The Incoherant Ramblings of a Poetic Compulsive: Essay: Poverty on Parade (part 2)

Part 2 – The Tools of the Trade (Means)

So you remember those three elements right? Well, it’s fair enough to cover the “means” now, for which I’m required to fill you in on a little background about me and how I came to be a musician. I’ll try to accomplish this without getting into too much “shop talk”. When I got home from Jesus Northwest ’92 I became obsessed with Christian music. I went through a phase that I would in the future see many after me go through as they transitioned into the obsession. And make no mistake, it can become an obsession. The discovery that one can listen to music of a style and genre they enjoy and at the same time not offend their senses or those they associate with, triggers a pocketbook reaction that can cost thousands of dollars of the individual’s money to be paid to the “Christian” record labels and retail stores. I call this phenomenon “converting one’s CD collection.” I once knew a man, a father of one of the kids I grew up with, whose CD collection increased by over 400 in the course of a single month. Converting one’s CD collection often involves burning or otherwise destroying much, if not all, of the secular CD’s you happen to own. Now this was ’92 and ’93 so remember, downloading songs was not an option. You either had to buy the tape/CD or try catching it on the radio and recording it on a tape deck. “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” It seems odd, but the first memory I can recall having is hearing that song by Tina Turner. I must have been about 3. I don’t really know why this is my first memory that I can still recall (and actually understand), but it’s only fitting that it has to do with music. Lord knows my dad would never allow such “crap” in his house, as he would call it. I was born in Jacksonville, FL on September 28, 1979 in Orange County Hospital just a few minutes before September 29th. My dad was in the Navy at the time and my mom had just been medically discharged due to foot problems that she still has to this day. Because I was a military brat, we moved around a lot from Naval base to Naval base. I have lived in Jacksonville, FL; Norfolk, VA; MD; Long Island, NY; San Antonio & Corpus Christi, TX; Louisville, KY; New Orleans, LA; Vancouver, WA and came very close to living in Anchorage, AK and Buffalo, NY. My dad later transferred to the Coast Guard when his term with the Navy was up. My love life consists of inconsistencies. When I was 6 years old my best friend in Gretna, Louisiana was Nicole. We called each other boyfriend and girlfriend, but really had no clue. As I was helping load the car to prepare for the big move West to Texas, I devised this grand scheme where she could hop in the trunk at the last possible moment and come with us to Texas. “Then my parents can adopt you and we’ll get married later.” When the last possible moment came, she chickened out. When I was nine I thought I was in love for the first time with Michelle, a curly haired girl in my second grade class. She even dedicated a song to me “Let’s Hear it For the Boy” by Denise Williams which was released on the Footloose soundtrack. I used to listen to that tape with her for hours in her bedroom. I later came to realize just what the lyrics to that song had to say about this “guy” Denise was writing about and Michelle was singing about (apparently his name was Rusty). Take a look:

My baby he don’t talk sweet/He ain't got much to say/But he loves me, loves me, loves me/I know that he loves me anyway/And maybe he don’t dress fine/But I don’t really mind/Because every time he pulls me near/I just want to cheer/Let’s hear it for the boy/Let’s give the boy a hand/Let’s hear it for my baby/You know you go to understand/Whoa, maybe he's no Romeo/But he's my lovin one-man show/Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa/Let's hear it for the boy/Rusty, Ariel, Irene & Doreen/My baby may not be rich/He's watchin every dime/But he loves me loves me loves/We always have a real good time/And maybe he sings off key/But that’s alright by me/Because what he does he does so well/Makes me wanna yell/Let’s hear it for the boy/Let’s give the boy a hand/Let’s hear it for my baby/You know you go to understand/Maybe he’s no Romeo/But he’s my lovin one man show/Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa/Lets hear it for the boy/Maybe he’s no Casanova Still his kisses knock me ov-ah/Let’s hear it for the boy/Let’s give the boy a hand/Let’s hear it for my baby/You know you gotta understand/Oh, he don’t score at bowl-a-rama/Still you gotta thank his mama/Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa/Let’s hear it for the boy/Hear it for my man/Let's hear it for my baby

