2

I sat backstage at the Slide Rule. A sometimes hip restaurant / bar and for the night my place of employment. It was very quiet now. They had served dinner, but it had been relatively slow for a Saturday. That had nothing to do with me, I was just there to play into the night, but somehow the manager gave me a look that made me feel like I should be responsible. I wasn’t and I didn’t feel that way. Sort of the reverse of the guy in Billy Joel’s Piano Man – it wasn’t such a good crowd for a Saturday, and the manager didn’t give me a smile for the people you see only wanted what they could get for free, and forget about life for a while…
I had the gig for a while now, a few weeks, steady. The nights all ran into eachother. But I started right after school started up in September. I didn’t make much money, but I didn’t care. It more than paid the rent, and I looked at it as being paid to practice. It was a 5 night a week gig too. Wednesday through Saturday. Every week. This was more than most of the local musicians were making or playing. Since I stopped working full time with the band, this was a good in between, it kept me in the music, and it kept me in some money, I got to meet a lot of local people who I’d gotten out of touch with while I was doing a lot of touring, I was somewhat of a local celebrity, I new a lot of the people that usually came to hang out, I felt comfortable, and, well, it was fun. I guess, for now, it gave me some identity.
I knew most of the bartenders pretty well and they gave me more free drinks than the agreement that I had with the manager allowed. Most were college guys, just working to make some extra cash, some were going no where (like me?) just doing this for now, and a few were girls. Always a nice plus. There was one that I was attracted to and we used to flirt all the time. After hours we’d sit at the bar and do shots. I didn’t think she had any interest in me. Within the context of the bar it was fine for us to flirt and talk about sexual things, like the last time we’d gotten laid (lies) or how drunk we were the night before. Outside of the bar, it was an entirely different relationship. Almost like the other one didn’t exist.
One of the bartenders Patti, who I openly joked with about “everything” while she was behind the bar, completely blew me off when I had tried to pick her up at a party the weekend before. It was like our lives only intersected inside of the bar even though we lived less than a mile apart. What do you know?
For me, this was life post-band, PB. I was into that scene for 8 long and exciting and very draining years. The band had gotten bigger and bigger and pretty soon it was bigger than could be controlled and when that happened, the fun all went out of it. Like a balloon looks like a month after it sits in a corner; sriveled and deformed. The record company and all the pressure they put on us was the stake in the heart. Forever. It became worse than a job really. Even putting out the records didn’t seem to help. By the time they came out to me they were ancient history. We’d record an album in 1986 and it would come out in 1989. Some of the songs on the album were out of the repertoire by then. I still hadn’t resolved all my “issues” with this period in my like. In fact, that was one of the reasons I was playing here. Gave me time to sort things out I guess. I don’t know how much sorting I was really getting done, but I do know that I had to time to do the sorting.
At any rate, I liked playing here. I didn’t feel any pressure. I didn’t want any pressure. And it gave me enough to hang out during the day and work on my music and my writing and my yoga and my running.
Despite all the objections from family and friends about wasting my life and my education and my talents, it was what I wanted to do. I was happy. I had enough. I had friends. I had places I could work for a day or two at a time if things really got tight (which they sometimes did), a deli where I could make a few sandwiches or flip egg sandwiches in return for lunch, and a pizzeria where I could deliver food in return for lunch or dinner and a few bucks. And I got to network… I had something mom. Really, I had a scene…
Friends. I had a lot of friends. People I liked to hang out with. People who I thought understood me and my ways. buddies. Guys to watch the football games with. To drink beer with in bars and in living rooms. Girls who acted like guys. Now this is totally a male perspective, but it is my perspective and in some ways I got along with better with girls who could just sit around and be themselves, not hung up on things…
I had a few women who’d put me up and make me dinner and take care of me in a pinch. Part time lovers. Nothing more. People who I could go on walks with. Places I could stay when the nights were cold and long. Stops on the road of life where there was a warm smile and a backrub, and more, if I was lucky. I didn’t want anymore than that right now. Things had gotten so weird with Shari that I just couldn’t support anything to emotionally expensive right now. It was 6 months already. But, nothing was changing my mind, yet…
The right person would fix everything, I was sure of that. Questions was, where was she? I’d never get a girl who needed a lot of money spent on her, but right now, I would have found it difficult to spend any emotion on her either.
