"My Mom Loved Me So Much She Held KISS for Ransom" or; "The Sunday Night Six-Pack"

If you were to ask anyone that had known me for some time about my destiny, they all would tell you the same thing. I was going to be a rock star. Even my ex-father-in-law who’d only known me since my early twenties would tell you right out that I screwed up my life when I was young “trying to be a Beatle.” At age three, I could sing most of the lyrics to Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” and a good portion of “Jet” by McCartney and Wings. Even though I couldn’t read or write yet, I knew what buttons to press on the Jukebox at Choke’s corner store in Centralia to make those songs play. My seventeen year old aunt used to stand me up on the counter there, and I’d sing the lyrics to those songs into a glass Coke bottle. By age six, I was standing on my Father’s bar singing the entire “Rubber Soul” album into a gear shift he’d taken off an old machine at his work. By eight I was playing the jingle from John Carpenter’s Halloween on relatives’ pianos. In sixth grade I started taking formal lessons. By eighth grade I was playing in my first rock band. Throughout my teens I was in and out of various garage ensembles, and at age twenty-three I was recording what was supposed to be an EP with Easter’s Eve for the Shimmy-Disc record label. In my later twenties I found Jesus and rocked out with Resembling Trees and The Tell in his name. When I was twenty-nine I blew a couple grand that I didn’t have on recording equipment. I figured, if no one was going to sign me, I’d sign myself. For those who don’t speak rock star lingo, getting singed is the equivalent to getting laid when you’re a teenager; even rumors of it make you somewhat legit, if not legendary. So basically, I fucked myself to the tune of bankruptcy.

I was almost a rock star. I was almost a lot of things. I was almost a factory worker, a home builder, a care taker for the mentally retarded, a youth pastor, a phonebook-maker, and a missionary. Truth is, I’m not any of those things. They’re just things that I’ve done. What I am is this: my father’s son, a teacher, a writer, an ex-husband, sensitive, obsessive compulsive, creative, nurturing, slightly manic depressive, and most importantly, happy. I wasn’t always all of these things, particularly happy. Most of my life has been falling back on plan B.

I was five when I first saw Kiss on television. Everything my Father had tried to instill in me went down the drain for a couple of years. “Destroyer” was the first record I ever purchased with my own money. I took the payload I received for turning six to Woolworth, and proudly stood at the register with my Dad and that glossy, shrink wrapped record in my hand. Before this, it was all Beatle records: my Dad’s American original pressings that I scratched and ruined on my carry-case, mono phonograph. But this music was different. It was loud, irreverent, and written for six-year-old-minded people.

Before “Rock and Roll Over” came out that same year, I added “Alive,” and “Dressed to Kill” to my collection. And by the time “Love Gun” came out, my mother was concerned. Not just with the affect this music was having on me, but with the half naked women on the album cover. That was the first time I saw Peter Criss in the white, X-shaped shirt. I wanted to be him.

My mother used to beg me to sit down and do my homework. I didn’t want to. I wanted to listen to Kiss. I wanted to talk about Kiss. I wanted to stare at my Kiss lunchbox. I wanted to draw Kiss. I pretended I was Kiss. She began using the token-barter system. If I did my homework, I could stay up until nine-thirty. I could listen to one Kiss record before I went to bed. I could buy another Kiss record. And finally, I could listen to Kiss while I did my homework. That worked. Sort of. My mother loved me so much, she held Kiss for ransom.

It was almost quarter to nine and I still hadn’t finished my penmanship homework. I was listening to “Love Gun,” the cover on the table next to my notebook with one of my eyes on it while I wrote out the alphabet: the lower case letters reaching and not exceeding the light blue dotted line. I almost made it. I was so close. I got all the way to x, and as I was writing the capital Xs I proclaimed, “Look mom, just like Peter Criss’ shirt!”

That did it. She snapped. The last thing I coherently heard was the needle scratching over the vinyl during “Plaster Caster,” then it was all her screaming and me screaming, writhing on the floor as she took all of my Kiss records, and my phonograph, walked out the front door with them, and locked them up in my Father’s tool shed. Now I had to do homework in complete silence before six o’clock for about a month. And I did. And I remember the night I got the records back, the stack of them as ice cold as the January wind, and I clutched them to my chest, held them against my face, and listened to side three of “Alive” six times in a row.

There were numerous attempts to thwart my fixation on Kiss. Sister Ramondine, my first grade teacher, told me that Kiss stood for “kids in Satan’s service.” I wasn’t scared of Satan yet; I was scared of the Devil.

Kiss convinced me that I was a rock star already. My entire fantasy life was me hanging out with Kiss, and joining the band. Eventually, because of creative differences, I had to leave the band. My lingering Beatle influence ruined our relationship, so after “Alive II” came out, I quit the band.

My first solo appearance was on our back deck, in front of thirteen trees. It was a windy day, so the applause was thunderous. I strummed my baseball bat left handed as a tribute to the other Paul, a publicly defiant statement to my old band. It didn’t come off without a hitch, I forgot the lyrics to “Lo Caw Morris,” a song about a fictional British war pilot that I sang to the tune of Electric Light Orchestra’s “I’m Alive.” I was rock royalty. No one dared sue me over stolen melodies. “Rock and Roll City,” and “Don’t Do It,” were both sung over Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Satruday Night Special.”

