Consumed With Attaching A Side
When the crash occurred, I was on my way to a gig. I have been a performing musician for a long time, lets say, over 50 years, and I have went through several music iterations. I look back with fond memories of my early junior high and high school musical endeavors, and ultimately finding my way into a band that was actually an amazing collection of talented players. We called ourselves Wissinger’s Palace Magical Band. The three horn players were in the marching band and the high school choir, along with the bass player and the keyboard player. The seniors in the band conscripted me and our drummer into the choir. With six of seven in the choir we learned how sing together. We had diverse musical interests and did everything from Crosby, Stills, & Nash, to Chicago, to Grand Funk Railroad.
For a small agricultural school, we had a diverse music community with a marching band, a stage band, a choir, a symphonic choir, and even a barbershop quartet. There was also an interdenominational community youth musical group. Ultimately, I became involved in all of those except marching band.
I was a lost soul when five of my band mates graduated and went to college. I was offered a slot in a touring rock band, but at 17, my parents said “no way”. So for three years, I formed and performed with a myriad of rock bands.
When I went to college, I began performing with an acoustic guitar, and with only a few exceptions, that became my primary instrument. Music became a substantial part of my income for several years after leaving college. In addition to buying a lot of groceries, music helped me acquire many memories during those crazy times.
As my park career progressed, the recreation and stress relieve provided by music became much more important than the money. Being a musical “weekend warrior” served me well for twenty-five years or more. When my children started leaving high school, I began writing songs again.
I recorded my first solo full length record in 2004, and have recorded three more since. When I retired from the public sector in 2016, I was in the top tier of park professionals in Ohio. I had several people question what ‘I was doing but I wanted to redirect more focus toward music and artistic expression while I had reasonable energy and skills.
For the past few years, I’ve been plugging into music on a different level, learning the ins and outs of the folk music community, including self-promoted touring, radio, internet, and other forms of digital distribution. I have also been engaged in the process of building a series of connections for community concerts, festivals, and house concerts. My intentions were to scale back my local performances and focus more on recording and performing at listening venues.
Approximately one hour before the crash, I was talking to a colleague in the UK about more aggressively pursuing this transition.
I remember making the decision to transfer my equipment from my 2005 Ford F150 into the 2004 Toyota RAV4 that I referred to as my summer gig car. I would load my gear in the gig car and simply leave it in there for the summer. That day the car had a mechanical failure as I was merging onto Interstate 90 resulting in a broadside collision with a semi truck.
I could share countless observations and stories about getting through the next few months, the encounters with medical staff, the exquisite pain, ongoing sounds and interactions in the hospitals and the incredible compassion that I experienced.
Speaking of compassion, the week I got out of the hospital, about 45 of my musical friends performed at a gathering in my honor for a full house at the Beachland Ballroom. It was incredibly touching. Since then I have had several people offer to learn to my tunes and accompany me if I wanted to do a gig. I have also had several venues, including house concert hosts, reach out to say I was welcome to perform there in any capacity.
I am just wasn’t ready to do that.
I did ask one musician friend for help to move all of my guitars from my barn studio into my basement. I really didn’t wanna look at them. I also decided that I was going sell my PA gear. After all these years, I assembled what was the best rig I had ever owned. It was light weight, compact, modular and incredibly flexible. It was very high-end components and was capable of comfortably doing a 300-500 person show.
That was painful.
Several good friends caught word of this, and they reached out to me to say, “Do not sell any instruments!” And I promised everyone of them I would not do that.
When I got out of the hospital the only instruments I could play, or was interested in playing, were my Tibetan Singing Bowls. I would occasionally walk through the house and just tap one of the five of them. Sometimes I would pick one up and either hold it in my lap or let it rest on my bad hand. Occasionally I would coax out that magical sound by rubbing the mallet around the rim. I was became so enamored with them I decided I would look up their pitch and determine if they had associated healing frequencies.
