I was born into a family of musicians. My mother, Linda, is five foot seven with mouse-brown hair, blue eyes and has the figure of a model. She has the best smile in the whole family. Mom grew up in California and was part of the surge of hippies that took over the west. She originally wanted to be a writer and wrote an essay that got her a scholarship into UCLA. While there, she changed her mind and decided that teaching was a better idea. She got a job at the community center day care and joined some of the other employees there that started a singing group. This is where she met Jack Rafferty, her future husband. Like all good mothers she is a born worrier and a giver. She always knows where everything is and doesn't take any crap from my dad or me. She still sings for a local group that call themselves The Blue Notes. They sing at county fairs and funeral services.
My dad, Jack, is a full on beatnik. He has dark brown hair and eyes, and stands at five feet and nine inches. He sings for a jazz band that plays at a club called The Music Box every Saturday night. The guys at work always kid him about his goatee. He studied art and philosophy in college and somehow got into advertising. He joined the community center choir because his older sister made him go with her. Dad's a pretty easygoing guy so I'm sure it didn't take much persuasion. He fell head over heels in love with the beautiful soprano standing to his right and hasn't left her side since they met.
My parents and some of their hippie/choir friends traveled around the country and played at small music festivals and on street corners in college towns. They had an old school bus that they were using for transportation. It also became a sort of mobile apartment. Dad hated being on that bus, secretly he wanted to go home and start a real band that made money and promised a career. I know that Dad only stayed with the traveling hippies because he didn't want to part with Mom. To her, it was all for fun. It was quite a romantic sacrifice on Dad's part if you think about it. At least that's what Mom's sister Tina thinks.
My beatnik dad and hippie mother dated for two years and then got married. Six months after the wedding is when they discovered that I was on my way into their lives. Sitting down to think of a suitable name for me wasn't an easy task for them. Mom wanted to name me Echo and Dad wanted to name me Aldus after one of his favorite writers. I would have been beat up at school constantly if either of those names had made it to first place. I have my grandfather that I never got to meet to thank for my first name. My dad's dad sadly, passed away a few months before my planned arrival, this prompted Dad to name his son after his father. They compromised and I would be called Sean Echo Rafferty.
We live in Arizona where Scottsdale and Tempe meet. The folks moved here because this is where Mom was accepted to teach. Mom had applied for jobs all over the country and she got one that was fairly close to home, it's on the same side of the country anyway. The house they bought is in an old, comfortable neighborhood that's close to my school and close to Arizona State University which is where my mother teaches English. When we moved into this neighborhood it was really affordable but if we were to sell our house we would be making two or three times what Mom and Dad paid for it. My father works for an advertising firm in north Scottsdale. They dealt with a lot of high dollar accounts. Dad's a workaholic and has an office downstairs at the house. When he's in there I'm not supposed to bother him, but he takes plenty of time off for Mom and me.
Saturday nights were nights that I looked forward to. I was allowed to sit at a corner table by the stage and watch Dad's jazz band. The room was dark and smoky and there were always people dancing slowly. When I was very young I used to fall asleep before the show was over and I would wake up the next day feeling like the previous night was a dream. As I got older I appreciated these nights because of all the girls that were there. The girls there were older and always seemed so exotic to me.
My parents thought it was a good experience for me to go and listen to the different bands that played there. They were really good about exposing me to different kinds of art and music. They listened to a lot of sixties folk and seventies rock themselves, but they always encouraged it when I was interested in something new that I heard on the radio or something. I owned a lot of CD's and records even as a kid. It was kind of like my replacement for baseball cards or comic books. One major influence from my parents is my secret love for Credence Clearwater Revival.
At school I played in the band. I was a first chair trumpet player. I was pretty good and my parents were proud of me but I still got beat up for my lunch money. I was younger than the kids in my class because I started kindergarten a year earlier than everyone else. I was a fairly small seventh grader standing at about five foot two inches and weighing in at one hundred and ten pounds. Being in band didn't help to give me any cool points either. I was also not very hip with the trends. I always wore jeans and my converse. People were starting to get into the baggy thing by this time but that just didn't sit right with me. By the time I was in the eighth grade I started spending all my free time in the school library. All I ever did was read which didn't do much for my social skills. I thought that when I grew up I could be a writer and play in a jazz band on the side. But that was before I discovered punk and metal.
