Bros, Prose, Bloc Tops & Rock Bottom - Part 3: Lost
Rock solid friends, rock climbing, rockin' music, rock bottom & recovery
Lost: The US and global economy was only a few short months away from going into a recession. Sam’s inherited childhood home needed a level of restoration my young mind couldn’t truly comprehend, except to start at the beginning and move doggedly forward. Guts and glory, or something.
Looking back I realize that I wasn’t emotionally or mentally equipped for what I offered Sam, and the immense intensity of the situation would test our sanity and friendship. I can also recognize my youthful loyalty and feel appreciation for myself and the friendship that’s the reason for said loyalty. “Life’s answer is usually always both” as Sam and I like to say, from a wry and Taoist-inspired perspective we’ve often shared.
We lived in the old house without plumbing and we heated the drafty home through that first winter with an old wood stove. We were both raised in Colorado homes that used wood stoves as a primary heat source, so there was enough experience that we could get a stove-load of wood to last the night. Being an old stove, however, it took some skill to make it last all night and there were plenty of frosty mornings waiting for a fresh fire to cut back the collected cold.
We cleaned up one room in the house to the point it was sanitary enough to be inhabitable. We furnished it with a bunk bed after putting up layers of painter’s plastic to section the room off from the rest of the house. It was… a challenging living situation to say the least.
During this period of our lives, alcohol started to sneak in more and more. We used it to cope after long days of working on the house, clearing out mess after mess and making endless to-do lists, wearing respirators week after week until it felt as if our noses had been through a round or two of fisticuffs.
It seemed as though we were endlessly cleaning and repairing in a soul-sucking attempt to purge the immense sadness we felt around us, thereby carving out a place for ourselves in the world. We envisioned traveling and climbing with a home to always come back to, the dream. Each day we toiled toward a better tomorrow, but each day took more out of us, our mutual vision and stoic Taoist humor notwithstanding.
We would work on the house all day and then turn around and spend long nights drinking and playing pool at the local dive bar. We found solace in the friendships of old punk rock friends who embraced us despite and maybe because of our self-destructive tendencies. It became a bit harder to get out climbing after those long nights, but we still did.
One day while Sam and I were hanging out, we ran into an old friend and Hip Hop head since he was knee-high to yo’ mama. He’s also one of the more talented writers I’ve known, the fabled Banana Hands. We started reciting bits that we’d written to each other, going one for one. Sam and I had been writing together since he moved back, and we even had some collaborative pieces.
Bananas was stoked about what we shared and he asked if we wanted to come over to a mutual friend’s house, who goes by the MC/artist name of Obi One, to share our pieces with him. Sam and I were pumped. This was an unofficial tryout to be in their crew, Diabolical Sound Platoon.
Ironically, Sam and Obi had planned on creating a Hip Hop group in high school and Sam had coined the band’s name at that time. Over those high school years, however, it would end up being Obi and Bananas who wrote and performed together as Sam had increasingly focused his efforts on climbing.
Now, roughly 9 years later, we were hoping to join Diabolical Sound Platoon.
I knew Obi from childhood and I also knew that he was now an energized performer and a talented beatboxer. Sam and I made an impression that night, however, so we were in.
We started hanging out constantly, writing, painting, partying, and playing house shows. Just four young and aspiring writers, performers, and artists. MCs.
It was Banana Hands, Obi One, The Prestidigitator (Sam), and myself, The Human Genome. Ready to form Voltron, dyna-therms connected, infra-cells up, mega-thrusters are a go: Launch Diabolical Sound Platoon.
The band became our culture, our daily life, and all we could think about was the next show, the next song, the next line to scratch into an achingly blank page. Everyone in the band during this era (DSP has existed in some form for over two decades) was also a visual artist, and we covered canvases in paint and pages in ink day after day and night after night.
Our practice area was a 10’x20’ storage shed that we retrofitted with a recording booth and painting studio. We immersed ourselves in all things relevant to Hip Hop. Sentences, samples, stories, and spray paint were our communication and commodity, traded to a world that we didn’t trust and yet coexisted within. We also immersed ourselves in drugs, alcohol, and enough spray paint fumes to kill an elephant. Uppers and downers.
