• The Cerebellum Blues Story: Chapter Six, The Music Starts.

In preparation of my album launch, which should happen in May, 2011, I'm recapping how I got back into music. In this chapter:

The English Gardens / The music starts / Neurological notions

From 1991 to 1994 I lived in Munich, Germany, and sometime in 1993, after I had decided to return to the States, I was walking in Munich’s English Gardens and thought of an idea for a song. It was called People Change and the lyric forming in my head combined experiences I was having at the time with past experiences and imagined ones. I was deep in the Gardens when the idea first came to me, and so I walked with it for a good long time, turning it over in my head and mulling what it might sound like, as all around me breezes blew through trees, sunlight glinted off green grass and water flowed on my left, then right, then left again, as I navigated the paths alongside and in-between canals of Isar river water. I never finished the song. At one point, months later, I thought I had, but I had not.

In the years that followed, I worked on the song every now and then. I was convinced it had potential, but no matter how hard I tried, I just could not get the song to a point where I was satisfied with it. I would work on it, get nowhere, then head into a downward spiral, usually ending in a completely desperate feeling of engulfing sadness and despair (truly, I’m not exaggerating). In time, I let the song defeat me and started to think of it as yet one more reminder of why I should just give up on music once and for all. Music caused me too much frustration; to want to be good at it and yet never be able to reach a point where I thought I actually was, just drained me of enthusiasm for the stuff.  

But then there was this day, over ten years after that afternoon walk in the English Gardens — not too long after my brain injury, maybe a few months — when I was lying on the couch and noodling on my guitar, and I played the opening riff of that old song started so long ago, so far away. I played through the first verses and choruses and got the point I had always gotten to, a dead-end, a wall, and I... did not stop. I tried a few things and while I did not finish the song that day either, the process of trying to write a song felt different. Possibility was ever present, and I felt I could finally do it. Why would this be? I started to think about my brain injury and about what I had learned about the brain so far. I also thought about my situation (not working, thinking about more than just advertising for the first time in ages, allowing myself emotions beyond fear and apathy). I started to form a theory.

When you have an idea, research shows that it starts deep in your emotional, old reptilian brain and moves up into your new brain, which adds structure to your idea and thinks up ways to express it. My brain injury had not only damaged my old brain (the cerebellum is pretty primitive), but also it had disrupted the connections between the old brain and new. In other words, for better or worse, my brain processed inspiration differently from the way it had before. Also, I was in a deeply emotional state, so my old brain was intensely active. Combine it all, and I was someone in a highly emotional state whose brain had been changed in terms of how it processes emotions, transforms them into ideas and figures out how to express them.

Obviously, this could have gone two ways, one, where I lost some (or all) ability to transform emotions into specific ideas or two, where my ability was enhanced. I think I got “lucky”, and ended up with the latter, because after that first day of playing People Change for the first time in far too long, song ideas started to flood in and by the end of 2006, I had written/started probably 20 songs. For someone who hadn’t written a song in well over a decade, this seemed significant. In the coming years, I would ask several neurologists about my theory and while none agreed with it 100%, they all thought it made some sense.

People change. I was proof.

• The Cerebellum Blues Story: Chapter Five, Tremors.

In preparation of my album launch, which should happen in May, 2011, I'm recapping how I got back into music. In this chapter:

Tremors / Trying to find a reason to be hopeful / Hopes dashed / Noodling

I don’t remember the exact day — I’ve blocked it from memory — but maybe a month of so after my accident I felt a bolt go through me from feet to head right as I woke up. Or maybe a shiver is a better word. Or like a pang of guilt. Regardless, from that day on, I have struggled with Parkinson’s-like tremors from the waste up. At first, they hit hardest whenever I stood up, often forcing me to sit back down and try again. Over time, the tremors moved from my waste, where they would affect my entire upper body, up into my shoulders and neck, causing my head to shake from side-to-side, sometimes violently enough to send my glasses sailing. I hate it. It hurts.

With my brain injury repercussions now including vertigo, trouble walking, tremors, nausea, massive and frequent headaches, fatigue, depression, no appetite and a strong aversion to alcohol, I started to pester my main doctor for more diagnosis/treatment ideas. He was very frank with me, but somehow not discouraging (this would change), as he helped me work through ideas for getting better and consistently reminded me that new theories about the brain showed it to be plastic and that it could recover from injuries far worse than mine. Whether he believed what he was telling me or not, his enthusiasm gave me hope and when you have a life-changing injury, hope is the strongest medicine.

My dad was also eager to help with ideas for how I might get better, too, and phoned up a very rich, very connected friend of his, who was able to get me an appointment with one the nation’s top neurologists. Surely, this guy would be able to diagnose me and put together a treatment plan that would have me well in no time, right? Hah. When Catherine and I (plus her parents, who were visiting from the east coast to help out) arrived at UCSF to see this dude,  I was a wreck. The date was 4/10/2006, so I was still really struggling with the effects of my brain injury and even though there as a promise of help at hand, I just wanted to go back home and go to bed. I truly can’t put into words how physically bad I felt, but awful will do. Soon it would be a whole lot worse.

The doctor put me through the standard battery of brain injury tests (touching my right finger to my nose, now my left, tracking the doctor’s finger, performing a grip test, etc.). The final test was to have me walk down the hall, which I desperately did not want to, then turn around and walk back. The relief of being able to sit back down after this was immense. Then the doctor delivered his diagnosis: I was lucky not to be worse off and I would most likely not get any better. I would be told something similar later on, but at this point, I was still, I think, somewhat in shock from the injury itself and I don’t remember feeling as defeated as such a diagnosis should have made me feel. I don’t know, I was just happy for the appointment to be over and to be heading home and back to bed.

