GETTING MORE TALE #607: Every Picture Tells a Story

 

If you’re like me, you probably look at childhood photos and are immediately flooded with a million memories. Music, pictures and memories…they all go together don’t they? One triggers another and all three merge together in your grey matter. With that in mind, put on something nostalgic and join me with some short stories about some old pictures. If you can’t think of something to listen to, here’s Bryan Adams doing “Summer of ’69”!

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I can tell by my hair that this picture is winter of 1989-1990. On the far left, you’ll notice my Darth Vader lamp, hand made by my mom a long time ago (though not very far away). Darth is priceless to me, and I still have him on that very same dresser today. Next to Darth, I notice that I didn’t think to remove the Speed Stick before taking a photo.

That was my first guitar. I just had to have a whammy bar. That thing would simply not stay in tune. In the 80s, you had to have a whammy bar, although Slash was slowly causing them to go out of fashion. My mom found a guitar teacher, a really nice guy named Gary Mertz. He was teaching my sister, myself and my best friend Bob all in one shot. He came to the house, and did 30 minute lesson with my sister on keyboards first. Then 30 minutes with me and 30 with Bob on guitar. I just wasn’t any good at it. I just don’t have the coordination. How my sister got to be such a great musician, I really couldn’t tell you. I got the shitty genes.

A year and a half later, and look at that hair. Sleek?

Second guitar. A flying V I bought off a guy from work.  He was a huge Eddie Van Halen fan, and he customised the V with different pickups to try to emulate Eddie’s brown sound.  I still had to have a whammy bar.  Constantly diving for it made it sound like I was playing something other than random notes.  I was pretty useless on guitar.

A little older now, this is about 1993 and that’s my first beard! Zeppelin and the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701 D) on the same walls as before.  The Enterprise and the Kiss sketch I’m holding were both birthday gifts from my buddy Peter. I still have that Kiss sketch on my wall right behind where I work at LeBrain HQ.

Check out this model kit I build. That’s a Klingon Bird of Prey, a Romulan Warbird and a Ferengi ship. I bought it for the Warbird, truly a beautiful ship design. If you look close enough, you can see where I painted in little yellow windows on the forward section, just like the show. I did the same on the Ferengi craft, which actually turned out the best of the three.

And finally, I don’t know what compelled me to take pictures of all my stuff. Here it is, and all laid out specifically just so. Why? Couldn’t tell you. But there’s some cool stuff there!

With the exception of the cassette tapes, I still own most of this stuff.  Some CDs have been replaced by expanded editions.  The vinyl didn’t go anywhere though, and I definitely hung on to those Star Trek figures.

My collections for each of these bands has expanded so much that I couldn’t fit them all into a single photo anymore.  It’s funny to look back and think, “Wow, that’s all I had!?”