The kids that lived across the street from us were twin boys, Scott and Tyler that were about four years older than I was. One was really into punk and the other was into metal. Our parents were fair-weather friends and whenever we would go over for a bar-be-que or something I would hang out with them and we would listen to records. They had a lot of stuff that was on independent labels that I'd never heard of before. A lot of the stuff we listened to had political lyrics, it was the first time I heard people really being angry about issues instead of just talking them over the way my pacifist parents did. Tyler and Scott supplied me with the music education that my parents didn't have access to. They also supplied me with a pretty good stack of playboys when they went off to college last year. I'm going to miss those guys.
Eighth grade was a hard year for me. My only real friend with whom I'd gone to school with since first grade moved to Tucson at the beginning of the year. We pretty much only hung out at school but that's where I needed him the most. I had to try and make new friends but I was too shy. I had always been able to talk to people before, but junior high seemed to have rules about whom you can and can't be friends with. Kids that I used to be friends with ditched me when we got into sixth grade and they were moving along with the hip way to be. I guess I just sort of got left behind. I eventually acquired a taste for being quiet so as not to draw attention to myself. I didn't want the reputation of being that nerdy kid that got beat up all the time to stick. I was so quiet that other kids just stopped noticing me. The library became my safe place; once I became a regular in here I started to bring my lunch to save myself the trip of walking to cafeteria.
My parents were real good to me during this time. Mom and I were really close because of all the time we spent together while she wasn't working. We still are close, I tell her everything. We talk more like two friends instead of mother and son. Don't get me wrong, Dad's a good guy and we talk too, but it's just somehow so much easier to talk to Mom. I think it may have something to do with that guard that guys put up to block their feelings. Dads don't mean to do that with their sons, it's just more out of habit. I hung out with my parents a lot outside of school but when I was at school the library was definitely my haven.
Most of the time there weren't really that many people in there at lunchtime. It doesn't rain here very often but when it does everyone runs for cover. On this particular rainy day the library was full of giggling girls and their soccer player boyfriends. I sat in the back at a table in Periodicals to try and filter out some of their noise. A couple of magazines were already on the table so I decided to look through one while I was eating. Three of the magazines were issues of Metal World. The first thing I saw when I opened one was a picture of a man called Kerry King. He was playing guitar on a stage that had upside down crosses made out of lights and he was wearing leather armbands that had huge spikes sticking out in all directions.
It was the picture preceding an article about a band called Slayer. I had a few Slayer albums at home so this caught my attention. Even though I listened to a lot of music, I never really read music magazines. I read all about the tour they were doing and the fun places that they got to go see. The whole band was there for the interview and they all seemed to be having a great time. Right then, I knew that I didn't want to play in the same club once a week for thirty years. I wanted to be in a band that went on tour, and made enough money to be able to enjoy it. A lot of the underground punk bands that I listened to still had to have day jobs and played music on their own time. I wanted to be able to do what I loved for a living and not worry about the corporate job market. By the time I left school that day I knew exactly what I wanted.
That afternoon when I arrived home from school my Aunt Tina was there. She was waiting for my mom to get home from work so that they could go to some sort of candle party. I don't really understand these things. I just know that they go to someone's house and light candles that are supposed to smell good, drink lots of wine and eat fancy finger foods.
Aunt Tina lives over in Chandler, about a twenty-minute drive on the freeway from here. Mom convinced her to move out here after she graduated from college. She went to a private chef's school in California and is now a personal chef. She goes to people's houses and makes meals for them that they can refrigerate and eat as the week goes on. Her clients consist mostly of rich workaholics with families. She also does parties and important functions like weddings and bat mitzvahs.
'Do I hear an Echo?'� she called. She always thought it would have been cool if my first name had been Echo. She's the only one I didn't mind calling me that. I always humored her.
