mr dave

… It Ain’t Over Till It’s OVER.

Yeah so this whole confusing shenanigan went down over the Summer of 2001 and didn’t really ‘finish’ until late Spring / early Summer 2003; so many phone calls, so much emotional manipulation, guilt, drunken ranting and raving. Throughout it all I remained steadfast in my stupidity and desire to help. Here’s the most substantial thing I learned through the entire experience and something the vast majority of people need to grasp about themselves:

I AM NOT A TRAINED PROFESSIONAL! THEREFORE I CANNOT EFFECTIVELY HELP ANOTHER PERSON WITH THEIR MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES.

Her first phone calls back to me ran the expected gamut of emotions, first it was apologies, then anger, and threats, and extraordinary claims. I even got a call from her mom at one point going off about Cancer and stuff like getting together because of a major health issue was sensible.

My friends all made the reasonable suggestion of either blocking her number or changing my phone number. I refused based on my belief that she had to be the one to want to end contact with me otherwise she’d always continue pursuing me. Based on the efforts she’d already done (and would eventually do) I was right, even if it took the better part of 2 years.

Her biggest attempt at pursuit and reconnection was later in the Summer of 2001, probably near the end of August as 9/11 hadn’t happened yet because there’s no way the border would have reacted the same way a month later. Anyway, one fine day I was sitting down to start dinner in my apartment and the phone rings. The guy at the other end of the line identifies himself as a border guard stationed at one of my provincial crossings. He wants to know if I recognize LawLady’s fake name and maybe a little more light into the situation.

CRAP.

So yeah… I totally spill the beans and explain to him the scoop. Apparently she’d left some of her duplicated paperwork in her trunk including her driver’s license and registration stuff. Her brother had also given her a length of metal pipe to keep hidden under her seat in case she ever had to protect herself from road rage freak outs. To the border guard though, it was an individual trying to cross into another country with a false identity and a concealed weapon. Her original intent was a surprise visit, he assured me that wouldn’t be happening that evening, but that I might get a call from his supervisor just to validate the claims of the situation. I didn’t get called from the Supervisor.

Holy hell did I ever get some phone calls from her that night though. One thing I tried to stress to her (and felt that I got through with) was that there were no romantic feelings anymore, my trust was betrayed, it was never going to happen. I also recognized that she had to be the one to want to let go as well so I tried encouraging her to focus on her studies with the Travel and Tourism course she had started that Spring. It actually seemed to work and her calls subsided.

Or so I thought, apparently by the summer of 2002 the ONLY job she could get in that field was leading bus tours into the New England states and into my little part of Canada. Right….

It had been a year since the whole encounter, her calls had diminished, though I noticed if I was ever any kind of friendly she’d latch onto that and start calling way more often. I didn’t want to screw over her education and the effort she’d made to improving herself so I agreed to not object if she ‘had’ to work in Canada, but I was also very clear about the fact that I was not comfortable with seeing or having direct contact with her again. So long as she was only crossing over for work and would remain with her work then whatever.

Then one fine Summer day, pretty sure it was a Friday, I’m hanging out with my friend who actually did own a Celica. I remember we had to be back at my place for late afternoon since I was expecting a call from the border to say, sure it’s ok so long as it’s only work. Except the only call I got was from her saying that she was in line at the border and that it would only be a bit longer. So my friend and I head out and walk down to the corner store for drinks and munchies, hang out for a bit longer, and then he’s got to leave. Normal enough, then I notice he forgot his sunglasses on the counter, just as the buzzer rings.

Good timing buddy! (except he doesn’t actually feature in this story again).

So I hit the button and crack the door open and stick my head out, I was in a ‘basement’ apartment at the time so there were 3-4 steps to go down first before getting to my hallway. She wasn’t even down the first step before every lock on my door was fastened. I wasn’t exactly in fear of my safety I just didn’t know how to deal with her or how to properly handle the situation. I didn’t really want to go to the cops because it didn’t seem like ‘that’ serious of a situation. It’s also not physically possible to cross the border and drive a street legal car from there to my place within the timeframe of her phone calls.

So I took the coward’s way out and hid in the corner of my apartment before hiding in front of my computer with my headphones on (so I couldn’t hear her knock or complain through my door).