After UCSF, we were all down. But not out. More queries to my doctor encouraged me to try acupuncture, yoga (not right away!) and even massage (my neck muscles were killing me thanks to all my tremors). Would these things cure me? No, but they would do no harm, so why not? But first, physical therapy. My sessions started on 4/13/2006 and were originally scheduled to go for three months but ended up going for about six. The focus was gait training, and I would spend most of my hour-long sessions walking on a treadmill and being observed by the therapist. I was fitted with a safety harness (good call) and in time graduated to other kinds of exercises, the best of which was Dance Dance Revolution, a stroke of genius by my therapist.
PT was a big time commitment, and my parents and Catherine shared driving duties for my three-times-a-week sessions, which tapered off to once a week by September.

By May, I was still feeling mostly awful most of the time, but I was well enough to be going for regular walks and spending more time on the couch than in bed during the day and to pass the time, I started to read a lot, plus noodle more and more on my guitar. The noodling was like it had always been — a few chords, some riffs, some licks — and I thought very little about it. I would noodle for a bit, get bored or sick or both and then stop. Nothing obvious seemed to have changed, really. I still had mostly lousy timing, I still hit more wrong notes than right and I still didn’t have a lot of ideas for songs. If the future was going to be different for me musically, it was going to be news to me. Good news, as it turned out.

• The Cerebellum Blues Story: Chapter Four, Waking Up to Reality (sort of).

In preparation of my album launch, which should happen in May, 2011, I'm recapping how I got back into music. In this chapter:

The future is no longer the future / Staying put / Starting therapy / A visit to the office / I am NOT disabled, damnit

After my first two post-accident appointments with my regular doctor, I had a clear idea of what had happened to me and why. No longer did I think I had suffered a minor injury that would heal in a few weeks or maybe a month. Instead, I was fully aware of why my brain injury was called a severe traumatic one, and why Catherine and I had to possibly accept that whatever future we had been planning for no longer existed.

Oddly, I was not too stressed about it all. I had good health insurance and plenty of unused vacation, and I worked for a company that still had some old-school attitudes toward employees who had suffered some sort of set-back. In addition, by sheer chance, I had disability insurance that I could maybe use if things truly were as bad as they seemed to be. I had a safety net, right?

And so Catherine and I started to settle into a new life. No longer was I getting up and heading off to work every day while she stayed home and pursued her budding food writing career. Instead, I was mostly sleeping while Catherine handled countless calls and paperwork with doctors and insurance and my employer, who needed to know what was going on in order to make sure I could take full advantage of my benefits. She also fed me and bathed me and helped to keep my spirits up by simply being there for me. Needless to say, we completely abandoned our hunt for a new apartment.

In those early days, I was too out of it and Catherine too overwhelmed for either of us to be doing much exploration around ways for me to get better, so we simply heeded my doctors’ advice, which, sadly, did not amount to much. Not that I had bad doctors, it’s just that there’s very little you can do for brain injury victims. The main therapies suggested to me were physical therapy to address my walking difficulties and pyschotherapy to address my growing depression. I started both of these a few months after my accident and a routine developed in which I would get up most mornings around 10 or 11, go to whatever doctor or therapy appointment was scheduled, then come home and go to bed between six or seven. My parents were very helpful, driving me to from several appointments, but mostly Catherine was my everything. In time, we added movies to our schedule, heading off to the theater whenever I felt up to it, and we started going on a lot of walks together, which often ended with me getting sick, especially if I made the mistake of looking up.

Given all that had happened to me — life threatening brain injury (about 40% of those who suffer the kind of brain injury I suffered die), possible loss of career, motor control damage in my brain extensive enough to make it nearly impossible for me to walk unaided, etc. — it was a good idea to just take a step back and focus on my recovery, which I was doing. But old habits die hard and as I improved, I spent a bit more time checking work email and fretting about all that I was missing. I even went into the office a few times, and I could tell by he way people looked at me that I was in a bad way.

Call it stubbornness or maybe idiocy, but despite my condition, I was still fully expecting to go back to work. I just could not imagine any other future and was working hard in my mind to rationalize why going back into a career that had ultimately made me very unhappy made perfect sense. The plan was to stay home for six months in order to make sure I would qualify for my disability insurance should l I need it — actually, it was doctor's orders — but at the six month mark, I was going to return no matter what. In fact, when the time came, I remember working hard to convince my doctor I was good to go; he relented and approved me for 30 hours a week (or maybe it was only 20, can’t recall). But he was not enthusiastic and encouraged me to go on full disability, but I just could not accept that I was disabled. Sure, I was in bad shape, but I wasn't missing any limbs, I didn't seem to have any cognitive issues, I could walk pretty well, albeit with a cane, no, I was not disabled. And I was going to be better soon, I was sure of it.

Next up: casting for hope.

• The Cerebellum Blues Story, Chapter Three: What Happened to My Brain?

In preparation of my album launch, which should happen in May, 2011, I'm recapping how I got back into music. In this chapter: 

My regular doctor tells me the cold, hard truth / Early thoughts of disability / A changed outlook

When I was in the hospital, the doctors told me what had happened to me, but I couldn’t really process it and neither could Catherine. It was all too new and too filled with words like syncope, occipital, hematoma, ataxia, bradycardia... And we were scared and maybe didn’t want to know everything right then and there. But after being home for about a week, I had a couple of near back-to-back appointments with my regular doctor, who knew quite a bit about head injuries and was very frank—even blunt—with me. Here is a brief summary of what he told me.

He said that I had most likely fainted as a result of a combination of factors: being a little older, having to pee at night and being a man. To explain: like women, men sleep lying down; unlike women, they pee standing up. So at night, if you’re a guy and you gotta go, you will stumble off to the toilet and stand before it to do your business. This is bad for because (A) you are already a little lightheaded from having just stood up, (B) your body is secreting an internal chemical to relax you so you can go to the bathroom and (C) you are surrounded by hard surfaces. In younger guys, none of this is really a problem, but if you’re over 40, as I was when I had my accident, these things matter, because the chemical your body releases to relax you can be enough to cause you to lose consciousness. And then those tile surfaces come into play.

When I fainted, I collapsed down and then back into the tile wall, shattering a small part of the back of my skull (the occipital bone) and then bounced forward hard enough to cause a mild whiplash. This would have been pretty bad, but then I fell again, after trying to stand, and the absolute worst thing that can happen if you have just suffered a head injury is to hit your head again.

