From the time I was a tiny little girl, I always knew I wanted to be a musician. My earliest musical memory is from the late 70s, watching Kiss on television; like most children (and it’s easy to see as an adult how that band was marketed largely toward kids), I loved the costumes and the lights and the pyrotechnics! Fire!
As a child in the early 80s, cable television was becoming more and more common. We had cable installed at our house when I was probably about 5 or 6 years old. My parents were gone frequently, as I’ve discussed in earlier blog entries. Both were involved with jobs in higher education. My father, especially, took his gig as a public school superintendent incredibly seriously. He went to every school event - from the football games to the choir concerts and every possible thing in-between. My mother also worked long hours, but she was more of the “over-achiever” in the classroom. At that time, she was teaching kindergarten, and for anyone who thinks that kindergarten teachers just cut up construction paper and make macaroni crafts for their kids has never met MY mother. Her life positively revolved around the classroom, and even as recently as a year ago (when she finally retired), she would spend ridiculous amounts of money out of her own pocket on materials for the classroom. There’s a fine line between a teacher who takes her job seriously and works hard and one who goes over the top in terms of her so-called “commitment.” My mother was of the latter variety, and expected constant recognition for her commitment to excellence and her constant giving 110%.
As a result, I was alone a great deal of the time. Sure, there were occasions that I had babysitters, and I LIVED for those nights with a teenager in the house. We’d listen to 45s of Prince and Cyndi Lauper, dancing around the house with an abandon that was certainly never present in the oppressive, proper, and stifled environment my parents tried to cultivate. When my family was home, the only “approved” kinds of games were imagination games. Instead of toys for Christmas, I was purchased science kits, microscope sets, a dissection kit complete with dead worms and frogs, Mensa genius quiz books (my mother especially seemed to be obsessed with constantly having me IQ tested; I’m guessing this was in some vain hope that I was a wunderkind of some sort)...most toys I owned were educational in some variety or other. And while I did have Transformers and He-Man, which I mainly played with the boys down the street, most “kid” like things, such as Atari or later Nintendo games, were absolutely forbidden.
One of the greatest things about my babysitters was getting to watch censored television! In fact, it was at a day care center that I first saw Kiss on television. My babysitters knew MTV wasn’t allowed in our household, but often watched videos regardless. And as a result, I would as well. When I got a little bit older, by about age 8 or so, my parents began leaving me alone in the house relatively frequently. At that time, my MTV fascination turned into a full-blown obsession. This was the heyday of hair metal, and I completely absorbed my young eyes and ears in the world of Priest, the Scorpions, and Dio, and later Bon Jovi, Europe, and Whitesnake.
I was in love with music. I knew - just knew without any doubt in my little 7 or 8 year old mind - that someday I’d be a musician. I’d ride onto stage on a big motorcycle, don a skintight leather outfit like Lita Ford, strap on my Les Paul, plug into that Marshall stack, and SHRED. I would get tattoos, have the biggest hair, and sing to hordes of adoring fans packing arena after arena. I remember creating my own little mini electric guitars out of empty wrapping paper rolls, and jumping around my room listening to the final track of the A side of Europe’s “The Final Countdown” tape (I think the tune was called “Ninja” or something like that...I just thought it ROCKED, and frankly, I had a love affair with Joey Tempest’s hair!). I saved up any allowance money I earned or holiday gifts from grandparents to buy tapes of the bands I heard on MTV, but kept the fact that I watched MTV completely secret from my parents, since it was absolutely forbidden.
My parents knew I loved music, and that I was a good little singer as I sang in church choir from the time I was only 2 or 3. But, they didn’t really get the “rock” thing. Good girls didn’t play electric guitars, and even though I begged to take lessons like one of my friends who had been purchased a black flying V Gibson by her estranged father, my own parents insisted I take piano lessons. That was much more fitting for a girl, the daughter of the superintendent. My grandparents even went a step further with this claim, telling me that all rock musicians burned in hell, and that African witch doctors used rock music to help the devil possess people’s souls. I should add here that my parents to this day deny that they even had any comprehension that I liked rock music; it’s a classic example of narcissistic parents to not take notice of what is of interest to their children unless it is something that they can use to make themselves more grandiose. So, when I said that I wanted to play rock music, my parents heard that translated as, “our daughter should study classical music because rich people like that and it’s classy and she can play for all of our friends and colleagues and she’ll look well-rounded and it’ll be a great hobby for her when she becomes a doctor later on, something we can really take credit for and be proud of!!!”
As a result, I took what I could get when it came to music. I threw myself into classical piano lessons, as it was the only form of music acceptable to my parents. (It was the only form of music they would even recognize even though I was constantly belting out Whitesnake’s “Still of the Night” at the top of my lungs!) In any form, music was such an escape from the constant stifling Mensa quiz books, and early taking of the SATs (like in 7th grade, unbelievably). Oh, to just be able to sit down at the piano and play. Sure, Mozart was nothing like Iron Maiden, but hey, it was something! I got to be a pretty decent player, albeit far from a prodigy, and my parents did notice this. They’d ask me frequently to play for their work friends and relatives, who would invariably talk over anything I performed. It always embarrassed me, as I’d be told to play, but my parents wouldn’t really have an idea of WHAT I was playing and then would talk over the performance. I felt like some sort of trained dog, and it was like my piano playing became the “shake your paw” routine. And to hear my parents talk about my playing, it was like I was the 10 year old version of Van Cliburn or something, even though I was just a slightly better than average performer...I knew this, deep down, and it always made me feel so uncomfortable to hear my parents brag about my piano playing to relatives because I most definitely couldn’t keep up with their incredible claims.