So apparently I don’t talk sweet, don’t have much to say, am a poor dresser, no Romeo, no Cassanova, I sing off key, I’m far from rich, but I love her a lot. Oh yeah Denise/Michelle? Well….”bowl-a-rama” isn’t a real word!….and….and you start sentences with prepositions too!....crap. I kissed her behind a palm tree one day (Michelle not Denise Williams). Just a peck on the lips. It was my first and I would come to find it was my last for five whole years until I met my wife in junior high. We were as serious as 2nd graders get for awhile, until she found a cuter, taller guy in the 3rd grade, who dedicated a song to her. I understand it was a Huey Lewis and the News song, which seems fitting. In 4th grade my infatuation was with Jennifer White, Michelle’s best friend who was home schooled. I think I was pretty much the only boy she knew. I asked her to be my girlfriend, she said yes, and then I don’t think we really ever spoke to each other after that. 6th grade, after we moved to the Northwest, it was Tiffany. I never got her last name. That lasted about a week and was primarily conducted over the phone. Hang on, I’m almost done, there is a point here. When I was in 7th grade, 13 years old, I met my future wife. Sometime in December of 1992, one of my friends at church, Stephan, a Canadian living most of the year with his divorced mom in Vancouver, started officially dating Charity, an adorable brunette with beautiful green eyes and “striking features” as uncle Rico would say. That “relationship” if you can call it that, lasted a total of six months. The last half of which, Stephan was completely incommunicable. See some time between December of 92 and July of 93 he and a couple of the more rambunctious kids (*cough, cough* - me - *cough*) trashed the youth room in good fun. Streamed toilet paper, performed some Sharpie graffiti, etc. Stephan did a couple more destructive things and one of the elders in the church kind of threw a fit about it. His mom was totally embarrassed and they switched churches. Shortly after, I’m told, he went to live with his dad in Canada who lacked all sense of disciplining when it came to his son. I later found out he got into a lot of trouble in high school and completely lost track of him after that. But back in December, I played matchmaker between Stephan and Charity, even though I liked her very much, I knew they both liked each other, so against my better judgment I helped the two introverts get together. However, in July of 1993, at the now famous Jesus Northwest festival, Charity and I admitted to each other just how much we liked one another via a round of “Truth or Dare”. Her biological father died when she was 5 years old and, as I soon came to find out, she was now a missionary’s daughter. So after we had been dating for about 9 months she moved to Budapest, Hungary and was there for 5+ years. It was just about the most agonizing point in my life when she left. Dan gave me chickenpox which conveniently onset the day before she left so I did not get to say goodbye at the airport. Instead I stayed home scratching bursting pustules and tonguing the back of my throat wishing I were dead. For weeks I played Michael W. Smith’s “Somebody Love Me” on repeat, crying into my pillow. After the first 18 months, she came back to the states roughly once every year. Sometimes only for a couple weeks, sometimes for months at a shot. We e-mailed daily and phoned monthly so we kept in touch pretty well. She came back for good May of 1998 and I am glad she did. Many people react quite surprised when I explain we’d been dating for years since we were 13 and 14 years old and that it had been a long-distance relationship for most of the 5 years. When she first left for Budapest, I needed something to fill this enormous void in my life. Jay, the in-house “Weird Al” guy I was telling you about, was about thirty years old, married and had I believe only one kid at the time he found out I was desperate to learn the guitar. One Sunday he presented me with an old acoustic with terrible action, 5 strings and a flower pattern pick guard. “If you can learn on this guitar, later you’ll be able to play ANY guitar,” he bragged of the oddities. Over the course of the few months or so he’d give me lessons twice a month on how to form basic chords and play along with some worship tunes. He even showed me the basics on deciphering songs off CD’s or the radio. Yes, CD’s were transitioning in at this point. I spent all my time, energy and efforts on learning how to play and spent all my money on new and better equipment. I now have quite an array of guitars and guitar-related toys. It has become the ultimate form of expression for me. I was the first of my friends to start playing an instrument that could be used in youth worship teams and garage bands alike. Others followed closely behind me. Kevin L. was an extremely skinny, acne-covered boy my age. He had a voice that cracked very loudly most of the way through high school. The voice cracking pitch differential was so extreme that I used to think he was choking when it happened. His dad was the one whose CD collection sprouted from 10 to 400 overnight. Kevin took up the bass and his brother Chris got in to racecar driving. Their mother had been slowly dying at home for years from cancer I believe. I think music is what Kevin and his dad both used to cope with the process. Kevin’s dad once put on a “Music Night”. He invited all the youth from the church to come over to his house and listen to his CD collection. The wall of music was literally an entire wall in his living room covered in Christian Contemporary music. He averaged 5 or 6 new CD’s a week. No one was allowed to touch the CD’s or the stereo. We had to ask him to put on discs for us. He had one old computer set up that would only play Pong and a