So at the Slide Rule, I got dinner, and beers all the time I was playing, and all the beer I could sneak for my friends who came down. That depended on who was tending bar. The owners girlfriend of the month was bad for getting away with much, but the college kids liked me and didn’t like the boss and didn’t care anyway. It wasn’t their money or their beer. (It’s a sad day in your life when you realize that you have to be responsible for the things you do) At the end of the night – fifty bucks begrudgingly from the owner and maybe another thirty in tips, that was up to the crowd.
You’d collect the tips during the set breaks. “Well we’ll be passing around a hat now for the struggling artist performer.” Or maybe you’d want to buy one of these tapes, all original stuff, good stuff, really. And I’d always sell one or two, that was nice.
There were two breaks in the night. I’d try to time it so my set would end when the crowd was peaking in size to maximize the tips. Unfortunately this also sometimes had the effect of deflating an enthusiastic crowd and having a lot of them leave and go somewhere else. It was a fine line you had to walk. Personally material gain versus art and energy and the intangibles.
Of course the owner couldn’t have cared less about the tips and bitched when I stopped at what he thought was the wrong time, but that was his problem. I did pretty much what I wanted to anyway. Depended on the night. There was a lot of freedom in those days before I started to take everything so seriously again.
If I went around myself and got the tips, I’d make a certain amount. If one of my drunks and disorderly friends went around and asked for them I’d make less. If a nice looking girl would do it, I’d make more. The math was really quite simple even at this level.
That’s where Julie, sweet Julie, came in handy. If only I wasn’t so friendly with Glen… At any rate, the nights would usually go fast and I’d play to the crowd, mostly what they wanted to hear, requests, just me and my guitar and my effects boxes. I’d play songs that they knew and songs that they didn’t know, and ones that I wrote. I wrote a lot of songs back then. Before things got so crazy again.
And usually I had a good time, a real good time. Of course, that was up to me.
It was nice and crowded some times. The nights my friends would come down was always a good crowd, a hard drinking crowd to, the kind a bar owner likes. But usually it was just another stop along the bar hopping main drag called Easton Avenue. With bars and restaurants on both sides of the streets for six blocks and college kids and local kids flowing back and forth, night after night in search of nirvana and a new face that somehow had eluded them every other night they had done the same thing – the sloppy buzz, the perfect kiss, – if they were lucky, a story that they could tell their friends later that was true.
The Slide Rule could have done very well. It had the location, it had the ambiance, a loud section for the times you wanted to let loose, celebrate something, a quiet section for just you and your date, or the times you needed to get away from the crowd and talk about something important, decenct food, and of course, alcohol. Unfortunately, the owner was basically a greed driven ass who refused to cater to the clientele who had many a lot of others around town successful, the students.
But on weekends, the owner insisted on charging a cover charge despite none of the other bars on the street charging one, and casual onlookers would pass it by because of that. So often, pretty girls would peak there heads in, ready to sit down and listen to me play. I knew it, I could sense it in there faces, and they’d be turned away by the doorman asking for the measly dollar that the owner insisted on, or his stupid PT Barnum rap…. ”We got him, super guitar player famous songwriter, star of The Reason (my band), best songwriter in town. The guys going places and you can say you saw him here first. This stuff isn’t free you know. That’s right, here are the Slide Rule, we support the arts and local musicians and everything.” It was a lot of rhetoric. In truth, as it goes with all businesses, the bottom line is just that, the bottom line. Decisions were never made for the sake of art, the dollar ruled. Always did and always will.
