![Photo by Rachel Sharon]()
- Photo by Rachel Sharon
You never really know what any of this is going to be, you know? The trick, I’m finding, is to tear straight into it and see.
The first time I picked up a guitar, I hit it the same way I would see Townshend hit his. Brave, angry, unapologetic. Yeah, it sounded fucking awful, but it felt amazing. And that was the beginning of the whole thing. One noisy punch of teen angst and I got free. That’s the really right-on stuff about being fucked up—the restlessness, the relentlessness, the charge to find the thing that will help quiet that junk. I found mine in records. I found even more in making them.
The first time I ever tried to write anything, it was trash. So were the next hundred, maybe thousand. The Trash Period—that’s the part people don’t brace up for or they forget about or give up on. Man, here’s what it is: that is the time. That’s where it matters. The process, the struggle, that is the healing. Sitting down inside of nothing and making something out of it, poking holes in your guts to drain out something really real—man, that’s still my favorite part of this stuff.
I don’t know. I spend most of my time thinking about too many things at the same time, so much that my brain gets raw. I wonder about this weird life thing we all do. What’s that thing Bukowski said about being stuck with so many knives that when someone hands him a flower it takes time to make out what it is? I get that. I do.
Look, I listen more than I talk. I think more than I listen. Most days I forget to change my clothes. And I never comb my hair. I’ve never cared much about denting the world or fitting in.
Rock and roll is a lawless place for forgotten kids. We insisted on that part.
Listen to Beach Slang here.
Featured image by Jessica Flynn.