"I was sleeping. Now I am awake." No, I'm not quoting the bible's Lazurus there, but myself. For in a sense I was dead. Dead to something that had once been absolutely central to my life but that is no longer. Let me explain...
Like many kids growing up in the fifties and early sixties I felt like a stranger in a strange world. I was the kid that didn't fit in. I was the kid who had no interest in sports. I was the kid who stood with his eyes closed and his lips sealed while all the other kids sang with enthusiasm about their school's glorious colors ("Black and gold, staunch and true, towering over the ocean blue...") Achhh! (Can you blame me?) And then I, along with my best buddy, Al Karp, discovered rock and roll. Not on the radio, but in our finger tips. I.e., We learned to play guitar and formed a band. Several actually.
To me those early school years spent wondering what it was all about ended with a loud noise. That 'noise' was the sound of The Abstracts singing and playing the original songs composed by a true musical genius: Band member Andy Bonime.
What made this especially wonderful was that so many other kids seemed to agree! Suddenly what I was doing was cool. Abstracts fan clubs formed. Girls shrieked. Lines formed for concerts. Yes, now I finally understood: This was what life was supposed to be about.
Now it would make for a good read here on GaragePunk Hideout if I was to write that when this stage of my life ended my life went on to become a total drag. Good read or no that'd hardly be the truth. I was lucky enough to marry the girl of my dreams -- a fellow musician, Jan Vadala, from the Boston band IV Kings & A Queen -- and we have had a wonderful life together for now over 40 years. I found a neat nitch doing work that I loved and finding unexpected success at it. I raised a really cool son who in time brought into my life a really cool daughter-in-law and they together brought into my life all sorts of cool stuff (They're both pilots). And I went on to have a totally unexpected writing career that bought me into intimate contact with what may be the coolest company on the face of the planet: Ducati SpA.
But for all this there was something missing: A connection to my past; to my years as a musician. Particularly to my years with The Abstracts.
Then, just a bit over a year ago, I again linked up with the The Abstracts' drummer -- Mike Machat - a guy who has had a truly amazing life of his own. And to celebrate that fact I created a little YouTube video of the band's one 45 single release, "Always Always." And then -- low and behold! -- something amazing started happening. People who I really didn't think would care at all started getting excited about what The Abstracts had created musically all those years ago. And through those people I found yet others -- like you good folks here on GaragePunk Hideout -- who also cared about the whole music "thing" that I had once been a part of. And if that wasn't quite good enough I actually came in contact with people who cared enough about that music to gather up all the Abstracts' 40+ year old recordings, write the band's history and release an album that is so extraordinarily wonderfully done that it still totally blows my mind.
And just what has this meant to me? In one word: Resurrection. Nothing less than that. Resurrection. Coming back to life. No, not from literal death but from a death-like state regarding some of life's greatest gifts. The gift of music and the gift of a type of friendship that seemingly can only exist among people who have walked a creative path together.
Yup, as I wrote in this blog piece's title... Being resurrected can be so much fun.
-don