And now there were just a few couples in the main dining area, mostly college age kids, and a table of graduate students (slightly older than college students) sitting right next to the small stage where I had moved to adjust the sound system and fix my equipment. Another table with a few girls and two older people who I supposed were one of the girls parents. Up on a big Saturday night taking the little girl and her roomie out to dinner.
The grad students laughed pretty often. They talked, even though it was quiet, I couldn’t tell exactly what they were saying, I gathered that one had just finished defending their thesis and they were out celebrating. At least celebrating as they defined it.
It was a typical group of Rutgers grad students. Different nationalities. A mini-UN and a few Jersey girls. Laughing at the common things that the students laugh at. The lousy bus system, the lack of fun things to do (in fact quite untrue), who was dating who, how they thought that so and so was going to get together with so and so, but they never did, and who liked who and all that.
When I was in school, which was only a few years ago, though now it seemed like a long time, these were the same complaints and the same profonditities. I had spent four years in undergrad in Lancaster Pennsylvania (that’s another story in and of itself). It was a time of growing and developing. College, and the college years taught me what I needed to know about life. Maybe I didn’t have the grades to show it, at least not what I was capable of if I had put the nose to the grindstone, but I got by. Good enough to make it to graduate school at a major university with a full assistship which covered most of my costs including tuition.
School itself was actually pretty easy, but time consuming. And I spent a lot of time in the lab doing a research project on histidine metabolism and taking classes with titles like – “Nutrition: Biochemical and Physiological Basis” and I learned a lot. I even published a few scientific peer review type papers. The next time your in a medical library check out The European Journal of Pharmacology, Vol 37B, No. 6, pages 345- 351. _____________________. I liked being in school. When the time came to start looking around for jobs, or doctoral programs, I decided to stay put and do some more work for Rutgers. This was the safest and easiest choice afterall, and one that was surely the least resistance. There was no stretching of my comfort zone, and I was minimizing the unknowns. And frankly, I needed the money and the security.
Well, that lasted a few years as I got more and more into my music. I played the guitar and keyboards and sang and wrote songs. Lots of songs. More than 200 in fact. Some were really lousy, but a few, were really strong. I spent hours playing scales and exercises on my front porch as I watched the world go by with a blank stare. People would stop and listen sometimes and I started to make a whole new set of friends. Some of them were in fact excellent musicians and they’d bring their own instruments over and we’d play. All night sometimes. There was one summer just spent out there every night on the porch. The cover charge was a six pack, preferably good beer, but we took what we could get. The world was very insulated for me at this point, and I valued the things that I had. I had everything I needed and I was stable.
I liked writing the songs the most. And I wrote a lot of them. Some were really awful and stupid. Some were actually quite good. I’d play them over and over and the porch crowd got to know them and like them. And slowly, more and more people were showing up and hanging around. It was more fun than a bar, and cheaper, and it was so nice just to sit outside on a summer night in the open air. And amazingly, that entire summer, the cops didn’t hassle us even once.
There was a bar in town that had a weekly open stage night. on Monday nights. You would just go and sign up and play for 15 or 20 minutes, sometimes longer. There were nights that the only people there were the people playing so we didn’t even bother going up to the stage, we’d just play at the tables since we were just playing to eachother anyhow. It was a great synergy, and the most productive and creative period of my life. We’d help each other with our songs and ideas and improvisations and styles and how to perform. It was like a little artist colony once a week.
And of course, with time the circle expanded outside the bar and many of my coffee house friends started hanging out on my porch as well. We’d write songs together that we called “group aural sex” and there were and still are a number of great songs that came out of the period of time. As the summer ended and the cold air blew in, we took the whole thing inside and the big living room of my house became the place. The gathering site for my expanding group of musical friends.