As I grew into a teenager, and college loomed, I made it known that I wanted to study music as my chosen career path. My parents continued to pay for piano lessons, and I continued to buy tapes of metal and later industrial music on the “down low” since they hated it. I continued to sneak in MTV, as it was still forbidden to me even as a high school student. But even though my parents were “supportive” of me playing the piano, it wasn’t something suitable for college study, this “music thing.” I could only study music if I had something solid to fall back on, like science or pre-med or engineering. “Just think what you can do for your country,” my father would say, and “you’ll never get a good job.” At this time (high school), I was composing a great deal and performing my own music, but my mother would say that what I was doing was “weird,” and ask me why I couldn’t “just write a song for Barbra Streisand” to sing.
Ugh. I went off to college, and started as a double major in music composition and engineering. I dropped the engineering major within a week. I hated science. My dad freaked out and threatened to cut me off if I didn’t get another double major, so I picked Latin. No better fall-back plan than a dead language, right? There were some things acceptable about what I was doing, however, mainly because my training was focused on classical music. My parents would brag to their friends and relatives about all of my accomplishments, frequently over-stating and exaggerating, along with painting this weird image of me as some sort of virtuosic classical player. But at home, if they had to listen to what I had composed at conservatory, my mother would deride my music, call it “weird” and “dissonant.” I’d invariably get the Barbra Streisand comment over and over again. They never really would ASK me about what kinds of music I liked; it was all about them telling me what kind of music I enjoyed to write and play. Huh?
Then I went to graduate school. I earned a Ph.D., which my father told me I needed to earn because he never finished his, even though I had a nervous breakdown due to stress from going to school full-time and working full-time for year after year after year. (As an aside, my parents like to talk about how my college education put them in terrible debt, and will tell anyone who will listen about “how much they sacrificed” for me, when in reality, I worked full-time almost the entire way through school. They never mention that.) I continued concentrating on classical music, as a composer. And I was absolutely jaded and miserable.
After earning my Ph.D., I found a teaching job at a college, mainly covering the basics of classical music. And again, I was miserable, not to mention constantly pissed off and irritated. I couldn’t figure out why, as I was teaching music, and that’s what I loved! On my 30th birthday, getting ready for a work day, I opened my closet, and looking at the racks of Ann Taylor and Banana Republic sensible business casual separates, I suddenly thought:
“This is not my life.”
It’s not. It’s not ME. I’ve been backpedaling ever since. What music did I love? Where did it all start? And I started playing in rock and metal bands, and have never been happier. My parents hated this when they first found out, saying how all my training was going to waste, and that I was just having an early mid-life crisis. They’d criticize me if I played a gig that didn’t pay well, and would ask all kinds of inappropriate questions about how much money I was making to make me defend my choices. They’d avoid telling any of my relatives about what I was really doing, instead focusing on weird tidbits of information they’d glean in phone conversations about my job and over-inflating these to make it sound like I was still classy and associating with the wealthy intelligentsia associated with classical music.
The truth is, though: I don’t like classical music. I’d rather sing Maiden than Mozart any given day. I realized just recently through my therapy that I dedicated my ENTIRE career life to a path of music that I HATE in order to maintain some level of acceptability in my parents’ eyes. But even when I tried, my parents still called what I did “weird.” I remember even learning how to play the organ, becoming a professional church musician, and being told by my mother that my playing was only “adequate.” Anything I’ve accomplished, they’ve taken credit for, like it’s something THEY did...when in reality, they continually discouraged me from pursuing a career in the arts and still - to this day - they tell me that I would have been better off if I had just become a doctor or a lawyer. This past week, I realized the reason I pursued classical music as my career was so that I could be a musician in a way that would earn me some sort of recognition by my family, to not feel like my interests were completely invisible. It’s a heavy thing to realize that what you’ve studied and dedicated your entire life to is a complete and total farce. No wonder why I felt inadequate and like a “faker” through years of conservatory and academy training. No wonder why I had a shitty attitude. I HATED the music I was studying, and I was studying it for someone else...Mom and Dad. Not me.
Wow. It felt good to say this.
So now what? I’ve cut my family out of my life in a “temporary separation” while I focus on my own recovery process. What do I want to pursue? What kind of musician do I want to be? I’m going back to that old image of the gorgeous woman with the big hair in her leather outfit on stage, rocking out to an audience of screaming metalheads. Sure, maybe I’m a little bit too old to rock the leather, but I can still record and do session work or produce. To come full circle, getting in touch with that little girl dancing around to 45s, is an organic feeling. It’s never too late to start over.
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