Since I was a child, art and creativity have been what inspires me to get out of bed in the morning. I caught the bug early, writing my first song at age six, a flighty pop song about Hollywood glitterati scheduling a lunch through their “people.” I’m as surprised as you that a six year old boy would be commenting on fake plastic celebrity and power, but my parents were playing a lot of Steely Dan at the time. In the fifth grade, I wrote cross-over fanfic where Ethan Hunt and James Bond shared adventures together. I’ve been drawing since I could hold an implement in my hands. My sister recently told me about a letter I sent to her at summer camp when I was eight or nine that included a spread displaying the many lives and occupations of The Roadrunner (she mentioned a Ninja Roadrunner that I can’t get out of my head). My parents encouraged my creative impulses, enrolling me in summer drawing classes. Batman, X-Men, Star Wars, Bucky O’Hare, Ninja Turtles, Ken Griffey, Jr, Barry Sanders, Penny Hardaway and Lil Penny: if I could see it, I would draw it.
I went to public school in a district that, while I was there, fostered the arts on top of rigorous general studies. Art, calligraphy, and music were all required classes in middle school. We had a functioning dark room at my high school, where I learned to take and develop my own photos; the photography teacher also taught illustration, so I was privy to figure study, design, and nature drawing classes. There were analog and digital editing bays within our robust videography department. My friends and I wrote, shot, and edited short films about suicidal superheroes and corrupt 1970s police bomb squads before we were old enough to vote, and our instructor praised our outside-of-the-box mentality.
Over the years, though, music rose to the top as my artistic weapon of choice. My parents weren’t musicians, but they had a keen ear. The early Beatles, Beach Boys Christmas, Heart, Bryan Adams, .38 Special, Ben E. King, Pat Benatar, Boston, The Temptations, and The Proclaimers color my childhood memories. By the time I started seeking out my own musical influences, finding bands like The Smashing Pumpkins and Blink 182, all I wanted was to play guitar in a band of my own. My parents got me a cheap Fender when I was fifteen and were supportive enough to let me bang chainsaws against rocks in my bedroom for a year and a half before making sounds resembling music.
Senior year, I joined my first real band. I saw some friends at a Battle of the Bands, and they played their set without a bass player, a capital offense in my burgeoning critical musical opinion. I wanted to be in a band more than I wanted to play guitar, so I switched instruments. We played all over the state, eventually signing to a small independent label (in lieu of a paycheck, they paid the rent for my sophomore year in college). That situation fell apart and I was offered a spot with a college hardcore band. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun, but there was a ceiling. I wanted more from my music.
The hardcore band shared a practice space with another band whose guitar player ghosted right before recording an album and heading out on tour. This was my chance to go to greater heights, creatively and as a young man still discovering the world. I switched back to guitar and we hit the road. We circled every state west of the Mississippi many times, each circuit growing our legend and fan base. We slept on rest-stop concrete in Idaho, encountered fanged mountain men in Utah, narrowly avoided a hostage situation in Phoenix, and ultimately signed with another small label out of Pittsburgh. I felt the power of creativity leading me on the path to self-actualization I desperately wanted.
Embedded in my creative energy, however, was a powerful opposing force: high-functioning alcoholism. The habitual behavior started in my junior year of high school with the first time I got drunk on New Year’s with some work friends. It continued with my romanticizing liquid courage via Hemingway, Bukowski, and the casual attitudes of 20th century film and television. Drinking and great art had coalesced in my mind, and I sincerely believed one couldn’t function without the other. My first time on the road, we played a particularly electric set in Northern California after a dud the night before. The band had chalked the new buzz up to my manic physical performance that night. I was jumping around, guitar god posing and playing in ways I had never done at rehearsal or in the studio. When asked what was different, we concluded that it was because I’d had two pints of beer before we hit the stage. From then on, I required a consultation with the Warlock of Alcohol before any creative decisions could be made.
I was on tour with this post punk band, taking a sunrise piss on the side of a Colorado highway when I got the message: my father was dead.
