Damn Yankee - George S Geisinger (books for 6 year olds to read themselves .TXT) 📗

university where he'd gotten his Master's in music, he tutored me as well, free of charge, in music theory at his home, all the way through the spring and summer months of my senior year, before and after graduation, preparing me for the university.
I went to university to become a band director, a music education major, right in the middle of the Vietnam War Era. My instrument was trumpet, and I was also a tenor of some significance, not to mention being self-taught on guitar since I was 14. I had started two different folk groups in high school, and fumbled around with an old guitar until I had a few songs that I'd made up myself, by the time I went to North Carolina to begin my studies at the university.
I worked at a live musical theater in the summers for several years throughout high school, as a volunteer. I did everything from bit-parts in the musicals to accounting in the business office, when I was a clear-headed, intelligent teenager. Also, I played in a semi-professional dance band, playing trumpet and guitar in night clubs throughout high school. At those gigs, the alcohol flowed and flowed.
So, I finished high school with honors, and was packed off to university five hundred miles away from home.
But I was not the success everyone expected I would be. There was no one at the school to offer any kind of structure, limitation, or moral support of any kind, least of all to help keep me on an even keel to deal with my studies. The alcohol habit was complicated by a drug habit by the time of my sophomore year. It was the early 70's, and it seemed everyone was partying.
I began to come unglued as a person, by the time I was expected to get down to some serious rehearsal time and some serious studying. I spent a lot more time partying and chasing the girls around than I ever spent on my school work.
I had no idea how to handle university.
I was eventually told by a therapist that I'd been self-medicating with the drugs and alcohol. There were things that were very wrong inside of me, and I had been trying to get some relief from all my turmoil.
Failing utterly to get accepted into the degree granting college, stoned to the gills at the jury exam I had no clue how to handle, after two full years of neglecting my studies and partying myself into a nervous breakdown at the university, I decided to become a music theorist, a composer of music, and dropped out of university for the second and final time. The first time I dropped out, I was taken to the state hospital, with a diagnosis of an Acute Toxic Psychosis. Even after I was released from the hospital and had conned my mother into letting me go back to school in the fall, my health was not good, I had developed a lot of bad habits on campus, and had run out of money. I was starving.
I launched head-long into trying to compose music, since it was my best subject at the university I was about to drop out of, again. I didn't want to waste my education completely. It was the last bastion of hope for my dysfunctional thinking, complicated by a significant musical talent from behind the eight ball.
But I was a very creative young man, and began writing music, to help me half-way believe in the idea that I had any redeeming qualities at all. Why I had developed a problem with my self esteem is a mystery to me, but my entire twenties was a time of believing I was some sort of hideous monster that the world would be better without.
But I was writing music. That had to count for something.
First, there was Prophecy, a piece for solo trumpet with organ, that I performed for the music department in the performance seminar that I'd been cutting regularly for the entire time I'd been enrolled. I had a faculty member accompany my trumpet on the pipe organ. The performance went well enough, but I remember standing in front of the other music students I'd known for the past few, disastrous years, and looking into their eyes, trying to say goodbye to each of them by making eye contact with them. I'm told I took an eternity to begin playing the piece.
Next, there was Weeping Color, for four part mixed chorus. I'd rehearsed it with the university singers in my last weeks on campus, when I was starving. We'd rehearsed it just a few times before I bailed out, dropping out of school in mid-semester, and I came back to campus for the contemporary music festival, where the University Singers, of a full 70 voices, sang my song in the same concert with the music of the great Randal Thompson, who was conducting his own music, live, for my fraternity's Contemporary Music Festival.
I'd heard of the great Randal Thompson when I was in high school, when I had been so immersed in choral music with the great Mister, that the memory of his work had followed my talent to my mentor's Alma Mater, with my high school teacher's personal endorsement to underscore the idea that I was a musician. I did not believe I was anybody worth having a life, for some reason. I believed I was worthless.
The whole bit was kind of a blur in my adolescent mind the whole way through to an oblivion the reader would probably not understand, even if I could describe it in a fully orchestrated and fully organized motion picture portraying the story.
By the time of the Contemporary Music Festival, I was already dropped out of school and working, driving a delivery truck back home, living with my folks. I was delivering flowers, writing love songs behind the wheel of the flower truck in full voice, singing while I delivered flowers. Flowers by Dale; love songs by George. It was a marketing arrangement that was working wonders for my boss's business. He never did forget me, either. Mother was always telling me Dale was asking for me, whenever she'd see him here or there, after I'd quit the job.
I'd taken some time off to drive the five hundred miles south to the campus, to be there when the chorus did my song at the concert.
Anyway, there was this evening concert with Randal Thompson, on campus in the Contemporary Music Festival, and I attended it with Holly, Bill's old girlfriend he wasn't interested in anymore, and Caron, who was just about as big a knockout as any girl on campus. Bill was a pianist and a good friend, at a time when I needed a friend. The girls were both about as pretty as any college coed could hope to be, and they were friends of mine, too.
When the song was finished, the director of the chorus, knowing I was in the audience, called, “Composer!” and motioned out into the crowd, and I stood up and took a bow in the thunderous applause. But the bow was not half accomplished when Holly and Caron both stood up on either side of me and planted kisses on both of my cheeks at once. “Glory days in a young girl's eye,” as the popular songwriter once wrote, like a person is likely to hear on the radio.