Regardless, the band was providing critical relief and an outlet from the hard reality Sam and I had been living day in and day out. The 2008 financial crisis dramatically exacerbated the challenges to our goal of saving Sam’s childhood home. In addition to the extensive renovation work we were undertaking, we were both living on shoestring budgets after the economy had tanked.
If that wasn’t enough, the bank began trying to take the house from Sam through characteristically shady methods. This would result in a series of lawsuits and incalculable stress for my brother-in-life, in addition to the weight of everything else he was experiencing around his father’s passing. Some years after this point, the bank would be successful in its piracy of Sam’s childhood home during the third and final of their reprehensible lawsuits. Cliché as apple pie.
The pain and struggle of the existence we’d chosen, to save the house, was funneled onto the pages like our very blood spilling out from the pen, and Sam and I would stay up late into the night as we crafted our latest opus. The content was often dark. To quote Mike Ness of Social Distortion, “Oh sorry homie, we don’t do no happy songs.”
One day the band entered a spoken word contest put on by the poetry club of our local college. Starting strong, Sam charged into the piece he chose to recite. Strong is Sam’s style.
Should I make like Marie Antoinette and be headed?
Or reform the papers that Enron shredded?
Should I sail the American aisles filled with stalker smiles,
Fantastic fables and plastic rap labels?
Sam and I ended up winning the contest. I think there was a nominal prize, but what I remember most is the attention from the girls. Attention is a helluva drug, possibly my first addiction. It pairs well with being in a band and drinking to excess. Uppers and downers.
I began to develop my identity as a writer and as a performer, searching for my own peculiar perfectionism within the disorder of my daily life. My style was influenced by my favorites. The fast, punchy, and thoughtful rappers like Aesop Rock, Gift of Gab (RIP), Del, and Boots Riley.
These artists were originally shared with me by others, and my gratitude goes out to them. Music, much like climbing and life, thrives best with strong mentor and apprentice roles. It’s a symbiosis, as important to teach as it is to learn and to never stop participating in both roles.
I began to think of songwriting, in a Hip Hop sense, like a percussion instrument and a projector screen. You ride and create rhythm, accentuate tempos, play with cadence, and complement with triplets and space. In addition, you get to translate your experience and perceptions to others through the vast and malleable complexity of language, co-creating invisible imagery with the listener. It’s incredibly fun and engaging.
As a songwriter, I tried to develop clever wordplay and an always-expanding lexicon to translate complex and often disturbing ideas and observations into a rhythmic outpouring that sounds good even if you aren’t catching the words. Sam is highly adept at all of this, and I think when he’s threading his personal needle he can give the best to ever do it a run for their money.
One night Sam read me two verses and a chorus for a song he wrote called The Profiteer. The chorus went:
Have no fear, the profiteer is here,
Remain calm, outsource, watch it disappear
Have no fear, the profiteer is here,
You’re a human resource and this watch needs gears
You probably get the gist. When he read aloud what he had written for his verses, I was immediately impacted. Not only was the concept one I felt called to write about, especially with the bank actively trying to take the house, but his wordsmithing felt like it had transcended itself. Here’s a sample of what flowed from Sam's pen. There are many more 24-karat lines like this, but you can hear those on the album.
Kabuki kamikazi bukake karate,
In their Maseratis, eating biscotti,
Swerving through bodies
Aesthetic photogenic cryogenic genetics,
Make your prophetic rhetoric pathetic
Like eugenics for ascetics
Once again Sam had led the way to a new highpoint, and he inspired me to climb a branch higher and take my writing to another level. I wrote the half of the song Sam offered me that night and to this day, out of all the songs we wrote together and with others, it is still my favorite.
The following is from one of my Profiteer verses. My inspiration from Sam is stamped all over it, from the five-dollar words that link into machinegun syllables to the gritty descriptors driving at the heart of the topic.
