Trying To Get Away...

Sitting at the Oakland Airport, twisting my boarding pass in my hand while waiting for my flight, a teenage girl comes and sits two seats away from me. I dont really look up, but I can smell the grease and pepperoni on a slice of Round Table Pizza in her hand, hear the clinking of ice in a paper Coca Cola cup, then the sounds of her munching and slurping come through the white noise of the terminal. I pull out my book and begin reading, peer over at her bleached hair and lip ring and the cookie cutter restaurants behind her, same as any other terminal in any other airport. She drops a greasy napkin in front of me as she gets up to throw away her trash and makes a cell phone call as she sits down.

¨What are you doing?¨ I hear her say, ¨playing the blues? ...Its so difficult to move your pinky like that...¨

"Oh she´s a musician," I think to myself, "That´s Awesome! You dont overhear enough conversations about playing music."

Then she continues, "...Oh I can never do Dragonforce on Expert, thats crazy!"

"Oh. She´s talking about Guitar Hero," I think, "Thats a shame."

I mention this to my brother when I finish eavesdropping on her conversation, including a lament about her makeup being taken away at security and "depo" shots (People watching is the best at airports). I tell him that I´m excited to get out of the USA for a little while, to get out of the stronghold our corporate culture has on us. He agrees wholeheartedly. He has only been back in The States for Christmas.

Of course as we arrive in Quito, after jetting over the most beautiful spread of buildings and mountain peaks, the highrises clinging to the green hillsides, and after landing on the runway right in the middle of the city, as I´m standing beside my brother in line for customs with my guitar slung over my shoulder, he points towards a man a few people ahead of us in line with the neck of a Guitar Hero guitar sticking out of his backpack.

"Okay, nevermind," I mutter.

And, of course, the man screening bags at the Quito customs looks at my brother, and giving him a hug says, ¨Billy, whats up man!¨ We walk into the front of the Airport where dozens of eager faces are watching everyone come out of the terminal, and five of my brother´s friends are waiting, greet us with hugs and kisses on the cheek, take us out and load us and our stuff into two cars, and we charge across the city, American music blaring from the stereo...

Gone For A While

I have a good feeling about this next year. Though that may only be a personal feeling. I think its going to be an important one at the very least. This is certainly a good time to be paying attention.

I'm catching a flight tonight down to Quito. It'll be good to get out of this country for a while. I'll try to post a bit while I'm away, and hopefully I'll bring back a different perspective on things. We'll see.

Happy New Year Everyone.

Christmas Music

I feel like I heard less Christmas music than ever before this year. I'm not certain if its due to my avoidance of malls and television and most of what radio has to offer, or maybe even a tolerance that I have built up over the years. I can really recall only a few specific snippets of it offhand.

Once, waiting in the lobby of a hotel I stayed in several nights ago for a shuttle to pick up my rental car, I was subjected to the more obscure songs of the holiday niche from a radio station offering their very own "Christmas Miracles" - cash giveaways to people who called in with stories of friends and family who were down and out. Though the song selections were plastic and nauseating, and I couldn't help but think of the conversation in the station's management offices about charitable tax write-offs, I do dig that there is a season promoting selflessness, even if such selflessness and charity is often to the benefit of those corporations that tend to benefit from pretty much everything.

I heard "Winter Wonderland" when I was in a Borders yesterday. The used bookstore was closed. Outside, a crackling hailstorm had whitewashed the street and left an immense double rainbow from the hills to Bed Bath and Beyond. As we walked through the parking lot and into the bustling store, with the sun finally shimmering down through the weather, my brother commented that he hadn't seen anyone but us looking up at it, that he wasn't certain that any of the drivers waiting to make left turns onto the busy street or any of the pedestrians hustling in and out of shops had even noticed.

I heard holiday music a few other times, while scanning the radio when I had forgotten to bring my ipod into the car, or rushing into a coffee shop to use the bathroom, but it wasn't enough to really bum me out. I wonder if the heads of marketing this year advised that people were sick of the same old holiday crap, or if the freedom of choice that we're granted from mp3 players and free music from Limewire and BitTorrent and AUX inputs in car stereos has kept the air less polluted.

I appreciate it, whatever it is. Maybe its helped me keep a focus on seeing family and catching up, and it certainly has kept my spirits higher to not be subjected to it. My Grandma pulled out some John Lennon which was a nice alternative. "War is over, If you want it..." Singing something with a message is always nice.

Anyway, I hope everyone is having a great day. It certainly is always an interesting one.

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.

The chill was refreshing as I waited for the hotel shuttle, a white minivan with amateur lettering on the side, to pull up at the curb. I squinted at every other vehicle as it arrived in the bleary lights and commotion of rolling suitcases and cell phone calls, hoping it was the one to take me to a shower and a bed. The driver seemed rushed, wouldn’t smile, and was nearly as unpersonable as the other clientele, an older couple, the woman in a fur coat, who I tumbled into the backseat to accommodate, allowed to check in before me, and made awkward eye contact with as I walked by them putting the key into the door of their room. This place was beneath them. It was old and dirty, a one and a half star establishment. The sort of place to sleep through a layover. The sort of place I’m pretty used to.

