I have been meaning to write about this for a while, since one day this spring when the memories of this time of my life came crushing back to me. I've almost never talked about it in my adult life - not for any drama, not for any deep, dark secrets, but... perhaps out of habit. Out of muscle memory for the painful, pointless, adolescent embarrassment that the period coincided with. I can't say. I do think it's time to exorcise it, though, and to make it mine. So onward.
Despite growing up in Alaska, or perhaps because of it, my mother made every effort to raise her children with a musical education. Piano lessons began at around age eight, if I recall correctly. I think it was age eight, because trumpet began when they let you start playing in the band in elementary school, which was fourth grade, or age nine. And piano came first.
I loved piano, but there were a dearth of piano teachers in Fairbanks, and mine, though she was wonderful, was classically focused. Some of this was necessary, as a student learns the basics. I banged and pounded my way through Hanon's warm-up exercises and various etudes and simple piano pieces. I say "banged and pounded," since nuance and dynamics were not things that were of interest to me. This extended to school band, where I chose the trumpet, originally, simply by putting my lips to it and unleashing a godawful squaawk! and thinking "Yeah. This is the instrument for me."
The classical foundation was, of course, necessary, but I was much more interested in learning to play the synth parts of the various pop songs and the ricky, meaty ten finger chords from the piano ballads I heard on the radio. My piano teacher, Mrs. Wallace, resisted these urges. (Later, much later, my teacher would take a two-fold approach to a compromise - letting me play some cheesy piano ballad whose score I had picked up at the local music store, in exchange for consenting to play more classical fare. She's worked around my hopeless lack of dynamics by selecting musicians who fared well under my pounding fists - most notably the Russians such as Rachmaninoff, and some of the more contemporary classical composers such as Alberto Ginestera - a pounder's paradise if ever there were one on the keys.)
But, alas again, that was later. Much later. Nearly ten years later. In the intervening years, my urge to play other forms of music was almost completely unfulfilled, save for the occasional aforementioned pop music scores I'd find at Music Mart. These, however, only went so far when you had a full rehearsal docket of Brahms and Handel, as well as a practice card for band requiring five 30 minute practice sessions a week, to be signed off on by a parent, as well as classwork, and never mind playing doctor with the neighborhood girls. Not having someone to teach me and coach me through Lionel Ritchie's "Say You, Say Me" or Bruce Hornsby's "The Way It Is" made it even more impossible.
Years of frustration went by. Actually, I could do the math. From age 8 to age 13. Five years. No pop music issuing forth from my desperately modernist fingers. And then, somehow, my mother alighted on the solution.
The origins are murky, though of course, now, I realize that my mother probably always had this planned. She had, after all, set me on this musical path - she played the piano and sang in the choir and taught me all about everything from Ralph Von Williams to Bob Dylan before I made it to Kindergarten. By the time I was thirteen, though, I probably thought it was my idea to go to the University of Alaska Summer FIne Arts Camp, having gone through some fairly painful Alaskan-style summer camps, the stories of which are for another day. Wherever the idea came from, however, I can say with confidence that upon my first year of summer fine arts camp, my life was changed for good.
The memories of it are totally murky, and since they came rushing back to me this spring, I have been trying to piece them together. I went to the camp for four summers. I think. Maybe five. These were the summers of my adolescence, and there was so much change through the years that it's almost impossible to recall anything in a coherent series of events.
First, there were the musicians. Musicians from all over the state. This was something of a shock. There was band, of course, at your school, so you knew the other trumpet players you sat with and competed with for first chair, and the cute flautists and clarinetists that you had crushes on, born in exotic locations outside the state or raised by mysterious, disciplinarian parents who insisted their Korean, Sikh or Hatian offspring be the best. And there were adjudications, for piano, throughout the years previous - once or twice-annually affairs where all the piano students in the city of Fairbanks gathered at the public library to play on one of the three good pianos in the town - a Bosendorfer - while some out-of-state adjuticator passed judgement on your playing (curiously, this is where I finally learned about my lack of dynamic sense, and became acutely embarrassed by it, despite years of my teachers pleadings to learn pianissimo. Somehow the outside critique stung more). But aside from these, musicians in alaska were in a bubble. You got the sense there weren't many of them around.
So to arrive at Fine Arts Camp and discover trombonists and timpani players and harpists and jazz bassoonists - it really was eye opening. Reassuring. Overwhelming. Welcoming. Scary. Amazing.
I remember walking into one of my group piano classes (group piano class?? who knew there was such a thing!), and some precocious, snooty 14 year old I had never seen before (she was home schooled) was playing, perfectly, the theme song to a recent film, composed by an 80's one hit wonder I had liked (okay, okay, it was Lihmal's theme to "Never Ending Story"). Who was this person? Where did she come from? How did she manage to learn this song? Where did she even get the score from? She was one of many. Cool veterans of fine arts camp studiously scoring their own arrangements of new wave hits in advance arranging classes. Glockenspiel players! Glockenspiel!
