Winamp Wednesday: Drawing Stick Figures
In Memory of Greg Howard
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Greg Howard, “Charmed Life”
Have you ever heard of the Chapman Stick? It’s a newer instrument, barely fifty years old, and in some ways it still looks like it comes from the future. A multi-stringed instrument that produces sound by touch and tap rather than strum or bow, many folks first heard it through the work of the great Tony Levin on King Crimson’s “Elephant Talk”. If you were tuned into pop music in the late nineties you most likely heard a strange and alluring sound in the background of Dave Matthews Band’s “The Dreaming Tree”. That’s what I want to talk about today. We’re here to pay tribute to that particular Stick and the man behind it. We’re taking a break to talk about Greg Howard.
This isn’t exactly a Winamp Wednesday because my connection to Greg’s music goes all the way back to cassette tape. That music is ever-present and modern and part of my daily and so much a part of my childhood that it’s impossible to rip away from it. How much of what we love is formed when we’re nine or ten or eleven? More to the point, how much of what we find impressive is simply iterative from what we loved at those tender ages? I’m not sure that it’s possible to separate oneself entirely from what you thought was incredible back then, especially if it was given to you by someone you saw as an authority. We all have those someones who introduced us to music like edicts from on high. They were blown away by this album and they know you will be too.
That was the Charlottesville music scene as I saw it for years. Greg Howard, Tim Reynolds, John D’Earth, Tom Prasada-Rao, Bella Morte, Dave Matthews, anyone and everyone Rich Tarbell caught in his viewfinder was handed to me until I was old enough to discover it on my lonesome. All handed to me by my hip brother and his cool friends alongside innumerable other tracks discovered within and without Grounds. That’s how I ended up with a copy of Stick Figures in the sleepy summer I turned eleven years old, how it seemed to live in the stereo in an August without TV or internet or anything to do but dream before school started.
What was it about these songs that made it so easy to dream away? For me everything Greg created sounded like pure fantasy. First there was the novelty of it, my brother saying “no, it’s just him! It’s just the one guy!” It was pure science fiction, quite literally in the way Gurney Halleck played it through the David Lynch Dune. Then it was the motifs, something between the CTI jazz that my father played at dinner and the Loreena McKennit CDs my brother played while working. These songs were a melange and then out of it wholly original in their own ways. The lines they drew in my imagination became maps to places I’d never gone before. There was adventure and fantasy within these notes more than anything else in my collection.
Songwriters wrote for bands. Composers wrote for orchestras. Did that mean that Greg Howard was an author? Writing for himself in complex and spiraling ways but always resolving. Every bit felt like a chapter in that same wonderfully narrowing way. Reading a great book until the world falls away. Listening to a great song until you’re on that same precipice.
It would be several years and a couple of steps into my teens until I got to hear Greg perform live. I made pains to sit right up front, as excited to see him as I would be to see a Beatle. By that point his records had become the sound of creativity for me, an easy choice to sharpen my mind if I wanted to write at a stretch. His performance was beyond what I could have imagined; seeing him live was hypnotic like the great storytellers, and it remained so every single other time I had the pleasure to see him. He was perfectly attentive in person, and to many of my friends he was an incredible teacher and mentor. In many ways he was everything I hoped I would grow into as a performer, professor, and friend, but never reached.
This piece is, unfortunately, a remembrance. Greg Howard died on April 22nd. I woke up to a text from an old friend and then spread the news to everyone I could think of who knew him. Those who played from him, who learned from him, who had the great fortune of being students at Young Writers Workshop when he was on the teaching staff. We are bound by a web of memories that all include him and his music. Scaffolding around who we are.
You can’t separate yourself from what you saw as incredible. At least I know that I can’t. You can only build upon it. So I will listen in memory and because of memory, knowing that a life that’s gone continues to help create innumerable others. The strings of the Stick and the strings that tie us together, for a song or for a summer or for eternity. All because of a simple phrase: “I think you’ll like this.”
Thank you, Greg.