Unlocking my door, throwing my suitcase and guitar on the bed, I felt such a relief. I was finally alone, in my own space. The last two days had been carefully planned out, each stretch of moments colliding on time with the next. I had pulled it off as of yet too, making each meeting, catching all three of my flights, even if it meant screaming down Hollywood Blvd in my rental car through yellow light after yellow light. Somehow, I had made it to Seattle now.

I took a shower and set everything out for my delirious early morning self. Lying in bed, I thought through the last two days. I had been up way too early each morning after thin and anxious sleep, had spent most of my time in meetings that were pretty intense for me, meetings with potential producers for my next album, which is now written and ready and kicking. I thought of the mob of screenwriters I had seen picketing outside a studio as I drove by in Burbank, pre-coffee. I thought about the quiet coffee shop I made it to, where the woman behind the counter remembered my order from the night before, something I had grown unaccustomed to in LA. I thought of the view from the penthouse of a Sunset Strip high-rise office building, all of downtown spread out and silent behind the glass. I thought of the showcase I had been taken to, the schmoozing and chattering of industry around me as I wrapped sandwiches from the free catering into napkins and shoved them into my backpack.

I slept hard, but thoughts pecked at me all night. I kept waking up, but was never coherent enough to tend to them.

The next morning I got up early again to pick up my rental car. Seattle was gushing with rain as always promised and I was somehow upgraded from the shaky little “economy” car I had reserved into a calm and confident Jeep Commander. I endured the spray of semis blasting by me in the dwindling commute traffic while downtown appeared through the storm. And I pulled off at the one exit that I knew, where all of the venues I have played in town are scattered along the hill.

I wondered into Café Vita, down the block form Neumo’s. I remember babbling on and on about their coffee to someone on a tour a while back. It was still good and I was feeling full of potential. The girl behind the counter asked me how my day was going. Not wanting to get into it, I just smiled and said it was going fine, and asked her about hers. She said it still wasn’t easy getting up early each day, and I offered my sympathy. I told her that no matter how many days in a row I have to get up early, I can still sleep til one without a problem when a free day rolls around.

Needing a good spot to drink my coffee, I drove out to Lake Washington and watched the rain hit the surface of the water beyond the naked trees, with the threads of winter hanging from the branches, all stained with the weather. I watched a Crow hop along the grass and started the think that Seattle could be a cool spot to make a record. These songs are rainy songs, I think. That doesn’t mean they are sad necessarily. I have a lot of hope, a lot of inspiration, a bit higher of a rate of epiphany in the rain I’d say.

I found myself downtown by early afternoon, in an rickety industrial warehouse come artist studio. Through the cold windows I could see steam rising up from all the old buildings, all the brick a deep red with the water, the lights of the office buildings stretching above lit up vividly in the darkness of the day. I heard some good stories, learned a lot, and as I tore back down I-5 in the clamor and clutter of commute, my mind twisted and turned with possibilities.

I followed those thoughts back into the terminal, turning them over and over as I waited for my late flight, as I tapped my foot in baggage claim, and as my contacts began to hurt in my eyes as I rode in the passenger seat towards a familiar bed.

I got a lot to think about, but things are moving forward. After Christmas with my family, I’m going to go to South America for a bit to clear my head and hang with my brother. When I’m back I’ll be heading right into the studio. I cannot wait!

The Fire

I was getting coffee with Alicia and Scott the other day when I somehow got to talking about the fire that burned down a great deal of the Oakland Hills in 1991. I was seven at the time and though the fire came within fifty feet of my parent’s house, it didn’t burn down. A retired San Francisco firefighter lived on our street and after everyone had been evacuated, he went from house to house turning the gas off, and spraying down the roofs. He had a fire hose, but unfortunately it was fit for San Francisco hydrants, and he had to hike down to a station at the bottom of the hill to replace it. I’m still shocked that there were inconsistencies in the hoses from one city to the next.

When we returned from a friend’s house a few towns over, after a week of being away, we found nearly the entire hillside burnt away, and firefighters still putting out dying embers. Our street, though, looked just as it had before, except the sky had broadened a bit from the great redwood and pines that had fallen all around in the blaze.

For the next few years I lived amongst the rubble and the rebuilding, the homes coming up on insurance money all modern and stucco upon the scorched hills. There are streets that the fire didn’t cross, where one side is all old growth forest shading little wood sided houses and the other is a bulking row of three or four or five story monstrosities. A few of my friend's houses burned and despite the enormous loss, the seven year old me always carried around a morsel of jealousy for all the new things they had, though I eventually understood that the trade off for that big screen TV and Nintendo was their baby pictures, stuffed animals, and in some cases real cats and dogs.

My main point in my conversation, really though, was recalling how many of those new houses I actually have been inside.
My brother and our friends and I would go scavenging in the rubble, along the crumbled concrete foundations and melted rebar, burned out stoves and chimneys, and would find whatever had survived and been left when the houses were cleaned up. It was mostly trash, but we would haul bags of it back to my folks place and pour it out in the driveway in little piles, examining each little bolt or corroded saw blade.