And that was about the extent of my engagement with making music for several months. For the first time in 55 years, I did not have calluses on my fingers. My nine-year-old grandson asked me about finishing a song that we started to record together, and I told him that we would just have to wait and see if that would happen. He said: “Pa music is a part of your life”.
Kids say the darnedest things. Or maybe the most profound things.
Of course, I was concerned about what recovery would look like for me. I had one doctor early on who was very honest with me. He was also guitar player, and he said, “I’m sure you’ll play guitar again, but there’s no way you’re going to play at the same level you once did.” It was hard to hear, but I really appreciated that.
It was a hard reset button.
He also did something else that I am thankful for. Being a guitar player and realizing the level that I was writing and performing at, he did some research and referred me to an occupational therapist who works with musicians.
Sharilee is both a compassionate and extremely competent professional. The first time I met her, she looked at me and said, “How are you doing?” and for whatever reason, I got very emotional.
I don’t know why that happened, but there sat a lady who certainly understood the ramifications of my physical injuries, but was looking through that and wondering, how I was doing as a musician who could no longer play? She took me into a private office where I regained my composure and we began to go through the process of assessing my limitations.
From early on in our therapy, she began encouraging me to get out a guitar, put my fingers on the strings, and make “sounds”. She said there’s something that happens with you musician types, your brain gets engaged and starts pulling you along.
I had one guitar damaged in the accident, a relatively inexpensive resonator guitar. These are often used for slide guitar playing. It had a broken neck. My son had taken it to one of the best guitar specialists in northeastern Ohio, Ken Lesko. I had messaged Kenny and said I understand you have one of my guitars? When he responded, he told me that after reading the extent of my injuries, he said he figured that slide guitar playing was going to become a more important component of my show. With a little luck he thought he could fix it and would do that for me at no cost. A few weeks after that conversation, he messaged me and told me it was repaired, and he wanted to know if I wanted him to refinish the neck. He said that when he did, no one would ever be able to tell it was broken. I told Kenny “No way! You leave the scar there. We went through that wreck together and I’m gonna call that guitar Lazarus.”
Sharilee got me thinking about that conversation with Kenny. “I figure that slide guitar playing…” and even though my left hand could not grip anything, I began to think about attaching a guitar slide to my hand with Velcro. I thought I might be able to play the guitar on my lap like a “Dobro”. So I started trying to fabricate some method of attaching a bottleneck to my left hand. My favorite slide is one I actually busted off of a wine bottle and that’s the one I started working with first.
I told Sharilee what I was up to at one of our regular therapy sessions, and she was insistent that I bring the slide in the next time so she could see it. I made the mistake of bringing my favorite, the one that I had broken off at a gig, behind a club on a dumpster. It still had jagged edges, but they weren’t sharp.
That was a mistake.
She clearly did not want me using that on my left hand! But other than that initial reaction, she was very supportive of what I was trying to do and began making suggestions for additional techniques to attach the slide to my hand. And we spent a little time working on this for a few weeks.
Now am I ready to pass myself off as an accomplished bottle next slide player? No!
But I have been engaged in trying to find the best way to attach a slide to my hand. I’ve also been engaged in exploring alternative tuning on my resonator guitar. As you might suspect, I have been engaged with relearning blues tunes I have not played in 25 years or more, and most importantly, I’ve started to write songs again.
Slide guitar playing is a very physical activity, requiring a sensitive touch, string dampening with both hands, and a fair amount of motion with the left arm.
Has this been good for me? Certainly! I’ve been engaged with making music.
In light of the ongoing frustration with the extent of my injuries and the slow rate of my recovery, it’s wonderful to have a sense of hope and optimism.
It’s wonderful to once again have a sense that I have things to share with my musical community, my fans and friends. And of course those members of my family that have to endure my noise making for all these years.
And it’s also nice to be able to share a little bit of this my incredible medical team, all of the doctors and all of my therapist, who not only took an interest in my condition, but also who took an interest in me.