So, the initial fall had caused some bruising on my cerebellum (hematoma), killing some cerebellar brain cells near the point of impact and stunning other cells in both in the front and back of my brain as it slopped around against my skull, while the second fall stunned even more frontal and rear brain cells. I was dizzy and struggled to walk because the cerebellum’s main function is thought to be motor control.

My doctor went on to explain that the healing process after a brain injury happened in stages, with the first three months seeing the most rapid healing, as stunned cells “woke up”, and slowing as fewer of the stunned cells came back to life. Dead cells tell no tales, so they were gone for good. Parallel to all this activity, my brain was just starting to get busy reassigning the functions of damaged and dead cells to healthy ones. This process is known as neuroplasticity and was very recently thought to be a crock. Instead, the prevailing wisdom was that the brain was mapped and certain parts did certain things and if you lost a part, whatever it did you weren’t going to be doing again. Now, of course, this is seen as a total load (thankfully!), so I was in luck. I would get better, no question. Sadly, the part of the brain that coordinates the reassignment of brain function is, you guessed it, the cerebellum. Given all this, my doctor figured I would most likely recover, but not 100%. When I asked him how long he thought my recovery could take, he said he didn’t know but guessed it would be years.

After those appointments, I started to finally understand why they classified my brain trauma as severe, why they had kept me in the hospital for so long and why I was having so many problems. Still, it was just so tough to accept that I was essentially brain damaged, even though I could think clearly and had no visible physical injuries, and would have to possibly go on disability. It just didn’t seem to be possible that I could really be all that bad off. But I was. And the coming months and years would prove it.

• The Cerebellum Blues Story, Chapter Two: Back Home.

In preparation of my album launch, which should happen in May, 2011, I'm recapping how I got back into music. In this chapter:

The world’s greatest nurse / Oranges and yogurt / The upside down bath / Work? / The questions begin

When I arrived back home (in photo) on February 1, 2006, the thing I remember most was crawling into my own bed and hoping to instantly feel better after seven days in a hospital bed — and not. And why should I have? Nothing had changed: I was still dizzy, still nauseated, still wracked by near constant migraines and still mostly immobile, as I was unable to walk anywhere without Catherine helping to hold me upright. She held me every single time I had to get up, guiding me to the couch in the living room when I felt up to it, guiding me to the bathroom morning, noon, night and middle of the night, guiding me really anywhere and everywhere I needed to go within the confines of our small apartment. She made sure I had my trashcan next to me at all times and cleaned it regularly and cleaned up after me when I missed. She brought me food, shopped for the only thing I could eat and hold down, which was oranges in strawberry yogurt, as well as the only nourishment I could stand when I couldn’t eat, Ensure. She managed a mountain of paperwork, given all the insurance claims that had to be processed. And she bathed me most every day with a sponge bath, as I simply could not stand in the shower. Even sitting in the tub I had problems, because it was very hard for me to dunk my head in order to rinse out the shampoo. The experience was so vertigo-inducing, I once opened my eyes afterward and saw that I was upside down. Truly, somehow, the room had flipped and the bathtub was on the ceiling and everything stayed that way for several seconds, until I told myself that what I was seeing was impossible and the room righted itself.

Despite the fact that being home did not cure me of all my ills, it was heaven compared to the hospital, where I was connected to an I.V. and woken up every two hours by nurses, who were either checking on me or whoever else was occupying the room with me. If you’ve never gone through this, you can’t imagine how fatiguing it is, as you never enjoy deep sleep for more than about an hour at a stretch. And the smells. Chemical and human, it’s a nose-e-ating. But as bad as it was for me, it had to be worse for Catherine, as she was fully conscious and aware of everything and slept less than I did, leaving only on occasion to run home for a shower.

A few days after I got home, I was visited by one of the hospital’s physical therapists, who fixed me up with a cane, to be used on the day I would walk un-assisted again and then worked with Catherine to organize my physical therapy routine, which was determined should start in about two months.

Throughout all this I thought very little about work. At the time of my accident, I was what’s known in the ad trade as an executive creative director (ECD), and oversaw, along with my co-ECD partner, a group of about 15 or 20 art directors and copywriters within an agency of roughly 170 people. My job was to guide the creative work of my team for existing clients and prospective clients, as well as manage the team, lead new business pitches, come up with creative and strategic ideas, write headlines and body copy, and help manage the agency as a whole. In other words, I thought about advertising 24/7. I mean, you could be talking to me about virtually any topic under the sun and chances were near 100% that in the back of my mind I was thinking about a headline or a tagline or a strategy or pitch or an employee issue or an agency issue or an ad I’d just seen or how to make some copy a little shorter or how to think up one more headline so we would have three and thus a campaign or what my boss thought of me or me staff thought of me or... Post-accident, I hardly thought about work at all. This period of mental quietude lasted for only a month or two, but in my world, that was forever. In fact, I’d say that those few months right after my accident were the longest I had gone in over a decade without obsessing about advertising at least 90% of my waking hours. It was immensely freeing. I also started dreaming again, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I starting remembering my dreams. Before the accident, the only dreams I seemed to remember were nightmares involving advertising. Afterwards, I remembered dreams about all kinds of stuff, mostly quite freaky, but not nightmarish.

Without advertising to obsess over and with virtually no ability to do much of anything physically or mentally taxing, how did I pass the time? I slept. I must have slept on average about 18 hours for every 24. I hated being awake, it felt so awful to be aware of being me, what with the vertigo, nausea and constant migraines. I craved sleep to escape. And though I gave the impression of being depressed, I don’t remember feeling that down at first. Truth be told, I was enjoying being freed from the yoke of advertising; but more important, the doctors had given me the impression in the hospital that I would be fine in a few weeks and the doctor knows best, right? How could I have been so foolish? Every day I woke up feeling pretty much just as bad as I had the day before, sometimes a lot worse, never much better. In a follow-up appointment with my regular doctor, he finally told it to me straight. He said it could be awhile. I asked how long, he said months for sure, but most likely years. And it occurred to me that while I had heard the words used to describe my injury, I had not understood them. I started asking a lot of questions.

