Prophecy For The Failed Musician

I have been thinking about what I want to do with my life lately. Well actually, it wasn’t a pleasant drifting though that I just had recently. It was the product of a rather nasty argument. But none of that. I wanted to talk about this under different circumstances, you know, maybe something nice, like at the completion or commencement of part of it. But alas, “All in good time.” is backfiring. To put it simply this is the definition of an unfulfilled dream.

I was not the girl who was enrolled in music lessons and whose parents pushed her to learn an instrument or who knew that music was what she wanted to do from an early age. I was always set on what I wanted to do, there was never a period of confusion, but I have wanted to be an architect, an interior designer, an English teacher, a hand model, a rock music journalist, a radio host, a sound engineer… but most of all through all that, just under the surface- I wanted to be a performer. I wanted to do that typical teenage thing, I wanted to be a rock star. And when all the kids in high school were all confused about what they wanted to do, I laughed. Oh yes because at that stage, I was set on becoming a radio host. And I proudly proclaimed to anyone who asked that that was what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Until it happened.

I was in this health food shop being asked what I was going to do when I left school and I said I’m going to become a radio announcer, and the woman said that’s lovely, you know (whatever this guys name was, I apologise to him that I can’t remember because I owe him a lot) he used to be in radio, and she called over this big older man who introduced himself and said it was fantastic that I was interested in radio and that if I ever wanted to get into it I should call the manager of the local community radio station, who he was very good friends with of course. So he gave me his number and eventually I called him. We went into the station and met some of the announcers. They were running a training program and they asked for a résumé, so I sent mine in, and I got the position. Soon enough I had finished (even though I never got over how live it was) and then I presented some news for them which was pleasant enough. One of the announcers was really quite confident in me and believed that I may have a future in reading news and he said that any time I wanted, when I was ready, he would give me my own time slot. And there it was. My dream, like I could have snapped my fingers and it happened. But then I realised it wasn’t what I wanted.

It was right there and I could have taken it. But I realised that the thing that I really enjoyed about it was talking about music and browsing the collection of CDs and most of all telling the announcer things that he never even realised his audio software (which I had never seem before) could do.

It was the music.

Oh but before this, (this blog is turning into a monster) I had tried in high school to learn to sing and play an instrument. I had tried to get my mother to teach me guitar, and tried that again at school. I had tried to get a band together with a girl who wanted to play base a girl who could sing and play guitar and myself, who could write lyrics and offered to learn how to play drums so we would have a capable three piece band. So while I was spending my hard earned cash on lessons and slaving away with my inner performance demons, the other girl was not learning base guitar, and the second girl was whinging about needing two other guitarists. I was not terribly good at drums. Really not good. Once I could play a beat my timing was impeccable, my drum teacher even tried to put me off by playing another tune out of time on the xylophone and the bongos, and by starting a conversation with me. Neither of which, I am proud to say, put me off. But that was the thing, sure I could keep good time and slow down and speed up and all of that, but that’s unfortunately not all there is to do. I could only play a handful of beats and I really felt no creative flair for it. I was reluctant and moody through most of my lessons. And then there was the time my drum teacher went away.

I, like a faithful little music student went to the music room. only to find the guitar teacher in the rehearsal room teaching “Dani California” to a group of seniors. He said my teacher had gone away on the school music camp. Oh I said. Is there anyway I can help or do something? (music was getting me out of class and I must have had Maths or Italian) and he said sure, you could play drums for us. I was feeling pretty confident as last week was the week that I was complimented on my timing and this guitar teacher had actually come into the room I was in to see who was playing drums. So I said sure, could you write down the beat for me? And he did. So I struggled through this beat (which happened to be one of the ones I had the hardest time mastering) so I kept fucking it up the moment my mind wandered only to be sniped at by the guitarists for playing it too slow (which I wasn’t). So I sped up a bit and they were a little bit happier. But I could hear too, that the music wasn’t right.

But after this I was shattered, all that confidence that I had before was gone. I had totally stuffed up in front of a room full of guitarists and the cute boy and the rather attractive and nice but far too old for me guitar teacher. All I had ever wanted was to be in a band, this was for my band, which was falling apart at the seams anyway. I wasn’t learning fast enough for their taste so they’d found another drummer on the school music camp my teacher was at. I cried for the rest of the afternoon, not returning to class only to have my boyfriend of the time not notice I was crying, punch me in the arm, and walk off. It was a lovely day(!). I think I only attended one or two more drum classes after that. Enough to know that the guitar teacher had told me to play the song with the wrong beats in the wrong frigging time signature! I never forgave him. Then I quit drums.

Around this time, before that I think, I was trying to learn to sing. So I enrolled in singing lessons with the school. It was a new and exciting thing, I brought along my lyrics folder and trotted off to the music room to realise my dreams. She was a mid-thirties blonde sharp (in all senses of the word, tight clothes, tight hair, pointy shoes and features) woman. I had been put in a class that already had kids, ones that she knew well and had already picked her favourite out of. She had the rest of the class sing their songs that they had chosen to learn (which almost all forgot the lyrics to) before she even introduced me. Then we did some vocal exercises and some scales. She told me that I never once hit a note, but I did song in harmony with the others. Then she asked me what I wanted to learn and I sung a bit of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay”. She told me a I was flat and that was bad and to try another. I few songs later after being insulted by her I was almost in tears. She liked nothing and it seemed that she didn’t even class me as being good enough to even work with. And with that, and with a sickly pink lipstick-ed smile and the final parting words “You either got it or you don’t, and you my friend don’t, so stick to writing songs. OK?” She kicked me out of her class.

I spoke to the head of the music department, who said, and I do understand his position on this- that there was really nothing he could do. He suggested that I try the other singing teacher. So I did.

He was a round man with a beard who was an opera singer. I was put in the lowest class possible, with the girl (who although she was very nice and all, was credited by one of my friends at the time of ruining the whole school production chorus with her awful voice). But she improved faster than I did and I soon discovered that a good portion of my very limited range was below that of the teacher. So sadly, I had to give that up too.

And last but not least we have my flute lessons which I began when I started high school. All my very intellectual friends of the time were doing it so I though I’d try. The teacher said that the hardest thing about playing the flute was getting a noise out of it to begin with. After that you were set. I was the first one to get a noise out of my flute. But that’s all I could do, and after half a year, I couldn’t even play “Three Blind Mice” properly and the teacher said a I was holding the flute incorrectly anyway. So that was the end of flute.

Then on a whim I went and tinkered away with the school piano. I recorded it and it sounded quite passable. And I pretty much enjoyed it. The girl who I was doing drums with said very kindly that I was crap at drums and that it didn’t fit at all and that I looked uncomfortable behind the drum kit. She was strange, not at school for very long, my friends liked her but deep down I never trusted her for some reason. But she said that day, with utter conviction, sincerity, a hazy expression and inclined head that I should play piano, that it would suit me.

It probably won’t amount to much, but then I always have the harmonica.

☆Anika☆