Did you read Chapter 5: I See the Light?

So, at this point, I’d made some alliances that did not guarantee, but made it far more likely I would emerge successfully from the academic process. My grades improved, but more importantly, my comprehension and confidence grew and I rose to the median which doesn’t seem like a lofty goal in retrospect, but was a major accomplishment at the time.

As is typical for college students, the instant before the start of my senior year is the first time I had the conscious thought that I needed to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I didn’t realize that I’d still be trying to figure it out thirty years later.

To set the scene, the job market for chemical engineers in the middle eighties wasn’t exactly booming. For those of us graduating with bachelor’s degrees, there were basically two choices; technical services or process engineering.

Technical services required a bubbly, gregarious personality, some sense of professional style, and a conservative demeanor appealing to the chemical industry clientele. I possess none of these qualities.

Process engineering did not require highly developed social skills, but instead, required the ability to endure long periods of unimaginable monotony overseeing an established industrial facility with the ability to spring into action when the inevitable, but unpredictable crisis occurred. During said crisis, seconds of lost production would be equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue with the expectation that there should be no justifiable reprieve until the situation returned to ‘normal’ (meh, tough for me to get excited about).

Nevertheless, I accepted my lot and set about signing up for interviews with the various chemical and petroleum company representatives that visited the campus. I must have been interviewed thirty or forty times, but always with the same outcome; thanks, but no thanks. As I think back on it now, I surely wasn’t as enthusiastic about the prospect of working for these companies as their representatives would have liked. I was as naïve about selling myself as I had been about how to be a successful university student.

Four of the songs I wrote during the 1985-1986 academic term were about the lackluster reception I received from the hiring community and the uncertainty of what I was going to do at the end of the term.

“Carousel” expresses my feelings of being awash in a world I didn’t really understand and being overwhelmed by the enormity of life and seemingly endless cycles around me. The lyric uses the concepts of infinity and the struggle to lock step with my environment without being able to identify any reference points.

It’s probably no coincidence that I was in the middle of my third semester of differential calculus at the time. (Warning: Math Ahead) There’s a story about the opening and ending ‘bouncing guitar’ bit: The timing and amplitude of the bounces is a natural expression of an exponential decay. It is exactly the same as the hang-time and height you’d see from a bouncing ball (lower and faster until it finally stops bouncing). To end of the song, I reversed the sound.

“Steel Wheel” is about being a misfit and a failure. For every job interview, I received a rejection letter. There were so many letters, I papered the living room wall of our house on Semple Street. It became a joke (a sick joke, but a joke nonetheless). I couldn’t even get a second interview from my father’s workplace even after I’d interned there three consecutive summers. To add insult to injury, this particular rejection letter was (I shit you not) signed by someone I’d never met.

As best I remember, I wrote “Souvenirs” late one night in the spring of 1986 while worrying about an upcoming exam. I was unable to sleep and unable to study any longer, but had something I needed to get off my chest. As I was writing, I had a fleeting thought that someone could read the lyric and conclude that I was dangerously unstable, but (as the closing line explains) the need to express myself outweighed any potential embarrassment or concerns about my current mental state.

“Something I Can’t Find” is the darkest of these songs. It’s an expression of the absolute despair I felt as I approached the end of my senior year without a plan and feeling as though I’d never be able to achieve anything worthwhile.

As for the other songs written that term, they are divided between the recurring theme of loneliness (“Anthem”), a co-written instrumental (“Youngstown Jam”) and an untitled classical piece for guitar.

“Anthem” is a tidy little ballad with a vaguely sarcastic lyric. The opening line declares the song is “an anthem for those who remain alone”.

I can only take a small portion of the credit for composing “Youngstown Jam”. In fact, it’s more Jack Chamberlin’s song than mine and he has a different name for it. I just took the liberty of submitting the recording to the copyright office back in the nineties and registering it under our names. It is (I think) an accurate reflection of the two of us with me playing the 12-string guitar and Jack playing the electric. Jack and I recently talked about re-recording this song and I think we should.

I wrote a classical piece for guitar in the winter, but couldn’t think of an appropriate title for the song, never put it on an album and never registered it with the copyright office so it’s just “Etude in E” for now. I’ve misplaced the original recording, but still play it from time to time and plan to re-record a better version than the one from the eighties anyway (Look for it to get posted soon.)