Next: So what the hell happened to me?

• The Cerebellum Blues Story, Chapter One: The Accident.

The end should start with the beginning. 
So in preparation of my album launch, which should happen in May, 2011, I'm recapping how I got back into music, starting with the night of my brain injury.

When I awoke in the post midnight hours of January 27, 2006, with my head wedged between a toilet and a wall, I was glad for the toilet, because I had to throw up. Several times. It must have been the food, I thought. Catherine and I had been to a tasting event at the California Culinary Academy, and I had grazed on many a partially cooked morsel, several of which were fish and had been out long enough to change color a little. As I loudly vomited, I was embarrassed and worried, because I was positive I was making a pretty bad impression on my new neighbors. “They must think the guy who just moved in upstairs is a drunk,” I mused. When I finally felt well enough to head back to the bedroom, I stood up, which was oddly difficult, fell again, then made for the bed, figuring if I could just get back to it and get to sleep, I’d feel fine in the morning.

WHAT? As I entered the bedroom, Catherine sat up in the bed, and I was so stunned to see her I fell yet again. She was supposed to be back at our old apartment (in photo), while I was moving some stuff into our new one. What was she doing here? I hit the ground like a magnet would hit an iron floor, it seemed to pull me down, and I remember being glad, but confused, that it was carpeted. Our old place had carpet, but the new place was hardwood throughout. What was going on? Catherine got up out of the bed and was about to check on me when she saw the bathroom. It looked like there had been a zombie fight with chunky, red stuff everywhere. “What happened, are you okay, why are you bleeding?” My answers made no sense and she got scared, finally calling 911 as I begged her not to. I was convinced that if I could just make it to the bed...

The paramedics showed up pretty quickly, asked me questions about calendar dates, drugs and drinking, and then got ready to take me to the hospital. I did not want to go, but I at least figured they would give me something to make me feel better. I was also wondering how they were going to get me down the stairs. By now, I had figured out that I was actually in our old apartment (we had signed the lease on a new one earlier that day, but not moved in yet, which was one reason for my confusion) and I was dreading the trip down the two flights of metal and concrete stairs that led to the lobby of our elevator-less building. Where was the high tech contraption they would be transporting me with? I got my answer as they strapped me to some kind of plastic chair, picked me up, put a plastic bowl in my hands just in case, and huffed and wheezed me down to the ambulance. “Lame,” I thought. “Well, I bet the ambulance is cool.”

Catherine road shotgun, and we arrived at the hospital where I knew, just knew, I would be given something to make me feel better. Truly, I had never felt worse in my entire life, and I was ready for whatever they wanted to give me. But first there was a transfer to a gurney, then a CT scan, and countless questions throughout. Catherine was right there for all of it and hours passed before they finally gave me anything. I think it was Ativan, which turned out to be the only drug that would make me feel better for months to come.

I was put in a two-person room. Catherine made a corner chair her home for the next six days and kept the nursing staff on their toes, double checking their drug dosages, catching their errors and generally keeping them on their toes. When the doctors gave me their diagnosis, they had had considerable debate about why I had fainted. There was concern of drug use because of some chemicals present in my blood that indicated I had been taking something recently popular in the Mission, but Catherine and I convinced them I had not. With that cleared up (mostly, I'm not sure they totally believed me) they opted to describe the cause of my fainting as vasovagal syncope and got into the damage report: a fracture of my occipital bone, which resulted in a hematoma on the cerebellum and some other stuff, which altogether earned the classification of severe taumatic brain injury. Despite my seemingly dire situation, they gave me the impression that I would be fine in a few weeks (there was a skiing trip I was planning and they assured me I’d be able to go). During the rest of my stay, some friends visited, for which I was very, very grateful, but mostly I slept and had strange dreams. I remember one that was so vivid yet so fantastical that as I woke as I was frantically trying to find a newspaper to bring back from this place I had been catapulted to (it was an island, but double decker, and you got to it by being catapulted across a fair stretch of ocean). 

Early in my hospital stay I was a little concerned about my appearance (I was wearing a neck brace and dressed in nothing but a smock) and about constantly having to throw up into cups held in place by others, and having to pee into little jugs, also held by others, as I could not stand, but in time I didn’t care. I was just so grateful that people were willing to help someone so bad off. As my hospital visit progressed, I was asked to try to walk, to navigate some stairs, to use the bathroom on my own, and once I could do all these things, they were ready to release me on one condition: that Catherine would be able to provide 24/7 care. She didn’t think twice and I was discharged on 2/1/2006. My parents, who had been visiting regularly picked my up, and the only walking I had to do was from the wheel chair to the car, with Catherine making sure I stayed upright. If I remember right, it was raining.

The drive home was quick, as we lived just down the street from the hospital, and in 10 minutes or so I was home. Climbing the stairs to our second story apartment took forever, but I finally made it to my bed. I would barely leave it for weeks.

• Let the countdown begin. Sort of. And a huge thank you to Julie Michelle for profiling me on I Live Here SF.

Yesterday, I exchanged emails with Jaimeson Durr, the ace engineer I’ve been working with for over four years on my album, and he and I figured May is when it will be ready. I’m going to go ahead and have a little faith that this is actually true and start posting about the key events that have led to my making an album, starting with my brain injury back in 2006. The first post should be up in a few days.

In the meantime, please visit I Live Here SF, a site I am honored in a huge way to be a part of. The site is run by Julie Michelle, a San Francisco photographer and writer — and hugely nice person. Check out her photos/writings here. Thank you, Julie, for profiling me!

• Memories of a rock and roller -- with a stroller.

A few nights ago, I drove from SF to Mountain View to see a bar band. But not just any bar band, this was Three Chord Monty, which counts among its members Tom Thiemann (left in photo) and Cory Verbin (right), two people I used to be in a bar band with long ago, around 1988, to be exact. Watching them rock out felt so... familiar. In fact, the whole night was deja vu all over again.