After about an hour of that I get an email from one of my best friends. Essentially saying, “DUDE WTF! I’m playing hooky tonight and tried to stop over for a visit and…. WHAT THE FREAKING HELL DUDE!”

Turns out he had showed up and tried buzzing my door while she was waiting in the entrance (secured building) and when she saw him hit my button she made some comment about visiting me and asking for him to talk a bit of sense into me. He just backed away slowly. Then a 2nd friend did the exact same thing, he played hooky, and had a face to face encounter in my building before emailing me.

And that’s when we crossed the line and went full retard. We could and should have just called the cops and gotten this properly handled but… that would be boring.

So one of the guys leaves his car at my place and gets into the getaway car. We’re talking THIS badboy of automotive supremacy.


The glory upon which you are gazing is a 1992 Mercury Topaz. That thing can go 0-100km/h in less than a minute or so and won’t start shaking uncontrollably until you hit almost 120km/h AND going downhill. It’s also got the widest trunk I’ve ever seen on a relatively small car – you can load a bass guitar in a hard shell case flat in, no messing with angles or trying to shimmy and wedge it in there.

So anyway my two buddies are cruising around in that car and one of them is using the ‘cell phone’ to coordinate a plan with me. We’re talking one of those old school half brick gameboy looking things with a flip piece to speak into that still needed to be plugged into the car’s lighter socket. She’d been stalking my building and parking lot for a while apparently, they’d try drawing her away so I could ‘escape’ but she’d normally just turn back. Eventually she took the bait.

And the chase was on.

Now I was still hiding in my apartment at the time. I only know what I heard through the phone. She was apparently driving parallel to them in the lane for oncoming traffic through residential streets. She’d cut them off at intersections, weaving in and out of traffic, driving over curbs; everything short of physically ramming the vehicles. Heck even my friend was somehow pushing that Tempo and its automatic transmission to the point of squealing the tires. Then it happened, they managed to get her boxed into a lane at an intersection that only went straight, and with the current traffic she would only be able to go straight until she found another corner.
So I get the message. “She’s stuck! GO GO GO! We’re looping around behind the grocery store, we’ll pick you up at the shady end of your street!” Seconds later I’m sprinting down the street, neighbors are probably thinking I knocked off one of the corner stores, don’t care. I’m more than halfway to the corner before the Tempo pulls up to a fast stop. I motion to my friend in the passenger window to open the back door. I’m thinking the less time I’m visible the better. I point to the back door, I wave my arms in a “OPEN IT!” manner, he gives me a thumbs up.

Whatever, those few seconds didn’t end up mattering, she was lost and didn’t manage to round the corner to see my escape. I laid myself down on the floor in the back between the seats and might have even pulled a blanket over top of me just in case. First stop was my one of their girlfriend’s apartments, I hung out there for an hour or two while they went back and got the other guys car. They also did a few spins around the block to confirm that she wasn’t still stalking the area.

Now in retrospect I learned that when she tried to cross the border again (for work) that her first visit with the falsified credentials etc. was still on her record or something. Either way, it worked against her ability to cross the border for whatever reason, and in order to fix it I had to give my approval, but if I was OK with her crossing the border then I ‘should’ have been ok with signing a letter from the border agency or whatever on her behalf. That’s not how it was originally explained and therefore that’s not how anything played out.

After that incident the calls went bananas for a bit, she threatened me with legal action to recoup the costs of her education because it was ‘my fault’ she couldn’t work, etc. It took over a year to actually meet her again as yet another ‘new’ person (3rd? 4th persona?) except this time where she was adamant about being ‘new’ I was able to trap her logic and either force her to acknowledge the façade that wasn’t nearly as opaque as she’d hoped or to leave me alone, win win for me.

I got the last call a few hours later. She asked me to hear her out first before saying anything. Then went on to claim she’d finally seen or experienced something to fully grasp my perspective, she’d finally burned the sweatshirt she’d worn when she hugged me and as a result had smelled like me for almost 3 years…

It sounded like one of those ‘empowerment’ support group things like when obsessive people need to make some sort of physical display to get over some sort of emotional issue. In her case she needed physically destroy everything about me to move on or something. Good enough for me. The last thing I said after she explained herself and how she was moving on was “It’s taken almost 3 years, it’s about god damned time. Good. Bye.” Then I hung up the phone and went back to bed.

