Chemistry

“So you wanna be a rock and roll star?” Yes, Roger, I do. In fact, I was about 90 percent sure up until about 1996 that no other job would do. It didn't seem (at the time) all that unrealistic either...I’m not the most talented singer or songwriter or anything, but many of my heroes had achieved (in my mind) the nebulous prize of stardom not with talent alone, but with the right combination of talent, charisma, determination and sheer luck. I had determination in spades, a measure of talent and an admittedly self-perceived modicum of charisma, and luck? Luck can happen to anyone, right? So I figured I was a cinch. Pop stardom, in my theory, is about anticipation...It is the ability to look around the corner, guess what people will want to hear in six months, then work night and day perfecting it. If you guess correctly, the world will be waiting for you...and if you guess wrong? Well, you can always try again. I gave it a whirl. In those days, I used to wake up wondering how in the world I could be the one, the one voice in the crowd that would be heard. I used to fill every moment of down time chewing on lyrics in my head, trying to write the line that would stick, the phrase that would attack and keep on attacking until every last ear had been consumed. I tried so hard to say what people wanted to hear. Me and the boys had a band, and we tried real hard...you know the story. Jonathan quit, Bruce got married...here's the twist: Bruce got divorced and tried again, this time with a sense of urgency.



I moved to Austin in 1992 with intentions of regrouping the band that had formed the centerpiece of my high school pipedreams and finishing the story we'd all started to write all those years before. The core members had moved there and were still heavily involved in music. We had some talent, but more importantly, we had chemistry. I've jammed with people everywhere and everywhen since those days and have come to realize how precious a commodity that was. Chemistry is that magic thing that happens when you've got a few people jamming and something clicks, suddenly, you're out of the moment, it's like another person is there jamming with you, you know what everyone else is going to do, when they're going to do it, and it all sounds good. It sounds like hoodoo, but once you've had it, there ain't no going back. Every time I played with Kevin and Brandon from the first time back in high school I felt that feeling.



I've sometimes described music as an affliction, a recurring disease that attacks me anew every few years. I forget it's there for months at a time and then one day, WHAM, I've written a whole song and am dragging out my guitar and dusting it off to figure out the chords. These days I actually practice regularly just so I don't have to build my calluses back up when the mood strikes. But back then it was like a state of being. All I wanted to do was sing some how, some way, every single day.



I had another ace in the hole, as well. Kevin Allen, my guitarist and best friend in those days, was (and is) a bona fide guitar hero. This character would be sitting on the couch practicing guitar when I left for work in the morning and would often still be there, practicing when I got home eight hours later. For the record, he’s still playing; his band is recording their 6th full length record and in a successful 10+ year career, has toured just about every corner of the globe.



When I moved to Austin to regroup, it was on Kevin's invitation. He called me up, out of the blue, and asked me to come up to Austin to jam. I was at a low point, and his invitation sounded like the hand of an angel intervening to save me from harm. As we started to get to know each other again, a lot of that familiar chemistry came back. We grew into a five piece, and one day, practicing on the porch, we borrowed our landlord's name (Odus Krumly) and we had a band again.



Brandon, ever the oddball, suggested that we try a new direction, eschewing our punk, pop and psychedelic roots and forming a real country band. None of us had ever performed, or even regularly listened to country music, but growing up in Texas, all of us had been raised on the stuff. The idea was to try something new, to challenge ourselves and to stretch. Since country music was also not near and dear to us (at that time) we also felt no obligation to treat it with any respect. Our approach was brash and comedic, but as we delved deeper into the history and technique of the genre, it was eventually tinged and then filled with respect. I realized that what I originally thought of as witty parodies were actually quite true to a thread of country music that celebrates a smart-alecky turn of phrase like few other types of music, and that my voice was actually well suited to the style. As I often say, Texan is my first language. What had started as a parody became a journey of discovery and soon I was seeking out early recordings by Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Bob Wills. I was also thrilled to find many of those artists in my father's record collection, a discovery that brought me closer to someone I'd sometimes had trouble relating to in those years.



I always think back on those days with fondness. It all seemed so right. The songs were fun and fresh, the timing seemed right, and the dream was coming alive.



So what happened? Well, we still had to practice. We had to get shows and record demos. We still had to do the hard work of being musicians. This is what many people who have never been inside this world never see. Music, good music anyway, is hard work. I thought I had the will and determination, but then I started to listen to another voice in my head that was questioning my choices. I started to think about not what to say that would make me popular, but what to say that would make me feel good about what I had just said. And then one day it just stopped, the songs dried up. I had nothing left to say.



In 1996 I made a decision to devote my energies to cooking. I've written before about how I was discovering that cooking could also function for me as a creative outlet, but less than a year after leaving Austin and moving to San Francisco, something else happened. I began working with a cool guy, another former musician with a sense of humour and an oddball demeanor. We started talking about food in new ways and playing with ideas in a familiar way. We were jamming...and we had chemistry. Eric Tucker, the chef at Millennium taught me a lot more than how to be a good chef; he taught me that cooking could be just as fulfilling and just as creative as music had ever been. Within a couple of years of working together, we did a spot on the Food Network, published an internationally released cookbook and "played gigs" (read: catered for high profile events) in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. We had more than a few brushes with various types of celebrity, cooking for movie stars, musicians of note, even political names. I was actually living out my rock star fantasy in the cooking world, something I'd never even imagined...who knew? When I first started cooking the closest thing we had to a celebrity chef was Julia Childs, hardly an adequate predictor for the likes of Ramsey, Bourdain, Legasse, Flay and numerous others that were setting out to make chefs into household names in the years to come. My brushes with this culture were bizarre and comedic, with Eric and I laughing at the culture the same way the guys in Odus Krumly laughed our way through our Country Music, it was fun and fresh and our dream was coming alive.



When the time came, I outgrew Millennium, the same way I'd outgrown the music scene in Austin. Another relationship with a special chemistry beyond what I could have imagined became and still is the best jam session for me yet, with my wife, Nicole. These days, she and I have settled in a small town south of Ottawa and started our own band. Brent and Jenn Kelaher, our business partners, are jamming along with us and the branch is a special place for reasons all those other jam sessions could never have touched. We are saying something we think is important; that thing that I could never communicate in my songs is at the very core of what we do here, supporting local foods, organic farmers and the importance of community. Doing not what we think is popular, but what we think is right. And just as everything is starting to settle into place, the music is back in my life again as well, less like an affliction this time, and more like an old friend.



In 2006, ten years after I'd written a song any better than a two line jingle, it came back. I was doing laundry one minute and the next thing I knew, it was two hours later and I was putting the finishing touches on 'Walkin Sam', a song for my father, the guy whose music collection had finally helped us mend the troubled relationship of my teenaged years. The song is about charity, goodwill and community and finally gave voice to the things I couldn't seem to say all those years before. I've been writing regularly since then, and it's good to be in a place where that feels right. At the branch, in my cooking, in my writing and in my music, I can finally say what I need to, not what I feel like I have to.



Music, cooking, writing, all these things are connected for me. They are creative, special; they help me to reach across what is small in physical space, at times, but can be an incalculable distance when measured in understanding. The food is a way to give nourishment, to show care; the music, a way to provide joy; the writing, a way to let other people know that they are not alone...that someone else has thoughts that tumble through their head, has stories to tell and hopes and dreams to share. And that chemistry, the jamming, and the music that comes when it's working...to me, when you hear that other person, when you feel that magic, like I do almost every day at the branch, that's just how you know it's right.