Once the cement and lumber trucks began to block the street every day, making me perpetually late to school, new foundations were poured and scaffolding was erected around each structure. Property was poorly guarded, and in the summer, when it was light out late and the workers had all gone home, we would climb up the ladders on the side of the scaffolding and creep into open windows, wandering the corridors of bare plywood and drywall, exploring every inch until the locked windows and doors stacked along the garage floor were finally installed. I have been in most every living room, every master bedroom, every bathroom in the blocks surrounding my parent’s house. We would climb out on unshingled roofs, on single two by fours above several story falls and stare off at the bay area spreading beneath us in the hues of sunset, completely unaware of how lucky we were to bear witness to such a thing nearly every day.

By the time I was in high school most of the houses were completed and I had long moved on from the thrill of construction. There was only one remnant of it that captivated me on a regular basis, a set of adjacent lots at the top of my parent’s street that the owners had failed to sell or clean up. The view from there was one of the very best in the bay area. You could see each of the bridges that span the water, and on The Fourth of July, the entire neighborhood would be gathered in blankets, looking out at the fireworks shows from Oakland, to Berkeley, to San Francisco and Marin.

Feeling outcast at school and unsettled in my skin, I would spend a great deal of time there alone, bringing along a pad and paper to sketch or write, or my skateboard to roll around the foundation. My brother and I caught every meteor shower from that spot, and I would go up there with my first girlfriend and sit and talk and make out. It was just out of site from any other house and aside from the occasional person walking their dog, or seeking out the view, I had it to myself.

At some point in high school, one of the lots was sold, and big ugly house built upon it. The lot closest to the edge, with the greatest view, was still vacant, so as I nostalgically examined each room as it was being built, I had little animosity beside the design of the house and the materials used to build it being pretty hideous.

It took a while to be sold, but eventually a very young couple, freshly wealthy from Silicon Valley, moved in. I was going away to college, but when I would visit home, I found that little by little, my old refuge was being taken away. The new couple put up cheap barbed wire fencing around the lot that, though did not belong to them, attached to their backyard, and when my father invited them over to discuss ‘No Parking’ signs they had petitioned for in an area with little streets and tensions between neighbors already high from lack of space, they smiled understandably in his face and went ahead with it behind his back.

I detested these people, and as I write this, I realize I still do. There was a culture built up in our neighborhood that they had failed to understand, to respect, as they moved in, but there wasn’t much I could do to stop them. The Foundation, as I called the remaining lot, did not belong to them, but it didn’t belong to me either, and the real owner had always kept “keep out” signs visible, had probably been grateful for the new neighbor’s fencing. It was a familiar attitude that these folks displayed, taking control of that lot like a good fit of manifest destiny, moving in and changing things around to their liking. Its one of those stories I've heard in one shape or another all my life. I guess it never feels so great to be the ones that were there first.

Buying Houses

On the night before Thanksgiving I was having a discussion with my mom about the house I grew up in. I was telling her that I hope she and my father never get rid of it. I told her that if I have a family and steady income one day, and they decide to move, I would certainly move in to keep it in the family.

That discussion then went into another discussion about remodeling, things I would think of night after night when trying to fall asleep for impending high school mornings. I had forgotten that she took courses in Architecture, had already put to paper plans for all sorts of additions, and we talked all about different ways the house could be reconstructed, some simple and plausible, some purely dreams.

At some point, when making a grandiose proposal for a second story, I said, “well, I guess we’ll have to see where America is then.” Meaning by the time I’d actually have the means or the need to have a house of my own, the times may not call for expansion, but for making the best of what you got.

That comment came really naturally, and I caught myself a second later, “whoa did I really just say that?” I’m not sure that my generation has a real concept of trying times on a national scale. Certainly there are the personal ones that hit everyone to varying degrees – tragedy doesn’t discriminate - but we’re at what seems like quite a pivotal point, and maybe the habits and freedoms that we take for granted might not always be there.

I certainly hope a good leader is elected next year. It is so incredible to me what gets compromised for the sake of greed, and I know I’ve been damn lucky to grow up in the time and place that I have. I’d rather not give it up. I know most others feel the same way.

I talked more with my mom about this, about the houses that our generation could be buying in a few years. She commented that the blind expectation for one’s children to be doing better than them, might not be as common as it once was. The country is not on the rise at the moment. There is a seed of concern.

I have a feeling that there were some really interesting discussions at the Thanksgiving table this year, maybe some in the spirit of what we were told the holiday is about. With the presidential approval rating being so darn low, then I can only assume that there have been a lot of hearts that have changed. I guess that means that we’re less divided as a nation, that most of us can at least agree on something.

My mom continued to speculate that maybe our generation as a whole doesn’t even desire to live in that bigger house, drive a fancier car, and so on. I may think that her and my father’s house would look cool with that second story, but I’m ankle deep in a music career amidst the crumbling record industry, and my brother is a ski instructor and white water guide amidst the crumbling environment. We’re both really happy right now, though, and we know that the only thing of real value in this world is happiness.