Until then, creating art, writing, and playing music had kept the destructive force at bay. My father’s death opened up a chasm inside me, forcing out long-hidden demons. My dad drank himself to death. I know he didn’t mean to, but he didn’t stop until it was too late. And here I was, knowing I now faced the same fate. The music, the tour, creativity, they no longer mattered. After we played the show in New Mexico that night, at a venue that was no more than a pair of railroad cars fastened together, I walked into the desert, away from the tour and my life.
I left the country, washing up on the East Coast of South Africa. I found work at clinics and hospitals, and a nurse’s family took me in. They’d lost their paterfamilias the year before and we comforted each other while I ran away from my problems. I was able to dry out a bit while in KwaZulu-Natale because alcohol wasn’t part of the household, but I still found a hole-in-the-wall pub where I could spend a couple hours after my shifts in maternity and imaging. I was offered work at a rural hospital compound hundreds of kilometers outside of the city. There, I was able to return to my American drinking ways, surrounded by students and European doctors eager to blow off steam after completing their rotations. After a few weeks in the backcountry, I was robbed and forced to return home to the States.
I don’t remember much from the following few years. I have flashes of emotional breakdowns, crying alone on the floor of a stranger’s bathroom. Blurred throngs of people and body heat around me at a piano bar as my heart races out of control. I remember moving into the city, and proximity to alcohol being a deciding factor on the apartment I chose.
In this downtown apartment, I reunited with a musical friend from college and a fellow searching soul. “C” and I were both sick of the paths before us and conjured a three-year musical spell that took me back toward the self-actualization I’d sought. South Saturn Delta was a concept more than a band and, on this musical expedition, the early seeds of The Gonzo Raven emerged. We asked how 60s pop music and The Blues could reflect the 21st century, setting out to make the old sound new again. We lost ourselves in the musical realm, unearthing corners we’d only thought accessible to our heroes. Every second was that of discovery, a pure creativity that I still count myself lucky to have found. What we brought back with us to the mortal realm took off more than either of us imagined. We played festivals, fashion shows, bars, and other venues all over the Pacific Northwest; the offers came in so quickly that we couldn’t accept them all. At some point, I put on my own “Skitch” Patterson sunglasses and felt my dark-feathered wings open wide. If I hadn’t still been drinking, I may have noticed more how positive the reaction to our work was, or perhaps how inhabiting this nascent avatar gave me the freedom of expression I’d always wanted. But, as they say, life gets in the way, and keeping four people moving in the same direction became untenable. There were no ill feelings, but the project ended anyway.
South Saturn Delta had slowed the destructive force and I was as dry as I’d been since high school, but without the creative buzz the band provided, the drinking returned and increased. As did the melancholy. I sought out more music but couldn’t find what I had before. I know now that I wasn’t pursuing creativity in earnest as I had been, just trying to fill the void that drinking did. Additionally, high-functioning alcoholism requires money. I discovered that office jobs love college graduates and they paid more than enough to keep myself tranquilized.
In this new arena, a negative feedback loop grew and accelerated. I would commute for hours to crunch numbers for hours before returning home to drink for hours. I was sad, so I drank, and I drank because I was sad. The escalation went on for years and I soon had to stop every evening at a Mexican restaurant near the office for a couple beers before catching the bus. I would then grab another six to twelve pints at the store for my nightly intake back home. I looked forward to Fridays, when a mini-keg or bottle of whiskey would appear in the office to “wind down” from another hard week. And, after my Friday shift, it was common for me to tackle thirty to fifty beers over countless weekends I no longer recall.
Self-destruction doesn’t happen overnight, but it feels that way when it finally hits you. Like crossing state lines on a rural highway at night, you don’t realize where you are until you’re already there. I was killing myself in small doses. My life was completely upside down from where I’d left it and the power I’d discovered in the Raven faded away. I was no longer myself, I was a stand-in. A copy of a copy. An artistic paladin who’d chased creativity and music into higher planes had devolved into a shirt and tie at Initech. I was trapped at the bottom of a pit I’d jumped into willingly.