The band Tom, Cory and I were in was called The Distractions and during our reign I lived in SF, but we rehearsed in Mountain View, so last night, starting with the drive down, I was on an old, well-traveled road. The exit to Francesca’s, the bar TCM played at, was close to the exit for our old rehearsal space. Francesca’s itself was a bit a of a dive, but not too bad, a lot like Route 66, which was the Distractions’ preferred venue. And once TCM got rolling, there were a few too-drunk dancers getting a little too excited and generally being annoying but completely harmless to the other, more sober (slightly!) dancers. We had one at every gig, too.

What defines a solid bar band (which TCM most definitely is)? It’s the sound. A good bar band pumps out a loose, slightly sloppy groove that is, in all its imperfections, perfection in itself. If you’re too good as a bar band, it’s distracting. If you suck too hard, it’s distracting. You have to be Goldlilocks in your chops, which means you’re approachable to the crowd and not above them in any way, but not disrespectful either of their desire to have a good time.

TCM was just right indeed, with Tom’s swaggering vocals, chatter and mugging, all backed by Cory’s Stonesy guitar work and the other member’s utterly unpretentious stage presence. And though a younger person might look at TCM and see a bunch of well-over 40-something men trying desperately to relive their youth, well, young people don’t know shit. It was just some guys doing what they’ve probably done since they were teens and didn’t have kids and mortgages and jobs: just playing some rock and roll and loving it.

Rock on Cory and Tom. And let me join you onstage next time!

• I’m fooling myself. The album is officially on hold for, um, awhile.

Parenthood has caught me by surprise, I can’t deny it. I knew it would be demanding, but I had no idea just how demanding it would truly be, and as a result, I am finally accepting the undeniable fact that my album is not merely delayed — it’s on hold. Maybe for a month, maybe two, maybe more. Yes, the music is 95% done, but there’s so much more to do, including album design, copyright registration, ASCAP registration, the process of making my web presences consistent and on and on. Oh, and I need to put some sort of PR strategy in place. Meanwhile, there are two little girls whose entire lives are ahead of them, and I will be damned if they start those lives with me focusing more on my album than on them. I would regret that for all time. In fact, I already regret feeling a little peeved at times because I’ve had to stop whatever musical thing I was doing in order to change a diaper or adjust a pacifier or prepare a bottle. And that’s just not right. These girls are going to be infants for only a flash of time and I can’t be dividing my time between them and something that can wait. Besides, I’ve been working on my album for nearly four years, what’s another month or even year?

I will continue to post to this blog, so I hope my few (and highly treasured) readers stay with me. And the album will come out. But the girls come first. And work, which I haven’t written about much, now matters more than ever. I’m not full-time (yet), but I’m working toward that and hope my brain cooperates. So, in effect, music is now third on my to do list. But it’s still on the list!

• Coming face-to-face with a good critic.

If you’ve ever pursued any sort of craft or art in your life, you probably want other people to like what you do. Or maybe you don’t care, and I shouldn’t assume such things. But me, well, wow, I want people to think my stuff is the greatest thing ever and when it’s not — when it falls short even by just a tiny bit — I fall apart inside. Outside, I sweat. Really, you know when I’ve been emotionally crushed by the flushness of my face and beads of perspiration forming on my brow. It’s a physical upwelling of self doubt.

So, last night, as I headed out to a songscreening being put on by West Coast Songwriters (WCS) there was a little knot of worry starting to form, because I was bringing a song I had high hopes for. When I arrived, the room was much more crowded than usual and I took a seat in the back. I figured that if I did melt down, I wanted to be far enough away no one would notice, especially the woman screening the songs.

Her name was Judy Stakee and her resume was impressive, boasting over 30 years as a music industry pro, the last 20 of which were as Senior VP of Creative at Warner Chappell Music, where she oversaw both a staff of in-house songwriters and a stable of artists. Her reputation, according to WCS, is that of a consummate believer in the power of a good song. I HAD to know what she thought of my stuff.

I was number 15 on the list, so I had sit through a lot of songs before she got to mine. Along the way, I found myself agreeing with her as she rejected song after song, and I confess, I was smugly confident that when she got to mine, she’d change her tune, so to speak. Me break out into an embarrassing sweat? Nope, wasn’t gonna happen. I even kept my sweatshirt on.

Big mistake. As she explained that my song was faceless because it said nothing about the people in it, just their situation, I puddled. Outwardly, save for the deluge, I kept my cool (ha) — meaning I didn’t start crying or anything — but inwardly I simply hollowed out. Then she delivered the coup de grace: a flippant “It’s nice.”

Now I know that if I let myself fall prey to every criticism I will never develop and get better — or finish my album — but when I hear something I agree with, and I agreed with her critique, well, I don’t see the problem with accepting it and working with it.

And that’s what I’m doing. In fact, the minute I got home I wanted to set to work fixing the lyrics, but the babies were melting down, Catherine was at the end and everyone was starving. So I did my very best to simply focus more on the people in my life — just like I need to do in my songs — and helped get the babies fed and dinner on the table.

First thing I did on waking up? Starting re-working the song. I’m making good progress.

• Please pardon the dust while I do a little construction in prep for my album.

This coming week, on March 17, I will have my final mix day at Hyde Street for my album, and so I should have something available soon after that (maybe a few weeks, since I need to master the tracks). As longtime readers of this blog know, i have tortured myself over what name to promote my songs under. Should it be my name, a made up name, a band name, what? In the end, i have opted to call what i am up to Cerebellum Blues and I think of it as a project name more than anything else. As a result of this final name choice, I have rejiggered all my web properties to reflect it, and will re-launch everything when content is available (namely, fully produced and mastered tracks).

• The trouble with drugs.

Ever since I suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in 2006, I’ve resisted taking any daily drugs. Every drug has side effects -- noticeable side effects -- and I was wary of them. Also, drugs mask recovery. How much better are you truly getting if drugs are keeping you from feeling how you really feel?

