It's not supposed to be so hard.
I'll give you a moment to quiet the litany of Michael Scott's "That's what she said!" comebacks that are ringing in your head, so we can continue with this serious discussion. I'm not dealing in double entendres right now. (Well, not yet. Give me a few paragraphs.)
No, I'm lamenting the amount of effort I put into crafting these increasingly irregularly published egomaniacal columns.
Any hack with a computer and an Internet connection can string together a half-assed "I like this album 'cause it's cool" blog, or worse yet, a pointless "I hate this band because they suck" rant. But me, I'm trying to elevate my screeds into something a little more entertaining. A little more illuminating. A little more... well, cool, I guess.
I don't know if any of my loyal readers have noticed, but over this first year of “Lend Me Your Ears” (happy anniversary to me!), I've tried to wrap each tale of musical discovery around a life lesson, or a realization, or a momentous occurrence. Sometimes I think I've nailed it, like the story about falling in love with my favorite album of all time. But then sometimes I'm afraid I've been too blunt and heavy-handed, like my attempt to reclaim some happiness in today's chaotic world. Regardless of my perceived levels of success, I can honestly say that every installment that's been published so far, I'm proud to have my name on. Warts and all, they're my literary babies, and I adore them.
And that "professional guarantee of quality" is the reason why it's taken me so long to get back in the writing saddle. For the last several weeks, I've been agonizing over finding themes for my next series of columns. I can't tell you how many times I've typed an opening line into this very electronic document, only to backspace over it in frustration. The more I pushed myself to come up with the perfect throughline, the more cut off from my Muse I became. It got so aggravating that I just walked away for the last month completely. I was frustrated. It shouldn't be so hard!
But that break was just what I needed, I guess. Because the other day, while I was in the shower, it hit me. "Self", I said to myself, "why are you being so serious about all this? This column is supposed to be fun. Simple, carefree, dumb fun."
As my friend Rob would text: BOOM. The cinderblock wall in my brain exploded outward like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie logo. And there it was. My theme. The "hook" I could hang a few hundred words of musical "me" on: Simple, carefree, dumb fun.
And that means traveling back to a period of my life when I had zero responsibilities. When every day was a new adventure. When I was surrounded by good friends. When the goofy kid that was me matured into a goofier young man. When the nonstop hijinks of my daily life were accompanied by a soundtrack provided by...
MIGHTY SPARROW.
As I explained in a previous column, Alexander, my beloved college dorm, was the kind of place where you sort of picked up friends through osmosis. Once you met a resident and spent a little time with them, any of the people in their general sphere of influence that you clicked with, slowly settled into orbit around you. If you bumped into someone on Monday, there was a good chance that by Thursday you'd both be tooling around campus late at night doing stupid stuff. I wasn't aware of this incredible personal chemical reaction at the time... it just sort of happened.
And that's how I met my friend Erik.
At some point in the first couple of weeks of my freshman year, I befriended Simon, who, like me, lived on the first floor. Around that same time, Simon must have rubbed shoulders with Erik at some dorm function, despite his room being on the second floor. And by the transitive property of Alexander friendship, me being friends with Simon who was friends with Erik, meant that I was destined to be friends with Erik.
That's indeed what happened. Erik and I were part of a fluid group of miscreants who would hang out in the dining hall, or go creeping around campus in the wee hours of the morning looking for stuff to steal, or hang out in the dorm's basement and playfully hurl insults at each other. Erik and I weren't what I'd call "best of friends", but we were certainly close, or at least as close as anyone in our goofy group could be. Sometimes he and I wouldn't hang out for a few days, but that was par for the course. What with computer lab work and my extended circle of friends, my time was directed where I had space in my schedule.
I wasn't a drinker back then, and neither were the people I hung out with most. So our "good times" weren't fueled by booze, they were fueled by our inherent nerdy personalities. Yet despite our crippling sobriety, we had more than our share of fun. Simple, carefree, dumb fun.
Now, if you'll allow me a digression: It has always been a dream of mine, since I was a little kid, to visit Japan. My love of the Land Of The Rising Sun started waaay back, when I was a little kid, three or four years old, watching Speed Racer cartoons after daycare, and Godzilla movies on the local Saturday afternoon creature feature. Then, in third grade, my class watched a movie about Japanese schoolkids and their day-to-day life. If I were curious about Japan before, this short film made me crazy eight bonkers for Japanese culture. Those kids were my age, but they couldn't have been more different from me. Their food was different, their homes were different, their writing was different... Everything about Japan seemed like an alien planet. As Liz Lemon would say: "I want to go to there."
