Music from the Attic: my 3 minute story on ReadWave

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Music from the Attic

I stared playing guitar in the attic at our house in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, at the age of 14. I had played trombone for 2 years, but I instinctively knew that the guitar was the instrument with which I could best express myself. We lived in a 3 story house. The third story was the attic. I had shared a bedroom in the second story of the house with my brother, but I volunteered to move up to the attic as a teenager so I could have my own room. The attic was a place where a teenager could dream, could think, could feel, and could play guitar. There were old maps of unknown places on the wall and a lighted globe of the world, and I could look out of the third story window and see the lights of a downtown bridge in the distance. I would play the guitar for hours and hours up in that attic. The sound of guitar music would come wafting down the stairs and could be heard on the second floor, where my parents and my brother and sister all had their bedrooms, so if I wanted to play after everyone was asleep late at night, I would go down to the basement. There were ghostly paintings of thin, big-eyed people in the basement, paintings that an artist friend of my father had stored there years ago when he moved from Rhode Island. The artist never came back to retrieve them. There was also a dart board covered with little dart marks from family dart games, and boxes of basketballs, footballs, baseballs, baseball gloves and bats, with a naked light bulb illuminating the scene. 

When I left the family home to attend college, I brought my guitar with me, and when I made the 40 mile trip home from school, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes by bus or train, the guitar would be with me. The attic and basement would still be there, waiting for me to return and fill them with music. While at school I would play guitar in my dorm room, or outside on a wall overlooking the university, or later in a small rented room in Boston, where I lived during my last year at the school. After 3 years I left the university, and, guitar in hand, commenced to hitchhike across the United States. I had many adventures along the way, living in a tree house in the mountains in northern Colorado for a short time, living in a dome made from old cars in a commune in southern Colorado for a year, continuing west, stopping at some hot springs at an abandoned resort in Arizona for a week with a group of people who had picked me up in a Volkswagen van. All the time I was playing my guitar, writing music and songs, sharing my music with the people I met along the way, and occasionally returning to Rhode Island to visit. 
Life continued. I worked with autistic children for a year in Philadelphia, (incorporating music into the work, and later writing a song about it). I lived in New Mexico for 4 years, where I worked a variety of jobs and performed at restaurants and coffee houses. I  lived 18 years in Eugene, Oregon, with my 2 sons. I made a vinyl album with my first band, the Tree People, in 1979, distributing the album locally. I met my wife Kate, and we moved to Portland, where we still live with our dog Beeber. I performed regionally and nationally, recorded several albums and also did community projects and artist residencies.
The vinyl album that I made in 1979 was later discovered worldwide by record collectors, leading to the reissue of the album by record companies in Japan and Spain in 2006 and 2008, two more Tree People albums released by Guerssen Records of Spain in 2009 and 2010, and a trip to Spain to play at the Musiques Disperses Festival in 2011. My musical adventures continue, with an album, "by hand", in 2012 by my duo the Walking Willows. My newest project to be an album of original music on cigar box guitar in 2014.
Over the years there have been many visits to the Rhode Island house by me and Kate, and by my sons, my brother, my sister and their families. My sons both attended graduate schools in Massachusetts, visiting my father (my mother had died a few years earlier) often. A few years ago my father died, and after "sitting shiva" with so many wonderful relatives and friends of the family, we put the house up for sale. Sadly, no more visits to the old house. But I can still, in my mind, see the attic and basement in perfect detail.