As the spring semester wound to a close and my chances of finding a job went from ‘slim’ to ‘none’, I realized my only chance of getting into R&D was to continue on and get a graduate degree. Carnegie Mellon does not allow its chemical engineering undergraduates to stay for graduate degrees (at least that’s what they told me) so I had to go somewhere else.

In something of a panic, I hastily applied to the chemical engineering departments of Michigan Tech and WVU. I’d like to say I’d carefully screened and chosen these universities, but that would be untrue.

I applied to MTU because my father had a friend and colleague in the Material Science department and he encouraged me to apply (I applied to Chemical Engineering so we kind of got our signals crossed). I did get accepted, but it was months later.

I applied to WVU because my advisor at CMU had a friend (former CMU graduate student) on the faculty so he thought that might help me get in. I did get accepted (in fact, I was accepted to both universities), but it was pretty late and the program didn’t have the best reputation. On the other hand, I had a place to go, was guaranteed a livable stipend, and could run home in about ninety minutes if necessary.

My friend Janice and her older sister June both graduated from Bethany College in West Virginia. It was Janice who taught me the term “Hoopies” as a euphemism for West Virginians. Once I knew I was going to become a Mountaineer myself, I wrote a goofy (and unflattering) song about what I expected to encounter in Morgantown called “Hoopieland“. I imagine I will one day regret publishing this song, but it is a fact that, despite being less than fifty miles from where I grew up, Morgantown is a very different place.

Next time: A hovel in Hoopieland, broken bones in Pocahontas County, and the start of something wonderful.

<postscript>

I actually forgot one song. It’s an originally untitled jazz piece for 12-string guitar that I still play as a warm-up. When I registered it with the copyright office, I had to give it a name so I called it “What’s…the Name of This Tune?” 🙂

Don’t miss Chapter 7: Mo’Town and My First Crush

What about Chapter 4: Deep in the Valley?

The academic struggle had now lasted four semesters and I’d had the opportunity at this point to commiserate with my classmates. This led to the realization that they weren’t picking up the concepts on the first try either. The difference was, they understood that this wasn’t abnormal.

I worked my way out of the hole I was in by starting with some informal tutoring. In other words, I started hanging around with the guys who were getting good grades. They helped me with the homework. If they went to see the professor, I tagged along. When I had a question, it was easier for me to ask them first. If they didn’t know, we’d go to the Prof en masse.

The relationship wasn’t entirely parasitic; I could write, they couldn’t. If there was a project that required a report, I was more in my element than they were so I had no trouble getting on technically strong project teams. My GPA began to rise and almost as a side-effect, I began to understand.

I credit one particular classmate as a critical mentor. Pete from Rhode Island. Pete and I had almost nothing in common except our academic major. To me, he was sort of the Cal Ripkin Jr. of chemical engineering. Highly competent, but not someone I’d’ve chosen to hang with on a Saturday night.

My feelings toward Pete are warmer now than they were then. I wish I knew where he was, but haven’t been able to locate him. Our last conversation was at the commencement ceremony. He said “It’s been a pleasure” and shook my hand vigorously. I smiled, but could think of nothing to say in reply.

Anyway, music took a back seat for a while. Or, put more precisely, I rebalanced my priorities. I still saw my high school friends on the weekends or during break. I had an off-campus studio apartment where we could hang out, play guitar, drink a little beer, smoke lots of pot and occasionally write and record music (“Tap Haven” was recorded that winter).

Most of the songs created during this time were instrumentals co-written with Jack Chamberlin or Joe Adams. One that Joe and I wrote and recorded, I simply titled “Hampshire House Jam” which was the name of my off-campus apartment building. It’s the only period recording that’s good enough to include here. I may be able to re-record others, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Once the term ended and things slowed down though, I found myself writing more traditional songs again that summer. I was in possession of Wayne Ackman’s four-track recorder and bass guitar while he was overseas with the Navy. I also borrowed a synthesizer from JD Taylor so, for the first time, I actually had a variety of sounds available and the means to record them.

The first song I wrote was about two of my friends (Joe Adams and Jim Frazier) who had gotten a real job playing more than one show. They were booked to play a series of Holiday Inn motels. They were excited about going out on tour and I was happy for them, but (as I’d already written about this before in “Anywhere, But Here”) could see the down side too. “Helping Hand” is about the struggle to gain acceptance and the necessary assistance it would take to survive and advance in the music industry.

I’d also now had more than two years to think about how I’d dumped my interim girlfriend and the guilt and remorse found its way out in “Get It Right”. Not only had I thrown away someone who really cared about me and hurt her deeply, but I’d had a long, lonely time to think about how karma works.