Bucolic blue-collar moronic trauma tonic colonic
Bilagaana sauna piranha sonnet
Forgotten pawned vomit, want it?
Economy sodomy laudanum artery harmony
An alluring Barbie artistry pharmacy armory
Oh sorry homie, we don’t do no happy songs...
We had a whole lot of fun playing small regional festivals and weekend gigs at our local bars. We even started playing the opening sets for artists we had been fans of for years, like Lewis Logic and Dead Prez. Speaking with the disarmingly down-to-earth and endlessly creative Boots Riley after our soundcheck the night we opened for The Coup is one of the memories that I’ll hold forever.
These experiences gave us confidence that we were on our destined path. At the same time, more opportunities started to open up. Being in the presence of masters of their craft, when it’s also your craft, educates and elevates.
Over time we grew from four MCs and some beats into, at our largest, a nine-piece funk/rock Hip Hop band. We played to bigger crowds, began headlining local festivals, and continued to open for a number of our Hip Hop heroes when they played through the area.
The nightlife of a live band is a double-edged sword, and for some one side is much sharper than the other. I nearly cut myself mortally on that blade, and the deception of the cutting is that half of the time I thought I was having the time of my life.
But with every long night and late morning that passed, I became the living embodiment of another cliché. The one where the child of an alcoholic follows in their parent’s footsteps, and with each step they distance themselves from their original nature. For me, that meant falling away from climbing and into a late-night musician lifestyle that encourages excessive behavior. It was a path I watched my father walk. Cue the aforementioned cliché.
They say alcoholism is insidious, that it sneaks up on you and it’s hard to see coming because the changes happen little by little. Well I’m here to tell ya, “they” have some nuggets of wisdom and that’s one. It took some years, but I eventually became something my younger self would not have fully recognized, save for the comparison to my father.
The energy and elation from a good live performance with the band could, however, add so much vibrancy to a few hours of life that I could pseudo-rationalize the rollercoaster of ups and downs in between. It’s a tricky, sticky trap and over the years I’ve gained some empathy for my father through the course of my own mistakes and transgressions.
After living this way for some time, I fell into a deep depressive dependency and there was no lack of normality to the never-ending chaos. Coupling alcohol dependency with my penchant for self-punishment and general rebelliousness had created a perfect storm and devastating feedback loop.
I eventually racked up enough bad memories and damaged personal relationships that I wanted to change and I knew I had to change. But the physiological and psychological gravity well of the substance abuse blackhole is damn strong, and I felt like I’d let myself drift perilously close to the event horizon. I was so near that line one night I had a very close brush with taking my life, close enough that it still gives me a reflective pause when remembering.
Hindsight on that close call and the what-ifs of that night give me a great deal of empathy for the hurt that can exist in a person, and how the smallest moment can devastate multiple lives in an instant. It also taught me that one of the most important things to remember in those moments is to hang on a little longer. Just one breath or day at a time, whatever’s needed. Just one more branch.
As far as I’ve come to understand things, which is limited, substance abuse is an issue that requires serious and diverse efforts to address. So often it is just a symptom of great, festering pain. Pain that must eventually be attended to for recovery to have optimal success.
Looking back I can see that there were warning signs early on, as soon as my early twenties. At the time, excessive alcohol consumption just seemed like a part of my self-perceived wildness. We always thought of ourselves as more Harding than Chouinard, more Verm than Gill i.e. for non-climbers: rebels are gonna rebel, so buy a round or get out of the way.
Now, however, I understand that I was experimenting with an array of methods to soothe the great, lurking pain I felt inside. I realize now that I did that for a very long time. Whether climbing or working my body into an injurious ruin or closing down the bar after swearing off alcohol the day before, a vicious cycle of pain-purging excesses and the subsequent desire to punish myself in self-loathing repeated for much of my youthful adulthood. The driving and disintegrating engine of my rollercoaster. Uppers and downers...
Next month - Bros, Prose, Bloc Tops & Rock Bottom
Part 4: Found
Bros, Prose, Block Tops & Rock Bottom Links
Well written! Profound reflections. Memories as well being on the periphery of some of those scenes