Ep 41: My Music History Part Two

In this episode, John shares the second part of his music history, finishing the story of his first guitar and the art contest he won at a concert that allowed him to purchase it. He walks through his early performances, his jobs working for churches, and how all that experience led him to where he is today.

Transcript

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You are listening to the Gig to Live Podcast. Welcome everyone. I'm John Foles and I'm a full-time working musician. This podcast is about building a music life that holds up over time. It's practical, enjoyable, sometimes uncomfortable, but it's always about helping you stay in the game and actually enjoy the life that you're building. We'll meet some wonderful working musicians from time to time. So whether you're just getting started or you've been doing this for years, you're in the right spot. This podcast is for you. Well, hey everyone. On the last episode, I shared the first part of my music history, my story. And uh today we're just picking up where we left off. So here is part two. The night of the concert. My stomach was in knots. I wanted to win so bad. And when it was time to show off your banner, oh my gosh. We we just waited our turn. And one by one, people were showing their banners, and the crowd would applaud, and they would they would all clap and scream and hoot and holler. And by the look of the banners that we were seeing, my my stomach was doing flips, and I felt incredibly good about our chances. And then this guy walks across the stage and his suit lit up. My gosh, he was holding a banner over his head, the banner was flashing, and my heart just sunk. The crowd went wild for this guy, and I I think I wanted to cry. Well, a few more people showed their banners, and you could hear people all around us talking about how the light up banner was certainly going to be the one that was gonna win. And then they called my name. We were last. The banner was so big we knew we had to do something to stretch it out for people to see it. So I got on Tom's shoulders, Peter got on Mike's shoulders, we walked to the front of the Memorial Auditorium, and we unfurled this banner, and we held it high. And 3,500 people screamed and whistled and clapped and shouted, and the man with the microphone on stage said, I think we have our winners. And Peter and Tom and Mike and I all jumped up and down and we hugged each other. After the concert, we got to go backstage and meet Petra, and we also met their manager, who was the head of the record label that they were on, and everyone loved the banner. And the band asked, is it okay if we cut this banner and we take the part that has our name in the rocks? We want to hang it in the studio. And I was thrilled, and I said yes. And the radio station then asked if they could have their section, the one with all the album covers that said KYLO, and I said yes. And I told them I wanted to keep the center sheet as a reminder of the whole thing. I still have that banner, that piece of the banner, in a box in storage to this day. After the concert, we had to go to Sacramento to pick up the television, and just as she promised, my grandma Jackie bought the TV from me. I took my $400 from grandma and a little bit that I had saved, and I went to Auburn, California to buy my Mako guitar. And for the next few months, here and there, the uh band would practice. Uh we even did a concert for all our friends in my computer's garage. We called ourselves Monopoly. I don't know why. It was my idea, but I think I stole the idea from a friend who also wanted to start a band. Uh it was a band name idea for a couple of years. I used to draw the logo on my book covers at school. Our band was horrible. But we had fun. And I couldn't get enough of the guitar. What I really loved though was writing songs. I didn't have a microphone stand, but my neighbor Jim, who gave me the amp, also gave me a mic. So I used to have my brother Phil hold the microphone for me while I sang songs that I wrote at home. Here's a little bonus for the story, all right. 32 years after the banner contest, I was playing music at a camp in New Jersey, and there was a guy there named Daryl, Daryl Harris. Uh we spoke, uh, we didn't talk much at the camp, but we ended up getting stranded in an airport together for quite a few hours. And after talking to one another over a meal, he told me he founded a record label once called Star Song. And I told him I knew that label well because one of my favorite bands was on that label. He loved hearing that I knew about the record label, and then I told him about the banner contest and how we won, and I bought my first guitar. We split the banner in three sections when we won. I kept one part, the radio station kept a part, Petra kept the other, and Daryl's eyes got huge. That was you? He said. He said, John, I was Petra's manager back then. I took part of that banner. I took lessons at the music store for, I don't know, a month. Grandma paid for them as a gift. The first guitar lick I ever learned was Beat It by Michael Jackson, uh, you know, by Eddie Van Halen. Uh, and then I learned Carry On My Wayward Son. But lessons bored me. I didn't have the patience for someone telling me that I had to follow these little black dots on a page. Uh they said that's what I should be doing. But, you know, I wanted rock. I wanted to play a song. Uh you know what I'm saying? I mean, when when I taught guitar lessons later in life, I told parents that music is going to be fun first and technical second. We are going to learn how to play songs, then we are going to learn what we are playing. I think that's the way it should go, personally. I got decent enough to play guitar at youth group at church, and that skill kept growing. And throughout the years, I would say yes to more and more music to opportunities at churches. The Christian music scene played a huge role in my high school music life, uh, especially the music that was coming out of a place called the Warehouse or Warehouse Ministries in Sacramento, California. They held free concerts on the weekend at the warehouse, and my friends