I often think about a famous joke from Trailer Park Boys. The ex-cop and park supervisor Jim Lahey’s life comes unhinged because of his drinking. At one point, his ever-faithful companion Randy asks if it’s him or the liquor speaking. Lahey replies, “Randy…I am the liquor.” I laughed the first time I saw the episode. I had become the liquor and, after years in the dark, it wasn’t funny anymore.
I was drinking alone after another time-loop day at the office when a sense of finality washed over me. All that lay ahead was this repeated twenty-four hours of misery and a night spent chasing an ethanol sleep just to end the process for a few hours. I was playing in a band at the time, but my creative well was unfilled. I thought about seeking refuge with friends, but all I could see was a trip to a bar and more alcohol. I no longer had a life. I was no longer alive.
Death was the answer, then. I thought about how to die with surgical logic for hours. I had it all worked out when I saw in my mind’s eye the faces of all the people that care about me, even at my worst. If I took my own life, it would cause more pain than it would end. Damn, I’m lucky. This wasn’t the first time I thought about suicide, but it would be the last.
How could I navigate this life I found myself living? My mind projected into the future. Things looked the same, opaque and hazy between sips. I was a much older man, though, running my fingers through white hair with wrinkled, sun-spotted hands. My apartment had shrunk, littered with empty cans, takeout containers, and dead plants covered in cobwebs. A cell phone buzzed next to the bottle I drank from. It was a text from the boss. I’d been fired. Profits had slipped and they had to cut salaries so the P&L would look better for the next quarter. I’d spent thirty-five years with the company, just to be tossed out. I thought about all that time I’d wasted. I hadn’t lived, only existed. If only I could go back and tell my younger self to take a different path. I took a swig of the brown liquid next to me, and my warming belly sent me into sleep.
I emerged in a casino I’d never visited before. A familiar face from college reached out his hand, asking for money. He promised just to hold it, not to do any gambling. Without question, I reached into my pocket and handed over a stack of bills. He scurried away while I was distracted by a robot sitting at a nearby slot machine. I felt a slip of paper drop into my pocket. Dream logic told me that this message had to be more important than the gangly, metallic being repeatedly pulling a lever and hoping for cash.
I held a business card that read: “I can see all your skeletons.”
My eyes darted around the crowded floor, searching for who had given me the message. I followed a steam-powered tractor chugging away when I saw my younger self. He sat at a baccarat table, nineteen years old and dressed to the nines. I rushed through the bodies, but felt the dream again, molasses shoes slowing any sort of pace. I finally reached the table and grabbed the young man by his lapels.
“Don’t do it! Whatever you do, don’t do it!” I mustered at the top of my lungs.
He wrestled free from my grasp, straightening his tux and running his fingers through finely coiffed hair. “Fuck you, old man!”
I laughed, snapping myself back into the present. I sat up straight, struck by a bolt of cosmic and oneiric lightning. I wasn’t dreaming; I was communing with my subconscious. I was telling myself a story. I felt the viscosity of reality change, becoming easier to mold. A future unfurled in front of me, still unclear but at least in existence. I could do this; I HAD to do this.
My mind expanded further. I had been doing a version of this my entire life, but I had kept the different parts of my creative apparatuses from interacting. That was the missing key. I’m not a musician or songwriter. I’m not an illustrator. I’m not a writer. I’m all of those things. I’m an artist, a storyteller.
Still, change requires choice, and I knew I had to start the story of my new life. I had no direction, but I had to choose between creating and destroying. That’s what I’m doing here. My last drink was New Year’s 2020; I left my office job the following year and I started working toward what you’re seeing today. I don’t know if I’ll find what I’m looking for here, but I’d rather fail at creating something than succeed at destroying myself.
One thought on “How We Got Here: The Story of The Gonzo Raven”
You are so awesome! I do not believe I’ve truly read through a single thing like this before.
So good to discover another person with some unique thoughts on this issue.
Really.. thank you for starting this up. This web site
is one thing that’s needed on the internet, someone with some originality!
Comments are closed.