So spoke J.D. Keating, in prescient foretelling of my likely return to said valley, as he carried off my stereo receiver from my Kingsley Ave. apartment in January of 1997. I was selling off all my possessions (including a healthy collection of board games that Mike Dumont made off with), and giving away my mostly-functional Subaru wagon to a single mom and her blues-howling then-boyfriend.
I'd just had a plane ticket to L.A. purchased for me by Hollywood songwriter/producer Glen Ballard (Michael Jackson, Alanis Morisette, and others), the third or fourth person of influence in the global music industry I'd been hooked up with in my quest for rock stardom who was supposed to make me rich and famous. It was my first attempt to flee this area for any meaningful period of time, and needless to say, it didn't last.
I found Los Angeles not at all to my taste, and hightailed it up the coast to San Francisco the following October, where I couch-surfed with some friends and squeezed out a last, half-hearted effort to reclaim a lost love who had long since closed herself to me anyway.
My trusty steed: A 1987 Chevy Cavalier, given to me by my brother at his home in the desert near Palm Springs to replace the ailing 1972 Volkswagen Squareback that I'd purchased for $500 (plus another $75 to a questionable Mexican mechanic for a passing smog-inspection sticker that the oil-burning beast was surely undeserving of, at least in the legal sense). I was 29 years old.
The Cavalier made it back to the Valley after I'd had enough of 'Frisco, and I drove directly to the UMass Campus Center, arriving on a Tuesday precisely when J.D.'s brother Dave Keating was on the air at WMUA, broadcasting his show The Soul Patrol to the groove-loving masses. I was a regular collaborator on the program before I left, creating "fake news"and comedy segments and doing interviews, along with other Valley radio talent such as F. Alex Johnson ("The 4:20 Report"), Jesse Gordon (Twinkles the very inappropriate clown) and the aforementioned Mr. Dumont (sports betting guru "Mr. Book"). I came right into the studio and on-air, a complete surprise (no one had cell phones then, really), and was happier than I'd been in months.
In the next several years I had dozens of other musical adventures: touring around the East Coast with Settie, a silky-voiced diva who (with bassist/songwriter Brian Fellows) had managed to secure a contract with a decent indie label in NYC; forming my power-pop band Yanni Difranco (which got some national accolades here and there, including the Village Voice's number two spot on the "Best Band Names of CMJ 1999" list—beat out only by Gangsta Bitch Barbie); donning new identities in a number of the Arts Council's "Transperformances;" starring in a Boston/Valley-based "pop opera" called Skypaint as "The Sci-Fi Pimp;" guitar-slinging my way through the beer-soaked gauntlet of Tag Sale gigs, and eventually joining the nascent Big Ugly Wrench, whose Soundgarden/Queens of the Stone Age rifftastic style we came to refer to as "Wicked Hahd Rawk."
There were interviews, radio appearances, photo and video shoots, TV performances, conference and festival gigs in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Burlington and elsewhere, and priceless recording sessions at places like Scott Coar's Sow's Ear Studio in Easthampton and the legendary Slaughterhouse Studios (then in Hadley), with aural magician Mark Miller there to set the controls for the heart of the fun. There was a good deal of drinking, smoking, and other questionable activity, and there were many lovely ladies along the way, but perhaps the most therapeutic part of the mix was the invaluable camaraderie, creative collaboration and open, genuine laughter instilled in my soul by some seriously funny, intelligent fellow humans.
Through it all, the Valley offered up fledgling music stores, CD replicators, recording studios, college radio stations, instrument makers and most importantly, an almost inexhaustible supply of extremely talented people to fuel the engines of my/our creative pursuits.
Can one succeed musically in the Valley on a national level? Perhaps—it's certainly a great base of operations, with a bounty of the aforementioned resources and convenient proximity to places like Boston and New York City. There are musicians who work out of here who are quite successful, perhaps not quite at superstar level, but then I have a suspicion that many have discovered that "superstar level" may not necessarily even be a desirable goal. In many ways, one could also consider our area a proving ground—a training facility from which the most gifted and/or ambitious might launch their bids for the proverbial brass ring.
Regardless of what league you're shooting for, though, there are plenty of ways to make a (modest) musical living via weddings, DJ-ing, giving lessons, producing/putting on shows, designing musically related websites and even musical software, and teaching at our myriad schools and colleges, public and private. There are people who write scores for films or have their songs placed in national television shows, and people who record, publicize and distribute music worldwide; I personally spent five years building and restoring pipe organs for William Baker (R.I.P.) & Co., crawling through the innards and secret passageways of centuries-old New England churches. Of course, there are also the people who write about it all.
In the last month, I've played in two Transperformance bands (ZZ Top with my fellow Advocate staff and the Local Buzz boys) and The B-52s, practiced with my Joe Jackson tribute group Jo Mofo [Brass Cat Sat. Oct. 4th after the Band Slam!], played a few random rock jams, sat around a campfire passing a guitar between half a dozen world-class songwriters and learned how to tune my piano that I found on Freecycle. I've also taken in some phenomenal shows at several great local venues, listened to a vast spectrum of local CD releases and haggled with a few folks about the price of re-fretting my Stratocaster. I've been learning about the effects of music on people whose primary passion is peripheral to it; dancers, poets and spiritual types. My appreciation only grows. I've seen the next generation of bands and solo artists evolve in this Valley into a scene that seems to me even more vibrant and exciting than when I moved here in 1992, and the tools of the Internet have put us even more in touch with other creative people in our region, from places like Hartford, New Haven, Albany, Worcester, Boston, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire. I've seen my generation of folk popping out babies and, yes, pining for more of that sense of community and creative outlet that the music scene has always nourished them with, and that now seems (damn it!) increasingly harder to pencil in to one's day book.
Almost two years ago I bit the bullet and bought a house in Easthampton, so it looks like I'm all in, at least for a while longer. One of my first home improvements? A somewhat-soundproofed rehearsal space in the basement that aspires to eventually be pimped out for recording. Whatever your own aspirations—being a budding songwriter or performer, an impresario of the scene or a rabid, multi-tracking documentarian of fleeting cultural phenomena—the Pioneer Valley will never run out of grist for your mill, vehicles for your vision or inspiration for your dreams. And if you stay really involved and never lose your belief in the gods and goddesses of creativity, you can even forget to do things like get old."