Then there were the classes and the teachers. I remember learning what the 12 bar blues were and feeling forever changed. I didn't even like jazz, but just understanding such a basic, primal structure to so much music was incredibly powerful. Learning improvisation techniques - something so important to my thinking about music now, but heretofore completely unheard of. Improvise? You're kidding, right? You follow the score, you follow it exactly, and the if the piece is supposed to last 3:15 in the Glenn Gould version, then by god, you better be close to 3:15. But here, suddenly, were dozens of different teachers, styles and techniques. I took a classical malleted instruments class. Jazz improvisation - every year. Rock Piano (on Fender Rhodeses - my first introduction to such a heavenly instrument). I learned to play the harmonica. I expanded my trumpeting into jazz trumpet. I took my first guitar lesson - and hated it (guitar wouldn't hold appeal to me until I discovered the bliss of delay and fuzz). It was an unending smorgasborg of eye-opening musical magic. Marimbas. Vibraphones. Farfisas.
And then! And then! Let us not forget the name - this was Summer Fine Arts Camp, not Summer Music Camp. The music curriculum was just part of the fun. There were photography classes - I first learned to use a darkroom in my time here. For as much as my mother was a music buff, my father was a photography buff, and bought me my first Pentax K1000 when I was 11. It was here, though, that I truly began to understand the device's mechanics and the full process (I had always sent my film away previously). And print making classes - something I could never quite get the hang of, much to my consternation later in life. And Macintoshes! I first discovered the joy of Photoshop at Summer Fine Arts Camp. Painting. Figure drawing. Pastels (I loved pastels - I was such a pussy). There was so much.
And the other attendees... well, what can I say? Essentially every artist from 13 to 18 in the State of Alaska, all in one place. Along with innumerable student performances throughout the months, they had three student dances as well - social gatherings. The few times I've thought of Summer Fine Arts Camp through the years, this is the part that I almost always thought of. I made my first friends here that were anything like me. They changed my life. They gave me my life.
It was here, in the summer of 1985, that I first heard Peter Hook's haunting falsetto refrain that permeates New Order's "Temptation." I can still remember the first time I heard it, and I can still feel the reaction I had to it. I had heard nothing like it in my life. It's still a remarkable work, but then, in Alaska, it was unbelievable. Thinking back on it, it boggles my mind that this even happened - "Temptation" came out in 1982 or so, and somehow, in three years, it had found its way halfway across the world to Fairbanks, Alaska, to become a dance hit, unaided by the internet, New Music Express, radio airplay, MTV or even a halfway decent record store. I usually think of my friends at Fine Arts Camp as being older than me, and therefore "in the know," but it is really amazing how they found out about all this music so quickly. It was here I also learned about Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Tones on Tail (though not Bauhaus or Love and Rockets, which I had learned about in church, weirdly), and so much more. Billy Idol. The B52s. Roxy Music. Through my four or five years attending camp, the dances became, literally, the highlights of my year.
And it was here that a girl first ever told me she liked me. I still shudder at how terrifying and confusing it all was. I had had a crush on her for ages, but was a typical adolescent male, unable to think straight or see past my own nose. It was only when she explicitly, undeniably told me that she liked me that it started to click. It was not my first kiss, but it was the first I can ever remember. I doubt the girl, who went on to become a famous cheerleader in our district, even remembers it. I doubt she remembers me, but she changed my life.
So many memories blow by. I grew up at this camp, but time has blended the years together. Playing video games at the student union. Sitting in the seats of the giant concert hall (oh, man, what was it called? I will have to look it up. Oh, got it. The Charles W Davis Concert Hall), watching my flute playing crush practice in the symphony. Glowing with pride and embarrassment when she'd wave from the stage. Seeing my friend Dylan arrange and score New Order's "Elegia" and watching him conduct a string quartet as they played it. The choral practice room (oh man! I forgot! I sang in choirs there too! Church choirs. Jazz choirs. Doo wop. Everything I could get my hands on). Learning that the choral room was named after my father's godmother. The dances in the Great Hall. Learning the drum parts to Soft Cell's "Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go" that we just HAD to hear, in its entirety, at every dance. The dark rooms. The printmaking studio. Sitting out by the fountain, everyone trying to look cool, desperately wanting to meet everyone but too cool to admit it, or just too scared.
Years later, in college, I went home for the summer. I met a girl. I fell in love instantly. She went to another school, in another district. When I worked up the gumption to finally talk to her, she said, "I remember you. I was three years younger in Fine Arts Camp and I had the hugest crush on you." I met her at the campgrounds above the university. We walked down to the camp, which was in session. People remembered me, people remembered her. Their approval of me sealed my fate as an acceptable prospect for her to date for the summer. If the camp people thought you were okay, you were okay.
What amazes me now, thinking back, is how much of my life was influenced by this camp, and yet how little I think of it, and how I never pieced it together through the years. It just sits there, in the back of my mind, like your mother's care or the town you grew up in - something so intrinsic to your being that it's hard to even call it an influence. And it amazes me to think about all of this going on in Fairbanks, Alaska. When people ask me what it was like growing up there, I inevitably talk about the cold, the pain, the loneliness, the dark, the misery. But what were all these artists doing there? Hundreds of art students in a city of less than 30,000. How is it anyone in Alaska knew about the Smiths in 1986? Or the Cure, before Kiss Me? Who brought these things there? I don't think I'll ever know, but I do know that it was Summer FIne Arts Camp that brought them to me.
Current Music: "Feed This End" By The Mountain Goats from
Hot Garden Stomp [Cassette]
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