But about a month ago, I finally gave in. I’d been having near daily migraines; worse, my twitchy movements had simply become borderline unbearable. I was so tired of stuttering and shaking my head and making weird, grimacing mouth motions when talking to people I wasn’t completely comfortable around (stress, etc. aggravated my condition). And my damn neck hurt. All the physical, Parkinson’s-like moments really tighten up my neck and shoulder muscles, which, for all I know, was making my headaches more frequent.

The neurologist I called runs a headache clinic here in SF and after examining me he suggested Klonopin. I was at wits' end and said, “fine”. At first, it was great. I hardly noticed the side effects, my headaches stopped (mostly) and my twitchy tendencies faded, not completely, but enough to notice. And so I’m thinking, hey, this drug stuff is pretty good.

Then the headaches started again, as bad as ever, and although the twitchies stayed somewhat muted, they worsened a bit, too. Who the hell knows why. I called the doc and, you guessed it, he suggested adding another drug. This one is known as a beta-blocker and is considered to be an ideal first-line defense against migraines. So I’m on that now. And the headaches are gone and the twitchies are reduced... and that’s the trouble with drugs. First off, maybe I would have gotten better anyway. Second, where does it stop? I am NOT going to become a person with a medicine cabinet that could challenge Walgreen’s for selection.

My plan: give everything another month or so, then start weening myself and see what happens. The kids will be sleeping more, so I should be getting better rest and be better prepared to deal with whatever withdrawal discomforts come my way.

Oh, for life without brain injury. And Keith Richards’ constitution.

• Is music a public good? Private? Rival? Non-rival? Excludable? Enough, you academaniacs!

As I surf from music blog to music blog, one of the (few) things that really, truly, deeply get my goat (what does that mean, anyway????) is when music folk make arguments for and against free music by trotting out economics esoterica. I mean, economics is as much art as science, so using it to draw supposedly irrefutable conclusions is a fool’s game. Regardless, time and time again, in debates about music piracy on blogs such as Hypebot you will see the expression that music is a “public good”. Let’s look at what this phrase means.

(From Wikipedia) “In economics, a public good is a good that is nonrival and non-excludable. Non-rivalry means that consumption of the good by one individual does not reduce availability of the good for consumption by others (MP3s!); and non-excludability means that no one can be effectively excluded from using the good. In the real world, there may be no such thing as an absolutely non-rivaled and non-excludable good; but economists think that some goods approximate the concept closely enough for the analysis to be economically useful.”

Overall, I would agree that music is non-rival but I’m not so sure it qualifies as non-excludable (in other words, I do think copyright law could be enforced to the point where music would be more protected than not). More important, I COMPLETELY agree with this sentence from a book I’m reading called called “Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations”, by David Warsh: “Rival goods are objects and non-rival goods are ideas...”

To me, Warsh’s sentance brings it all home and the question we as a society should ask ourselves is whether ideas should be allowed to be owned by individuals and companies and whether the owners should have a say in who else can benefit from the ideas. To me, the answer is absofuckinglutely. To do otherwise would be to remove all personal incentive to create ideas and this would be catastrophic. Don’t believe me? Look at the former U.S.S.R. and name ten killer, world-beating-holy-cow ideas that came out of that place. Now try the same exercise with the U.S.

Bottom line: songs are ideas and if we as a society choose not to let individuals profit from their ideas, it will be our loss as a society. Now, if individuals want to give their ideas away, fine, I am not for a moment saying that no one should be allowed to give away his music, but I am saying that no one should be forced to. And the onus is on our society to figure how to protect ideas no matter how easy they are to copy.

Stepping off me pedestal...

• Announcing the worldwide premiere of Welcome to the World!

(I posted this once before, but thought I'd post it one more time!)

I had planned a longer post about this song, but there's just not time! Here's the short story: it was a few months before Amelia and Avalon squalled their arrival to all in attendance, and I was thinking to myself how lame to not have a song for them. And a few days later, the phrase "welcome to the world" popped into my brain and started writing lyrics. But what to say? I mean, the WORLD? It's kinda hard to describe. So I went back in time to when the world was simpler and thought to be made of earth, air, water and fire and grabbed The Maton (all hail!) and a few hours later had the song in time for the birth. I did not have time record it, though, until after the girls showed up, so I had to sing it acapella in the nursery. But now I have a proper version! This one is for Amelia and Avalon. Hope they -- and you -- like it.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD 

Say hello to the mountains reaching to the sky
Say hello to the valleys stretching far and wide
Say hello to the trees home to all the squirrels
Say hello to everything and welcome to the world

Say hello to the rivers, and lakes and streams
Say hello to the oceans deeper than your dreams
Say hello to the oyster who hides a pearl
Say hello to everything and welcome to the world

Say hello to the breezes cool and warm
Say hello to the howl of a winter storm
Say hello the birds as their feathers unfurl
Say hello to everything and welcome to the world

Say hello to sunlight from so far away
Say hello to fireflies at the end of the day
Say hello to everything my two little girls
Say hello to mom and dad and welcome to the world


• To be or to not be a product? That is NOT the question for music.

I recently read a post on Hypebot titled News Flash: Your Music Is Not Your Product that inspired a post of my own, one in which I wholly disagreed with the Hypebot piece, but I still have more to say. Dammit!

My main beef is with the Hypebot article’s weak argument for why music is not a product, which is kicked off with this paragraph:

“When a label executive tells you that they are "not in the business of selling discs", (or vinyl, tape, t-shirts, etc.) and that they are actually "selling music," they are, at best, fooling themselves, or at worst, lying to your face. Moving plastic, vinyl, paper and/or any other tangible good they can dream up is exactly what the recording industry has been about since it was established.”

Based on this argument, software is not a product (Adobe moves CDs, right?), movies are not a product, hell, any sort of content is not a product based on this argument, right? You buy a CD, it’s the plastic your purchasing. You buy Photoshop, again, it’s the plastic. You buy Time magazine? You’re just buying paper. Please.

What the article should have argued is that content producers, which is what musicians are, should realize that content does not have to be their only product. In fact, it might not even be the product they charge money for. Maybe it’s what attracts people to the live show. Maybe it’s just something to listen to while watching a video. Maybe it’s the basis of a political effort. Regardless, it’s still a product, just not the only product, or thing you produce.

