Читать книгу Delivered From Evil - Anthony Greve - Страница 6

Paradise City and a Six String

I was watching MTV at my grandparents’ house in Turkey when I saw a band that would change my life forever. The song in their music video would give me a new direction. If I wasn’t sold out on rock music before, I was now. I was enamored. Years later, I would get this band’s guitarist tattooed on the back of my forearm. I instantly fell in love with this guitarist and singer duo. The two of them were none other than Slash and Axle Rose. The band was Guns N’ Roses, and the song was “Paradise City.” I couldn’t get it out of my head, nor could I stop singing it. I would walk around the house all day singing as much of it as I could remember. The song had a great hook, and they got me with it.

One day my grandmother said to me, “We are going down to the cassette store and getting you that tape.” Though virtually obsolete today, a cassette was the medium for listening to music at that time. It was the successor to vinyl and the precursor to CDs. I was so excited. The following day my grandma took me to the cassette store, which was not even a mile from the house. We walked together arm in arm. I was around ten years old. When we got to the store, my grandmother asked me to tell the man what tape I wanted so that she could purchase it for me. The only problem was, I didn’t know the name of the band, and I couldn’t remember the name of the song. She kept telling me to sing it for him. Reluctantly, I finally did. He knew exactly what song I was singing. He reached over and pulled “Appetite for Destruction” off the shelf. My life would never be the same again. I could not wait to get home and listen to it.

From the moment I put it in the cassette player, I was hooked. I was a GNR (Guns N’ Roses) fan for life. As far as I was concerned, this was the best thing I’d ever heard. Guns N’ Roses was the band that turned the tide for me and truly got me into rock and roll. The guitar riff to “Nightrain” stole my heart. I would listen to the album every day. It stayed in my tape player for a while. I would crank it up as loud as I could and jump up on the couch like it was a stage, playing air guitar and singing along to it. At times I would use a tennis racket as my guitar.

One day while I was rocking out on the couch, I looked over and saw some of the neighborhood kids watching me through the window. I was so embarrassed that I jumped down and hid. Guns N’ Roses would open the door to other bands that I would get into such as Aerosmith, Metallica, and eventually Pantera.

I noticed that my desires were shifting. Karate didn’t mean as much to me anymore. All I wanted to do was listen to rock music. This led to me getting my first guitar. Since I wasn’t interested in martial arts anymore, and I didn’t want to play sports, my mother demanded that I do something. She suggested that I pick up an instrument. She took me down to a music store called Rick’s Musik. The owners there absolutely loved me. When my mother suggested a band instrument, I said, “No way!” I was going to be like Slash. When I told her that I wanted to play guitar she said, “Honey, I don’t think they have one in your size.” One of the employees checked to see if they had something that was suitable for me, and sure enough, they did. They had one little acoustic hidden in the back just for me. There wasn’t even a case for it, so we brought it home in the box. It was a tiny little child-sized acoustic that was dark brown with a deep reddish tint.

I couldn’t put that guitar down; when I would go to sleep, I would put it in the bed next to me. I would write and make up songs on it before I even knew what I was doing. My parents soon realized that I was serious about this and decided to get me some lessons. I took one guitar lesson at Rick’s. The instructor was a true rocker named Ted. That would be not only my first but my last lesson at Rick’s for a while. My parents weren’t able to keep taking me there at the time because of the distance. They also thought that maybe I should start with something a little more conventional.

My parents remembered the classical guitar player from the talent show that I had been in and set me up with him. I learned chords and how to read sheet music. He taught me the basics. I learned songs such as “Ode to Joy” and “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” in their simplest forms. But I was very serious and a perfectionist. When I did something, I did it with all my heart. There were times when I would make my whole family sit in the living room and listen to me play. I would attempt to play a song straight through, but I’d get frustrated and just start all over when I’d mess up. I wouldn’t let anyone leave the room until I made it through the song. This became about a half-hour long event. Minus my mistakes, it should have taken three minutes. Needless to say, I was determined.

After about a year with the classical instructor, there wasn’t much more he could do for me considering the direction I wanted to follow. I wanted to rock. He recommended a rock guitar instructor who was taking lessons from him at the time to get some classical playing under his belt. Believe it or not, he sent me to Ted – the guy I had taken my very first lesson from. Later on, during my Pop Evil days, Ted would come out on the road and do some tech work for the guys and me. He played a very significant role in my life. He was like a father to me.

Once I got a little older, Ted would take me into the bars with him, where I would sit and watch him play. I loved watching him play. He was so good, the best. I would just sit there and watch him all night. I wanted to learn as much as I could from him. By the time I was in my early teens and had gotten a little better, Ted would let me get up and play some songs with the band. One of those songs was “Where the River Flows,” by Collective Soul. I rocked that thing. This was an exciting time in my life. Around this time, I would dye my hair funky colors, get my first real girlfriend, and begin broadening my musical horizons by getting into bands such as Green Day (which inspired the hair dye). I could never seem to get my hair as bright and vibrant as Green Day’s vocalist, Billie Joe, got his. My first attempt at dyeing my hair was with Kool-Aid. Someone had recommended it. It didn’t work; all it did was turn my scalp green. It would have probably worked better had I bleached my hair first, but nobody had mentioned that beforehand.

Green Day’s album “Dookie” had just come out, and I was a huge fan. They had great songs, a great sound, and awesome hooks. More than the skill, I loved the aura and attitude that they carried. They were punk. I hadn’t been introduced to punk before.

It was at this time that I got my first electric guitar. Like my acoustic, it was a knockoff brand, but it was great. It played like a champ. I wouldn’t get into learning Guns N’ Roses songs until later. They were still a bit complicated for where I was at musically. But Ted would teach me Green Day songs, and that’s when I first learned how to play power chords. Those chords had the real rock sound that I was looking. Before I knew power chords, I would just play open chords on my acoustic. Once I grabbed hold of power chords, it was on! It was powerful, indeed. I would later get into punk bands like Rancid. They had an album out called, And Out Come the Wolves. It was my favorite album for a long time. These guys were a punk band that was completely punk yet palatable enough to be mainstream. They also had a bit of a reggae feel to them. The first time I saw them on MTV, I realized that I too wanted a ten-inch spiked Mohawk.

It was also around this time that my sinful nature started kicking in. My friends and I were good kids, but we were starting to get a bit mischievous. We would dress in all black and sneak out at night to syrup mailboxes. Somehow our parents always knew what we were up to. One day my dad said to me, “Don’t let me catch you putting syrup in mailboxes again.” I thought we were as sneaky as could be. How did he know? I have no idea how he found out. Parents know things! Though I knew it was wrong to do, a part of me wanted to fit in. The majority of what I got myself into came from hanging out with the wrong crowd. We weren’t all bad. We just had a tendency to do some bad things. We were just kids being kids, but things would get more dangerous down the road. It seemed my friends and I were inseparable, but things are always subject to change.