Fast-forward about eleven years. It's April of 1986, and almost-twenty-year-old me was in the process of signing up for classes for the fall semester. Over the previous two years, I'd knocked out my language elective requirements by taking Spanish and Russian. (The Russian textbook was actually printed in Russia, and it smelled like fish. Seriously. Fish.) But as I was flipping through the course catalog, it hit me like a bolt of lightning: There are Japanese classes! I could learn to speak Japanese! I could take a big step towards making that silly childhood dream come true! I could frigging go to Japan!
During one of our nightly dorm get-togethers, I mentioned I was going to take Japanese. Erik's ears pricked up. Turns out he had also harbored a years-old desire to learn the language. In fact, he'd taken three years of Japanese in high school! (Back then, his high school was the one of only two on the East Coast that taught Japanese.) When I brought it up, he realized he wanted to continue with his studies. So the next day he signed up for the same class.
And that was the beginning of three years of fun. Simple, carefree, dumb fun.
I don’t have a photo of us from back in the day, so here’s a cartoon that pretty much summarizes our daily interactions: good-natured physical abuse. This is me attacking Erik using my “special move”.
That first semester of Japanese, Erik and I were together for hours a day, three days a week. We'd walk to class together. We sat together. We walked back to the dorm together. We studied together. We'd eat together. What had been an amorphous "we'll see each other when we see each other" friendship accelerated into an almost common-law marriage. Over that four month period, it's very possible that I spent more time with Erik during school than with my parents during breaks.
You'd think that we'd eventually get sick of each other, being joined at the academic hip like that. But we shared so many geeky interests, our bond was more like twin brothers who were separated at birth who had just been reunited. We gushed about our mutual love of James Bond. We geeked out over the Lego sets we had as kids. We made David Letterman appointment television, no matter how beat we were. We scoured the racks for tapes and import singles at Schoolkids Records and the legendary Record Hole. We endlessly quoted Monty Python. We devoured every note of Peter Gabriel's So. We watched stacks of rented horror movies. (On VHS, no less. I'm old, kids!) If it was nerdy and woman-repellent, we were into it.
But the nonsense wasn't reserved for just our pop culture crossovers. No, it permeated into our daily lives and interactions, too. For instance, when things got slow in class, we'd pass endless notes and doodles back and forth, trying to one-up each other so that we'd burst out laughing.
Every couple of months we would sneak into the dorm across the courtyard at two in the morning, and yell at the top of our lungs, then scamper to safety as people fell out of bed. Simon was particularly good at this. He could produce an eardrum-piercing shriek from deep inside his barrel-shaped torso, earning him the nickname "The Screamer".
On our way back and forth from class, I had discovered that there was a loose stop sign at one of our street crossings. So in the thick of the between-class crowds, I'd pretend to slam my forehead into the sign at a full walk. The impact made this incredibly loud metallic WHANG-NG-NG!, which caused everyone within fifty feet to stop dead in their tracks. I'd yell out in pain, drop to the ground, and roll around in mock agony. After a couple of moments, I'd pop up with a flourish, and we'd continue on our way. A cruel trick? Definitely. Funny every time? Hell yes.
That's the level of immaturity we were wallowing in. Pranks. Stupid jokes. Cartoons. Utter nonsense. And we loved every minute of it.
But it wasn't just the main campus that had to suffer the pains of our pathetic antics. No, we were not confined by geography. See, we were mobile. We had wheels. We were carried through the gates of Valhalla, riding eternal, shiny and chrome. The immediate metropolitan area was our playground, thanks to the Detroit-engineered turbo-charged awesomeness of...
...the Daytona.
Climb in, ladies…
If you thought we were stupidly nerdy on foot, putting us in a ton-and-a-half of rolling American-forged steel made us a zillion times more obnoxious. Erik would roar up to red lights and then slam on the brakes, fishtailing as we screeched up to the white line. When we were sitting in traffic, he'd pretend to punch me, and I'd slam my face into the passenger window, scaring the people in the next lane. There was some sort of glitch in the way the automatic gearshift engaged, so when he wasn't looking, I could actually nudge the car from Drive to Neutral with my knee. And when the light turned green he'd hit the gas, only to find the car going nowhere, as I giggled like a gibbon.
