McExperience

In February of 2003, I visited the Experience Music Project with a few friends from Guitar Maniacs, which I had never been to, but had heard a lot about since its opening some years before. It was pretty cool, to say the least. It was cool to see the Jimi Hendrix Experience's full stage and gear set up, as if it were on stage, but I thought that the guitars, drums and amps should still be out there in the world, somewhere, with plenty more stories to tell. I also remember seeing clothing items worn by Jimi, and also Eric Clapton's jacket that he wore on stage at Cream's farewell concert.

After we were done, we planned to visit Jimi's grave over in Renton, at the Greenwood Memorial Park. This was when it was still the block of granite in the ground; the memorial that was evenutally built there was a few years off in the future.

When we were done with that visit, we went to the McDonald's across the street for lunch. There was something familiar about the place, like I'd been there before, and while we were eating, it finally came to me.

Back in the later part of the '80s, I was made to be part of a Sunday School class, and there were a few times that we took a field trip to places like Winslow, Snoqualmie, and even Vancouver. Not something I recall with any fondness, because the others were teenage girls who were a few years older than me, they lwere into Debbie Gibson and Madonna (who were very popular at the time), and they played tapes of their music on these long trips, and I heard far more of that than I care to remember. Somewhere during the course of one of those trips we had actually stopped at that very McDonald's...only I didn't know that Jimi's grave was located right across the street from the place. If I had, I would have gladly announced to the others, "You go ahead end enjoy your McGarbage...I'm going to go visit Jimi!".

40 Years On

Strange thing to say, that.

In all honesty, it really doesn't feel like it.

I remember seeing a meme somewhere that said something like, "What if all these years we've lived through was just a dream that we're all having while we're asleep at nap-time in kindergarten?". That's definitely one of those cases of "If I knew then what I know now, I'd definitely make use of that knowledge!".

That period of time has really been occupying my head-space as of lately, flashing back on memories of that period, and reflecting on what I'm doing now.

It had been a great summer, getting very hot at times. It got so hot in the house that my sister Angie once proposed that we pitch a tent in the backyard, and all sleep out in the back. We didn't have a tent...but we had a clothesline that ran from the house to the garage, so we clamped a good-sized blanket to it with clothespins, put a good-sized rock on each corner of the blanket to hold it down, and we all slept in it that night. It was fun, even though we never did do that again for some odd reason. Another overly warm evening found all four of us cooling off in the wading pool that Angie and I had, right on the patio out in back.

We had our friend Mitchell, who lived across the street. For some reason, he had gotten this idea that we should all go to the B&I store, which was way out on South Tacoma Way....just us three, no grown-ups, and we took the bus out there. How we managed to do that is a mystery to me to this day, and still feels like it happened in a dream. Especially when we found out (the hard way) that the local bus only went out there, and not back, so we hoofed it from there all the way back to 9th and J, which is quite a long way (it must have taken us about five hours!).

Along our long journey back, we walked along the outside of the Tacoma Cemetery and we noticed this wall that ran along the top of the hill on one end of the park. Some teenage stoners had spray-painted a big cross and the words "BLACK SABBATH" on the wall. We wondered what it all meant, and what was behind it. We went up there, Mitchell hoisted himself up, got on top of the wall (now guarded by a fence), and saw what was there. Behind the wall is the Tacoma Cemetery graveyard. When he jumped down and told us what was behind the wall, we belted ass out of there so fast, our feet hardly touched the ground, and we didn't stop until we reached the next corner. You can bet we were exhausted by the time we made it home!

The family had gone on a camping trip with Dad's friend Fred, and spent a few days out in Alder Lake, which is pretty close to Mount Rainier. When we came back, the house was overly hot from being shut up for the last few days, even with the windows being opened up, and since there was something that Dad really wanted to see on TV that night, he put the TV and the TV stand it was on, right on the front porch, and so we parked ourselves out on the front lawn, and what was on that night was The Blues Brothers. I had never heard of it, and didn't really know any of the people in it, but I was blown away by it, and thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen at that point. Oddly enough, that was the only time we ever did that!

I started kindergarten that September, over the Bryant Elementary School, which was about half a mile up the street from our house. This was the only school year where Angie and I went to the same school with Mitchell. They were both in the second grade at the time, but I was a newbie to all of this. I was rather prepared by a number of years by watching Sesame Street, plus lots of books and reading material at home, so I was a little ahead of the others in class. So much so, in fact, that I went to the nearest first-grade class for my reading assignments and lessons. I was also the narrator for the class play, which was The Elephant's Child by Rudyard Kipling. Sadly, no pictures or audio of my first public performance (of sorts) exist.

