Musical Humble Pie 101

I attended the University of Oregon for the last three years of my college career. This was after several transfers and many changes in course of study, so by the time I got to the end, I was pretty much maxed out on my elective credits, as I'm sure you can imagine.

(Side note: The U of O campus is still one of my most favorite places in the whole wide world.)


In either the Winter or the Spring term of my last year of school in 1998, I registered for all of the classes that I needed, but was one credit hour short of being a full-time student. I browsed through the course catalog and found a perfect match. Beginning Blues Guitar. Perfect. My thinking being, "I play guitar, I wouldn't exactly call myself a beginner and I doubt this is going to blow my homework out of the water. If anything, I might be able to teach them a thing or two.


Yeah, think again.

The class was taught by Don Latarski, who's a really stellar guitar player and a heck of a nice guy. He truly puts in the work, as long as you do too. The format of the class was simple. There were about 15 or 20 of us in the class and we all sat in a circle with our acoustic guitars. Don would teach us a riff and we'd all work it into a rhythm until we could all play it simultaneously, at which point Don would take a solo through about 12 bars or so. Then the person to his right would solo for another 12 bars, then the person to his right, and on and on. You get the point. The one that we learned that sticks out in my mind was The T-Bone Shuffle by T-Bone Walker. (If you click the link it'll open a YouTube video in a different window so you can listen while you read. Just for the whole multi-media experience, you know...) I can remember specifically feeling like I had the lick down, getting in synch with the rest of the guys in the class, waiting for my turn and then playing something that sounded like a whoopee cushion getting eaten by a pack of vultures. It was horrible. Just horrible. I sucked really bad, and everyone else there seemed to be really really good. Discouraging, but I didn't give up.

It went like this for the whole 10 week term. Show up, learn the riff, play in a circle, and inevitably embarrass myself in front of the whole room. These guys were a shit ton better than I was. Apparently playing the blues wasn't as easy as I thought, but I did it. I stuck it out and ate shit when it came to my turn and went home and tried to get better for the next week. When the last session of the term came around, Don said, "Well, you know, the funny thing is, I feel like this is a guitar class, and you'll get out of it what you put in, so I don't waste time taking attendance and all that nonsense. The downside of that is that here we are on the last day of class and I don't even know any of your names, so I'm going to read through my class roster and when I get to your name, let me know that it's you and I'll give you credit for the course."

He got through the entire class roster and I was the only person whose name was not called. This is odd, mostly because as a Barker, I'm used to being up towards the top of the list, but also because I know that I specifically registered for this class with plenty of notice, and I haven't gotten any notifications about my student loans being messed up because I'm not registered full-time, so clearly there must be a mistake somewhere.

Don gave a sincere "Hmmm..." and lifted up his class binder to see if any other papers were in it. I instantly noticed the problem when I read the 3x5 card that he had taped to the front of it. "Don, let me interrupt you there," I said. "I think I've got it. You see, I signed up for 'Beginning Blues Guitar.' But you're reading from the class roster for 'EXPERT Blues Guitar."


I had been in the wrong class. All term. For whatever reason, I wrote down the wrong class time and location for my Beginning Blues Guitar course, taught by Don Latarski, and had accidentally been attending Expert Blues Guitar, also taught by Don Latarski.

Don very graciously and humorously gave me credit for my Beginner's course that I had apparently never shown up for, which was news to both him and me. And everyone else in the class gave me a little look of understanding. And I felt kinda dumb and kinda less sucky at the same time.

You Never Forget Your First Prison Tat. Or, How Beavis and Butthead Marked Me For Life

I got my first tattoo when I was 18 years old. For a lot of folks, that's become a kind of rite of passage, and it way as well be, but keep in mind that in 1991 tattoos weren't exactly as cool as they are nowadays. 

Then again, most of the time when people get a tattoo, they go to, like, you know, a tattoo parlor.


My good pal Kiersten Alder (then, Bergquist) had a roommate. Two actually. One named Samara (I think I spelled that right) who I had a minor crush on, and Naomi. (Side note: In my diction, "minor crush" means I really liked her but I was too chickenshit to do anything about it. I had a lot of minor crushes on girls in college. I'm sure that'll come up later.) Anyway, Naomi had recently taken to doing tattoos. Nothing too big, mind you, just little tribal designs on her toes and stuff like that, and by God, I wanted in too. So the next time I'm over at Kiersten's house for a party, Naomi and I hatch a plan to give me some ink. Turns out Naomi wasn't exactly working with your standard 20th Century toolkit here, so she busted out a sewing needle, a spool of thread, and a bottle of India ink. She wrapped the thread just above the point of the needle, and it served the purpose of absorbing the ink and keeping a steady stream of it going down to the point of the needle. This, it turns out, was her ink gun.


I wanted to get a tattoo of a yin yang. I know it has a lot of meanings, but I had my own garden-variety definition that I hatched based on a little snippet of wisdom I took from an episode of Beavis and Butthead. I wish I could find a copy of it to post here, and if I ever find it I'll edit it in, but the scene goes like this:


Beavis gets pissed off that a video sucks, and he's getting pretty amped about it. Butthead intervenes and says something like, "We need the videos that suck so that we can have a standard by which we know that the videos that rule, actually do, indeed rule." In my translation that means that we should be thankful for the bad days, because they make the good days just that much better.