With an actual car at our disposal, we were no longer trapped within the confines of where our feet could take us. On weekends we'd drive out to the local state park and just goof around. We'd head for the local mall and eyeball the Patrick Nagel prints in the framing store. (You know, the guy who did the cover to Duran Duran's Rio. C'mon, it was the mid-80s. Nagel was still cool.) At this point, Erik had moved off campus, so after Japanese class, usually on Wednesdays, he'd treat me to lunch at McDonald's and then we'd go to his apartment and watch movies. With the campus and its immediate environs having been my entire world for four months at a time, being mobile was invigorating.
The one major thing that the car afforded us, however, was access to the local airport. You kids won't believe this, but there was a time when you could waltz into an airport at any time of the day or night, and wander the terminals. No metal detectors. No TSA agents. Just miles and miles of empty, quiet airline hub goodness. With a such an amazing playground at our disposal, every couple of weeks, we'd blow off some steam by heading to the airport at midnight and politely going nuts.
Since Erik lived in the Northeast, he had occasion to fly into, or pick people up at, the airport. So he had discovered a kick-ass video game arcade and an honor-system used bookstore in the main terminal.
We'd hit the arcade first. We were obsessed with a video game called Qix, a simple strategy game in which you had to enclose areas of the screen in boxes before energy creatures zap your avatar. (It sounds easy, but it's actually pretty challenging.) I never mastered it, but I got decent enough to where it remained fun to play.
And then we'd hit the book store. The book store... Sigh. Well, here's where I have to admit that, although I'm a pretty decent human being, I'm no angel. Erik and I would browse the shelves, and if we saw something we were interested in... we'd just take it. Nothing major, like an unabridged Oxford dictionary or a first edition of "Catch-22". We gravitated towards small paperbacks, things that were a buck or less. I know, I know. That's not really a valid excuse. Stealing in itself is bad enough. But because this store donated its money to charities, our five-finger discounting was doubly deplorable. I've done my best to balance my karma, though. The first time I flew back to NC in 1995, I stopped by the store and stuffed forty bucks in the money box without taking a book. Too little, too late? Maybe. But I tried.
This is the bookstore in the 2000s. Unfortunately, it has been closed for good. There’s probably a Cinnabon in its space now.
We spent a lot of time in the Daytona. And because Erik was a big music nut like me, he had zillions of mix tapes that he kept in the car. His musical taste was a lot more expansive than mine, so he exposed me to stuff I probably never would have heard otherwise. It seemed like every month he was introducing me to some new group or performer. Our sojourns were spent in the company of geniuses like Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, XTC, Kate Bush, and so many others.
One night, while we prowled the streets, Erik wanted me to listen to a particular song. As he was fast-forwarding the tape, he promised me I was going to love it. He took his finger off the button...
...and I was suddenly pummeled by the most frantic, most chaotic, most unexpected noise I'd ever experienced. My eyes were ping-ponging back and forth in their sockets as my brain tried in vain to keep up with my ears. I could make out horns, definitely. Somewhere in the background there were rapid drum hits, I'm pretty sure. And... was there actually a melody tying all this craziness together? Yeah, I think so.
But all of these elements were overshadowed by the vocals. Vocals? Were they actually vocals? What kind of accent is this? Was the singer having a stroke? Was the tape accidentally wrapped around the capstans and speeding up? What in the name of all that's holy was I listening to?!?!
Lost in a fog of uncomprehending stupor, my head lolled over in Erik's direction. To my astonishment, he sat there grinning like a Cheshire cat, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He wasn't even remotely thrown by the cacophony escaping out of the Daytona's speakers. He was having a blast.
Somehow I fired enough neurons to squeak out weakly, "What is this?" Without missing a beat, Erik replied, "It's Mighty Sparrow!"... An answer that answered nothing.
(In the years since, I have learned that Mighty Sparrow is one of the most famous calypso musicians ever. Born in Trinidad, he rose to prominence in the 1950s and became a global phenomenon as "world music" grew in popularity. On that fateful night in the car, however, none of that mattered. All I knew is I'd heard something completely new. New to me, at least.)
Once the song was over, and my brain processed the last bit of auditory cotton candy the ears had sent its way, I found myself... smiling? Somehow my mind was stitching all those disparate sounds together into a song. A catchy song, no less.
