More of my Punk Rock History 101:Origins. Hearing the music: Message in a Bottle.

  At the age of 14, while eating amid the chaos and clatter of lunch trays and teenagers in the cafeteria of Illinois Valley High School, a song I had never heard made its indelible mark on my future.  It came across the auditorium via my classmate Chuck G's boom box.  Chuck was at the forefront of NEW in our tiny town of Cave Junction (pop 870); he and his brother had appeared sometime in middle school wearing checkerboard Vans, riding skateboards and writing the mysterious word DEVO on walls and peechees. He played trombone in band (I played flute- somehow not my instrument) and seemed to know about all the cool stuff. He was maybe from California. He had sidled up to me back in 7th grade, put his arm around my shoulder casually and said "Hey baby- go with me?"  Having none of that, I blushed deeply and promptly punched him in the gut. That was that: from then on he bothered me daily, which was easy since his last name and mine were conveniently contiguous in alphabetical seating charts.  He foamed at the mouth, made ridiculous suggestions and leaned his chair back on my desk regularly. I kind of hated him, but I was also intrigued- his dad played in a band and he knew about music I'd never heard of.
   I vaguely aspired to be a musician from the age of 5, dressing up in bellbottoms and guatemalan belts to lip synch Beatles songs with my cousins and sisters in a 'band' we called Hot & Cold.  I talked about having a band that was female(naturally!) all the time, despite disparaging comments and no real role models of such until high school. My grandparents were musicians who met in college, Grandpa Pete being employed by several Big Bands touring the country  when my dad and aunt were babies.  He later had his own radio show in Los Angeles. Grandma Martha was a singer and pianist who had put her music career aside, taking on full-time motherhood when her kids were born.
  So, on this day in 1981 or thereabout, my cousin Jennifer and I were eating our lunch (cafeteria food/ brown-bag hippy, can't recall which) and talking about how we wanted to skip class to take mushrooms and walk the serpentine hills behind the school.
Then this music drifted into our consciousness, arresting our conversation. Coming across the echoey auditorium in a wave, it washed away everything else all at once.
The guitar and drums urgently announced something important, the bass coming in and punctuating, the beats worldly and polyrhythmic.  The guitar soared, the bass throbbed, and something about the sound was circular and siren-like. The vocals, high and almost shouted, with harmonies- told a tale of loneliness and exile on an island lost at sea, "sending out an S.O.S", crescendoing triumphantly with "a hundred million bottles washed up on the shore".  We stopped talking and listened hard; we were entranced.
 I boldly walked over to Chuck (my nemesis!) and asked him who it was.  He showed me the cassette case and told me the name of the band: The Police.


Jennifer and I started talking excitedly- Wow- Yes, Yes! the music almost sounds like a siren! Who are these Police? We looked at the cassette case but couldn't really tell  who played what- their names were listed above the tops of their blonde heads on the back cover, with very little information to satisfy our desire to know who made this amazing music.  We had to get this album, and soon. We made plans to travel to the cool record store in Ashland (almost an hour drive) and find it.
  That was the moment I knew what kind of music I wanted to make, because of how that song made me feel. A moment of awakening and longing, and the pointed first step on my journey to become a rock musician. They became my favorite band, and I avidly purchased all of their albums, requesting  nothing else for christmas or my birthday(well- I also begged for a Sony Walkman). I decided to play the bass and sing, like Sting; I identified with the songwriter/frontman role and his unabashed intellectuality - he was always championing literature and using it as inspiration for his songs.  As it turned out, I learned guitar since my dad had a classical I could use until I saved up $70 to buy a little Harmony electric from a junk shop when I was 17. (My sister started playing bass later and played with me in Calamity Jane and Semisweet, but this is much later in our story.)     In 1983, we went to the see the Police at the Tacoma Dome on the Synchronicity tour. My mom took me, Megan and Jennifer and had as much fun as we did, I think. We held hands and screamed for most of it, unable to contain our joy and excitement at being in the same building as our heroes.
   The song was 'Message In a Bottle' and it always provides that immediate rush I had the first time I heard it, even when 27 years later, the opening guitar riff blasted through the sound system at the Police's reunion concert (2008) and I was compelled to run - yes, RUN back from the concession stand so I wouldn't miss a second.
  I still aspire to write a song that good.
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