It wasn’t my idea, Ted. I just awoke this morning and your firing was dancing before me like a Tupac hologram. What can be done? Pick up your shit and go.
See how that works next time.
I’d always been more comfortable with other people singing my songs, so when I visualized myself as a lead singer, I was terrified. I didn’t believe intellectually I should be singing, but when I saw it with such clarity and inevitability, I knew that was the way. Similarly, when I went on my first solo piano tour years later, it was because I visualized it that way. I dreaded it. I shook in my boots. I had to convince my manager, booking agent, and audience of something I wasn’t even sure I could do.
Retreating home after my aborted London move, I could suddenly and clearly visualize Majosha, which was to become my first serious band, as if it were already so.
It didn’t matter what Millard or Dave, who’d played with me on those resort gigs, had going on at that moment or whether they also realized it was to be. The three of us would be Majosha, and we would soon be gracing stages and making recordings. I had already imagined the kind of house we would live in. I saw a van with shag carpet, road maps, and equipment rattling around the back. I visualized the gigs, an EP, an album, and even a manager. And by late summer, all those things would have materialized, powered by my useful delusion and a lot of hard work.
I was twenty-one years old. I had a high school diploma and mounting debt. I was a waiter of tables. And I was a bassist with a beast of a band that was hungry for new songs, over which I would gladly toil. In the middle of a Majosha recording session one night, as Millard, Dave, and I were rushing to finish our debut cassette EP, to be called Majosha: Five Songs About Jesus (none of the four songs on the EP were about Jesus), Anna and I casually announced that, oh by the way, we had gone to South Carolina earlier that day and were now married. They congratulated us, shrugged, and we got on to the next take. Anna was a good sport about the recording sessions taking precedence over a honeymoon and about living in the house with a nasty rock band. After all, she was the band’s manager.
Anna and I were both ambitious and utterly focused on getting this band up and running. We lived and breathed the band and the business around it. Millard and Dave were more part-time about the whole endeavor, but, man, were we a fine trio! Musically, we were, as Dave liked to say, “tight as a gnat’s ass.” (He may have had personal experience with which to back up this metaphor, who knows—there are some things you don’t ask a man.) Dave, who was a self-taught monster on the drum set, was the swinger, the bad boy of the band. He once had three girlfriends on-the-go simultaneously, all named Kim. I shit you not. He was three-timing multiple Kims. It became really stressful answering the phone at the band house.
ME: “Dave, pssst! It’s Kim on the phone! She sounds upset. What should I tell her?”
DAVE: “Which Kim?”
ME: “Am I supposed to actually ask her that?”
DAVE: “…”
Millard, the guitarist and singer, was quite the shredder of everything from jazz to heavy metal. He’d sit on the floor of the living room—also his bedroom, through which everyone had to cross—straddling a bong and playing a million notes a second through Rockman distortion. The Rockman was a little box that looked like a Sony Walkman and allowed you to play professional-ish guitar sounds through headphones or a stereo. It was developed by Tom Scholz, who was famous for his rock band Boston. “More Than a Feeling”!
The three of us had played a lot of funk together as a cover band, so that was naturally a big part of our sound, even though we all preferred English new-wave music and thoughtful almost-punk bands like Squeeze or Elvis Costello and the Attractions. At our gigs, always slightly insecure and wanting to keep the enthusiasm of the crowd up, we’d reflexively do what had worked as a cover band. We’d break into “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” when we worried our heartfelt songs had been boring everyone. Then, when we had safely blown the roof off the motherfucker, we’d shift back to a ballad like “Emaline.” It was probably a little confusing for the audience. But it’s always tough to debut earnest, unknown songs as a new band. It feels like you’re making everyone eat their spinach. You have to hold your own, stay strong, and deliver your songs until they stick. But we weren’t that kind of band.
Majosha could be described, as could most bands, as a failure. That is, we never “made it.” The band was probably doomed from the start—from the moment I chose that hideous name. We had heard “Majosha” was a Native American word for “penis” (as if there was only one Native American language). I highly doubt it’s a word for anything at all, and I’m not sure where we got that from, but maybe it gives further insight into how and what a young man creatively visualizes.
Majosha went through a few member changes (no pun intended), including the addition of Evan Olson, who was a total rock-star front man. We also went through a few drummers before settling on a fellow named Eddie Walker. I guess I kept creatively visualizing the wrong drummer? After eighteen months of regional weekend gigs, we were beginning to get some attention. Majosha’s self-released album, called Shut Up and Listen to Majosha, began receiving some airplay on college stations, and we even had some record-label interest.
Cover of the cassette version of Shut Up and Listen to Majosha—from L to R: Evan Olson, me, Eddie Walker, Millard Powers
But after all that hard work, and all the disappointments and successes, Majosha was growing in one direction, and my interests were growing in another. To put it bluntly, Majosha was at its best when we were rocking a drunken party, and I had higher aspirations.
And so I creatively visualized not being in that band anymore. I got sick of the whole thing and we were done.
WHERE OH WHERE IS MY VOICE?
I’ve Looked Everywhere and I Can’t Find It!
AS GOOD AS MAJOSHA WAS, I was no longer able to write songs for an almost-funk, almost-indie, almost-Southern party-rock band and keep a straight face. I didn’t want to feed my new songs to that beast anymore. The songs themselves were becoming the beast that needed to be fed. They had grown up faster than me, and I had to catch up. I still had to find my artistic voice.
By artistic voice, I’m referring to one’s artistic thumbprint—the idiosyncratic stuff that makes an artist unique. It’s not a precise science, and finding it is always a painful process. I think it has to be about subtraction. It’s not a matter of cooking up a persona or style so much as it is stripping away what’s covering up the essence, what was already there.
Sometimes it’s just growing out of the imitation phase. Most artists have a period where they sound like their favorite musician, and once they’ve learned from that they can shed that effort. Sometimes the subtraction is about casting off a misconception about how music is actually performed, or how art is made. No matter what your particular subtraction is, the artistic voice you will discover will ideally be something you haven’t seen or heard before. Because, miraculously, in a world with billions of people, you’re still the only you. That’s some cringeworthy self-affirmation shit right there, but it’s just the truth. That impossible search for the voice is, in the end, about being yourself. It’s self-honesty. And in those moments that the artistic voice shows its face, it’s hard to imagine what was so difficult about finding it.