I Went Down To The Crossroad...

        I grew up in Tustin, California and as many kids do, I loved to draw. My first realizations in art were that I posessed a natural ability to draw pretty well and that I loved music. I made friends in school by drawing life-like portraits in charcoal. I left high school with a certificate of proficiency and went to work for a printing company in the middle of my junior year. My Father suffered from financial setbacks and left the area to seek work in a distant part of the state. Unwilling to leave the area at that critical point in my social development, I parted ways with my Pop and began living on my own when I was 17 years old. When I had trouble I had a great-grandma who lived nearby that would help me sometimes.

        In 1981, at the age of 18, I was accepted to the world-renowned Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood, California. Having sold everything I had just to pay the tuition, I found myself in the daily company of the world's most accomplished musicians but without any money to afford rent or to pay for food. Grandma gave me a little money when I left to secure a small room but that was soon gone. I lived in squalor for about three months and then had to leave G.I.T. when a friend back in Tustin offered me a place to stay and he helped me get a job in a print shop. It was either that or homelessness and starvation on the mean streets of Hollywood.

        Once safely back in Tustin, I used to see Allan Holdsworth around town on a daily basis. He was and still is to this day recognized the world-over as possibly the finest guitarist to have ever lived; the undisputed heavyweight champion of the guitar world. I would see him at the hardware store buying materials for his day job. Guitarists of his caliber could sell records only to other guitar players it seems. I understand he has since been able to make a living just by playing his music.

        Though I attended classes at the Guitar Institute, circumstances forced me to drop out, I never received "Student of the Year" honors and I was never offered a teaching post at the world-renowned school . I never went on to a fabulous career as a world-class performer or recording artist but I did eventually manage to become Employee of the Month at Gary's Johnny Print. A dear friend once told me, "Vin, you are the single biggest waste of talent I have ever seen in my entire life." . . . And he meant it. I laughed but I knew it was true and his words stung me for I had had such dreams which to this day have gone unrealized. The only dream that I did realize fully was the one I alone could completely control. I learned to play the guitar with the best of them. It's just that I never really went anywhere or did anything with it except within the private little world of the songs that I wrote.

        I never played onstage with Chic Corea or James Taylor or Bonnie Raitt but I have seen them all perform live. While I was still at G.I.T. they had told me that one day I would come to a crossroad and when I reached it I would have to make a very profound decision, one that would determine the course of my life from that day forward. They said the world was filled with pheonomenal guitar players and artists of all kinds and if I wanted to make my mark I would have to choose a very specific direction and specialize in only that if I were going to become a true master of whatever I chose to become.

        It wasn't long after I was told this that I found I had reached the crossroad, my crossroad, the place myths and legends are made of. I made my own personal toss of the dice and let it all ride. I sold my soul for whatever it was worth which as it turns out, wasn't very much. The one thing in life I could control was the skills I would develop fully, skills that no one could ever take from me. I was still at G.I.T. when I came to understand on a very deep level that I wanted to become a songwriter, an originator of art in sound. Because no matter how great an artist is on his own, he or she is nothing if not for the material they perform, if not for that one amazingly beautiful song they play or sing.

        So I reached my crossroad and I made my decision. From that day on, I never looked back. I set out to write that one song that would change the entire world and bring peace and happiness to everyone. I continued to play guitar as my primary instrument, to develop my understanding of music and my technique as an instrumentalist. As time went by, my music grew, changed and developed, becoming more sophisticated and introspective with each song I'd write. My whole world became about chord changes and what would sound good over them.

        Over the years, I wrote hundereds and hundreds of songs. During some periods, one or more per day and in other periods maybe only a couple in a month. Eventually, I put my instrument down and quit playing altogether. Then something would happen that would drive me back to it, only to throw it down again in frustration. None of my songs were ever professionally produced or recorded. Nothing I wrote or sang has ever been seen or heard on radio or television and no international recording artists have ever covered any of my tunes. I seldom performed in public and even more seldom did I record my own songs onto a cassette recorder or what-have-you, but those recordings do exist, however few and far between.

        Years passed and I found myself married and divorced and remarried. Now I am the father of a beautiful baby daughter. Daddy sits in his room now with his computer and his Fender Stratocaster, a couple of Acoustics and a Gibson Les Paul, fumbling through the remnants of his musical past, not all that different from the way he spent all the years before really. Only now I have taken up the other facets of art as well, painting, drawing and graphic design. I still work in the printing business, almost 25 years later. So now I have reached a second, much more remote and distant crossroad; one they never taught us about at G.I.T. It is a crossroad so remote that the only way I could have even known of its existence was if I had spent my entire lifetime pursuing the path which came before it. It is an intensely personal intersection which exists on a much more vast and yet temporal scale where lifetimes sometimes meet with an overwhelming sense of eternity, finality, the inevitable.

        Am I going to let my artistic passions go? Am I going to let it all just die into the frustrations of a day-job's ongoing futility, just bury years of unrealized dreams or will I keep these passions alive and play on, for life, no matter who listens or who may or may not be there to hear me? Will I play just for the love of playing and paint just for the love of painting? Will I continue singing just for the joy of singing and will I write just for the love of writing? Will I continue on purely for the need of self-expression and take a road few ever even know is really there, just because there is something inexplicable drawing me onward?

        Hell yes, I will!! And if you could afford me a moment as an armchair philosopher: I'm simply touching and embracing the simple joys of living only to realize, through time, the truth of my existence, the little corner of this life which is only mine to be known. So maybe, in the limited number of days I'm alive, I might turn to another and share my perspective of this seeming mirage, this passage through what is after all my position in life, this time, this possibility, this man I turned into. . .

        It may seem strange but this is the place I have come to at this point in my journey through being. After all these years, this is all I know and I really don't have anything better I can do than what I am doing here and now. So let me pass on something I have learned through all of this: "Being able to perceive some greater awakening, to play the guitar like Al DiMeola, or paint like Van Gogh, is no guarantee that you will be able to pay your rent or feed your children."

                                                                                                                 ~ Vincent ~   06-30-02