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But back to the night of that chase. From the ‘safe-house’ of a friend’s girlfriend’s living room, to the safety of a friends’ parent’s spare room; there was really only one place left to go. The safest, most secure, most obscured room in my area, that side room in the basement of my friend Jef’s parents house.

Oh yes, after a night like that the only place to go was… straight to THE JAM ROOM! (I only wish I could find the jam we recorded about her - "BALTIMORE! BALTIMORE! WE DON'T NEED YOU, ANYMORE!" then my friend J-the driver tries to sing this high note and his voice cracks like he's a Muppet, it was a thing of beauty).

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Trollheart

[quick, gobsmacked reply] This is amazing! Out of nowhere, I chose Lenny's "It ain't over" for the Daily Earworm slot for tomorrow, and I haven't thought about that song for years! GMTA! Or, indeed, GEHA! [/quick, gobsmacked reply]

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Trollheart

Like I said already, probably one of the most entertaining things I have read in a long time, which is not to denigrate or ignore the trauma you went through, but man was that interesting. You certainly have led an experience-packed life! Hope it all worked out in the end.

You should definitely sell this story (names changed to protect the ignorant) --- it'd be a movie in no time!

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mr dave

Thanks, glad you enjoy my ramblings haha. I can definitely see where people would call some of those experiences traumatic, but I never really felt in danger or overly concerned. I'm gonna chalk it up to being really naive

You're also not the first person to mention movie action in regards to that story. It's kind of nutty, don't really know how I'd go about turning it into a movie though.

Also, great job on the Journal Guide thread, though I don't see myself transitioning to a more album review oriented format anytime soon hehe

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mr dave

YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!

… and that about sums up the years in the basement jam room in a nutshell.

For the most part we were a bunch of pretentious stereotypes that couldn’t see beyond ourselves at the time. I’ve said it for years and I’ll say keep saying it for decades to come, there’s a whole hell of a lot more to music than just the sounds you hear. Ultimately it boils down to communication, honest and clear words and thoughts flowing between the individuals within the group. It’s a whole hell of a lot harder just to string those words together to form that preceding sentence than it is to actually put it in practice face to face.

What we lacked in adult life experience we made up with passive aggression, it was ultimately a recipe for disaster. I’m still friends with everyone I played with, though looking back I feel like I owe them an apology for wasting that spot of our youth right after college. At the time I still had all sorts of unresolved issues in my head, and lacked the life experience to properly address them. As a result our jams became more of a cathartic exercise, none of us went to therapy; we just exorcised our demons through our improvisations. There are plenty of times where our drummer / vocalist blew out his vocal chords and finished the afternoon completely hoarse due to having screamed out his own frustrations about his situation.

I’m not proud of having to admit to having thrown a guitar across this basement either. It might not look like much but it thoroughly captures the essence of that group and our relative immaturity (mine are the feet on the left)



I still struggle with grasping the difference in how people see me and how I see myself, but musically I’ve finally been able to assert myself clearly. Problem being, I only found that ability long after our last jam room flooded and we all started moving in separate directions. All the people I used to play with still talk about jamming when I see them again, but the only one I’d truly feel comfortable starting anything substantial with is my original drummer (the F). That’s not to say I never made attempts to express what was flowing around in my head. I’m going to take the easy way out of this entry by copying and pasting en email I wrote to my bandmates back in what almost feels like a past life (Summer 2007):

Apologies for the lack of capitalization, I was a bastard, but that last two paragraphs really solidify the majority of my perspective on being an idealistically artistic musician. Yet, even 5 years later, I still complain. The result of that original email? Lots of praise from the bandmates, lots of OH YEAH! LET’S JAM!!!. Was there ever a show? Well… we can’t just go up there and make it up. You can’t just do that. I don’t want people getting angry or laughing at us… From a guy who fancied calling himself a Hooligan (incidentally this is the same guy who never learned the bass line to The Mountain Song).

Yeah… COMMUNICATION! It’s not about saying the right thing, it’s about being honest, with both yourself and your bandmates; and sometimes that means the best thing for your band is to find new mates.

