Continued from Chapter 6: What Do I Do Now?

I opted not to work the summer after graduating from Carnegie Mellon. I knew it would be my last summer off and I intended to take the greatest advantage of that.

I set up all the musical and recording equipment I could borrow in my parents’ living room and feverishly set about recording the backlog of songs I’d written in the last two years. These were the most ambitious multi-track recordings so far with drums, keys, bass, guitar and multiple vocal parts.

The common four-track cassette recorder of the day allowed recording (as the name implies) four independent tracks, but if one wanted to overcome that limitation, one could combine tracks. For example: I could record bass, guitar and piano on tracks 1, 2 and 3 and then combine (aka ‘bounce’ or ‘ping pong’) those tracks onto track #4. Now, I could reuse tracks 1, 2 and 3 for three more instruments or voices. Unfortunately, this means the song will not be in true stereo.

If you want true stereo, you need two tracks (one for the left and one for the right). So, for example, you can record two tracks, mix them together in stereo and ‘bounce’ them to tracks 3 and 4. Now, you can record new instruments AND the stereo mix back to tracks 1 and 2 (preserving the stereo separation). Theoretically, one can continue in this way and add an infinite number of tracks. But this was the analog eighties and the fidelity of the recording deteriorated rapidly when you did this.

There is a third option to keep the recordings as clean as possible and add more tracks: Use the same track for different things at different times. One example is using one track for both a vocal part and an instrument solo (during a portion of the song where there’s no singing). This is tricky because ‘punching in’ and ‘punching out’ without wrecking the original track is difficult and there was no ‘undo’ command back then (“Hoopieland” was done this way).

Back to the story: I came down to Morgantown to look for an apartment on a particularly hot summer day in August of 1986. I had never been there before and didn’t know anyone who’d gone to WVU so I was pretty much clueless.

With a map from the welcome center and a copy of the Dominion Post in hand, I started making calls and seeing what was available for rent that Fall.

Oh my God! I had never seen such a collection of arguably uninhabitable structures. After three of four of these, I re-adjusted my standards and pressed on until I found one that I thought I could tolerate.

The apartment was in a house in Sunnyside and the rent seemed reasonable so I had the landlord send me a blank lease to sign, but it was so one-sided I complained. The landlord refused to modify the lease and I was back to square one.

Eventually I came across a basement apartment on Protzman Street. It was…OK. It had a little living room, one bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. The only problem was the party animals who rented the house above me. My tolerance for the noise and late nights was greater than it is now, but even I couldn’t overlook the “get-together” that ended with someone spilling a considerable quantity of beer on the kitchen floor. That’s because the kitchen floor was above my bedroom.

Now, I like beer as much as the next guy, but it loses much of its appeal after passing through linoleum, plywood, fiberglass insulation and acoustic tile. I was able to break the lease due to a typo and moved into the third bedroom of a house occupied by three friends as one of them graduated.

Academically, things continued to look up for me. My inherent shyness was overcome by the fact that there were only three students in the Masters program. I literally had entire classes with the three of us in the front row and a professor lecturing. There simply was nowhere to hide and I received the one-on-one instruction I needed whether I was willing to admit it or not.

I made some good friends at WVU but, romantically, nothing had changed. I was still very lonely and aside from the letters I exchanged with two girls I dated in high school (one casually and one…well, NOT so casually) lacked any female companionship.

There was one particular student I had a crush on though. She was from South Africa, petite, dark hair and incredible blue eyes. She was also extremely bright and focused on getting out of WVU with her MS in Mechanical Engineering and getting into the PhD program at MIT.

One other detail: she played the clarinet (or, rather claimed to; I never heard her play). But that was enough to move me to write an instrumental piece for her in the ‘clarinet-friendly’ key of Bb. I originally titled it “Jazz Tune in Bb”, but later retitled it “Song For Larry” when I recorded it in 2000. I can’t remember if I ever played it for her.

Anyway, during the spring semester of 1987, I went to a party thrown by a fellow student ostensibly because I expected her to be there. She was and we started talking about various things including (and I don’t know how we got on this topic) how much we enjoyed having our backs scratched. So, standing in the kitchen, we scratched each other’s backs. Not a big deal until one considers that it had been a very long time since I’d felt the touch of another human being. What made the experience even more tragic to me was that she had just announced that she was leaving for MIT at the end of the semester. That was the inspiration for the song “Before I Turn Around”.

On to Chapter 8: Spring Break and the Big Ride

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?