force, with support by Saxon and Black ‘n’ Blue. It’s the first time he smells weed. It’s the first time his ears will ring the following day. It will not, by any means, be the last.
The roofers lay down the tar paper and shingles. Things are under roof now. Shelter from the storm.
1988: The boy graduates High School and starts College. CCAD, the Columbus College of Art and Design (one of many Columbus schools living perpetually in the shadow of THE Ohio State University). A den of freaks and misfits. After a relatively white-bread rural heartland upbringing, it’s the boy’s first exposure to edgier characters. He’s introduced to “College Rock”: R.E.M. and Camper Van Beethoven start competing with Iron Maiden and Deep Purple for airtime on his boombox. Punk Rock rears its head and captivates him.
The utilities go in. Plumbers do their thing. Electricians run their wiring. The lights come on.
1991: Art career abandoned, the boy is now (legally and in theory, at least) a man, at 21. He’s been playing guitar for a few years now. Hooked. He gets a job at a mall record store. By now, he is an absolute sponge, soaking up music from all directions, adding Public Enemy and Fugazi and John Coltrane and the Clash and Bach to the gumbo. The hair is very long now. He’s a Seattleite at heart, stuck in Ohio. He sees Jane’s Addiction in the Spring, at the same arena he had come of age in. A blistering set, a communal bacchanal. During the encore, Perry Farrell thanks the crowd for its energy and delivers the benediction, saying, “It’s gonna be a good summer.” It is.
Insulation is added. Protection from the outside world. The drywall is hung and mudded. Things are starting to really come together.
1995: The kid is 25, now firmly entrenched in the local music scene. The previous fall he’d had his molecules rearranged by Jeff Buckley’s Grace, an album unlike anything else he’d ever heard, but at the same strangely familiar, tying together Led Zeppelin and Nina Simone and Benjamin Britten and Joni Mitchell in a way that somehow works perfectly. In May he gets his chance to see Buckley live, at Bogart’s in Cincinnati, and learns what true charisma is. From the moment Jeff walks from the wings in his white V-neck and Drugstore Cowboy leather jacket, dragging on his cigarette, it is impossible to take one’s eyes off of him. It’s an unattainable blueprint, but one the kid tries his damndest to follow for the next several years, at least until he gets a better idea of who he actually is.
The facade goes up.
2003: The little boy is 32 now. No longer skinny, the first hints of gray starting to creep into the short-in-back/long in-front cut he’s sporting now- a physical manifestation of a vague, growing weight he’s carrying. Adulthood, the struggles of reconciling what he wants to do with what he has to do, who he is and what he should be. On the surface, everything’s going pretty OK, but inside’s a different story. He’s never been a stranger to occasional melancholy, not even as a young kid, but lately that inner cloud has become heavier and darker, and more frequent. One gray Saturday in the dead of winter he goes for a long, aimless drive to either clear the murk from his head or, failing that, to wallow in it. He heads south from Dayton and winds up in Fairfield, at a vast shopping mall. He wanders for a bit and, as usual, finds a record store. He ends up buying a CD he recently read a glowing review of, Bright Eyes’ Lifted or the Story Is In the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. The boy takes the long way home, though the snow-covered stubble of harvested corn fields. It’s one of those perfect moments, where the right mood aligns with the right music in the right setting. Conor Oberst, this goddamned 22-year-old kid from Nebraska, has managed to encapsulate everything the 32-year-old manchild was going through at the time with those songs, delivered like a combination of Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson, filtered through a midwestern lens. Those tracks burrow deep into him, and the truth in them exposes the lack of real truth in his own life and music. It’s jarring, and sad, and inspiring, all at the same time- a satori, a much-needed spiritual kick in the head, and it motivates him to recommit to true self-expression. By the time the album is done and he gets back home, he feels a lot better.
The house is still relatively new, but the first renovation is already overdue. Out with the old, in with the new.
All these little steps and snapshots have resulted in a home for the boy. Some people have Church to provide their compass, their sanctuary from troubles, a place to retreat to and assess and reassess their place in the world. Music has always been- and always will be- his. He’s redecorated the place from time to time. He’s repainted, switched out the furniture, and added some rooms over the years- Reggae, Cosmic Country, West African Desert Blues, Gypsy Jazz…but the bones are there, and they’re good, and he can’t see himself moving anytime soon.
It’s a blustery day. Rain lashes the siding and streams down the windows, but it’s warm and dry inside. The boy is 55. He could lose a few pounds. His mop of hair is more silver than brown these days. He gingerly puts a fresh record on the turntable, and turns the rest of the boys he’s been.
“There’s no place like home. Now check this one out.”