Sunday, January 10, 2010

When I was almost a famous music star

This is another article about my childhood and some of my experiences. I grew up in the Bible belt southern United States. My family is musical and we sang and played music in local churches. As I grew older I became interested in more upscale music and just one week after my 21'st birthday my younger brother and I joined a band. We played what we called country rock music. That was in the late 70's and early 80's. Such artists as The Eagles, Eddie Rabbitt, and the Bellamy Brothers were popular then and we fit right in. Much to my parents chagrin, my brother and I abandoned church and began playing in bars and nightclubs. We were working hard to become rich and famous someday. We made records and were on tv a few times. We traveled some and played in adjoining states. All my life I had thought that music was what I wanted to to for a career. It seemed so romantic and appealing. Turned out that it wasn't. Suddenly the new wore off and it became the most boring, lonely, thankless way of earning a living that I could imagine. My brother felt the same way but we hated to jump ship and waste all of the years of hard work. Finally we did and I don't think the others in our band ever completely forgave us. One of them went on to become an industrial engineer and is now the contracting engineer over several of the local radio stations. He made a good life for himself, probably much better than he would have if we had continued our music career. I have no idea what happened to the others but last I knew one was a truck driver. I think now he may own some trucks of his own. The girl that was one of our singers was a housewife with children the last time I heard, but that was many years ago. Its amazing in our lives how we will stay close to people for many years sometimes, but then someday we just walk away without meaning too and maybe never see them again. My brother and I never actually intended to stop playing music, we just wanted to slow down, but that led to a misunderstanding. We had a blast most of the time when we were playing music, not so much in the bars and nightclubs, but when we had practice with the others in the band. We would get together every weekend and practice our songs, maybe learn some new ones. We would play music for an hour or two and then we would go out and play sports, or ride motorcycles etc. Sometimes we would go camping and swimming in local rivers. It was an experience, or series of experiences that I wouldn't have missed for the world, so to those others in our old band, where-ever they are. Heres to you, and to all the fun and experiences we shared. I hope your lives are good and that you are happy....

1 comment:

  1. Wow such an informative post. Thank you for sharing your childhood experienced. Have a good week. Keep up the good work!

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