Even though I was cured of Kiss, inspiration was everywhere I looked, so concentrating on mandatory tasks was impossible. My next big hit, “No. 2,” was inspired by the pencil I wrote it with.

My music was becoming eccentric and mature. I saw a picture of Ritchie Blackmore in a music magazine with a caption that read, “I can’t put up with incompetence,” and that became the title of my next single. For Christmas, my Aunt Sonja bought me what would be an otherwise useless gift: a notepad with numbered lines and a heading that said “Dumb things I gotta do,” but that phrase became the title track to my next album. But my biggest hit, the one I was beckoned to play at every concert, was “When the Weather was Cold.” I can remember the lyrics like it was yesterday: “A long time ago / when the weather was cold / and the people didn’t know what to eat / (killer guitar lick similar to the intro to Billy Joel’s “Big Shot” goes here) / a big fat man / ran down the road / after a big fat toad / a big fat ugly toad / a big fat pregnant toad.” I can’t remember the chorus, but I know I sung it to the chorus of The Little River Band’s “Lady.”

During the winter touring season, I played my bedroom a lot. The way me and my brother’s twin beds jutted out from opposite walls made for an elaborate stage set. When I wasn’t touring, I wrestled in the WWF on that very stage, every match ending with the victorious pile driver I laid on my baby brother. I also boxed in the no-punches-to-the-face boxing league. Winter mittens were the accepted boxing gloves. I was also a sitcom star on a 24 hour a day program: it was the first incarnation of reality television. My busy schedule eventually ended my long-term relationship with Deborah Harry. She never really understood me anyway.


At age twelve I retired from the industry all together due to the pressures of reality. My withdrawal from the rock world led to an addiction to Marlboro reds, and the occasional dangerous dip of Hawkins, mixed with a little Gold River for extra sweetness. I fell into a bad crown for a while. They were into the hard shit. Copenhagen and Skhol. For a while the trendy thing was Skhol Bandits. I gave up the Bandits after swallowing one in Immaculate Heart Elementary School to avoid getting caught.

Life was long and mundane, that is, until The Police and The Clash and Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson came along. I was often seen on summer evenings at my Father’s bar with Sting, Meatloaf, and Paul McCartney, and with Nancy Wilson on my arm. They all ditched me when I met Roger Waters. The only people who would hang out with me then besides Roger was the cast of Nickelodeon’s “You Can’t Do That On Television.”

My Father’s stereo pulled in WYSP from Philly through the cable. I spent the summer of ‘83 listening to the un-hip but too-cool-for-you playlists of post-punk artists and prog-rock bands. I didn’t see much of my friends (the real ones, not the imaginary ones) that summer. I slept until five in the afternoon on most days, having been up until five in the morning dubbing songs from the radio onto the eight track cassette recorder.

WYSP used to have a show called the Sunday-Night Six Pack. On this program, they would play six full-length albums. One night I sat through Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” disenchanted because the man wasn’t living up to the myth. I was in the kitchen swiping another pack of my parents’ Salem Slim Ultra Lights when the deejay announced the next album, a double: “Pink Floyd The Wall.” I, like everyone else, knew the anthem, but hadn’t been exposed to the whole piece of work yet.

It was about three songs into side one when I realized I should have been recording, so right near the end of “Another Brick in the Wall Part One,” I hit the pause button and let it roll. It took up the greater portion of a ninety minute eight track. I was now twelve, and about to become far more obsessed with this record than I ever was with Kiss or The Police or The Beatles or anything else I’d ever heard before.

Because of Pink Floyd, I quit a real band. Defender was a power trio consisting of Jeff Cawthon on guitar, Jim Edmundon on drums, and me on a Lowery Micro-Genie keyboard. Jeff and I knew each other since first grade, got really close in sixth, and by eighth, formed the band. Jim was younger than us, but a hell of a drummer for his age. We wrote our own material – a whopping set list of four songs plus a half-assed cover of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” And everything was instrumental. By the spring of 85, Bill Adams was playing bass in the band. Everybody else was still into Kiss, and Billy Idol and The Scorpions and Quiet Riot and Van Halen. I was into Pink Floyd. That’s it. So I split that scene.

By high school I was a complete progressive rock snob, but I compromised to form Relayer. Me, Ray Wyland, and Jim Oakum were the only people in the band that knew we were named after a Yes record. Bill Adams from Defender climbed aboard to play bass, I was still on keys, Ray was a fantastic guitar player for his age, and Jim was legendary. Two years younger than us but possibly the most advanced musically. Bands like Genesis and Rush influenced his drumming, and he was the master of his universe. Eventually we recruited Jon Boyer to sing and play rhythm guitar. The rest is history no one knows but five boys.

Relayer was on-again off-again throughout high school. After graduation, it was off altogether. And I had my first life crisis. I flunked 11th grade, graduating a year behind most of my friends and bandmates, and I was on my own. In desperation, I bought a four track cassette machine to make demos on. My dream of becoming a rock star was in danger. I couldn’t sing, and synth-pop was long dead.

More to come???...