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Dr_Rez

First off Mr. Dave I am very sorry for never seeing this. I just randomly happened to see it in recent posts made while browsing. You are a very good writer and had a very interesting story to tell. I must admit some of the story near the end I skimmed but all the first entries about your dad and that jam room were quite interesting. his song was actually really good, I enjoyed it alot, would definitely be interested in hearing some more if you have any. Also your footage was cool as well. Unfortunately the quality of the camera was awful so I dont think I got a very good judge of the atmosphere, sure seemed like a good light show though by the look of it.

Secondly I can relate to so many of the points you have made about jamming with friends whether they be close or not. The problem is my friends always seem way to interested in JUST jamming. While I love that and a live performance is often half that, you need something of substance so you can have an excuse to play in front of people. Sure we did a few small shows and whatnot but never grew into anything more because they were never willing to put the time in to sit down and learn parts and make it sound remotely clean.

That is why I have wanted to go to college for the last 4 years. You seem to have had a good time meeting people who wanted to make music with you and that lived pretty close to you. What would you suggest doing regarding finding new people to play with. Im currently working and dont go to school so not many people around me play anything seriously. Just confused as to how to seek out people who would like to start seriously jamming now that I have a house thats perfect for it.

Again great journal keep it going, and im sorry it took me almost 5 months to get to it!

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Trollheart

Thanks, appreciate it. I don't expect any/everyone to follow it, and certainly not those who have journals already. It's sort of like you say in your following piece: it doesn't have to do anything, it just is. It's not a set of rules, or even advice really, just a few guidelines, a hand reaching out in the dark, as it were, grasping the "newbie"'s groping digits and helping to lead them a little way into the light. But then, the hand lets go and where they end up afterwards is their affair.

I'm not here to tell people how they should write journals. I'm absolutely not here to write people's journals for them, and I don't particularly want anyone copying my style.

I'm just here to give a little help.

Sometimes that's all that's needed, yes?

PS anyone who wants to can of course chime in with comments or additions any time: it's not exclusively my guide. I just started it.

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mr dave

It’s all good, thanks for the positive feedback haha (and TrollHeart as well). To be honest I don’t expect that many people to read it all. It’s as much of an opportunity for me to either clear out or reorganize a bunch of the crap in my head as anything else. That whole Baltimore can of worms was never supposed to be that long; I didn’t realize how deep that rabbit hole still happened to be hahaha. Also, considering one of my main recurring statements is “There’s far more to music than just the sounds you hear” it shouldn’t be too surprising that I see a Jam Room as a metaphor for the human psyche as much as a dirty room filled with amps in the back of a warehouse. Glad you enjoyed the clips hehe (and yeah, it was an AWESOME light show hahaha, I figure about 100 people in attendance).

I’m going to address your comment backwards because the next bit goes all Led Zep (Ramble On!) Don’t think that I’m discouraging you from going to school for a second, but please have a better reason than just wanting to meet new people and stuff. Meeting people and finding people to jam with is almost a given in college / uni, the one thing you might have a bit of a hassle with is being seen as an ‘old’ guy. It took me a jam or two to warm up to playing with people in their 30s when I was in my 20s mainly due to my lack of experience with dealing with that level of age difference as equals. Even if you’re only in your mid-20s, the fact that you’d be surrounded by people who were still in high school a few months ago and you weren’t makes you appear ‘old / grown up’ in a lot of their eyes.

As for finding people to play with, I wouldn’t necessarily advertise the fact that I have a jam house right off the bat because it’s a bit of a kick-me sign for getting your place robbed. What’s your local scene like? Facebook groups for bars / venues that normally host live music? Out here there’s a general local message board, but it’s mainly amateur, if you want to step up or at least start trying you need to get involved with FB groups. Also, even if you’re not a student it doesn’t mean you can’t put a notice on school bulletin boards that you’re looking for musicians. Specify as much information as you can when you’re soliciting as well; that you want to start a gigging band, that you have a rehearsal space, what sort of style you’re hoping from the other musicians. It’s no fun for anyone to look for a metal singer but never specifying whether or not you want a Rob Halford screaming type or some black metal growler, right?

Your second point in regards to jamming and the purpose of performance is spot on and something I actually discussed at length with my cousin last week. He went the opposite direction than what I did and is actually involved with two proper working bands. I find it interesting to look back as well since both of our fathers played music, but his never had the same level of success as mine.