But I think most musicians know this and always have, which is why all throughout music business history (at least in pop music) the music has only been part of the equation. Think about Elvis and his movies, the Beatles and theirs, the Monkees. Or think about Bowie and Madonna and the way they re-invented themselves to stay relevant and in the public consciousness. Think about KISS. Most common, think about all the merchandise (and the outrageous prices being charged for it) at every concert you’ve ever attended.

Nowadays, everyone refers to artists as brands, and just as the Ivory soap brand probably couldn’t be extended to industrial solvents, a folk band probably won’t be able to extend its brand into deathcore. But in both cases, at the core of the brand is a product that can be distributed and monetized in more ways than one.

All of which is a little ironic, because the Hypebot article actually expresses this point about it all being more than just about the music, as it argues that musicians should sell an “experience” (yet another word for brand or image).

To me, what it all comes down to is this: people buy people. If all you’ve got is music and no personality behind it, you will most likely never sell a thing (which is fine, so long as you’re not trying to sell anything!).

Next up, I’m going to take on copyright and public vs. private goods, but I gotta do some more reading. Stay tuned!

The sad state of debate around music as a commercially viable thing.

The other day, I came across an article on Hypebot titled News Flash: Your Music Is Not Your Product. You should click over and read it and then read the comments, but here’s how the article starts:

“I'm tired.
I'm tired of having the same conversation over and over again.
The conversation about how we should go about dealing with "thieves" and "pirates" "stealing" our "product" like so many shoplifters. I'm just gonna say it.
It's absurd.
Music is not, and never was, a product.”

I thought the article would go on to talk how YOU are your product and you are a brand and blah, blah, blah, which is what everybody says these days. (Actually, I think this is true, to a point). Instead, it says your product is an experience and music is not, has not, and never will be a product. It’s a service (how this is different from an experience, I’m not really sure).

When I was done with the article, I read a lot of the comments, and commenter and after commenter lauded the article and tried to expand on the idea that music is not a product. They trotted out a lot of economics esoterica about “public goods” and “scarcity”. As I read the comments, I was at first stunned (I thought they would be negative), but then I thought back on all the blog articles I've seen out there about what music should cost and can it be stolen, etc., and I realized that such comments are exactly what I should have expected.

And in my opinion, this article, the comments and just about every other article I've read on this subject all miss what really matters, which is the fact that what you buy when you by music is clearly defined: you buy a right to listen to music under a limited set of circumstances.  There's no (worthwhile) debate about this. Truly, look it up folks! Copyright.

Further, if you copy and distribute music without the permission of the copyright holder, you’re very likely breaking the law. 

So, what should the debate be about? Easy: it should be about whether or not copyright law should be changed and what punishment, if any, should there be if you break it.

All this blather about whether music is a product or a service, whether it’s being devalued, whether it should sell for x or y, it’s all blather. Decide on copyright law, then worry about the rest.

Harumph.

PS - Jeff Macdougall, the guy who wrote the article I'm referencing deserves a TON of kudos for responding to so many of the comments -- even the meanspirited, negative ones -- with grace and style.

The last mix day.

On Thursday of last week, as a late afternoon rain fell across San Francisco, I drove over to Hyde Street Studio C to check out the final mix of the final song for my first album, a project I started as 2006 faded into 2007 — and my severe traumatic brain injury was barely a year old. I stopped at a favorite coffee shop on the way, and while waiting for my espresso, Jaime Durr, the engineer I’ve been working with since day one of the project, texted me to say he needed another hour. And so, to pass the time, I did what I have done on so many occasions in so many cafes over the past few years: I worked on some lyrics. The hour vanished in what seemed like minutes, and I was on my way.

The mix sounded great, as I knew it would (Jaime is aces and I have the best musicians this side of Saturn helping me), so all we had to do was make a few tweaks and we were done. Sort of. Truth be told, there are several more hours of mixing tweaks to be finished up, but we’re done in that the rest of the process is just a checklist. Jaime figures he’ll have everything ready for mastering in about a week.

Given the low stress nature of the session, we talked a lot. Jaime showed me some photos and video of the Chickenfoot project he’s been working on with Michael Anthony, Chad Smith, Joe Satriani and Sammy Hagar. We reminisced a bit on how long my project had taken and the twists and turns along the way. We spent a little time on a few other tunes, songs that will be on later albums. And suddenly it was seven o’clock and I had to go.

I walked out of Hyde Street into the rain that was still falling, got in my car and headed home. I was far more reflective than elated. When I started this project, I was naive, I admit that.  Or maybe I was just caught up in the moment. MySpace was rolling, Facebook was opening up to non-college folks, iTunes was becoming the new Tower, and everywhere was the sense of possibility, possibility that an independent, DIY musician like me could get his music to the masses and maybe have some success without having to be signed by a label first. Gone were the days when the gate keepers at major labels manned their velvet ropes and who got in was a mix of stuff that made sense and stuff that did not. But one thing hadn’t changed, will never change, and that is that the music business cannot be breached with talent alone. No... blood, sweat, tears and luck all remain at the top of the criteria pantheon and with my inability to give my project my all in a concentrated amount of time, well, the odds were against me.

Further, in 2006 it wasn’t simply that the music business had changed, it was that it was changing and still is. Faster and faster. I’ve struggled to keep up, I’ve been reading Hypebot, The Lefsetz Letter and countless other blogs, but it’s hopeless. And even if I were to wake up one Monday morning and have it all figured out, no matter, by Tuesday, I would once again be behind.

The imminence of becoming a parent finally got me focused on all that truly mattered: the music. Starting around September of 2010, I dug in, I got organized, I finally picked the songs that would be on the album and set to finishing them, making them as good as I could make them, rewriting some lyrics for the 100th or even 200th time, completely re-doing demos, having long talks with guitarist Tim Young about what was needed, seeking out some new vocalists, spending countless hours mulling over arrangements and rhythm parts and bass parts and drum parts and vocal parts. I all but quit freelancing in adland to give me time to get the music right. I even bought a new computer -- a dual Quad Core Mac Pro -- to increase my productivity (it helped a lot!).