couple different varieties of Lay’s potato chips. We all pretended not to see the woman in the wheel chair in the back corner of the room with 17 different machines attached to her and the breathing tubes cutting across the carpet. Kevin took up the bass about the time that my dad did in what must’ve been late 1993 or early 1994. He never had any sense of timing and was always content to just play the roots. He didn’t appreciate anyone suggesting to him he might try to play something more than that. To say Kevin was clumsy would be the understatement of the decade. I once watched Kevin get stuck in his own coat one winter. My three year old does that occasionally and it’s cute. With Kevin, it was just sad. At water ski camp Kevin nearly drowned in two and a half feet of water when seaweed wrapped around the big tow on his left foot. He’s the only person I’ve actually witnessed hang his head out the back window of car at highway speeds and swallow a wasp. Derek H. must have arrived at our youth group around late ‘93/early ’94. If Kevin existed in a completely opposite parallel universe, he would have been Derek. One of the regulars first brought his brother Dean Hiebert, who was a classically trained piano player and who to this day is pretty still amazing. Derek played a crappy Wal-Mart brand black strat copy electric guitar through a $45 Gorilla amplifier. He used to play these really high notes heavily distorted that I liked to compare to the torturous experiments of felines. Derek was eye candy for every girl in our youth group when he joined. Before him, I held that position, and while I had a steady girlfriend, I didn’t appreciate him squatting on my turf. He was tall and tan and handsome. He talked like a surfer from San Diego and had a cool job (comparatively) at the local pizzeria. I switched to electric guitar for youth group worship a week or two before Derek showed up with his. Derek was two years my senior and while I thought myself the better guitar player, he knew a couple of songs on the local secular alternative rock radio station (“Say it Ain’t So” by Weezer and “Big Me” by Foo Fighters”). He played them at get-togethers and all the girls sang along like some kind of really sappy deodorant commercial or something. And I’d have the distinct privilege of listening to their comments as he rode away on his skateboard. Derek eventually signed up in the Army reserves, and when he got back from boot camp, went to Bible School. He met a young woman that was the nurse at a youth camp he was counseling. They got married and he became the youth pastor at our church eventually. They have one kid, a daughter, named Gretchen. He’s changed a lot since the Gorilla days. Literally pulled a 180 on us. Back in high school he had an orange Camaro that we used to all pile in to and blast the stereo and terrorize around town in. It’s because of Derek I was ever turned on to ska and punk music, for which I owe him (take that any way you want). It wasn’t so much that Dan knew how to play keyboards, as he had a keyboard. An Alesis Quadrasynth (I remember it like it was yesterday). MIDI capable even. Before then he dabbled on Casio and Yamaha $100 toy keyboards. When I got my first electric guitar for Christmas of 1993 he came over Christmas night and brought his keyboard. My new guitar was a Peavey Predator. A red strat copy that my parents bought for me. For $300 they got the guitar, a Peavey Audition 110 amplifier, a strap, two packs of strings, a gig bag, a pack of picks, and three free lessons from the local guitar wizard. We went up into my attic-converted-bedroom of downtown ghetto Vancouver and played the only song we could play together (“Spirit Thing” by the Newsboys) for about 3 and a half hours. We imagined we would start a band like Petra someday. We named our band, titled our first 7 albums, even drew out a stage plot of where we would stand and how we would look with the huge lights of Jesus Northwest shining down on us. It took less than a year from the time Jay had given me that first guitar for him to help us start our first band. “Jonah and the Wailers” we called ourselves. Get it? Wail-ers? Wailing on the guitar? Get it? Anyway, Jay played guitar in the group and sang. Kevin on bass, Derek and I on guitar, a friend of Jay’s named Bob who was in his 50’s at the time and had a hunchback (but is to this day still an amazing drummer), and I convinced them to take in Dan as a keyboard player. That’s when he bought the Quadrasynth. We practiced for a couple of months once a week and then performed at a church talent show. Along the course of those couple of months I won (yes I won) a guitar in an online contest put on by Gibson and Compuserve. Not just any guitar. A Gibson Centenniel Les Paul worth about $10,000. Solid gold hardware, diamond inlays speckling the guitar throughout, solid mahogany body, and dual P-90 pickups tuned to perfection. I brought it to the talent show for our first ever performance. I also used my paper delivering money to buy a new amplifier: a Peavey 50 Classic 410 combo just like Jay’s (which I still use to this day). After we got everything set up, all the guitars and amps put on stage and drums and mic stands and everything, it was so beautiful it almost made me cry so I took a bunch of pictures. We