Just Wanted to Learn

It was one of those nights when a person just had to get out of the house. I seem to have a lot of those nights. I had decided to go to one of the local bars. This is something I normally don’t do.

I never liked going out to bars by myself. I always felt uncomfortable standing alone in a place filled with people. That’s one of the small problems that I have that I can’t seemed to fix.

There weren’t very many people in the small bar. There biggest crowd came in on karaoke night. People were smoking their cigarettes even though they weren’t allowed to. The band was up on the stage playing.

I had known of the bar most of my life. There had been a lot of memories there. I had family members who had always went to the bar. The bar looked the same as when I was younger, but the crowd was nothing like it used to be.

It was a bar that I had always wanted to play music in. I had only got to sit in with another band once at the bar and that was because of my dad. Now, I don’t even know if I would stand on their stage even if they paid me.

I stood in the corner holding my beer. It was some well needed time out of the house. I wasn’t there long, but I felt like I was ready to go home. I tried to get into the music that the band was playing.

The band had some funny name. I had never seen the band before. They didn’t sound bad at all.

I was getting ready to leave when I was spotted by someone I hadn’t seen for awhile. There were hopes of him walking on past me. My luck never happens that way.

The guy’s name was Jimmy. He was in a tee shirt and jeans. He was a city boy trying to be country. He was a country singer who I had never seen a cowboy hat on.

My dad had shown him a little with music. He had also played in Jimmy’s band. Jimmy and I had never been that good of friends. My dad had introduced Jimmy to his drummer

Jimmy had formed his own band and done well. I have to admit it kind of surprised me at first. He wasn’t a kid that I could see him being a front man for a country band.

What’s up? Jimmy said. It’s been awhile.

We shook hands. He had smile on his face. I didn’t have too much to smile about.

Just having a beer, I said. I didn’t have very much to say to him. Checking out the band.

I didn’t know what to say to him, because I didn’t even know how I felt about the guy anymore. We had been though this routine before. He always thought that he was better than me.

Scouting, aren’t you? He said. Getting a band ready?

He had kept the smile on his face. His band was a regular at the bar. He was a regular at the bar even when he wasn’t playing.

No, I said. I wondered what business it was of his anyways. I’m just watching.

Sure, he said. He chuckled. We shook hands again before he started off. I know what you’re doing.

He thinks I was out looking for people to put together a band. It wasn’t about that at all. It was just thinking about what could have been. Why couldn’t I be on the stage playing with the band?

I finished my beer and left. I thought about what Jimmy said for the rest of the night. I thought about a lot of things. I thought about my dad.

Chapter Two

There aren’t too many things that we can say has touched a little part of every single person on the planet lives. Music has done something for all of us. Music can bring out feelings that lay hidden deep inside of us all of our lives.

It seems that music is part of most of the things that we do. We listen to it in the car or when we are cleaning. There is music on our phones. There’s music on television and about everything else.

Music has to touch a person very deeply to make them want to become a musician. You have to have a serious love to push yourself down the hard road to becoming at least a good musician. You have to want to keep learning.

Some of the greatest musicians never make it to the big show. They play and they entertain. They live and they die. Sometimes they get very little respect for what they have brought to so many people’s lives in the best way they could, music.

We all have people who influence those paths that we take. We can try and go the same as they did, or try to make our own paths with what they had done before us. Whatever way that we choose, we must make it our own somehow.

This is true for one person that had been in my life. There are not too many people that I can say that have truly influenced something in my life. This one person should have been closer than what he had been, my dad.

My dad always said that it is better to be just a little hometown star than no star at all. I don’t know if he was what you could call a hometown star. The love that he had for music and the serious want he had to just be a hometown star had kept him going for many of years.

For years I couldn’t see all of this. It took sitting down and looking back over my entire lifetime to understand the music in my dad’s life and my own. There comes a time when you have to take a hard look at the good and the bad even if you don’t want to.

Chapter Three

My name is Richard Selby, the son of Harold Selby. I have always been the skinny and shy kid. I am the youngest child of three.

I’m no tough guy even though life has made feel as though I need to act like one. I think having an older brother sometimes makes you toughen up a little. I have always been one to keep to myself.

My older brother’s name is Lee. Lee and I look a lot alike. People always think that we are twins, but the twins are my sister and him. His hair looked close to being blonde, while mine was brown.

My sister is named Samantha. She had shoulder length hair. She was skinny when we were kids and then put on a little weight while growing up. She always took a different path than Lee and me.

I come from two different kinds of families. The families didn’t think or act the same at all. Both sides of my family had influenced my life in many ways.

My mom’s side are good people, but wasn’t always the best influences. I had to watch my back a lot at my grandma’s house because of all of the other kids. My grandma Michaels wasn’t anything like my grandma Selby.

There were fights every day. My brother would get the other kids to pick on me with him. They like to get loud and some of them liked to drink.

My dad’s family was serious religious people. They spent a lot of time with their families and gardens. My dad was the black sheep out of all the kids.

My dad was always the bad rap. Lee and I got thrown into that label. They never liked it when Lee’s and my hair would get long.

My grandma Selby was the only reason I even went to church when I was younger. If it not for her, I probably wouldn’t have walked into a church as often as I did when I was younger. She is the reason why I like the old school churches better than the new style churches.