So again, back to the tattoo. Turns out that Naomi, more specifically her hand and wrist, are her tattoo "gun." I took my shirt off (My 1992 Lollapallooza shirt. I remember that vividly because I was twisting it as hard as I could in my hands while she was stabbing me with the needle and the silkscreening pretty much just crumbled right off.) and she started perforating my chest. Directly above my left nip. As fortune would have it, I saved the tissue that I used to dab the blood. Interesting trivia note: It's the exact size of a Carmex container.

Nice, huh?

It was at least five years until I was able to let my mom know I got this. I might have fancied myself a little bit punk rock, but I was still afraid of my mom.

Twenty one years later, I've got a lot more ink than this, but this still remains one of my favorites. Lots of folks have suggested I go to a pro and get it patched up, but that, to me, would defeat the purpose. My tattoos are a scrapbook in ink, and this is maybe the best way I can think of to remember that when I was 18, I was the guy that let a girl tattoo him at a party with a bootleg tattoo kit, even by prison gang standards. I may grow up to be old and boring, but hopefully this will help me remember the less old and the less boring times.

Get On The Groovy Train

My first car was named Gus, and like most first cars, he was magnificent.

Gus was a 1976 Honda Civic. White with really cool gold trim work. He was a class act even before we got him up and running, but the finishing touches that I put to him were, at the risk of sounding immodest, nothing short of a masterwork in automobile design aesthetics.

Oh but first, the back story...

I graduated from Redmond High School with a GPA somewhere in the twos and a minimal interest in going to college. Soon after graduating I fell in with a girl and decided, in the kind of way that only 17 year olds can, that I didn't want to go to school, but rather I'd like to stay in Central Oregon and be with this girl and be a FATHER TO HER CHILD. Yeah, I know. Dark days on the horizon here.

So my parents hatched a plan and put it to me like this: If you go to school and finish a year of college, we'll buy you a car.

Well now, this changes everything...

Long story short, the car won out over the girl, the relationship with the girl flamed out as it should have, and fast forward to August of 1992 and my friend Catherine Hayden picked me up from my dorm, helped me load up my shit, and drove me home to Redmond. As we turned the corner to my dad's house I could see, from about five or six blocks away, that there was some big old thing on his front lawn with a big red ribbon on it. While I didn't have any big expectations for anything too fancy, I was still a little bit derailed when I realized that the car that I had re-directed my life for was, in fact, a 1976 Honda Civic. What minor bits of disappointment that might have flashed on the screen at that point went away pretty quickly when I got out of Catherine's car and got a little closer. This was a special car.

He was white, the interior was in pretty good shape, and the fine gold trim on the hood, fenders, and other parts of the car signified a little bit of a special touch that had gone into this one. With the help of m friend Will Chisholm, I named him Gus, and I immediately went to work...

The first big addition was a big velvet Elvis that I got for ten bucks at a garage sale.

I meticulously safety pinned it to the headliner of Gus and moved on to the fabric store, where I bought a long string of red dingle balls (I'm fairly certain that there's an actual term for "dingle balls" but the words themselves are a bit of an onomatopoeia, meaning, you pretty much know what I'm talking about, right?) which I stapled to the trim of the interior. A few months later I added a big fluffy steering wheel cover, which I tried to dye red. That didn't really take, so it ended up being pink, and I was pretty much ok with that too.

Gus was my Freedom Bird. I did a lot of crazy, stupid stuff in, around, and with Gus, and more stories involving him will undoubtedly come up down the road. (For that matter, I think it's probably fortuitous that I chose this as an early entry on this blog. This way I don't have to backtrack on who/what "Gus" is. He'll be mentioned often, believe me.

Mechanically, Gus was relatively sound, other than the fact that he burned a quart of oil for every tank of gas. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating. I carried a case of oil in the trunk. Other than that, ran like a top. And his exhaust looked like burning tar.

One time I was driving up Lake Billy Chinook outside of Redmond with Kris Dunn and some girl named Jenean. (I don't know if I spelled her name right, but I didn't exactly get along with her very well at the time, so I'm not too concerned with that.) A bee got in the car with us and was buzzing around the windshield, so in a quick ninja-like move, I pulled my left sleeve up over the palm of my left hand, extended my arm in a quick, "haaaaaay-ya" motion and attempted to squash the bee on the windshield. The bee survived, but the jerking motion of my arm sent us careening off of the road into a big field of huge, pointy rocks. Bad news. Blew a tire and dented up the body a little bit. Otherwise, pretty lucky. Only problem is that I was sitting on a big pile of small boulders by the side of the road. No way could I drive out. Then a kind and burly park ranger drove by, called a few of his other park ranger buddies and we ("we", meaning me and three other guys) physically LIFTED Gus off of his perch on these big ass rocks, and walked him back onto the road.

A year later, my dad offered to help me buy a newer car. I loved Gus dearly, but the writing was on the wall. He wasn't going to last forever, so I traded up to a 1981 Honda Accord, which I totalled a few months later when I ran a red light on Portland Blvd in Portland (right in front of the Burrito Loco) and t-boned a truck. Nobody was really hurt, as far as I know, but the car was toast.

I digress.

My last night with Gus was spent at work at Pietro's Pizza. During my break I went out to the parking lot and sat in Gus and sang "Long May You Run" to him. Smoked a few cigarettes. Burned some more incense. (I used to stick incense sticks in the dashboard and light 'em up. Just ashed all over the carpet. I didn't care. It added to the charm.) Said goodbye. It was hard. I probably even teared up. Yep. I'm pretty certain that I did.

A year or two later I saw Gus drive by my dad's house. He looked ok. A little dirty, and worse for wear, but still driving.

Long may you run, buddy. Long may you run, indeed.