This is the first presidential election since I started blogging, isn't it? Yes, I believe it is. And from time to time, I'm going to have to acknowledge that fact. Now, for example. If you don't want to know about my political views, this might be a good time to scroll down to the last entry, or maybe skip over to one of the other pages

If you were thinking you knew my politics by virtue of my being a white Southern son of a Marine who teaches at a boy's boarding school in rural Virginia, I'm afraid I'm not quite that easy to nail down. My general tendency is toward moderation, but my philosophical leanings often point me toward the left-libertarian end of things.

To some degree, that's because of my upbringing in Chapel Hill, NC, a town whose liberal outlook once prompted Jesse Helms to claim that North Carolina could save a bundle on its state zoo by simply putting a fence around Chapel Hill. (No, that sentiment didn't endear me to Jesse; my only regret about moving to Virginia in 1995 is that I didn't get to vote against him one last time.) I still recall the shock I felt in 1972, the first year in which I paid real attention to politics, when Nixon won. How could that have happened? Everyone I knew supported McGovern!

Some may think my liberalism is my mom's fault. After all, she's a minority--she converted from Judaism when she married Dad--and was a feminist before feminism was cool, a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine, and a woman whose frankness about "taboo" subjects was a profoundly liberating influence on me. In high school she very bluntly told me that I could always count on her for a ride home if I was drunk--she didn't want me drinking, but if I did it, she wanted me to be safe about it. I finally took her up on the offer in my senior year of college. After a slight overload on wine at a writing-class party, I offered to call her and have her ferry me and several tipsy classmates to safety. True to her word, she showed up, greeted everybody, and took us all back to our homes. (In fact, that's when she met Kelly, as I recall...) I admire her attitude more now that I have my own kids--jeez, how do you balance what they need to know against what you want to tell them?--and there's no question that my love of free expression stems largely from Mom. But that's not quite it, either.

My dad is a retired Marine, yes. But he's also a longtime educator, a product of North Carolina's public schools and state-stupported university system. He's intimately familiar with the good things that governments (and the taxes that operate them) can do, and I have every reason to think that his decades in Chapel Hill pushed his thinking to the left as well. All in all, sure, he's probably more conservative than Mom is, but I know of only one election where they didn't vote together--1984, when Dad couldn't bear to vote for Mondale and Mom couldn't vote for Reagan.

(That was also the first election in which I was able to vote, and I went 0-for-November: my choices for President, Senator, Governor, and Congressman all went down in flames. I went to writing class the next day with a black armband on; Kelly, whom I wasn't dating yet, showed up in mourning, with black nail polish on. Kismet!)

But I don't think it's all Chapel Hill's fault. My dad's father, Joe Cashwell, was born on a tobacco farm in the most rural county in North Carolina, Sampson County, but he wasn't exactly a conservative. Heck, the story is that he was known to march in the occasional May Day parade in his youth--something that didn't come up for discussion much in his later years. He went to college in Cleveland, got married, served in the Navy during WWII, and ended up as a high-school principal in the small textile town of Albemarle, in Stanly County near Charlotte. He later worked for the NC Department of Education, then retired to the edge of a golf course in Sanford. As far as I could tell when I was a kid, he was like every other old person I'd ever met: reactionary, strict, tightly wound, and ready to criticize anything modern, shaggy, or remotely sexual.

But then one day I was in the room while he was watching the evening news, where a story about illicit marijuana farming was being shown. Daddy Joe seemed to tense up, furrow his brow, inhale sharply, and do everything possible to suggest that an explosion was imminent. I was in my late teens, at the height of my long-haired anti-social period, and I was waiting for him to start a litany of the horrors that the Evil Weed had visited upon American society.

"Goddammit!" he bellowed. "I don't know why they don't just legalize it, tax the shit out of it, and fund public schools for the next century!"

Not until that moment did I really think about the fact that this was the man who raised my father, a man for whom the concept of the citizen-soldier remained clear all his life, a man who believed in America and freedom, and wasn't afraid to let his love of the latter direct him out of the former's mainstream.

So I apologize if I don't meet everyone's expectations where politics are concerned. Sorry. It's an old family tradition.
3:05 PM

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So I went back in time the other night.

Not literally, no, but I did sort of have to reset my mind to a different time zone. It was a zone that stretched from roughly 1978 to 1991, from the end of junior high through high school, college, marriage, and right up to the onset of parenthood. This was a significant chunk of my life, but one I haven't visited (obviously) for quite some time.