The good and the bad things that happened in my life were molded together. The things we go through and how we deal with things will shape how we react to things in the future.

Sometimes the effects of this can go unnoticed for years till one day you sit back and ask…

How in the hell did I turn out like this?

Music has always been in my life in one way or the other. When some people say that they are only talking about listening to music, I’m talking about living it even when you don’t know what’s going on.

There are a couple things that had pushed me to want to learn and play music. One of the main things that pushed me was that I wanted to be better than my dad. Second, something just seemed to draw me to all things about music.

There were four people who had influenced some of the music that I love. We all have people like this in our lives. We grow into our own taste in music built on what we grew up listening to because of our families.

My mom had listened to the 80’s long hair band love ballads. Her mom had listened to country music. My dad was a classic rocker and his mom listened to the old gospel.

I got my want to learn how to play music from my dad’s side of the family. There was always something that had put a little spark of music in me. Things have happened throughout the years to keep music apart of my life.

There is a picture of my dad playing a twelve string acoustic guitar at my Grandma Selby’s house. It was taken when I was a baby. I know this because the back of my head was in the picture. I don’t remember ever seeing the guitar.

I tried asking my dad about the guitar. I even showed him the picture. He acted like he didn’t remember it.

Then there were the little things like going through the living room and seeing my dad with different guitars in his hands. At that age I didn’t know what he was doing with it, because I knew the guitars that I had seen him with weren’t his.

I had asked him once about the different guitars that I had seen him with. At first he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then he said that his buddies wanted him to break them in for him.

I don’t believe that to be the truth. I had never heard of someone doing that since then. Why would he lie about?

A lot of time spent at my Grandma Selby’s house, especially during the summer months. She lived out in the country and she didn’t drive. Once you were there, you wasn’t leaving till someone came out to pick you up.

We didn’t have video games or cable television. We had to come up with things to keep ourselves entertained. I would go through things when I got bored. You would never know what you could find at my grandma’s house.

She was an old lady. She kept a clean house but seemed to keep everything. She could find a place to stash anything.

At a very young age I was going through one of the bedrooms. There were two bedrooms. I usually stayed in the smaller bedroom and that was the room I was going through.

I found an old violin/fiddle under the bed. I was amazed by this find. I tried to ask about it. I was told to put it back under the bed and not to mess with it.

I always wondered who it belonged to and what music was played on it. I never found out the true story about it. That was what sparked my interest.

There was a guitar at my grandma’s house. My grandma was the first person I can remember seeing play and sing with the guitar. There was only one old bluegrass song that I can remember her playing, Little Brown Jug.

I thought it was neat to watch her play. I never had the courage to touch the guitar at that age. There was no one pushing me to learn how to play music.

That house meant more than just music in my past. My grandma Selby’s house was where I felt safe. At this age I was already scared of my dad.

Around the age of five I had gotten into some trouble at my grandma’s house, and I was told I was getting my butt whooped when I got home. I had gotten so scared of what my dad was going to do to me.

When we had pulled up to the house, I had taken off running. I was running away from home. I still don’t know what put the idea of running in my head on that day.

I had gone several blocks. It was the longest I had ever gone by myself. I had gotten scared and turned back to go home.

My dad was the one who had caught up with me when I was almost back to the house. It was my mom who had calmed me down. She had given me a hat that she had when she worked with the paramedics.

I didn’t get whooped that day. That doesn’t mean that my dad had changed his ways. I didn’t want my dad upset me, because I knew that I would still get punished.

Chapter Four

Harold Selby was the youngest of seven kids. He was a little disconnected from his brothers and sisters. There was a slight age difference. His next oldest sibling was five-years older than him.

If you want to know when he touched his first guitar, then you would have to go back to when he was little. He has a baby picture of him holding a guitar. My grandma bought him a guitar for Christmas one year. At the age of fifteen he tried to start a band.

His bands never lasted long enough to amount to anything. He had started to do pills and egos had gotten in the way. They were teenagers trying new things.

Harold was a sophomore in high school when one of his older brothers was drafted to Vietnam. He didn’t graduate from high school. This had upset his dad, my grandpa.

My dad had been married before and had two daughters by that woman. I don’t know if he played music while he was with that woman or not. I never knew too much about the lady.

I didn’t even know much about my two half sisters. One of them I only seen when I was young. I was young enough not to even remember ever seeing her. They wanted nothing to do with my dad.

At a young age I knew a little of my dad’s involvement in music. I had always heard things about him playing before I was born. He never played or singed in front of the kids while he was married to my mom.

There were a couple of nights where I remember him saying he had to go and sit in with some friends’ band. He would go out and be out all night. Sometimes there would be arguing when he got home.

I was never able to talk to him about the places that he was supposed to go play at. That was my dad’s business. I grew up being taught to not ask questions about things that weren’t my business.

We were kids and we were taught to know our place. We were taught to show respect. If we didn’t, then there was the paddle, belt or fresh tree switch.

He had wild friends who we weren’t a loud to talk to. One of his friends we found cool because he had all kinds of neat guns. The guy’s name was Mike. He knew my dad when they were younger. He also had a couple of daughters.

Once we had seen them shooting an Uzi at a tree. This was around the time Rambo first came out. We had thought it was so cool.

My dad had a 68 Camaro that I still love today. This was our everyday car for awhile.