Ultimately we came to the conclusion that as a musician or any sort of performer you NEED to be able to recognize the raison d’etre of a stage and respect it. That doesn’t mean you can’t be an improvisational freak out band, but you still need to accept that if you’re on a stage you have to respect and entertain the crowd. The point of being on a stage is to showcase some sort of performance for the crowd. The big mistake I used to, and a lot of idealistic amateur musicians continue to make, is ignoring the crowd, they don’t want to ‘sell out’ by appealing to the masses so they perform for the sake of their own ego (but holy crap dude don’t ever call them out on that while they’re drinking or you’re going to have a seriously pissy temper tantrum on your hands).

Something else we discussed was the lack of people playing music for the simple fun of it. When we were kids he could have named 10-15 places back home where he could be guaranteed to find some kind of live music every weekend (their living room was one of those places). Nothing major or earth shattering, but you knew if you went to buddy’s house on Saturday afternoon there would be a few people jamming with acoustics, and if you went to dude’s cottage that evening there would be a different group of people busting it out on theirs as well. At this point, he’s hard pressed to find one spot when we go back home where he can be guaranteed there will be live music.

There’s something to be said for economic downturns and an aging population especially in rural areas but I don’t think the lack of jobs and increase in old people is necessarily causing a decline in music so much as a shift in cultural attitudes and expectations due to technological innovation. On one hand technology has changed the face of live music, DJs who play ‘gigs’ with just an iPod, on the other it seems less and less people just play for fun. It seems to me that we, as a culture, did more with less, before we had all those technological distractions we were forced to spend our time doing other things and developing various skills and abilities based on those hobbies. Back then ‘showing off’ was a reflection of your talents, today ‘showing off’ is about displaying your material possessions.

As a result of that technological shift it seems that there's far less opportunity for 3-4 good musicians to entertain a crowd of a few hundred as opposed to a few hundred melodic geeks entertaining groups of 3-4 people everywhere via their phones. That semi-professional middle ground between garage grade amateurs and international superstars has become very eroded over the last few decades to the point where it's become an undeniable concern. I'm not saying the sky is falling and that this shift is the death of good music, but at the same time it's hardly an encouraging direction for society to be moving towards in regards to the arts.

Dang, I didn’t expect this response to be this long hahaha

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mr dave

Is there really anything that needs to be said about that tune? Proto-metal, butt kicking hard rock at its finest that still gets borrowed from today. I know I mentioned deconstructing the songs I’d post with a thread but at this point they’re becoming thematic accompaniments to the core ideas I feel like posting about. I figure I’ll do a collective retrospective deconstruction when I run out of stuff to blab about. This time around I’m still going to go off about band based communication.

There are five main points I want to address:

Introspection
Clarity
Tone
The Power of First Impressions
Professionalism

Ultimately a band is a group effort, but the first level of communication has to be internal. Ideally any potential musician should have already taken the time to sit back and contemplate the big questions about their lives, their goals, and their music. The big challenge is being truly honest with yourself, and then being capable of clearly communicating that to your band mates. What I notice most is that a lot of people are hung up on external validation, they don’t want to potentially upset or offend others, which seems nice, but if you’re lying to yourself to please someone else you’re just delaying an inevitable breakdown. Unfortunately (or fortunately) there’s no shortcut to enlightenment, it’s not like there’s an actual endpoint anyway. In my own case it only took me, oh… 15 years to figure out and acknowledge the most underlying issue within my music.

The other big challenge is admitting to yourself that you feel differently than how you want to think. Your conscious mind is something you have direct control over, your emotions and especially your gut instinct, not so much. Yet it’s one of those things where we seem to be conditioned by society and mass media to believe the opposite, that because we have control over our conscious mind we should also be able to establish direct control over other intangible aspects of our being. To an extent that’s definitely true, tempering your emotions is a very useful skill, but a proper application of that ability requires the recognition of those emotions as being uncontrolled elements applying influence to your being.