and I, we were there all the time. That music, those musicians, influenced me big time. It was the rock and roll, punk, new wave, and even folk scene that church parents allowed. I mean, we were still smoking cloves outside, but our parents liked that we were at a church concert. And in high school, guitar and performance were always part of my life. But my girlfriend was a bigger part in high school. We constantly went to concerts, but playing with a band fell by the wayside for a bit, and I certainly didn't mind. She was worth it because we're still married 39 years later. My parents started going to church a few years after I did, and their path was a bit different. Their path was very conservative. My parents went from, you know, mom being a tube top wearing hippie mom and dad being a pot smoking dad to church three times a week, Bible readings that were mandatory every night. You know, get out of the room, it's time for Bible reading. It was it was awful. Uh part of their transformation included burning all of their albums and cassettes to purge themselves of the devil's influence. And they threw out the TV as well. Uh I came home one day to find my dad throwing albums onto a huge bonfire outside our home in the country. And some of my albums were already up in flames, but I grabbed the rest, I threw them in my car, I threatened to move away from home. My car, when I was 16, was a VW bug. I built it from the ground up with a friend. I took my bug to my girlfriend's house. I dropped off the albums, and then I got them back when I married her. It was a weird time musically. I wasn't allowed to listen to rock and roll in the house, Christian or not, but that wouldn't last long. One year later, I moved out of the house before I even graduated. My senior year of high school, I was summoned to the choir room, and a man sat at a piano and he asked me to sing the notes that he played. I asked him why I was there, and he told me that my friend Michael had suggested I join the choir. It sounded fun enough to me. He told me I was a tenor. That man, Mr. Donald Baggett, Don, was a huge influence in my life. He instilled more musical confidence in me than anyone. He told me I had something special. He encouraged me to sing. He encouraged me to play guitar. He gave me a solo that year. He encouraged me to write songs. And I got more daring with my public performances in high school. I won a talent show that year for singing both parts of the song You Don't Bring Me Flowers by Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond. That's a fun story. I would write birthday songs for people in high school, and I would get hired by their friends and then show up in their class and sing them, and teachers would let me out of class to do this. All of my extra credit projects were musical, like performing the theme song from Gilligan's Island for an English class where we had to uh, you know, sing poetry for extra credit. My wife and I got married in 1987. We were 19. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, but playing music once again became a huge focus for me. I was asked to play weekly for the high school youth group, a group I was barely out of, but you know, I was married at this time, so I had street cred as a leader for teens. Every week, twice a week, I played music. Now with a band, too, because I was training high school kids how to work together and how to make something special together. A couple of years later, I got a call from a guy named Dennis Holbert. He said he was looking to start a Christian rock band, and someone had given him my name. Uh, the woman uh had an alcoholic son who was in rehab, and he was a great guitarist, and she had asked Dennis to mentor him as a favor to her, and he thought uh it would be a great idea to put to be put together a band so you know this guy had friends surrounding him and something to focus on. He thought putting a band together would be good for the guitarist, but he also thought it would be a blast. Well, we formed a band and we called it Makaira. We practiced in the basement of the home that my wife and I were renting. We soundproofed it as best we could. We rocked our socks off down there. We played churches, bars, coffee shops, county fairs, festivals, you name it, traveled throughout California mostly. We even started our own festival in Grass Valley, California. And that festival, by the way, is still going to this day in the foothills of Northern California. Uh Dennis is still in the band. Those were amazing times for me as a young musician. And it was during that time in this band that I began to feel this calling on my life, for lack of a better word, to become a pastor. And I went back to school to get a degree. And me, my wife, and now two children moved to Portland, Oregon to finish school. I finally figured out what I wanted to be. I thought. Without telling that whole story, I will say this. In all of the roles that I played as a professional church person, music was always a part, no matter what my role was in the church. I was always playing in bands, recording, playing around town, doing tours, traveling Europe. I always found a way to work music into the job. And for many years, the biggest part of my job was music. I got paid to make music every weekend, multiple times a week, uh, multiple times on a weekend, developing artists, rehearsing bands, writing songs, recording albums. And outside the church world, I kept plenty busy. I did music for conferences, wrote jingles, played with other bands and artists. I did studio work. I recorded my own albums. And in the 90s, I was relatively sure I was going to be writing hit songs in Nashville and playing Christian music on big stages. And I sat with record companies, with songwriting teams, but it never worked out. And to tell you the truth, I wasn't really chasing it down that hard. I was content at that point in my life. I was writing a lot of songs with a church audience in mind during that time, and I remember a couple of really disappointing moments along the way. Once was when I sat with the executives at EMI in Nashville, and they told me my music was not easy to replicate for