Posted by Like very many other days in this fortunate and wonderful life of mine, on July 8th, 2013 I found myself living the dream.
It was a Monday and I woke up early. Or late. Or whenever the heck I felt like waking up because with the rarest of exceptions I simply never have to get out of bed at any particular time. This was a blissful privilege that I had dreamt of for almost the entirety of the first quarter-century of my life. Every time I fumbled for my alarm clock and forced myself out of bed I wished I didn’t have to. And once I dispensed with the concept of exchanging physical labour for money and completed my desired scholastic endeavours I stopped doing it.
The main reason I never had to get out of bed in the morning is because I became a guitar teacher, and lessons never started until mid-afternoon at the earliest. And right there I knocked off another couple of huge fantasies I’d always had. One was to be a teacher, a semi-constant dream that arose mostly because as a schoolkid I was always jealous of the teacher’s big desk, but the other fantasy – to be a musician – was a constant life-long hope, wish, and dream that I pondered aimlessly for as many hours as I’ve since practised aimfully. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to play an instrument – any instrument; every instrument. Oh sure, if I had my druthers I’d be a piano player (my earliest memory is asking my mother for piano lessons, which never came as we didn’t have a piano in the house*), but when eighteen-year-old me walked into the Moncton Music Centre with $150 in hard-earned and suddenly expendable cash (having just given up his apartment [and girlfriend] and moved back in with his parents, rent-free) he walked out with the only thing such a paltry sum could purchase: a used Hondo Telecopy electric guitar priced at $135+tax. After making such a massive financial commitment (and I’m not joking even a little; that was a huge amount) I solemnly vowed to myself that I wasn’t going to waste my money. I was going to practise an hour every day and damn-well learn how to play the thing.
Now I gotta tell you, after half a lifetime of teaching guitar I’ve heard countless people say the very same thing – that they were going to practise an hour a day – and I swear I’ve never seen a single person actually do it, not one. But I did. I had returned to high school at the time and I worked in a bar (which is a whole bunch of other stories), so I wouldn’t get home from work until 3am and I had to get up at 7am to get ready for school (oh, the sleeping-in dreams I had…). I remember several times I’d be just crawling into bed and it would occur to me that I hadn’t had time to put in my hour of practise that day. So I’d look at my alarm clock and if it read 3:12am I would sit on the end of my waterbed (yep, I had a waterbed) and I’d force myself to practise until 4:12am; no exceptions. And I can report with complete and utter honesty that I kept my vow almost entirely; in that first year of playing guitar I only missed one single day of practise, and that was the day of my grandfather’s funeral**. Oh, and I had no guitar teacher; I was literally self-teaching myself out of magazines***. I had no real clue as to what I should have been practising so I would just sit there going over Scorpions riffs and Def Leppard songs played half-right (which is the same as “all-wrong”) again and again – totally re-enforcing countless bad habits and horrible non-techniques the whole time. Also: I didn’t have an amplifier. I had been playing my electric guitar for almost eighteen months before I saved up $100 for a little 15-watt amp and plugged it in for the first time. The first riff I ever played plugged in (and with built-in distortion)? You Really Got Me, the Van Halen version. I’ll never forget it.
Of course this is just a long way of saying that I was pleased as punch to be crawling out of bed on that summer day (at whatever time I wanted) as a person who was squeezing so much personal joy and a moderate living wage out of playing the guitar. Add in the fact that I had woken up next to a beautiful woman who loved me as much as I loved her (not a dream I ever really had but I’ll certainly take it), and yeah, I’d say I was living the dream.
But wait, it gets even better! Ever since I got my first taste of live music I dreamed the impossible dream that I would get to see a breadth of amazing concerts on a daily basis, and here I was in the middle of the Ottawa Bluesfest – a daily festival featuring world-class bands on multiple stages – and this on the tail of the Ottawa jazz fest which had just filled a dozen straight days with awesome live music! So with a wide smile plastered to my happy face I rode my bike along five kilometres of gorgeous bicycle paths to the festival grounds and arrived on site in time to catch The Specials (riding on dedicated bike paths was another lifelong dream that began the day I received my cherished blue bike as a reward for passing the first grade).
If I haven’t belaboured the point already, the penultimate dream I’ll refer to was my longtime desire to be an encyclopedia of music knowledge. And though I have yet to even approach realizing that dream, on this day I found myself knowledgable enough to at least be aware of British ska legends The Specials despite never having knowingly given them a listen. And of course they were really fun. How could seeing a classic live ska band on a pleasant summer’s eve not be really fun when one is living the dream?
I seems like I could pretty much wrap this up right here and have outlined a pretty dreamy day. Leisurely waking up surrounded by m’lady, m’guitar and m’cat and riding m’bike along the river to hear relatively esoteric music that wasn’t unfamiliar to my semi-experienced ears, and likely with a cool beer in my hand besides…Pretty dreamy, huh? Well I ain’t seen nothin’ yet! For one of the longest longs, one of the yearniest yearns and one of the dreamiest dreams of my early-to-mid adulthood was to see the subject of my earliest musical obsession and my three biggest heroes – Rush – live in concert, and whattya know, Rush was the evening’s headliner!
Sure I had seen Rush live before – several times in fact – but a dream as intense as my adolescent dream to see Rush in concert can never be fully sated no matter how many times it is realized. Was I as excited as the first time I saw them? Of course not, back then I was young and hungry and less experienced…heck, what am I saying? Yes, I was just as excited as that first Rush concert! For I was standing in the eye of a microcosm of living the dream.
And the show was great!!!! They started with one of their surprisingly long wacky-funny videos before kicking off the show with Subdivisions. First song and I was already air-drumming every break with nary a hint of restraint nor a sliver of shame. They split the show into two sets, playing new stuff and old stuff (okay, old stuff and older stuff) like Limelight, Red Sector A, YYZ, and Tom Sawyer that melted my brain with nostalgic bliss. Rush even brought a string section on tour with them – a first for sure – to help flesh out the second set, not like the band needed it or anything. Oh, it was so great!
And if things weren’t dreamy enough (and they certainly were), the concert closed out with a bam-bam-bam triple whammy from 2112: Overture, The Temples of Syrinx, and Finale. A fantasy!
When I woke up the next morning I pinched myself just to be sure it had all been real. Just like I do every morning.
*Come to think of it, my dad was a furniture mover at the time and I bet dollars-to-donuts that he had the opportunity to bring home a free upright piano more than once. And oh, the difference it might have made to this life of mine. Thankfully, he didn’t.
**Excepting a three-day suspension for being drunk at the Hallowe’en dance****, my grandfather’s funeral was also the only day that I was absent from school throughout my entire three-year return-to-high-school career. I can tell you that I was absent almost all of the days throughout my first three-year run at high school, during which I didn’t earn a single grade 10 credit. Which is why I was twenty-two-and-a-half years old when I finally graduated. Remember kids, 80% of success is showing up (Woody Allen) on time (me).
***If you’re self-taught it means by definition that your teacher didn’t know what he or she was doing.
****Being well over the legal drinking age I honestly thought I was allowed to be drunk at the dance. I wasn’t drinking on school property or anything, I had arrived already drunk. If I had known I probably wouldn’t have dressed up as a six-pack of beer.
Todd Man Out 