a little kid running around with a maxi pad stuck to your eye pretending to be a
pirate to your senior year in high school when you got voted Class Clown for
repeatedly charming your way past the ladies in the front office to make fake
announcements over the loud speaker to that summer you learned to play the
guitar without looking at your hands. When were you most turned on by life
(and if you have yet to feel this way, stay tuned . . . ) and what can you learn
from those experiences?
For me, one of the most exciting and on-purpose times in my life was when
I was the singer-guitarist in a band called Crotch. I use the terms “singer,”
“guitarist,” and “band,” all very loosely because we in Crotch weren’t
concerned with things like learning to play our instruments or
practicing or any
of that snooty musicianship crap. We had bigger fish to fry, like talking in loud
voices about our band and checking ourselves out in plate glass windows as
we walked by with guitars strapped to our backs.
Electric ones.
I started Crotch with this chick from work named Paula who’d never picked
up a guitar in her life either, and who was as incapable of embracing her
feminine side as I was. Paula and I were the kind of young ladies who prided
ourselves on the wattage of our stereo equipment, our firm handshakes, and
our ability to drink anyone in the room under the table.
The testosterone-fueled chip on my shoulder came from a high school career
spent futilely awaiting a timely puberty while standing a good foot taller than
everyone on earth, all the boys at my high school included. None of them ever
asked me out, but I could make them laugh and kick their asses at basketball,
so rather
than fail at seducing them, I simply became one of them.
Paula’s issues were more homicidal in nature. She was the kind of angry
found in highly intelligent women who develop the body of a Playboy bunny
by the age of thirteen and are forced to grow up in the deep, redneck South.
Within the first few months of starting the band, she traded in her long, raven
locks for a fire-engine red buzz cut and covered her arms and back with tattoos
of flames and dragons.
We decided that as the tough one, she should play bass while I, the
desperate-for-attention one, would be on guitar, and that my little brother,
Stephen, the malleable one, would play drums. “Only until we find another
drummer,” I promised him, as I attempted to plug my guitar into the wrong
part of my amp. Stephen has played the drums since he was five, and is the
kind of younger brother every bossy older sister dreams of: talented and
endlessly enthusiastic with a very high threshold for pain.
The great tragedy of Crotch was that underneath our sneers and our bravado,
we were two sweet girls who desperately wanted boyfriends. But we had
issues—issues that we decided were best worked out while drunk, and
sometimes naked, on stage. Paula and I, baffled by our lack of gentlemen
callers, chose to express our disappointment by writing and singing songs like
Sew Me Up I’ve Had Enough and by yelling things into the microphone
between songs that one evening would inspire an audience member to rush the
stage holding a chair over his head with intent to beat us with it.
In spite of ourselves, we quickly acquired quite the following. In less than a
year’s time we also wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a film about the
record industry; wrote, directed, and starred in a music video that got on
national television; recorded an EP, got a demo deal with Columbia Records,
and even learned a couple more chords. And we did it with full-time corporate
jobs and no idea what we were doing. It was fun with a capital “F.”
There’s nothing as unstoppable as a freight train full
of fuck-yeah.
If you’ve ever known what it’s like to be in your groove, and are having
trouble finding your way right now, think back to your attitude and what your
priorities were when you were totally lit up about life, and use them to help
give you the clarity and the kick in the rear end you need now.
Here are some nuggets of wisdom I gleaned from the Crotch days that I still
find useful:
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