How I got started... (Part II)

So this is the part where I get disorganized chronologically and tell you some stuff from before the ROTC fiasco. When I was in 4th grade, I started playing clarinet at my school; they had this early musician's program and I got straight into it. Musically, I was very fortunate, having a father who was very much into current music (of many genres) and a lot of good rock from the 70's as well. He played music on his stereo system constantly, and I still have memories of watching MTV (back when it was still awesome and mostly music of course) as early as 4 years old. Anyway, so as soon as I had the opportunity to play music, I was like there before it happened. The funny thing about it was, I was the worst kid in class (the first day I came in with the mouthpiece upside down, so the reed was at the top of my mouth; I actually was trying to play it like that) until about 2 months or so, when I started developing some level of coordination. After that, I started learning how to read music, and by the second half of the year I was asking the teacher for more stuff to practice on, other than just what we did during rehearsal 3 days a week. And besides, that stuff was boring anyway. You see, it wasn't that I was particularly gifted at playing my instrument. I think what happened was that reading music just started making sense to me way before the other students. And I practiced like 3 times as much as anyone else. I was just into it! So much into it, that at the end of the year the teacher suggested that I start playing cornet (it's like a small trumpet). He told me, "you need to get familiar with several instruments before you make a decision on what you want to do with music." I really liked him, probably because he hated me at first, but then later I became one of his favorites. If you ever want someone to really like you, treat them like shit first, then shortly after, if you treat them with even a modest amount of respect, they'll love you! That is if they're still hanging around after you act like an asshole.

Anyway, so I was first chair for the cornet/trumpet (my hands were still really small so trumpet was too difficult, since it's bigger) section after the first half of my 5th grade year (lots of practicing during christmas break). Oddly enough, my parents didn't have very much interest in my musical development. My dad went to our big concert at the end of my 5th grade year. Now, I don't want to paint a picture of him as someone who just didn't care about me; in a lot of ways I think he was extremely overbearing. It's just that his musical tastes were pretty specific, and listening to a bunch of 10 year olds try to play extremely simple classical pieces probably didn't do much for him. After the concert, it was like, "yea, that was pretty good son, but what about your grades?" My grades were bad. The big problem was that the only schoolwork that I was interested in doing at home was practicing the cornet (or fucking around playing "stuff that sounded cool in my head," more on that later). And in Michigan schools at the time (we lived in Farmington Hills near Detroit), if you wanted to pass your classes as a 5th grader, you had to do SOME homework, unless everything was really easy for you and you just did it all in class. Well I wasn't one of those kids, and I wasn't doing any homework. I fucking hated school! I mean, I liked biology and earth science and some of our literary reading assignments, but everything else was just completely boring and painful to get through, including math (which was almost all arithmetic at the time). So I was sort of failing some stuff. As in, I had to cry in front of the whole class at the end of the year to get my teacher to pass me. Yea. So I got in trouble and one of the first things to go was cornet. Music was over for me at that point. On top of that, in my first year of middle school, I was put in a remedial program where all of my teachers had to list all my assignments for each class every day, and my parents had to sign it every night stating that they'd seen it and had me work on them that night. It was embarrassing.

But it did get me back on track academically, which, at this point in my life I feel a little ambivalent about. By high school, I was in all honors classes. I was on my way to maximum institutionalization. My sophomore year, I had dreams of going to MIT to study... I don't know, theoretical physics, or biochemical engineering, something really complicated and, really awesome! Then I took the preliminary SAT. Scored an 1100. In case any of you don't know, you needed like a score near 1500 to even be considered at a school like that. I took the actually SAT the next year, 1170, which put me in like the 80th percentile or some shit. It was a disaster. My dad thought I was just fucking off and not concentrating during the test. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I was terrified during the exam, because I knew full well what the ramifications for a low score were. I knew I had some problems with testing, but I was always told that I was just too nervous and needed to calm down. Actually, this turned out to be a completely false assessment of my problem, but more on that later. I took the test 2 more times, scoring something like an 1130, then 1160. Doomed. I took a $750 SAT course during the summer before my senior year. The deal was, my dad would pay for it all if I scored 100 points higher, and half of it if I scored 50 points higher the next time I took it. I only scored 40 points higher, which was a 1210. I had to pay for the whole thing with money from my job that summer. I mention ALL of this stuff because it was the first time I began to become disillusioned with my plans to become a notable scientist of some kind. It had been pounded in my head, since I was 12 years old, that I should go to college and do something extremely technical and high-skilled so that I could be happy with my life (which involved making lots of money obviously).