churches, and they were looking for artists who were writing more simple tunes. They told me it was too complex musically and especially lyrically. They didn't say it this way, but what I heard is they wanted hickory dickory dock. They told me they loved my music, but they didn't think it was for a wider church audience. And it was such a blow to me because, in all honesty, I already felt like I was writing less complicated music. My favorite songs were way more poetic, so uh I felt defeated. And then a worldwide magazine that was reviewing music for the church world reviewed my music and they said great things about it. They said things like, this song has a beautiful Paul McCartney-like lift in the chorus. And uh about another song, they said, we couldn't get the song out of our heads. They said a bunch of nice stuff. But then they shot it down at the end, uh, in in so many words, uh, to me, anyway, by saying it would take some uh, and I quote, musical heroics for churches to use the music. And just like that, I felt like I got shot down again. So I realized at that point the Christian music industry was no longer interested in good music. They were looking for singable, copyable, easy-to-approach music for churches to sing. And all the cool bands that I used to listen to that were every bit as good musically as anything on the radio were no longer getting signed because now it was just a product, a Nashville stamping machine that had a formula for making money. You can tell I have an opinion on this, right? Well, I'm actually glad it happened to me. My songwriting took a huge turn, and at that point, I think my songwriting got way more honest. Later on, when I had a job in the church where music wasn't the main focus, music still found a way to leverage itself towards my responsibilities. You know, it's funny, music always had a way of getting me in trouble in the church world. Most people loved me. I think they did, and I had a great relationship with so many people, but there were a few noisy, powerful people over the years who thought that everything I did was suspect. Not because I liked whiskey and occasionally smoked a pipe, although that didn't help. Uh, not because I had earrings and tattoos, although that wasn't exactly celebrated. It was always something strange, something that was hard to prove, something they thought was too showy, or I was full of myself on stage, or I liked the attention on me, or I played it too loud or too fast, or too rock and roll. Frankly, probably too honest. I have this unfortunate memory of someone uh anonymously drawing a picture of the stage and the musicians at church, and it was all done with stick figures, and they put the drawing in the offering basket, and it was a suggestion about how we should rearrange the stage, and the drawing showed people where they should stand on stage, and I was the stick person in the corner facing the wall. Yeah. People can be mean. Somewhere in the early 90s, the division of what some people called secular and some people called sacred became a real issue for me. I didn't believe in there being a line musically. Uh music is music. Good music and bad music. What I wanted was honest music. I didn't want to label it. If a song was good, then I thought we should celebrate it. And one of the things then uh that was always a topic of conversation for me, and sometimes where the battle lines were drawn, uh, was my celebration of music inside of the church walls that wasn't specifically, according to the gatekeepers, religious or sacred music. Because I saw music differently. Music is a lifeline, it's transcendent. Sometimes it's happy, sometimes it's sad. Sometimes it's both. You know, it's a happy sadness like a sunset makes you want to smile and cry at the same time. Music holds your hand through grieving, it dances with you in joy. It says to us, Hey old friend, remember when it opens a door to some kind of hope. Sometimes it surfaces a need to grapple with things. Music sometimes presents situations that we wrestle with. It it meets us at the bottom sometimes. It it high-fives us at the top. It's not just a product. It's not something that we just use. It soothes us, quiets us. And sometimes it it lets us break out and scream. It can make us feel understood. It sometimes gives us just the words we were looking for. It's therapy on a level unlike any other. I believe in therapy for our mental health, and I haven't found better therapy than music, to be honest. For a decade then in Jackson, Michigan, I found a church community that believed all of the same things about music that I did, and it was one of the best music seasons of my life. We celebrated art, we talked about tough things in life. Honestly, while we certainly were singing songs at that time that were full of religious sentiment and imagery, we believed that a song didn't have to be chalk full of those things to matter. Um we just saw music through a different lens. I I I went back to California at the request of the church where it all started for me, and they wanted me to help instill some of that philosophy into the culture in California, musically and otherwise. Part of my role was to oversee music, not played all the time, but certainly oversee it. And it did not go as planned. People like the idea of change more than they like change. All the while I continued playing music out and about. So for the past few years now, music is once again a large part of our life. It pays the bills. Yeah. Bars, restaurants, coffee shops, festivals, private parties, weddings, funerals, grad parties, engagement parties, receptions, showers, playing at cigar lounges, corporate events, writing jingles, playing at wineries, breweries, distilleries, cocktail lounges, outside in a park. I'll play in your backyard. I told a couple once that I would mm sing them to sleep if they paid me. I said it as a joke, and then they actually offered for me to do that, and then it got a little bit weird. That's another story. Uh if people want music, I'm there. And that's a wrap. Thanks for listening. I just thought you might be curious. Until the next time, stay creative, stay after it, stay hired.