Soon, the music group became a travelling show alternating houses and apartments and it didn’t take long for the whole thing to become a seven night a week hang one place or another. We’d play guitars, and bang on pots and pans for drums, and someone, I forget his name, actually had a really nice conga drum that he would bring, but he wouldn’t ever let anyone else play it. Someone showed up for a few nights with a trumpet. And then a beautiful girl in a gauze shirt came one night with a harp. Ahh. My heart stopped. It was so soft and gentle that we had to play “molto pianissimo” (very soft) to hear her, but she could jam. Turned out she went to the art school and studied harp. I guess she was sort of slumming with us, the musical proletariate. The best part was that there were NO hang ups. No issues. We needed so little and we had so little. No one was concerned about anything… that sounds so nice right now…
And it was one of those otherwise indistinguishable nights that I first met Shari. At a party on Handy Street. She sat there swaying with a morocco or something while a bunch of us played. I kept looking at her and losing my place in the song. She had a constant smile on her face. And was she great looking. A sweet and innocent smile surrounded by sweet and innocent lips and sweet and innocent eyes. She wore a gauze shirt and a skirt. She had beaded earrings. The perfect “bohemian look”. And we both had the same birkenstock arizona sandles. I still remember the electricity the first time we held hands…
There were a lot of really interesting and talented and very cool people who hung out in this group. Many were working “day gigs” and doing alright, and some were students and some were “bohos” and some were just there for the ride one day at a time. There was Chris who could have been a pro guitarist (he really was that good), but preferred just having fun with it while he finished his doctorate and was engaged to a girl also named Chris, and Shandy (who took his music much more seriously than everyone else), and who just put out a CD, and and TD (who we never really liked but always brought a lot of girls with him) and Donna and John (who later got married!) and Mellow Tom (who sang with his hand on his ear of all things – like Don Pardow on Laugh In) and mellow Tom’s sister Annie (who was the quietest person I ever met who I tried to pick up the night I got the drunkest I ever did in my life (she said no thanks)), and Terry (the guy) and Terri (the girl) and Virginia Joe (our token biker) , and Jose and Blue Lew and some guy who was only ever known as Snow, and Everett (our token nerd), and Lee (who had a very lucrative day job and didn’t play any music but bought way more than his fair share of beers), and Mona (who never showered) and Don (who also didn’t jam but would bring his tape recorder and tape everything) and Kyra (who gave great backrubs) and Greg (who just disappeared one day and never came back) and Rena (who I always had a little bit of a crush on but never did anything about it) and Sue (who had a fantastic voice) and another Sue (who didn’t have that great a voice and played the clarinet out of tune – she later switched to kazoo…) and yet another Sue (who later married Lee) and a couple of Leslies (one of them, I don’t remember which now, is a congresswomen in the NJ state assembly) too, and on and on.
One of the guys, Mark, who hung out was in a band. They played aroung town and were doing pretty well. He came in one night and said that they needed someone to sit in for a few gigs since their regular keyboard player was going away. He was leaving, moving on to go to graduate school in Wisconsin. My ears perked up. It was something that seemed the natural evolution at the time. The next step, the next challenge.
I did the short series of gigs after we crammed to learn the 30 or so songs that the band played. Most were local, frat houses, and bars, but one was a party at a frat house in Ithaca. And can’t remember how the whole thing got arranged now. We drove 6 hours to get there, played for 4 hours, partied the rest of the night and drove 7 hours home (we were tired). While we were there it was all new. People were nice to us. We were, and I use the term very loosely, Rock Stars. Celebrities. Guys brought us beers and other stuff, girls wanted to talk to me. What little sleep I got that night was on a VERY uncomfortable couch with a big rip in the fabrix was an unknown girl with her shirt unbuttoned next to me. The thing was, it was really fun. And it sealed my decision to join the band.
I also joined the band because I liked the other people in it. They were, at the time at least, my friends. We busted out butts and through a lot of ups and downs we started doing well. We went from playing local clubs and parties and fraternities to the Jersey
Shore (Bruuuuuuce) and the city and a Thursday here and there and all the sudden we were working full time hours, but for very part time money. There were weeks we’d pull in hundreds of dollars, and weeks we’d make almost nothing at all.