So once you’ve done your introspective soul searching and found your peace of mind it’s a matter of finding the words necessary to express it in an undeniably clear way to your band members. Good luck – especially if one or more band mates are not ready, far enough, or flat out refuse, to do their own introspection. Worse case is you have a complacent personality in the group who just says what they anticipate the others want to hear; which just leads to tension and resentment. Then you run into the classic conundrum of ‘Do I keep a band with my friend, or try with some random dudes’. From a technical standpoint if you have to choose between a virtuoso with a bad attitude or your buddy who can’t play more than power chord riffs – choose your buddy – they’ll eventually develop greater technique. On the other hand if you’re trying to start a band for a specific purpose and you’ve established a clear vision for yourself and your friends are simply trying to coddle rather than truly support, then the randoms might be better options; especially if the intentions are clearly communicated from the start, even if it might end up feeling like a weird employer / employee relationship.

Tone is something I get comments on - ALL THE TIME. How many times have I been called condescending on this site? How many times have people complained that they feel I’m talking down to them, I consider it more from the side, perpendicular perspectives or something. But there’s a reason for it, and its how I choose to communicate through the written word. Based on that choice and the fact that I normally choose to make broader generalized comments, it’s created a particular reputation. Whether completely accurate or not is irrelevant, I don’t have control over how other people interpret my words, same as I have no control over how listeners hear my music. As a result I need to be able to accept that the majority of people will not always see things the same way, but more significantly, my own personal feelings on the matter are generally irrelevant to their interpretations of the ideas I present. At that point I have the choice of being accepting of the new feedback or I can let myself take it personally and get defensive. The positivity or negativity of the new perspective shouldn’t become a factor in my own reaction. One of my old jobs explained it best – we only had to address the concerns within the letter, never the tone – so if someone raged for 2 pages about how evil we were because of a late fee, all we address in the reply was the late fee.

As lame as it seems, first impressions count for a lot. How you choose to present yourself and the attitude with which you do so will have a lasting effect on how your peers see you and your reputation in your local scene. The choice ultimately resides within the individual, but unlike the inability to control how listeners react to your music, the reputation of a band or its individual musicians is very much a controllable element within the group. I’m not saying every band should hire a PR person or have a member with a proper marketing background, but at the same time a little knowledge from those domains will not compromise the integrity of any artist’s work (same as some basic small business / entrepreneurship knowledge).

And that brings this entry to my final point. Professionalism. Ultimately if you want to be taken seriously outside of the circle of family and friends who’d rather lie to your face than bruise your ego, you don’t necessarily need to be a pro, but you need to be able to act like one. Copping any sort of attitude with a promoter or bar staff will get you moved to the bottom of the list of potential bands or straight up black listed. Being ignorant or rude to fellow musicians in your scene for whatever reason will limit your opportunities to perform. Ultimately, any sort of drama allowed to be recognized by the public will diminish your possibility of success, however you chose to define it.

That reminds me of a story...



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(I’m pretty sure I’ve posted it elsewhere on the site before but whatever)

Back in the warehouse days, sometime around late 2006 I imagine, we were in the middle of our regular Friday night super freak out shenanigan and taking a little smoke break. The only other band in the warehouse was some punk outfit in a room across the way on the 2nd level. We can hear them struggling with the start of a song. From the sound of things the singer also plays guitar, he’s counting it off then playing at a slightly different speed. EVERY time. We can hear him starting to flip out and get belligerent with his band mates. So we decide to turn the screws a bit more, 2-3-4 we kick into their riff, and proceed to smoke it.

Two years later I’m starting a new job and working with this dude sporting a big green Mohawk and we get to talking tunes pretty quickly. We live in a relatively small town, ran in relatively insular circles, and sure enough, we’d both had jam rooms in that same warehouse. So I start telling him about that particular evening and he start ROARING. He’s laughing so hard he’s almost out of his chair.

DUDE! That was us!

Apparently the band was first and foremost about being a dirty drunk street punk. Drinking was the focal point of pretty much everything. It might be shocking to learn the band imploded shortly thereafter. The main guy apparently stiffed a few of the other dudes their fair share of the record they’d all paid to have produced and pressed.

Also the dude apparently completely lost it when we started out playing their riff, I think it ended their night before they were able to get through their first song hahaha But with the way they communicated within their unit, it was never going to amount to anything anyway.

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Blarobbarg

Dang, Dave. Awesome last few posts. Your writing is fantastic, and you life experiences awkward/tragic, but make for a great story. You need to write a book.

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