The Detour Project

My Journey Into Music

This is a guest post by my friend, Neil Dixon Smith.

Hello Detour Project! My name is Neil Dixon Smith, I’m a professional musician living in Chicago and also a longtime friend of Dennis. After an excellent recent round of deep late-night conversing about life and the pursuit of happiness he suggested I might like to contribute something to this site, and I am honored to oblige. I thought I’d share the story as to how I got into music, from the way back machine.

I have a very precise memory to the moment I wanted to be a musician. I had just turned 8 years old and my parents took me to some Summer festival type event that featured a big band orchestra, the conductor of which was a swank old school brat-pack-Frank Sinatra-style trumpet player named Stan Collella. If the movie The Godfather was set in Syracuse NY, he would’ve been the wedding entertainment. He was also the conductor of the 4th grade band at my elementary school (he happened to live a couple blocks away) and my parents knew him from my older brothers. During a break, they brought me up to meet him. I was about to enter 3rd grade, but they were laying the groundwork to get me stoked to join the school band.

It was the first time I was introduced to an adult that my dad truly admired, the child-like grin on his face while he shook Stan’s hand was not something I had ever seen before. I could tell that he felt elated to just be in this guy’s presence. And then Stan turned to me. I already knew I wanted to play trumpet, because that’s what my older brother did. And here was the King Trumpeter shaking my hand, inviting me to join the tribe. He was overpoweringly self-confident and charismatic, as a shy little boy I felt like I just met The God of Cool.

And right then and there I concluded there was nothing greater one could be than become a musician. If that was the person playing music turned you into, sign me up now. To top it off, because he had liked my brothers, the plan was immediately hatched as we stood together that Summer’s day that I could join the 4th grade band as a 3rd grader. Straight to the big time!

I started lessons, joined the school band and stuck with it for four years, and pretty much hated every second of it. Trumpet? The valve oil gave me headaches, and I never could get a proper sound. The music? Strictly corny, couldn’t relate to any of it. Practicing? I’d rather watch TV (my mom would literally put a timer on for 20 minutes while I would fake play). Thank God for getting braces in 8th grade, as I could claim it was just too painful to continue.

But music was still my favorite thing. Sitting in my room for hours on end with headphones on, I could travel to private worlds forever away from the sterile indifferent suburb.

To my parents credit, recognizing how much I obviously was fascinated with music, they insisted I find some instrument to work on. And so at 13, heavy metal record collection in effect, I took on a guitar with an eye straight for rocknroll glory.

I signed up for lessons with a local stoner in the back of a record shop, who started me on Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, along with learning the notes on the first string of a cheap beat up acoustic guitar. I went through the Mel Bay books while he showed simple rock and blues riffs from my favorite tunes. The things that sounded most amazing to me, I realized, were often simple little tricks of technique.

This time, I didn’t need a timer, I was learning something I wanted to learn. Plus, unlike trumpet, I realized you could watch TV and practice guitar at the same time!

After a couple years of clear effort, the cheap acoustic upgraded to a cheap electric. At the same time my drummer buddies from the school band were moving into the jazz ensemble, where they got to access to drum kits. Soon there were evenings in friends’ basements, spontaneously forming gangs from two to eight 16-year olds banging out and re-creating punk rock in our own image.

Hyper, bored, pissed-off, alienated kids working out aggression, pain and hormones in a fury of ecstatic noise. It’s a beautiful thing, I can’t recommend it enough. The bonds of rockroll brotherhood formed, the absolutely religious experience of playing to the point of complete exhaustion, the incredible explosions of imagination.

I’m sharing this story not because it’s unique in any way, but because 30 years later I now see how ordinary it is, and I find great comfort in that. Of the dozens of professional musicians I know personally, they basically fall into two camps: those that came up in a world of serious formal musical training, and those that started like this.

Like most folks, after the initial teenage rush, playing music took a back seat as I entered my 20’s and contemplated my place in the world. By my mid-20’s, and the dust settled to the degree to which I had a something like a steady job and an apartment, I decided to get back into it.

Of course, by this time I had all sorts of new ideas and motivations, you know, like wanting to play music that actually sounded good to listen to! But at the end of the day all I’m ever doing is dipping back into that initial fountain of energy I discovered by trying to forge my private world into something real.

And my instinct about Stan Colella was right – learning to play music does change you, but in exactly what way will be your own story. It gives you opportunities to become different people, too, for a time, but the longer you stick with it, I think the more it helps you find the person you want to be. (Cue corny soundtrack)

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Neil Dixon Smith is a solo classical guitarist who performs for private parties and weddings, and rocks out on electric guitar in the band Más Trueno. You can check him out at neildixonsmith.com, and drop him a line at neildixonsmith(at)yahoo.com