Well, now I was between a rock and a hard place. I could go to a less-reputable school. For instance, I DID get accepted to Illinois Tech and Boston University, which are both pretty decent schools. But schools like that costed upwards of 25k per year to attend as a freshman at the time. I had applied for Air Force, Navy, and Army ROTC scholarships, but my SAT scores were killing my application, and despite all the work I'd done in JROTC, a lot of it was irrelevant apparently, because they mostly wanted to see that you were in some well-recognized and physically intense varsity sport. Financial aid? My dad and his wife were grossing well over 100k per year. I was totally ineligible, and ironically, after all the pressure that my dad put on me to go to school, he wasn't able to help me pay for anything. He was living beyond his means and was in a lot of debt. So I was, well, pretty much fucked if I couldn't get a scholarship. For some reason I was convinced I couldn't for a while, which was entirely untrue. However, because I WAS convinced that I couldn't get a good enough scholarship to go to a college where I could study the more advanced subjects that I liked (or thought I'd like), I sort of gave up. I was pissed, man! I fuckin' busted my ass for 4 years in high school, in class and on my extra curricular activities. This included JROTC, Orienteering and Rifle Team (shooting, not that twirly, tossing guns around bullshit), which I went to two national championships and practiced intensely for. None of it mattered, because that SAT score was blaring, "hey, this guy's brain is a dime a dozen." So the last month of the summer before my senior year (after I'd gotten my 4th SAT test score), I kinda started feeling like I should do whatever the hell I wanted to do. This included getting into the orchestra with my friend Aaron (who played cello); he talked the director into letting me borrow a shitty viola to start practicing on during the summer, then MAYBE I could make it into the B orchestra (which Aaron assured me I would probably be able to do, because, "they really sucked").

See, I'd started fucking around with a program called Cakewalk on my computer. Cakewalk lets you write music in standard musical notation. It pretty much does everything for you, all you have to do is click the right spots on the staff and choose the correct note duration, and it structures it all for you (writes in the rests, puts the notes in the right position in each measure). Anyway, I was fucking around and showing a lot of this to my friend Aaron, and he was like, damn dude, how did you learn how to do that if you don't even play an instrument? It wasn't that the stuff I was writing was particularly entertaining, it was just that I was writing coherent, somewhat complex stuff, which was surprising, especially to me. So we were on a mission to get me into the orchestra. My dad, however, sensing a shift in my attitude about life in general, especially towards his authority, was totally against it. Eventually, before the semester even started, he had finally come up with a reason (or, really, an excuse) to directly "outlaw" my practicing viola in "his house". The reason was, "if somebody accidently breaks that viola, I'm gonna have to pay for it. You have a 4 year old brother running around here." I explained that, hello, I have a job, I can pay for it, and it was only worth about 200 bucks at the most in the condition it was in. However, I was still paying him back for the SAT course. Plus, it didn't matter what I said anyway. He was a fucking asshole back then.

What eventually ended up happening with my college career was this: I planned not to go basically, until about March of my senior year. The rejection letters on my ROTC scholarship applications rolled in, one after another during around christmas time, which was to be expected at that point. I spoke with some Navy and Air Force recruiters, and had decided by March that I was going to enlist. I'd already taken the Air Force ASVAB and scored in the 95th percentile (which was a nice ego boost), and the recruiters were really on my case after that. So I talked to my JROTC head instructer, Ret. Major Coatney, about how to make sure I got the job I really wanted. Much to my surprise, he was deeply appalled. "Bunch, why are you enlisting? What happened to the ROTC scholarships?" I told him, "My fucking SAT scores, sir. I averaged like an 1170." He was like, "So, what about everything you've done in this program? What about Rifle Team?" I told him, "Hey, it's not really a varsity sport. They want football, basketball, baseball, track, tennis players. They could give a shit if I can fire an air rifle and hit the center of a quarter over and over from 33 feet away, sir." So he took me on a field trip with a school bus full of other JROTC students to a school in Nacogdoches, Texas (our high school was near Dallas), called Stephen F. Austin State University. This was a school that was well known for its reputation as a big party college. Not my idea of a great university experience, but hey, he got me an interview set up with the battalion commander of the Army ROTC program on campus, and I pretty much had to go. The commander liked me, enough, anyway. Thought I was squared away, and liked all the stuff in the academics packet I'd brought. Basically, he got me a 3 year campus-based ROTC scholarship that would start my sophomore year, and in the meantime, the school would pay for my room. Pretty sweet deal.

Anyway, back to the music stuff. So my dad had a lot of control over what I did in the house, but he couldn't stop me from writing stuff on Cakewalk. All through college too. I wasn't making "progress" really, I just kept fucking around. Eventually I started using another program that a buddy lent to me called Fruity Loops. Then, another buddy of mine, Adam, who had heard a lot of my stuff, bought me a guitar at a garage sale. He showed me how to tune it and wrote down some scales in tablature form. I hardly practiced the scales at all, but once my callouses grew in, I was fucking around like an hour or more, everyday. I'm not really sure how to explain what I was doing, but I can offer some examples of where it led to, http://www.myspace.com/regengt
The whole guitar thing started happening about 5 months before I quit ROTC. The reaction that I got from my friends when I eventually started improvising with them on guitar made me really think about my life. What was I really supposed to have done with myself? Why am I spending 50+ hours a week struggling to perform at a barely satisfactory level in my physics classes when writing music was so much more interesting?

Alright, so I guess there's gonna be a part three. Thanks for reading this though if you've made it this far! Hopefully the theme is becoming a little more apparent, but if not it should be by the end of part three.