I had to decide whether to stay working at Rutgers or not. It was making it tough to go on road trips with the band, playing until 2 in the morning in Washington DC and driving all night to be in the lab by 8 am… then the same 6 hours the next night in Richmond, etc… I was getting so drained… so I just cut the cord and made the committment. At the time it seemed so natural. The Life.
The safety net was gone now. I had some money saved, but not enough of consequence. But it was a committment. It was do or die by music. I knew it was going to be fine, but I didn’t know how long it would take.
I didn’t even talk to anyone about the decision. I told my supervisor in the lab and she told me I was nuts, but accepted it. She said I’d be back in a month and that I may or may not have a job. I told all my friends and they thought it was great and were jealous. I asked myself what was really the right thing to do, and you know, I really wasn’t sure, but it just felt right, and I always wanted to trust my intuition… and I was going to have so much fun… and Shari said it was OK. I could always stay with her …
The band worked full time hours but didn’t get paid full time pay at first. So, I had all sorts of odd jobs. Delivering pizza (cool), gave guitar lessons (which was fun), installing water sprinkler irrigation systems (good in the summer, sort of – too hot!), working as a lackey in a recording studio (seemingly cool, but really boring), mowing lawns (ugh), selling knives (only 3 days – double ugh), selling frozfruits at the beach (semi-cool), fixing bicycles (which I enjoyed), driving a delivery van for a flower store (don’t even remember anything about it now)… all of them seem so remote now. Did you really ever happen? Now and then, I ask myself that and sort of laugh, sort of…
Surprisingly, music business people started taking some notice in the band. Through a lot of effort, and a lot of legwork, we got signed to a record contract. We started working on the first album and touring a lot more. And a lot further.
Sometimes we’d be away for weeks. All over the country. The south, the northeast, the midwest, the west coast, back to the south, to lots of tiny small towns with a school, a few fraternities, a bar and a main street. They were quiet. There was nothing to do. When the band came to town they had something to do. We hung around and we made a lot of friends. I met all kinds of people. At the same time I was completely losing touch with my friends in New Brunswick. I liked meeting people. I met a lot of girls. I really liked meeting a lot of girls. We were popular. People wanted us to stay at their houses. People wanted to give us things. Things were basically good. I got used to all the bad things, like spending 15 hours a day in a van, and started to think that things would just keep getting better and better. In fact they go up and down, spiral like the stock market, up and down, but generally up.
I could have lived anywhere, it didn’t matter, I was rarely home anyway. I decided to stay around New Brunswick when I wasn’t on the road. I liked the area, and I had friends there, even though I hardly ever saw them and we had less and less in common anymore. But most importantly, there was Shari who was the only person I ever missed while I was travelling. We were tacitly smart enough not to classify our relationship. That would have killed it. When we were together we were together. That was the only committment that either of us needed.
Somehow I rarely called her from the road, we just knew where we stood with each other. Radar love… We could be apart for weeks and pick up exactly where we left off… and amazingly, to her credit and my delight, she stuck with me, through some good times and some bad times. I imagine she had many others. I couldn’t blame her for being lonely. And there were countless guys who would take her. And she had to know what was going on “out there”. She wasn’t naive. She just said, if I’m important to you, then you’ll be there for me.
When we played at home, and nearby, she come and watch the band play and dance and smile. She had graduated now and had a job. She was “on her own”. I secretly knew she was with other guys and I didn’t care. That wasn’t the point of our relationship anymore. As long as she was there for me. We talked about everything that meant anything at all. Sometimes we even fought, and we made up. We met each others families. We talked about living together, but never did. We shared our fantasies. We slept together most every night I was home. I read poetry to her while she took baths. Some I wrote and others, like Shelly and Browning, I interpreted. We saw friends relationship come and go and tried to figure out why. Right after I’d be home, I would long for her the nights I was away, yet somehow as the tours grew longer, that would fade, and then, when we reunited, as time went on, I knew she was drifting away. Through it all I held out hope that it would work out. We had a foundation after all. So much that we’d been through together, surely that would count for something.