The years went by, and I spent a dozen of them in state hospitals, plunking out extremely dark piano music on the crazy house piano, scribbling on folded sheets of staff paper, in varying stages of being a vegetable, depending on what kind of chemical had gotten me incarcerated for the particular hospitalization of the moment. As I've said, I developed a kick-dog attitude about myself, and believed the worst things about myself. I cannot account for the fact that I had a negative self-concept throughout my twenties. I even made an attempt against my own life one year, but promised myself I'd never do it again, fairly quickly after cutting my wrist with a razor blade.
The only thing I did in the state hospitals, besides practice my drug habit, was to write music. I was very ill, and had a very difficult time concentrating on the songs I was trying to create, but I developed a few keyboard works, and a few guitar pieces, over the time I was getting locked up so frequently, before Ronald Reagan changed the rules about state hospitals.
By the end of the 70's, I had a new guitar I'd bought at a music store, waiting for me at my mother's house, and was a ward of the State of Maryland, with two doctor's certificates against me, locked away in a hospital with an ancient baby grand piano. I was not at liberty to leave the building for better than a year. I wrote the Songs from Secluded Grove, because I'd been in Spring Grove State Hospital in those days, and somehow, those works were a lot less dark in quality than their predecessors from my drugging days.
I'd ended up getting sober at Spring Grove, and began a new life, by the time I was in my thirties, and wrote about 15 original songs for keyboard, and about 45 original songs for solo classic guitar, by the time I was in my fifties in the early 21st Century.
Poor Mister, having allowed me to drink his beer now and then, when my drinking buddy and I used to go over to his home while we were in high school, blamed himself for destroying me by giving me alcohol under age, and drank himself to death.

Chapter 3

Have you ever heard of the late Stevie Ray Vaughn, the ole funk/blues guitarist, who dared perform ole Jimi Hendrix' songs in the 1980's in his own concerts, and did them well? He could easily be called Hendrix' successor on electric guitar. He carried on a hard rock tradition and legacy. He used to play with Eric Clapton, but lost his life in a helicopter crash after a concert in 1989. One of my buddy's here at the Brighton Dam has some recordings of ole Stevie Ray, and he's so totally heavy, he reminds me that I'm still tripping, after 28 yrs of total sobriety.
I don't have to take any elicit substances at all to get back to that place in my head again, but I listen to that late guitarists' music, and it's just like old times, when music was more sacred to me than any other thing, even more sacred than all those things that are Holy, like the word of God and other such things. It was a large part of the beating of my heart, right around the time of all my schizoid stuff. All my bad habits had me feeling almost totally defeated, back when I was keeping myself unglued all the time. It makes me feel like I always used to feel when I heard that kind of guitar, not the bad stuff of what I went thru in my youth, just the good old pride and joy of understanding the language of the man's music, like I could always do in my youth. It's an instinctual thing with me, a part of my blood.
And that's not the only sound that spoke to me in those days. Chopin's piano, especially as interpreted by the late, great Arthur Rubinstein, who were