I wanna be a rock star
Yeah, I know, real original. Doesn’t everyone?
But sometimes, do you hear a band, or maybe watch them live on a late night talk show, and think, my god, why didn’t I learn to play the guitar? Or the drums?? What was I thinking?
It’s so clear that I wasn’t thinking at all.
Seeing people make art is incredibly energizing, for me at least. It honestly makes me want to go out and get all tattooed up so that I’d never be able to work a “straight” job again. I could go right now, there’s a place over on Sheridan–maybe Broadway?–and I know it’s open now. Right now.
The latest band to evoke this feeling in me is the Cliks, outta Toronto. I had to log onto emusic.com and download the album. I also recently got this same feeling from watching Good Charlotte.
What’s a little ironic about this is that I avoided all forms of art in school. I never voluntarily took an art class, quit music classes (terrified of marching band), no photography, no creative writing. I thought that I needed to load my high school transcript with purely academic classes in order to get in to college. My first mistake there was conforming to an external standard, my second mistake was not doing a little research to see if indeed taking an interesting class would make me an undesirable college student, and my biggest mistake as far as I’m concerned is that I didn’t check in with myself to see where the compass was pointing.
In reality, I don’t want to spend my life in a tour bus, or on stages in small, smoke-filled venues. I definitely have a prediliction to self-medicating, and I feel very, very sure that if I had attempted rock stardom, I would have died anonymously long before a record was ever sold, via whatever drug was most readily available when I was feeling self-destructive. But who doesn’t want to get it on with that creative impulse? I want to take that energy and sit down with my pen and paper and go there.
Random thoughts: for my 12th birthday, I received the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You. I don’t remember what day of the week it was, but I got to open my presents before leaving for school. I was in the sixth grade. I listened to the record, and I remember knowing just enough to be embarassed at the lyrics of Start Me Up: make a dead man cum. I didn’t know for sure what that meant, but I knew it was something I didn’t want to listen to with my mother. In retrospect, man, that’s kind of a graphic song. I’ve never been good at really listening to lyrics and dissecting their meaning. I personally think it’s because I’m not an auditory learner. Hearing isn’t my best way to receive and digest information. Most people are visual, as am I. If I see it, or can read it, it’s in. I got it.