played a cover of Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky”, and Dakota Motor Company’s “Trip to Pain.” We also had two originals that Dan and I wrote together and I think we rearranged a worship tune too. Sometime during the “show” Kevin got so into….into whatever it was he was doing over there…that he bashed the headstock of his bass against the floor and the whole neck came flying off the bass like those wild untamed monkeys on the discover channel fly from tree to tree screaming at the top of their lungs and flinging their own poo. It made the most horrendous sound any of us had ever heard. I remember thinking Armageddon was coming when it happened. Luckily it was toward the end of the song so people just assumed it was like a late Beatles kind of an ending or something till they noticed half of Kevin’s bass was hanging on to the other half around his neck only by the four thick metal strings and the look on Kevin’s face said he did not do it on purpose ala Pete Townsend. He stepped up to a microphone and asked, over the PA, if he could borrow my dad’s bass, to which my dad adamantly declined. That was the most awkward silence I’ve ever experienced. He muttered something about it being a cold day in Hades under his breath. I actually played bass for the one remaining song anyway, because it was too hard for Kevin, who we put on tambourine duty, so I used my dad’s bass to play it. Shortly after Kevin’s mom finally passed. Kevin’s dad remarried a month later and moved him and the boys out to Oregon City where they found a different church. He called me once, years later, from Japan about a year after I was married. I understand he was actually kicked out of the Army and Marines before he finally made it through a Navy boot camp. He seemed to be enjoying the lifestyle and, at 21, his voiced still cracked when he talked. Jonah and the Wailers pretty much broke up after that show. Never practiced again, never did another show. Dan and I still wrote songs. He did most of the lyrics while I wrote most of the music. Once we had about 6 or 7 finished tunes we went to Kevin K., the local computer/music guru. Kevin had produced, engineered, mixed, mastered and provided the instrumentation for a complete album that he cut to CD himself. He performed live once at our church. His keyboard rack provided all the background instrumentation. Drums, keys, bass, synth sounds, etc. And he played a guitar with, what I would later come to realize the guitar enthusiast community referred to as “ice pick” distortion. Dan and I only wanted to make a demo of the music we had so we could hear it on tape and it was clear that Kevin K. was the guy to help us. The only problem was that neither one of us could really sing. We recorded a couple of tunes with him regardless and I think I wound up singing at least one of them. He later worked with a guy named Bart out in Scapoose, OR that had a professional studio and Dan and I came to observe the process. That was my first and last taste of the recording studio for a very long time. The next three years, till I was about a junior in high school, I’ve come to refer to as “The Garage Era” of my life. Sometime in ’95 or early ‘96, a guy who had been a friend of mine for several years named Adam started talking about taking up the drums. A couple guys before him had made this claim as well and had not followed through so I was skeptical at best when he first mentioned it, given the cost associated with taking up such a spendy and space-consuming instrument. Adam was two years younger than me and had/has what I like to call an addictive personality. See, when Adam finds something new that he enjoys, he throws himself into it. Snowboarding, golf, crossword puzzles, poker, drums…you name it. The guy becomes engulfed. But, to his credit, he’s also one of these characters that just oozes cool out of every pore in his body. Most of us can do something incredibly stupid, and people will gauk and call us stupid. As they should. But with Adam, something is only stupid until he’s seen doing it. Then it becomes a trend. The guy can’t do anything wrong for some reason. In junior high he gave himself a reverse Mohawk (fairly long hair except for a thick shaved strip up the center) and everybody loved it. In high school he walked around in shoes completely covered in orange duct tape. And the closer you get to knowing him, the more you become aware that the guy speaks primarily utilizing inside jokes. He hops from one to another, and then eventually starts chaining them together until he’s babbling seemingly incoherent sentences that make absolutely no sense to an outsider looking in. Should you happen to be around as the inside jokes develop and can deconstruct the pattern to make some sort of sense though, you’ll be laughing in stitches for hours and even find yourself communicating in this retarded sort of pig latin. Anyway, it didn’t take long for Adam to get good enough at the drums before we started playing together. Sometimes under the official-ness of a “band”, often times just the two of us playing whatever came to mind at the time (a.k.a. “jamming”). Derek and Kevin L. and Dan were often part of these off-the-cuff bands and jam sessions, though Dan didn’t really play anything, it wasn’t for lack of trying. First