If I could have been there to hold her hand one night in the summer when lightning struck a house down the street and scared everyone to death, maybe things would have been different….
But I traveled with the band for the better part of the year while she stayed in New Brunswick and tutored math and science or something academic while she worked as a middle school teacher. Hanging around with her friends. And I know there were times that she had to be lonely too. And there were a lot of guys who would want to be with her. I know that and I knew that. But I never thought about it. I had plenty of opportunities too on the road… and sometimes, I have to be honest, I took full advantage of them and she wasn’t on my mind at all…
I called once, from the Grand Canyon. The worlds largest vagina (why did that make me think of her?) just to say hi after watching a particularly awesome sunrise. I had thought of her, I could have thought of so many others, and yet, when I called, she wasn’t excited about my sunrise at all, or my whole trip for that matter. It was the 8 in the morning after the lightning storm and the fire and she was late for somewhere and had to hurry. The most expensive call I ever made in my life and she has to hurry. Exactly 23 quarters, 5 dimes and 11 nickels into the slot on the pay phone and I’m left with a “talk to you soon”. I wanted an “I love you and please come home soon”. I needed a simple “I care”.
I should have known right there, I should have, in my mind, let the whole thing go, but, one doesn’t always think clearly, and after two months on the road, 51 shows in 61 nights. With a crowd of people, yet alone with my thoughts most of the time with lots and lots of thoughts, Jack Kerouak jr, living in a van and just going, going, where?. just going…
Coming up Rt. 81 through Pennsylvania the thought of a warm body next to me sounded very nice and I called her from a rest stop somewhere near Harrisburg at 1:30 in the morning. I stood in a warm August rain that had followed me from Western Virginia somewhere. Over the roar of 18 wheelers pulling in and out, I pleaded with her to just think about everything and give it all another chance. She held out for a few minutes.
I told her not to leave the light on and I’d let myself in. About 5 hours later we were making love like nothing had ever changed. I told myself as I watched the sun come up out her window, that it was all right, things would be fine, I would be home for 3 weeks, then back to go into the studio to work on another record. That would stabilize things a little. We could get to know about each other again. I was getting tired of the road and she was definitely the only person that was going to lure me away from it.
And of course, she had her own long and winding story in her life, and she was getting older and maturing now and wanted her life to really begin. She knew that she couldn’t be 21 for ever. And she, unlike me, was able to act on that reality. And one day , when I came back from our first tour of Canada, and oddly enough the only time I ever sent her a postcard from the road,…the ax just fell. Not even sharply and unkindly, but we both just knew that things had changed. And, well, we couldn’t go back again. She had started seeing someone else seriously who could give her the things she wanted now (house, family, etc.) and felt bad about it, but, well, … he hugged for a long time. I never wanted to let go. I bit her hair that fell across my mouth. I put my fingers between the vertebrae in her back. I concentrated on her hands on my shoulders so strongly. I had trouble swallowing. I didn’t realize until maybe 6 months later that the feelings I had were nothing unusual, just my heart breaking.
She was my first adult love. All others since them were and are somehow judged by her as a standard. And while we never made a formal committment to eachother there was no questioning how we felt about each other. But there was so much going on at the time. I have asked myself ten thousand times how things might have been different. And all of it was away from her. It was a cruel twist of fate the timing. But she gave everything a relative scale to be valued against and once it was over I made sure that the band was successful. The price of addmission had been so high, that I had to make sure I got all I could out of the show. She wasn’t the first, but up until that point, she was the deepest. And in retrospect, I know she didn’t think the same way about things, and sadly, she probably didn’t even try to.
How would things have been if I’d sent that letter to Shari I wrote. All the way from Ithaca to Madison. 14 hours in the van. The letter was 24 pages long. There was nothing left out. I put it all in words, nice words, musical words, rhythmic words, persuasive words. Words that I meant. Words that I wanted here to hear . Words that I simply wanted to say. Where would I be now if I had only had the guts, or the desire, or if I was simply man enough to send that letter?
