My First Recordings

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

When fatigued with your dearest aspiration remember this quote from Hermann Hesse’s novel about the Buddha. Sometimes it can seem you are just going in circles, repeating the same steps and never getting anywhere, but look closer at what experience does to you, how each successive trip around the circle provides a little more wisdom and insight about the journey. Hermann Hesse wrote another great book titled Journey To The East in which a main character is traveling with his group and throughout the travel feels his group has abandoned him. Somehow he’s the only one left still persuing the goal. The character journeys on alone until he finds his group again, and when questioning why they had abandoned him, he learns it was he who went astray and the entire group affirms this and welcomes him back.

In both scenarios, perspective is key. When we feel like we are going in circles, it’s because we lack the perspective to see the growth each revolution creates in us. When we feel like we’ve been abandoned and are all alone, it is because we lack the perspective to see we’ve traveled astray and are missing the mark, blazing a trail all our own and refusing the refuge of the collective. In another amazing Hesse novel, Demain: The Story of Youth, the main character struggles to understand the duality of a world full of both good and evil, represented by light and darkness. Ultimately, this youth realizes how to see the two worlds a distinct earthly world full of false truths and illusion and the true world or a spiritual or supernatural world governed by an awakened unconscious.

This is really the key when walking in circles, when doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. That is literally the definition of persistence, not insanity. Insanity must be, in my opinion, some for of defeat, a giving up, a quitting and a relinquishing of our will and mind. But then again, a crazy person is rarely aware they are insane, and so maybe I’m wrong here. maybe I’m not going up and up as I go around the spiral, maybe it is a circle and I long ago lost my mind, but I’m just saying that like tickling the belly of a sleeping bear. I believe it is a spiral, and the experience I gain proves it to me. I believe in the awakened reality of heaven on earth…of hell of earth. Of having them be together and separate and all one at all times. There’s no way to describe it except for an inner widening of the arms to receive, a letting go of control while floating a river, or riding an unbridled stallion. It’s all there and we see what we choose to see.

While teaching English in Toledo, Spain in 2009-2010, I met a guy named Ramon from Brazil. He was studying in an Erasmus program at the university and we met while I would busk down in Plaza Zocodover, the main square in the old quarter where tourists gather and there was even a McDonalds. I would be belting out covers by the Beatles, John Denver, The Grateful Dead, Jason Mraz and the like and one day Ramon and I started hanging out. He joined David and the other Ramon, from Toledo, and myself at our Tuesday night gig and he and his friends were a major part of why it was packed in there each night. Ramon was a quiet giant of a man, bald headed and muscular and from a middle class part of Sao Paolo. He had a MacBook and eventually invited me to come record. He used garage band and we made a few recordings of some of the songs David and I had come up with in the basement to our Toledo apartment. A blues shuffle in E, me screaming out, “I got a baby yea, you know she does me good.”

I ended up staying with Ramon for a couple weeks, when my apartment lease ended and most of the teachers went back home. Grad school wouldn’t start for another 5 months so I didn’t have to go back home. While we were cooking meals, and a meal needed to feed about 5 grown men, I was helping Ramon chop up some broccoli one afternoon. He was making his Tuna Pot Special, which was a huge crab boiling pot full of veggies and about 10 cans of tuna. The whole meal probably cost around 15 euro, but would feed us all and then some. I went to throw out the stock of the broccoli, which I had never eaten in my whole life, and Ramon stopped me and glared at me like I’d disappointed him, “Around here we don’t waste food. Get that out of the trash and chop it up.” I questioned him for a moment, but it was his house, his rules. My first thoughts were about poverty and how I thought I had grown up poor, but we always threw the broccoli stalks on the compost pile.

Ramon told me to skin the stalk like a potato and chop it into squares and add it to the mixture in the giant pot. He’d sauté the veggies on the bottom of the pot until they were nice and tender, then he’d add in the garlic, tuna and tomato, pasta and water. It always turned out tasty, but I still eat just about anything put in front of me and I enjoy it.

We went on to record a few other songs and even wrote a couple like See Ya On The Other Side. Ramon was a great guitar player and arranger of music. We put the recordings on Sound Cloud and shared them around the group of friends, but nothing else every came of it. I’ve tried to keep those recordings, but I’m not so good at keeping up with digital material every time my computer crashes. It was a great experience and Roman was so giving and he really had an idea of who to record and layer tracks. This was my first experience and I was certain I had some songs I could use.

Looking back, the experience was an important layer to my spiral. My experiences while living in Toledo, Spain for that year took me to new heights with my guitar and singing. I would busk and smoke weed and go to work between coca colas and espressos. It was amazing and I made so much progress. The first song I learned was Folsom Prison Blues. I’m not even sure why I learned it, but I practiced it alone for hours in my apartment before rushing down to the plaza to make some tips. The feeling of the coins going into the hat for playing music is something I still love and crave. In its most basic spiritual sense, it’s like God is raining money down on you. Free money. I love it.

Eventually I accepted my offer to go to Grad School and would return to Eugene, OR and Ramon had to go finish his undergrad back in Brazi, so we parted ways. Ramon came to visit me back in 2015 in Fort Worth and it was so good to see him. Nothing has come of those recordings yet, but we both still have dreams of getting together and recording all those songs we were working on back then. For me it would be a thrill to have enough funds to fly Ramon up and pay him to do the album with me, but I’m just not there yet.

So, that was my first attempt at an album and it inspired me to purchase a MacBookPro when I returned to Eugene. I was very much against Apple and, this was a time when the smart phone wasn’t too prevalent, but the whole Apple culture was catching on. Everyone in my graduate program brought their laptops to class and all you could see where their noses and eyes jutting out above the Apple logo. It was an infectious disease. Part of me gave in a spent the $1900 in 2010 money because it would help me fit in and at the same time provide me with the tools I needed to make video and audio recordings. It came stocked with the GarageBand software. I went about making little recordings and going to open mics and performing. The Monroe Street Café had an amazing open mic every Wednesday in Eugene. The place was packed each night and the list was always full. There was a small city park just across the street where everyone could go and smoke their joints. I mostly performed Slam Poetry pieces. People liked them and I started making a lot of friends through those performances. People uploaded videos of me to YouTube (that I had to have taken down by threat of being terminated by Fort Worth ISD as a detractor reported the videos to the Office of Professional Standards.) I cut a couple of the poems I used to do on an album called So Low that features Gary Grammar on harmonica.

At these open mics I met a guy named Danny, who is now a father and a fireman. He had a small home studio thing going and I would go over and record little songs we wrote together. Again, nothing came of any of these tunes, except to swirl around in my mind looking for their home. I once heard, “You don’t chose your songs, they chose you.” And I’ve come to think of the songs as little invisible floating entities you can reach out and pull down. I’m always reaching and so now find myself trying to make these ideas come to life. At this time 2011, I was still making all my money off being a student, but that quickly changed when I left my graduate fellowship program. I went to busking and lived in a VW Westy down by the Willamette River, and I definitely did my share of doobie rolling while I was there.

I worked on writing songs and one of those tunes I Won’t Go Away made it on that same album So Low. It didn’t take long for me to tire of living in the VW Westy and I got my apartment back and sought out a teaching job. I was hired to work at The Academy of Arts and Academics and after a year of that, I decided to go back home to Fort Worth. Little did I know I would be walking into a major music scene, and with my little knowledge, it wasn’t long before I was back to thinking about making an album again.