keys, then guitar, and eventually he even quit the bass. He did write a lot and have lots of great ideas for image, special effects, arrangements, etc. Dan eventually got involved with video production heavily and Kevin of course moved away, which pretty much forced me to become a decent bass player, which Kevin had already motivated to do anyway. I used my dad’s gear often at these get-togethers. We were just teenagers making noise and having fun. It was during this time we probably attended a concert or two every month, both independent and signed bands ranging in venues from underground clubs in the ghettos to the Rose Garden (where the Blazers play). Lots of pizza, video rentals, lots of overnighters, video games, dreaming of the future of “our band”, impromptu wrestling matches, and late night talking of girls, sex, the scary abyss of the future and the ever-looming question that everyone over 30 always wants to know the answer to…what would we do with our lives? A question some of us are still asking ourselves and the “adults” have stopped trying to get an answer for. Towards the end of the Garage Era, as I transitioned from sophomore to junior in high school, Dan and I got involved in an organization called Pro Youth. See, there was a man who led worship at our church named Mike C.. Custer was a guitar playing genius that had both the head knowledge and the feel. You could argue that Jay’s “feel” for the instrument was stronger, more intuitive and fluid, but Mike just had a way of leading worship. He knew how to bring out the emotion in every song. And Mike Custer played a very large role for Pro Youth. He was the worship leader. Anywhere Pro Youth went, they had a worship band and an enormous PA system because they inevitably would always have thousands of kids at any event. And Mike had the distinction of being “The Pro Youth Worship Leader”. It’s hard to convey in words just how impacting that was to our youth group, and the church-attending kids in the entire Portland metro area. But suffice it to say, he was like a local celebrity. Anywhere he went kids spotted him and recognized him. He had/has a voice that’s as smooth and creamy as butter and a way with the guitar that seduced the senses. He can talk for hours on any subject and speak like an expert. And this relatively short Italian with a mustache ala Mario & Luigi could shred on the guitar given the opportunity. Every time Pro Youth had an event, he was tasked with organizing the entire worship structure, forming the band, picking the songs, arranging them, establishing practices, etc. And sometime between my sophomore and junior years, I too became a permanent fixture with Mike C. The drummers, keyboardists, horn players, BGV’s, and additional guitarists would all change from event to event. But I became Mike’s favorite bass player and a staple on the worship team. He stretched me to the degree I was actually pretty good by the end there. Some events were 4 or 5 days long in locations as luxurious as fancy hotels and walking around throughout the week was a bit like being royalty. Make no mistake, I worked my fingers to the bone for Pro Youth pulling cable, stage setup, spotlight and camera operation, soundboard stuff and inevitably I was always there for load-in and load-out, lifting the monstrously heavy and very expensive equipment in ways that would probably give me hernias today (as was Dan, who got roped in to being the video production guy there for awhile). But when I was there on stage playing for the built-in crowds, I was often flooded by kids (mostly guys – bass players) that wanted to know how they could get their time on stage or how I played a certain riff or whatever. It’s quite possible, especially at the larger events, that the attention went to my head. And while pride was probably a concern, ego never was. My self-esteem was far too low for other reasons. Once Derek joined the Army, Dan and I got respectable jobs working in the IT industry and many of the other friends we had moved away, went to college, or got involved with people and things that drug them away from the church scene. When I graduated from high school in 1998 I remember thinking I was very much alone at that time. Dan had started going to another church for his own reasons and Adam was hanging out with friends his own age still in high school. Luckily Charity moved back permanently from Budapest just in time to attend my graduation. I proposed to her a couple weeks after graduation and we were married in July of 1999. Shortly after, Pro Youth almost completely disbanded. Mike and I left and most everyone else I knew in the organization left when its founder left the parent company to strike out on their own doing a completely different type of ministry. During the early years of my marital engagement to Charity, Mike C. got together with another guy named Mike Honholz and several other people that called Harvest Community Church of Camas, WA home. Camas is a small town 20 miles East of Vancouver. This was by far the largest group I’d ever been involved with. There was a lead singer who played acoustic guitar, a lead guitar player who played a really nice Les Paul through a Marshall half stack and used a $700 effects processor, Mike C. who played a rhythm/lead jellyfish kind of