During those years, my mind was focused largely on pop music. I was an obsessive collector of records, tapes, and CDs, as well as a student of everything from folk to ska to madrigals to rock opera to jangly pop. I took lessons on guitar and piano during those days, and took courses in musical comedy, theory, and music appreciation at UNC. I served as a deejay at WXYC for nine of those years, and a clerk at Record bar for three of them.

Most important, though, I was a working musician. I don't think I can say "professional," because that implies that I made my living as a musician, and I can't make that claim. I never made much money at it, but I'd estimate that I may have made enough in my lifetime of performing to pay for most of the equipment I've bought over the years. Even discounting the dozens of amateur ensembles I've played with from time to time, I've played for money in bands of every shape and size. The first was a more-or-less nameless five-piece guitar/bass/drums/sax band back in high school (we tried being "Galaxy" and "The Renegades" at times, but our hearts weren't in it in either case) that played one paying gig (my grandparents paid us $75 to play at a party at their house in Sanford) before morphing into a more successful group called "Dealer" after the drummer and bass player quietly found themselves a new pair of guitarists to play with. After that, I found myself playing in the John Santa Band, Terminal Mouse, Great Wall of Doo Doo, Rohrwaggon, Nipples for Men, and Elmo & PC (sometimes PC & Elmo, depending on who made up the posters). But it wasn't until around 1988 that I found myself onstage alone.

Playing solo is a strange thing. It's good because you have complete control--the drummer's not going to lose the beat, the guitarist won't throw a tantrum, the bass player won't break a string--but at the same time there's only YOU up there. If YOU lose the beat or break a string (or throw a tantrum), there's nobody to cover for you; the audience knows exactly what the source of the trouble is. In many ways, though, the best part of playing solo is the preparation; you can choose your own material, arrange it the way you like, and not have to worry about compromising with your bandmates.

What you lose, however, is the creative contributions of your peers. Even when you bring in a completed song, the players are going to add a little something to it. The version of "Camouflage" I brought to Terminal Mouse changed when Tom Reichenberg and Carey Floyd got ahold of the chorus; they added a couple of beats to the riff that I'd written, and suddenly the song had more life. Years later, when I was recording a demo version of the song with Mike Beard, he suggested that I make the structure less complicated; I changed the verse from A to D, adjusted the approach to the chorus, and made it better. It is a better song now, but though I still think of it as my own, I can't ignore the things that have influenced it since its birth; it's grown up and gone to school and been changed by its teachers and schoolmates. There's a great comfort in working with people like that, people who can so fully appreciate what you've created that they can guide it toward fulfillment.

Friday night, however, they weren't around. I was playing an open-mic night at the Cameron Street Coffee House in Culpeper. No bandmates. No recording engineers. Just me, an acoustic guitar, and a couple of microphones. In the audience were Kelly, Ian, and our next-door-neighbors, Greg and Shari. Everyone else in the place (which was packed) was a stranger. There wasn't much to hide behind, except for a bit of dry banter which didn't seem to engage the crowd too much. Instead, I tore into my two-song set, starting with my acoustic cover of the Bobs' "My Shoes," which they do (like all their songs) a capella. I was happy to get an enthusiastic response, so when I finished I asked the crowd if they wanted a cover they'd never heard before (I had Robyn Hitchcock's "Alright, Yeah" ready to go) or an original they'd never heard before. They called for an original, so I broke out "400 Chemicals."

I first wrote the basics of this song on keyboards when I was trying (and failing) to teach myself the Dixie Dregs' long, spacey, gorgeous "Night Meets Light." When I joined Terminal Mouse in 1984, I decided to adapt it into something danceable. I added a ska beat and some lyrics about a guy who's drawn to his girlfriend purely because of her pheromones; the title came from a commercial for some auto parts store that bragged about having "over 400 chemicals in stock." It was still a freakishly complicated tune, however, and though TM played it with gusto, it never quite achieved its potential.

Years later, I was drinking with Mike Beard in preparation to do some work in the studio with him. We were trying to decide which of my songs to record, and I mentioned "400 Chemicals." He opined that he liked the song, but that it was too complex for its own good. "It's a speed-metal song, PC," he said. I thought he was insane. We ended up recording "Camouflage" and a couple of other tunes, but we left "400 Chemicals" off the list.

Friday night, I played a stripped-down version. In E. With the bridge and most of the weird time signature changes removed. It was just me and my acoustic, but it was as close to speed metal as I could manage all by myself. But of course, I wasn't really by myself; at this point in my life, whenever I go onstage, I'm playing with dozens of people from another time zone, long ago. And they're doing their best to cover for me.

Thanks, guys.
10:28 AM

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