My Story 4: Crime and Music

My little family of three moved to Vancouver when I was 11, and I started getting into crime. I shoplifted with an older friend, stole change and other stuff from parked cars, and I even ripped off the local high school, taking a classical guitar. Thus, my life-long passion for music was based on theivery. I learned to play "biker music": The Eagles, Bob Seger, Bob Marley, Deep Purple, and Neil Young et al. The advantage of playing guitar was that when my mom brought home a bunch of bikers, I could stay up late playing them songs until everybody passed out in a drunken stupor, which is perhaps not such an advantage, depending on how you look at it.

Music became my de facto identity. I was not the toughest kid on the block, I was not cool, I couldn't handle my liquor, and I wasn't popular at school like my sister, but I was a musician, and somehow that allowed my mother to accept me as one of her own. She was an incredible singer who never did anything with her talent, probably because of her substance abuse problems. She had lots of offers from bands, agents, and managers, but she refused. Just thinking of her beautiful voice gives me the chills to this day: she carried around twice the pain of Janis Joplin, so you can imagine the soulful quality of her vocals. She sang to us all the time, and music enveloped our lives. Despite our extreme poverty and occasional homelessness, we always had a good stereo with eviction-sized speakers and a huge collection of great albums.

Music has always been a part of my life, and inevitably, music helped me recover from my difficult beginnings. Music and personal growth are intrinsically linked, because music teaches us about dynamics; we listen to music because it changes and flows like a river, and I believe we can apply this progressive mode to our lives. I can look back at what I listened to, and how intently, and I can see a distinct pattern that matched what was happening in my life. To me, music was like a wise old friend with a bunch of interesting stories.

...and crime was that good-for-nothing friend that always made you do stuff you regretted. I got into shoplifting quite a bit and got caught. I remember wailing as the store clerk led me into the back room, not because I thought I was in trouble, but because I realized perhaps for the first time that I was doing something really wrong. Somehow, I had been ripping off stuff without truly coming to grips with the impact. Theft does more to the theif than the victim, I think. My mother didn't do much.. she screamed and threw things, but only for an hour or so, and her opinion was already not very important to me. I was definitely changing, growing more hardened and taking more risks. I got in a few fights, and I started hanging around the skateboard park in East Vancouver. There were some teenaged "gangs" (which in 1982 were not very dangerous) that hung out at "the bowls," and I got to know some of them. Just when it looked like my life would consist of hard drugs, hard crime, and misery, my father stepped into the picture for the first time in my life...