Continued in Chapter 6: What Do I Do Now?

Get the whole story. Read Chapter 3: Leaving the Nest

The remainder of my time as an undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon is probably my most prolific period (as a songwriter) so far. Between the summer of 1983 and the summer of 1986, I completed and recorded fifteen songs either alone or with friends. It was also the loneliest time of my life.

I ended the last chapter with the conclusion of my freshman year, noting that I had survived. I did pass all my classes, but struggled like I’d never struggled before.
I was shy, never asked questions in class and always worked alone. The professors intimidated me and I avoided talking with them one-on-one for fear they’d recognize that I wasn’t smart enough to be in their class.

I made some lifelong friends that year unlike anyone I’d ever met before and enjoyed a series of experiences I wouldn’t trade for the world (I wasn’t planning on using those brain cells anyway).

But over the summer, I forgot all that. I moved back into my old room, slept late, stayed out late, and more-or-less practiced my own form of anarchy.

Let me backtrack and tell you about the dorm lottery. It was the practice (and may still be) that returning students enter a housing lottery. First, the juniors pick numbers, then the sophomores, then the freshmen. As a freshman, I think I selected the number sixteen (out of something like two thousand) and was able to reserve the last single room on campus.

It turned out that the ‘prime single’ was actually a regular dorm room with only one bed. That’s it. Bathroom down the hall, double occupancy on either side. But…I now had a place of my own.

As I entered the fall semester of my sophomore year, my thinking was that I should take advantage of the AP classes I’d taken in high school so I could lighten my class load and give myself the opportunity to catch up. I still didn’t understand that what I lacked was not aptitude, but initiative.

The academic advisor assigned to me by the department (the only professor I HAD to talk to directly) was initially pleased that I was off to such a good start, but soon began to express his disappointment; actually saying to me at one point, “You had such a great head start. Too bad you wasted it.”

I was still hung up on my high school girlfriend and we talked regularly so after I moved in, I convinced her to come visit me during the Columbus Day weekend. Neither of us had a car, so she caught a city bus near her parents’ home and took it downtown. I took a bus from campus and met her there and we rode together back up to Oakland.

To say the encounter was awkward really wouldn’t do it justice. I still don’t know why she agreed to come. We just sat in my room making small talk and repeating our respective arguments as to why we did/didn’t want a monogamous relationship (me on the pro side, of course).

She had only been in college a few weeks, but was already telling me stories about her roommates’ bisexual experimentation and, although she was not specific, her own.
I was repulsed and felt the pain of rejection all over again, but at least I understood that there was no going back now. That encounter was the impetus for the song “Embers” that acknowledges the relationship would never again be anything, but casual.

To me, it felt like time ran out. I walked her back to the bus stop and as her bus pulled away, I already had the bones of the piece in my head.

Now armed with the knowledge that I would have to find someone new to relate to, I took stock of my assets and liabilities: I knew I was a geek. I knew that I spent almost all of my time reading textbooks while listening to music. That didn’t leave much time for meeting women and even then, I had very little idea how to make the most of the time available. So, I fantasized about the coeds around me; rehearsed conversations in my head, but never had the courage to go any further.

This untenable situation was the inspiration behind “Education”. Painfully shy, bookishly inclined, devoid of self-confidence, unrealistically romantic, frustrated and sarcastic.

Late that semester (Fall 1983) or early the next, my sadness and frustration had evolved into anger and resentment. “Free of Lee” is the cathartic attempt to release (or at least express) these negative emotions. I remember the weather being seasonal (wet and cold) and the accompanying discomforts of dry skin and damp clothing. I would have to say the exercise was successful because, although I did still write about loneliness, I was able to stop writing about her.

In fact, I didn’t write anything more that year (at least that I can recall). The fall semester was the academic equivalent of treading water, but the spring semester was different and I had bigger issues on my mind.

I remember mid-terms in the spring of 1984. I remember walking across campus to retrieve my grades. I was hoping I’d done well enough on the mid-term math exam to stay in the fat part of the bell curve. I didn’t. It was the first D I ever had. My uncertainty regarding my academic abilities peaked as my grades bottomed-out. As I walked back to my solitary room to wallow in self-pity, the sky looked ominous. I stopped halfway across the football field, looked up at the sky and said “Go ahead, rain on me.”
It did.

On to Chapter 5: I See the Light