My Real Memoir

It started as the best month ever. Coming off our TV special, our buddy “Bob,” mega-publisher Robert Petersen, booked my band The Daily Planet for our first Big Gig (no dancing teenagers shouting “play something we know!”) at the Motor Trend Car Show in San Diego. We’d play our own stuff and be paid way more than “fifty-bucks-and-all-the-punch-you-can-drink.”

We didn’t love it when our opening act’s manager Fiona informed us we’d be backing up her “fast-rising country star” protégé. One of whose cover songs, “Harper Valley PTA,” was pretty near the top of our rock-n-roll-suicide list. But we sucked it up and picked-and-grinned our way through the poodle-haired singer’s set.

We did love it, however, when Fiona approached us afterward and offered us a management contract that guaranteed…our first album! It would be no time at all now, mere microseconds compared to the age of the universe, before we were proclaimed “the next Beatles!”

When we got home, we signed up for the final concert of the season at our town’s Garden Hill Park amphitheater. Determined to blow our audience’s minds, we decided to conclude with the aptly-titled tune “Blowin’ Our Minds.” We passed out percussion instruments and invited the audience to join in. Led by our phenomenal drummer Joey, they clapped and maraca-ed, bongoed and tambourined, cow-belled and claved their way to the end, and then cheered as we left the stage and rushed back for an encore.

My girlfriend Marty and I had barely seen each other since starting school at two different colleges. We’d gone through a rough patch during the summer when I told her, clueless to the disparities between infatuation and love, “I don’t feel the same anymore.” Later, realizing my love was simply evolving, I asked her to forget what I’d said.

So when she approached, eyes glistening, after the concert, I assumed we’d be doing some serious make-up snogging. Instead, she stroked my hair, and said, “I don’t feel the same anymore…”

“Oh, hey, but that’s just—”

“And I’m in love with someone else,” she concluded. I felt like I’d created the hole that made the dam burst. But, in retrospect, we’d been seventeen, in love for the first time, and then started moving in different directions, meeting different people.

Sadly, Marty’s new love was a fascinatingly moody older guy who was still “technically” married. He was also technically an alcoholic, and for a time her yearning to fix him had felt like love. Later, I heard, after my good little church girl managed to disentangle herself from him, she was crushed and ashamed. But by then we were out of each other’s lives.

The following month, Judy Collins’ version of “Both Sides Now” was released, introducing me to a songwriter, Joni Mitchell, who would become one of my biggest musical influences. It also introduced me to lost love. I can never hear these words…

I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions, I recall
I really don’t know love at all…

Without thinking of Marty.

My Real Memoir is a series. To read the next one, click here.