And in the end, that’s what I have: music. And I’m proud of it; hell, I like it. (Yes, I confess, I listen to my own songs just because I like them.) My marketing plan remains half-written, my networking activities to try to meet folks who could help me find a market for my songs are as moribund as ever. I have no idea what’s next, besides some vague notions about gaining exposure and trying to tap licensing opportunities. But I do have music. Good music. And when I do find opportunities to get some exposure or earn a buck, I will have a shot, I believe that. More important, no matter what happens going forward, I will be able to write on my tombstone “Here Lies A Dreamer for Whom at Least One Dream Came True.”

It’s time to begin the real begin. Stay tuned.

Weighing on the debate over whether or not Apple should offer 24-bit downloads.

These past few months I’ve mainly been changing diapers and trying to fit in freelance ad work, so I am out of the loop in a major way regarding the music blogs I follow (actually, follow is about all I do nowadays, I read a headline, then a baby erupts, and I gotta go). Just this morning, though, I had a bit of extra time and read a fair bit about Jimmy Iovine’s push for 24-bit files on iTunes and other music download sites.

First off, let me just day I’m for it. I hate the fact that the only files available to me from iTunes and Amazon are MP3s. Why does this bother me? Mainly because I know I’m paying near full pop for only a small portion of the actual data I receive (an MP3 gets rid of about 90% of the data in the original recording). I much prefer buying a CD, ripping it, and creating the file formats I want, based on the environment in which I will be doing my listening. I know, I do not represent the masses, but that’s not the point. The point is that I, as a sonic geek, should have the option of being able to purchase 100% of the data I want. Further, I wonder if an MP3 is really legal. After all, I am buying the right to listen a recording, should that right not be for the whole recording?

Now, a lot of folks out here are saying that Iovine’s nuts and no one cares very much about audio quality. Further, they accuse him of simply pushing the agenda of the Beats audio brand he’s started with Dr. Dre. On the first point, I think the naysayers are wrong; there are plenty of people out there willing to pay more for better audio quality. On the Beats thing, I agree. Beats to me just Bose all over again. Mainly, I think it’s about EQ and slightly better speaker drivers, not truly better gear.

Here’s what I would like to happen:

• Apple spruces up the iTunes app so it can handle SACD-quality files (24-bit / 196 kHz in stereo) and starts being clear about which computers in its lineup can handle SACD (maybe they all can already, I don’t know).

• iTunes and Amazon start selling SACD files/albums (they can charge a premium).
(Failing the whole SACD thing, then let’s just go with Blue Ray audio, which is capable of handling the SACD spec. Obviously, not all music would be available at such a high quality level, but a lot would be, given all the work that has already been done using SACD, DVD-A and Blu Ray. What’s more, I could rip my SACD and DVD audio discs into iTunes.)

• I would be able to filter my search results on iTunes and Amazon for SACD downloads (or Blu Ray audio, etc.) and off the the races I would be. Other folks, who don’t care as much, could choose 24-bit / 96 kHz AIFF files or high-rez MP3s.

Oh, and for everyone who says such a shift is too hard (updating iPod hardware, iPhones, etc.), please. It could happen in a few years, no big deal.

BTW, please visiti my new Cerebellum Blues Facebook Page and Like it! Thanks.)

An update on my version of Chinese Democracy.

To all the people who have continued to visit this blog despite my many broken promises to deliver an album by such and such a date, I thank you very much for sticking with me. The album is coming, soon. Here's the lowdown (or downlow, if you're hip):

Next week, on February 24, Jaime and I will mix the final tune, polish a few others and create a master CD, beta, which I will listen to incessantly for about a week to determine the best song order (I know, why bother in this digital age?).

Once I've decided on a song order, all tracks will head off to John Cuniberti for mastering, during which time I will finish designing the artwork, then I'll send everything to Oasis CD for printing. If all goes according to plan, the music will be available sometime in March.

More changes: after much twiddling of thumbs and furrowing of brow, I have finally decided to simply call the album Cerebellum Blues, which will also be the name of the virtual "band" behind the music. In other words, everything will be marketed under Cerebellum Blues, so that I have a consistent, clear presence across my sites and fully leverage a phrase (cerebellum blues) that I own lock, stock and two smoking barrels, so that searches of cerebellum blues will lead to me. Yes, my name had the same powah in the search world (Jeff Shattuck is unusual enough) but it's just not intriguing, I don't think. Plus, you hear a name like that and you're thinking singer/songwriter, or at the very least a single male vocalist or a key musician (think Santana), neither of which describes me. 

And so, I will have a blog (this one), a bandcamp page (under construction here), a Facebook page (under construction, but you can see it here) and a YouTube channel (just starting work on this) — all under the CB name. I feel good about this, so if you think I'm nuts, please keep my mental health in mind before you comment!

Stay tuned.

Happy Valentine's Day, Catherine.

After I had my brain injury in 2006, I wrote this song for Catherine. At the time she was my girlfriend, now she is my wife and the mother of our two little girls, Avalon and Amelia. And on this day, I can think of no better way to say I love you to her than to post this song, which is finally, nearly finished.

Coming Together (By Falling Apart) by jeffshattuck

COMING TOGETHER (BY FALLING APART) 
Life teaches us lessons I never knew I could learn 
And there are pages I could never turn
I took you for granted as the years slipped away
But I learned what matters when life had its say

I came to and I was lying against the wall
I tried to stand but I had to crawl
I heard your voice from the far end of the hall

And sometimes it all has to fall apart
Sometimes we reach the end before we can start
Sometimes we have to lose control
To find the truth in our soul
And it was you I found in my heart

I remember doctors and all the daily routines
And all the nights without days in between
And blinking lights and the sound of fear
And all the dreams of anywhere but here

You spent the nights in the corner chair
You made me laugh even though you were scared
And when I opened my eyes you were always there

And sometimes it all has to fall apart
Sometimes we reach the end before we can start
Sometimes we have to lose control
To find the truth in our soul
And it was you I found in my heart