Turning Pain into Purpose: How did we start pt. 3

When I thought about my question of what I still needed to do in my life and realized how much music meant to my brother, I decided I would be starting a band before the year was over.  That seemed kind’ve crazy at the time because I was a high school teacher, raising my kids and super busy.  I mean, what middle-aged, polo and khaki wearing high school teacher was going to start some super band that would do anything in the entertainment capitol of the world right.?

Life in Vegas

As I finished the painful process of gathering my brother’s things, packing up his house, turning in his car and telling the mortgage company they could have the house back (he was upside down in the place and I wasn’t about to start taking care of a rental home from across the country), I got back to my own life in Vegas and got super engrossed in the work I was doing as a high school teacher.  

Contribution to the medical program

My high school, which was a block from my house, was one of the worst high schools in the entire state of Nevada when I started working there.  Our graduation rate was 44% and our reputation as a school was in the toilet.  I still can’t believe I left a well running magnet program I had started on the east side of the city to start helping the school with the worst reputation in the state.  Heck, I hadn’t even let my daughters go to the school because the reputation was so bad.  When I started there, we had no books, no equipment and nothing in place to start a medical program at the school.  Over 5 years, I invested thousands of extra hours, wrote grants and built a program that ended up enrolling around 450 students and ended up having 3 teachers by the time I ended up leaving.

Go After Your Dreams..

My brother passed away in my 3^rd year of teaching at this high school, and I was in the middle of a tremendous amount of growth and change with the program I was running.  It was VERY busy and I was exhausted and run down most of the time.  Because of this, my dream of starting a cool band ended up going to the back burner, as many of our dreams do in our lives.

I wanted to start a band to provide the inspiration and hope that kept people like my brother from giving up on life.  A band that was fun and could move a crowd and leave a positive experience in the mind of the regular, every day people struggling with this journey we call life.  My brother barely made it many days, I had barely made it many days and I know there are many people in this world that barely make it through some of their days.  Music had kept me from giving up many times, or just changed the entire mood and atmosphere of my day.  Music is like a drug isn’t it?  You feel sad, you take your earth, wind and fire pill and feel better.  You feel frustrated? You take your metallica pill and feel better.  Or you take some James Brown cough syrup and feel like you can’t give up now, cause you’re Superbad.

Music is medicine, it’s hope, it’s healing, it’s possibility.  It’s the stuff I wanted to make and give the world to help them have some hope.  Our music is for the every day man and lady…. For the blue collar, the ignored, the downtrodden and the hopeless.  That’s one of the reasons why we do funk.  Funk is a punch in the face of fear and hopelessness.  James Brown’s screams are really saying “I’M NOT GONNA GIVE UP WORLD!!”.

So it was Christmas time and my oldest daughter wanted a ukulele.  I went to guitar center and this dude was helping me find one.  His name was Craig.  Craig was a pretty cool dude and was playing around on the ukulele pretty well.  I thought, “he must play guitar” so I asked him…. “Do you play guitar?”.  

He said, “yeah, I play guitar.”

“Do you play in a band right now?”, I replied

“No, not really..” he said.

And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why I said what I said next.  I didn’t know the guy… I had never seen him play guitar, but I blurted out:

“Would you like to play in my band?”

WTH!!  Lol…. Why did I say that?  To this day, I have no idea.  I knew he was gonna say no and I’d move on with my day.  He would move on with his and think “who was this crazy dude asking me to be in his band from buying a ukulele?”… lol.

Well, it turns out he had been thinking about being in a band for a while, so he said, “yeah, maybe I would be interested.  Give me a ring when you decide on rehearsing and stuff”.

He thought I already had everyone in the band gathered!! Lol…. I didn’t have ANYBODY yet!  So, I thought to myself…. “well, I guess I better start forming that band I’m supposed to be forming.”  (cont. part 4 – “You got David Rogers??!!”)