And finally I realized that you have to only judge life by your own standards. Things had been good. Very good for so long, especially for me. As she said later, everything was good if it was judged by my standards. Problem was, judging by her standards right now, well, that was the enigma.
Now, all I had was the band, and things went up and down like a see saw but without a proper fulcrum. Craziness and out of whack. In and out of the van. In and out of bars. In and out of smoky rooms and the noise and the volume and the awful food. Life was good, bad, intense. One thing, it was passionate. There was nothing like the band. Every night I layed it all on the line. It was my creativity, my energy, my soul and in reality, my livelihood. It was the balance of art and business and simple survival.
I had too much time to think about everything that I wanted and didn’t want to think about. The ideas flowed and flooded my mind. There was peace, then no peace. There was never any real rest or privacy, or time for complaining. And there were some priceless highs. Being on a stage in front of 7000 people at an outdoor festival while the sun set over a distant hill…
I was into the spiritual and the mystic. The part of me that was born in high school creative writing class, nurtured by chemicals and poignant conversation with cohorts throughout college, and blossomed when I moved up to New Brunswick. Not having any friends (distractions) gives you a lot of time to think. A lot of time to think and I, being an active and aggressive person at times, went inside myself just to see what I could find. I knew a lot was in there anyway. I was born that way. I knew a lot was in there too because of chemicals. For better or worse they show you a lot of things you not otherwise care to look for. I always wanted to look for them, and I had. Just that it was just usually in a group, or with other people, not usually something personal. Now i was into personal. I would meditate and think about the great beyond and stuff like that and try to communicate all of this with mysef in journals. No one else in the band really cared, at least they never acted like they did. It was hedonism to them. Where was the next big buzz and good time going to come from.
I was looking for escape. I was looking to get out of things. I was looking to do something that I knew I really didn’t want to do, to force myself to suffer, somehow, to blame myself for ruining a relationship that had been sabotaged by infidelity and wanderlust and the mistaking of lust for romance and the uncontainable energy of youth and I guess ultimately the fact that we simply weren’t together. Who could blame me. I didn’t blame myself. I needed a little fun. I needed a break. Mentally, I needed a break from just being me.
And withour going into the details now, leave it at this. After a whirlwind of eight years, I left the band. It was all just too weird by the end. Moving all the time, but now getting anywhere. The crowds less consistant. One more ass of a bar manager hassling us about something that we had no control over, and most of all, the endless hours on the road on the van…
Once, in some place that I can’t remember, while the hurt of losing Shari was particiularly encompassing, and I wanted to start my life all over again from the first time that I kissed her… I sat down and wrote a song in about an hour. It became one of my biggest “hits”. People always asked who it was about when I played it, but I never said. It was called “When I Loved You.”
And somehow this all came into focus now sitting on the stage of the Slide Rule. I had just finished setting everything up mindlessly.
The guitar now tuned and the strings changed, I strummed the first few chords of the songs and quietly, thought about what might have been so beautiful and feeling a little misty, I sang to myself….. and to the room.

I remember a time when life floated on air
and the days went by like they weren’t even there
And the seasons changed and it was good to know
that from my world you’d never go

You can call us friends or lovers ’cause it don’t matter now
for our paths have split and I think somehow
We could have made it work if we’d only tried,
we could have made it work if we’d never lied

That’s when us was we, do you recall the time
when you called me yours and I called you mine?
When even the birds seemed to sing our songs?
That’s what I miss the most and
now I’ll always long to feel that way
When I Loved You

Time can put a tarnish on the finest gold
and it took your warmth and it left me cold
and it happened so quickly while the earth spun by
and all the history still occurred
and now the tolls mount high

For we gave it all if even just to know
what seeds we could plant and which would start to grow
What would overcome all the hopes and the fears
and those perfect wishes and the silent tears

For the lonely days now and the reasons long past
why you broke my heart with the spell you cast
Why I gave to you what others had to steal,
why I’d start again just to know it was real
and to feel that way
When I loved you….

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