Sometime in September, the whole lot of us (along with Red Fred) hopped a Trailways bus and went to Seattle, where we visited their fair, instead of the usual trip to the one in Puyallup. It was awesome, and much more fun. Red Fred played some sort of ring-toss game, and one prize he won was a sound-alike copy of the "Sgt. Pepper" movie soundtrack (the one on the Springboard label). This was my first trip to Seattle, and in the years since, I have only been there exactly twelve times since then.

Dad beckoned me into the house one evening, while we were the only ones home, and invited me to join him in watching this movie he was watching on Showtime...something about a family looking after a massive hotel somewhere in the Rockies. I think we know what he was watching (I've written about it here), and it completely blew out the inside of my fragile little mind. I was the same age as the young boy in that movie, which really drew me in, and made me see it through his eyes (so to speak). Maybe Dad saw some of me in Danny Torrance? I don't know, but I'm glad he let me watch it with him that night, and I was blown away again when I got to watch it again a week or two later with Angie and Mitchell, who also loved it.

Speaking of Seattle, in October, Dad hopped a Greyhound bus, and went to see the Rolling Stones at the Kingdome, to the tune of sixteen dollars, which was (if you can believe that) considered expensive at the time. Not one of his favorite concerts, as he was way up in the "nosebleed" seats, and was watching the onstage action on the video-screens on either side of the stage, while the band looked like teeny little ants; he later said it was like watching TV the whole time, and that he might have well have done that at home. I thought they were the bee's knees at that time, and was excited for him that he was there, while wishing I had been. It wasn't until 2002 that we saw them together at the Tacoma Dome, even though the ticket price was quite a bit higher that time, but the show was more enjoyable.

At a place called the Music Exchange on 11th Street, Dad got hold of an 8-Track player, and some 8-Track tapes, since they were cheap, as most people were moving over to cassettes, and no-one wanted 8-Tracks anymore. They didn't last too long around the house (he got rid of it, and went over to cassettes as well), but two of them had a major impact on me.

The first one was Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, which Dad had an album copy of, but I hadn't actually heard until he plugged the 8-Track of it into the player one afternoon, and--again--it blew me away completely. I really liked the keyboard playing in it, which was played pretty much as a lead instrument, and I decided right then and there that they keyboards were one day going to be my instrument, even though we didn't have anything remotely like one around the house. The other one was The Best Of The Guess Who by The Guess Who; Dad turned me onto this one with the song "Bus Rider", which was a tight, perfectly-crafted rocker, but I found that I liked everything else on this album. In fact, I fell in love with it, and I don't know how many times I played that 8-Track on days I wasn't in school.

As the 40th anniversary of that magic period is currently hanging around me, there are also a few sad notes that are connected to it. Charlie Watts, the Stones' legendary drummer passed away in late August, as did Ron Bushy, Iron Butterfly's drummer. I'd enjoyed their works and contributions to the music that they helped make all these years, and it was hard to see them leave us. And then there was something else from that period that was also a bit sad.

One of my favorite friends from kindergarten was another boy named Michael, who lived just a couple of blocks up from where I lived, with his parents and younger brother. I remember, when his birthday came around, I picked out a book for him of something I'd recently enjoyed; since a "Little Golden Book" of something like The Shining or The Blues Brothers wasn't an option, I settled for Pete's Dragon, which he seemed to like. Sometime during that school year, he moved away, and I never did see him again. His house on L Street was pretty much the only thing I had to remember him by, the one scrap of our friendship still in existence.

I'd always wondered what became of him, where he went to, and what he could be doing now. I went to one of those "people search" sites online, typed in his name and age...and sure enough, he seemed to have in lived in Tacoma for all these years, even though our paths never crossed. No photo of him, though. Who knows...he's probably 6'6", with a shaved head, tattoos and a ZZ Top beard. His profile had a massive list of places he'd been living at, in and around town, some not lasting more than about six months on average. When I clicked on "most recent address", it showed the address of what was the local jail down there on Tacoma Avenue, a stone's throw down the hill from the old neighborhood. I guess there wasn't much reason to look in any further.