Indigo Archives: 1981

Amy

Years ago, I came across an old high school love letter I had written for Emily-it was the days of unicorns and waxing in fledgling poetic phrases about the moon, calling out our high school on it’s failures, and our dreams of getting out there. But, it wasn’t a typical “love letter,” those were reserved for greasy Southern rock-boys and forgiving football stars. My love for Emily was a high school infatuation for something I wanted to be. I saw another, a year older than me, playing guitar, singing, writing music, connecting to something bigger than the confines of high school.

We met some time in 1974 across a lunch table in a cafeteria. I don’t really remember much except the playground and the cafeteria scenes-girls gathered around Emily while she played her guitar. Emily and I barely knew each other, that one-year gulf between kids in elementary school is a chasm of great proportions. I do remember thinking, as I listened from afar that music was the ultimate vehicle for communicating the underdog notions in my head.

It was the sheltered suburban south, we were coming out of the civil rights movement and things were still bad. I was barely aware of what was going on around me, but it seeped into my bones as I lay listening to my sister’s Woodstock records- Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane. By 1981 I was peeling the Reagan bumper sticker off my car, hanging out with the high school chorus and learning a James Taylor song with Emily called A Junkie’s Lament.

When we started playing music together, it was the most energizing force I had ever known.

I was already fueled by a new independence of thought and being, and music was a big part of it.

I played guitar on my own, sitting in my bedroom, at my church youth group meetings…but this new found bond over music with Emily was different from every high school rock band I had tried to form.

Most of the time, we got together in the basement of my house, across the street from our high school. School loomed large for me, the football field with it’s pep rally bon fires, the sounds of drill team, marching band, it was like a pressure tank in my heart -the sounds, the teams and clubs that I would try so hard to be part of. Nothing would ever feed me the way music did, nothing would bust through to who I really was. As soon as I felt the way our voices sounded together, I was inconsolable, except by the music we would make.

When we started playing together our practices had no real goal. For me, having time together to sing was the point, in and of itself. I mean we had small dreams, like playing for our mentor, Mr. Lloyd’s English class or doing an open-mic night, but the biggest and most intense feelings I had were in the that intimate space of a 1970’s ranch house basement- a pool table from Sears, a Panasonic tape recorder, and hours of learning cover tunes.

We can claim all our influences and they were varied and often opposite, but when you look at the songs we were learning, well, I guess something about them felt in reach for us. We couldn’t do Jackson Five or the Allman Brothers, but we could do Jackson Browne, Dan Fogelberg, James Taylor, and Carol King. It was the era of singer-songwriters who were emerging from the Summer of Love and moving into the slick production of 1980’s folk pop. Some of these writers would endure for us- Jackson, Carol, and James were something to aspire to. We talked about Joni Mitchell for hours, taking apart her lyrics and chord progressions. I couldn’t play all those fancy chords, but Emily could cop a Joni song easily. This difference between us is what helped to define us, and it helped us create our sound. I had a long slow learning curve and I just wanted to sing and play so badly that I didn’t have the patience to properly learn the guitar or work on my harmony singing. It was in me from church choir and camp town songs, but YMCA guitar lessons only went so far. I was satisfied to sing the melody and play the chords the way I knew how, so we approached the songs from two different sides. If I had to sing a harmony, then I thought of it as a melody, I voiced my chords differently, more simply from Emily. We sang counter melodies because they came easy to us and that’s how we could make the song more fun and dynamic. The first days of playing were just this urgent need to sing songs, sing anything, just to hear the sound of our two voices.

I taped everything we did. I made notes- I mean I noted everything happening in the room. There are only a few tapes that survived the years, but when I read the cassette covers and listen to them now, it’s enough to understand where we were at- the incessant talking and giggling between songs, the awkwardness of such a big catalyst entering our life, and the blend of two voices that feels as familiar today as it felt shockingly liberating in 1981.

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Emily

I am pictured sitting in the chorus room at Shamrock High School, most likely in late Spring,1981, as there is a yearbook to be signed, sitting on my lap.

Although we had met and been acquainted since we were 9 and 10 years old, Amy and I really only became friends when we both joined the chorus in high school. Being in the chorus together truly bonded us, as it was a chance for kids from different grades to hang out, and Amy and I were immediately and deeply simpatico. Shamrock had a very good choral program, and we worked hard as a choir, which set some of the stage for our diligence in practicing and arranging. something to which we still hold fast as IG’s after all these years.

Chorus was the springboard for our friendship and burgeoning musical path. And then A.P. English at Shamrock for me and Amy, with our dear teacher/mentor, Ellis Lloyd, further greased the wheels, as Ellis encouraged us to play for the class, and we had to know songs in order to play!

During 1980-81, Amy and I spent a lot of time in the basement of her house, listening to and learning songs endlessly. It was the most fun I had ever had, and we both wanted to include original songs in the mix. Early on, we loved James Taylor, and we used to write and speak Joni Mitchell quotes to each other, particularly from ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’. Amy turned me on to Jackson Browne, I can clearly remember. But it was original music that we really wanted to focus on, as time went by. We made a point to ‘sneak’ in original songs, while we were a ‘cover song’ bar band, both having fake i.d.’s and our parents’ encouragement to carry on. And it was the original songs that became the most gratifying.

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