I guess he could tell I was intrigued, because he played the tune again. Since I'd already experienced the initial shock of this unique musical composition, the second time through I was able to make out more lyrics. I could let myself get into in the rhythms. I found myself swept up in the madcap happiness of the tune.
And from that moment on, Mighty Sparrow's song, "Music & Rhythm", became the unofficial theme song of our off-campus Daytona excursions. It got played pretty much every time we were powering up the Beltline headed for the mall. Or the park. Or the airport. Hell, if we'd had a bad day in class, we'd listen to it on the short ride from the parking lot to the dorm. We would use phrases from the song, like "nose hole" and "music in me big toe", as verbal shorthand. No matter where I was - the computer lab, working at the snack bar, cramming for an exam, even back at home for a break - "Music & Rhythm" was always in the back of my head, this crazy calypso mindworm that never failed to bring a smile to my face. For years "Music & Rhythm" was the ultimate musical expression of the fun we had on a daily basis.
Simple, carefree, dumb fun.
A gallery of some of the cartoons Erik and I drew. There are more - a lot more - but they’re disgusting. And probably illegal in some states.
Here it comes: the inevitable "things went bad" part of my story. Towards the end of my college days, Erik and I had a misunderstanding that sort of blew up our friendship. I totally cop to the fact that most of it was on me. My family had a "no conflict ever" policy, so when I ventured out into the real world, I was unequipped to handle any sort of stumbling block that occurred in my personal relationships. Instead of having a difficult conversation that could have cleared everything up, I said "that's that" and walked away.
For a good fifteen years, I kept my distance. Not just from Erik, but several people that I'd run from. Then my girlfriend (now wife) Suzie opened my eyes to the fact that life is too short to hang on to negativity, especially if it affects people that meant something to you. Armed with her wisdom, I took the plunge and reached out to the friends that I'd lost touch with over the years.
Erik was at the top of that list. I was afraid it was going to be awkward, but when I contacted him, it was as if no time had elapsed. I apologized, he brushed it off, and we slipped right back into being goofy.
It turns out that we'd both saved all the various doodles and cartoons that made up the bulk of our college hijinks. Armed with scanned images of our immature artwork and copious adult beverages, we spent a night cackling over the phone as we took turns emailing each other pictures. I'd forgotten how many mean, insulting, pornographic drawings we'd shared over the years. Every new image was funnier than the last.
Along with the pictures, he sent me an MP3 of "Music & Rhythm". I hadn't heard it in a decade and a half! As it played, we both howled with laughter as we recalled our misadventures. The Daytona. Japanese class. The mall. Alexander. The airport. All the years of nonsense. It was a blast.
Reconnecting with Erik happened at the right time, at a point in my life where I was under a lot of existential stress. That evening on the phone, when we regressed into clueless twenty-year-olds, rekindled something inside me, something that I've tried my best to apply to my life on a daily basis: to try not to take things so seriously.
I am guilty of beating myself up mercilessly. For some reason, I feel as if I have to hold myself to some ridiculously high standard of achievement. No easy way out for me. Making dinner, or changing a light bulb, or folding laundry... If I don't do it correctly the first time, then I feel the need to punish myself. I take little things and blow them up into "end of the world" moments. I have no idea where this personality flaw came from, but it's there. And it's insidious.
Writing this column is another great example of something I feel I have to nail. It's not a life or death scenario, it's supposed to be a lark. I've got the opportunity to blather into the void of the Internet every few weeks. That's not a chore, it's a privilege! But in the heat of the creative moment, I can really get down on myself if the words don't come easily. When I feel my mood turning sour, I've learned to step back, take a deep breath, and remember that in between all the headaches, all the setbacks, all the strife of daily life... there's still plenty of room to be a kid and have some fun. Simple, carefree, dumb fun.
And because I’ve got long-time friends like Erik out there, that's not hard at all.
(Unfortunately there was never a video made for this epic song, so enjoy the audio for free.)
BIO
Don Stroud is not the famous actor and world-class surfer of the same name. He is the non-famous California transplant who became an award-winning film editor and - finally - an award-winning screenwriter. He loves cats, sushi, comic books, movies, music, and Cherry Coke. What's that, dear? Oh yes: and his wife. You can follow him on Twitter, where he pops up sporadically, at @DonStroud2.