role on an acoustic/electric guitar and sang backup and lead, a piano/keyboard player, a male BGV, three female BGV’s, a sax player, a drummer/percussionist and me on bass. That’s 11 pieces if you can believe that and on top of that, it was some of the hardest music I’ve ever had to play. We took Vineyard and Maranatha recordings and made them even harder, rearranging, re-writing and harmonizing in ways that astounded me. Things were going really well until one day the male BGV singer who was mid-twenties came in to practice and told us that God had spoken to him. Yes, like audibly. He told us God said to him that this group was going to go amazing places and do amazing things and we’d all be singing and playing on enormous stages for thousands of people and then proceeded to tell us how exactly we could accomplish this. It didn’t even take a week before Mike and I left the group after that. The goal had been to put on a show for a local prison and after Mike and I left the whole group fell apart. Well Mike, not wanting the ministry to suffer, got the drummer and sax player together and we kept practicing and did that show just the four of us. Larch Mountain Correctional Facility was an amazing show where we got to share the gospel and had a great response. I believe the Lord was pleased with the results and I’m grateful to have been a part of that endeavor. In 2000 and 2001 Mike C. and I got together to do some private stuff. Kind of rolling with the momentum from the Larch Mountain show. I was still exclusively playing bass, so had purchased my own gear by this time. A gig here, a show there. Doing a combination of covers, worship, and originals for various audiences. About half of those times we used Adam Armstrong on drums, who was going through a weird phase with a girl at the time, and the other half of those times we used a guy named George. While I was now 20 years old, George couldn’t have been more than 28. George was and probably still is the best technical drummer I’ve ever played with, though I’ve always preferred playing with Adam just because I’m more “in tune” with him. It’s a hard concept to explain. Anyway, George had done something I never thought was possible. Towards the latter half of the shows with Mike C., George had told me that he took a whole year off from working, took out an enormous loan, bought a bunch of recording equipment, wrote ten or eleven songs, produced them and tracked a demo. It was harder stuff. Edgier rock to be sure. Mike started slowing down a little bit with the shows since Harvest Community had asked him to become part-time paid staff as their worship leader so he was looking for a break when George brought this up. He asked me to play bass for him and I said I would because I enjoyed the music from the demo. He said there was a club in Estacada, a farming community with a small downtown of sorts about an hour from Vancouver. He knew the owner/promoter personally and they had bands there all the time. It was a Christian Youth club with an “under 19” requirement. The guy who ran it said George could come and play his material any time. So I rounded up Adam to play drums and the three of us played for about 6 months while I also attended night school 3 nights a week and Charity gracefully sauntered through her first and second trimester alone for the most part. The only shows we ever had were at this youth club, and we probably only played there 4 times or so. Still it was fun. And I got to play with Adam again which I always enjoyed. It was the hardest music we’d played live since the garage days and it was nice for us both to be able to let loose on the rock scene again. That club eventually closed down after a member of the church footing the bill to run the place discovered he ‘allowed’ kids to smoke outside in the back. It was after George that my musical tastes really started to broaden. For some reason more and more opportunities within the church were arising. There had always been the occasional special event that needed a band and both Adam and I were often willing to oblige. But right about here is where the Christmas specials, Easter specials, ice cream socials, Valentines Day sock hops, talent shows, chili cook-offs, weddings, memorial services, etc seemed to really ramp up for some reason. Perhaps God was just keeping our chops up. It seemed like every month there for awhile there was some event that required significant time and effort in the group setting to give a decent playing for. Adam was engaged and towards the end of this time (2002-2003) had gotten married. As all this was happening I started listening more and more to different and new types of music. And my taste for the lighter and darker sides of rock and roll were both intrigued and it was also at this time, God really placed a yearning in my heart to do something significant with my ability to play music. Something more than just worship and church banquets. I prayed every night that He would use me, in any way He wished, to have an effective ministry for Him. It was about a month or two later, that I got the call.

Bazooka-Joe made it so at 4:48 PM

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Monday, August 01, 2005

Essay: Poverty on Parade (part 2)

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