'I don't know, I don't know!'� I called back to her
'Hey kiddo what's going on?'� she asked, giving me a big hug.
'Not much. Everything's always the same around here.'� I said
'Isn't somebody's birthday coming up?'�
'Yeah, but I'm not gonna have a party or anything. I just asked mom and dad to take me to Jim's for dinner. Mom said that she wants to get me a good present but I haven't told them what I want yet.'�
'How old are you now?'�
'I'll be fourteen.'�
'Wow, you're getting to be an old man. Do you know what you're going to ask your mom for?'� She asked me
'Well, I just figured it out today. I want to learn how to play the guitar but I need to have one before I can take lessons.'�
'So, you're going to ask for a guitar?'�
'Yeah'�
'Anything specific?'�
'Yeah, I want a Jackson Soloist. I think they might be kind of expensive though so I'll just suggest it. I'll need at least a practice amp too.'�
'Yes you will. Did you know that I used to play the guitar?
'No I didn't. Did you play in a band?'�
'No, I played the acoustic guitar. I mostly played in the living rooms at my friends' houses during parties. It's not a bad set-up if your friends don't mind hearing the same songs over and over again.'� She said with a smile. Aunt Tina is probably my favorite relative. I think what I liked the best about her was her ability to turn anything into a positive situation. She's never bitter about anything. She is younger than my mom by about five years and they spend every minute that they can together. She has short brown hair that she lets hang in her face a bit and she is very tall. She is perpetually single and likes to hang out with a young crowd. I think she has the best sense of humor in the family by far.
'Well, I think that I want to be in a band someday.'� I said to her. 'I think I would like it better to travel around and play for different crowds.'�
'It certainly sounds exciting. I think that your folks would be thrilled to know that you want to be in a band and would gladly help you out with anything that had to do with music. You should just ask them for that guitar, you might get it'� she said with a wink. My mother came into the room to proclaim that she was ready to go.
'How do I look?'� she asked me. Mom did a twirl and the yellow sundress she was wearing fluttered about her ankles.
'Stunning as usual,'� I said. She gave me a hug and a kiss and they were out the door.
I went back to the library the next day to look at more magazines about guitar playing. There was a surprising amount of them in there. There also turned out to be a section in the backs of some of them that had songs written out in tablature. I made copies of a few of these and smuggled a couple of the magazines out of the library. They won't let you check periodicals out and there was a lot to read.
When I got home that afternoon Aunt Tina was waiting on the bench on the front porch. No one was home yet and she hadn't brought the extra key that she had for house sitting occasions.
'Hey, what's going on?'� I asked her. It was unusual to find her there with no one home and no key because she knew Mom's schedule better than Mom herself.
'Nothing, I have to go out of town for a cooking seminar tomorrow morning and I just wanted to make sure that I saw you before I went.'� She said to me as I opened the door for us.
'What did you need to see me for?'� I asked her.
'Well, I know your birthday isn't until next Friday but I'm going to be gone for two weeks and I wanted to give you your present early.'� She said as she handed me an envelope. It didn't feel like there was a card in the envelope and I was afraid that she might have forgotten to put it in before she sealed it. Things like that happened with her occasionally. When I opened it there was only a piece of paper stapled to a business card in it. It was a certificate saying that I was to receive one year of guitar lessons, courtesy of Tina Malone.
'Wow, A whole year of lessons!'� I yelled out.
'I just thought that if you knew you were getting lessons you would be more apt to ask your parents for the guitar. It's just my way of giving you a boost.'� She said and smiled at me
'Thanks Aunt Tina. I'll definitely ask them.'� I promised her.
'Well, I hate to run out on you but I have to go and pack. Be sure to remind your mother to pick me up in the morning, she's taking me to the airport.'� She told me. I walked her out and locked up behind her.
Now I was more excited than ever to ask my parents for a guitar. Even though they are music junkies I just couldn't help but think that they wouldn't approve of my wanting to play the guitar, especially an electric one. I needn't have worried. That night after dinner I asked them about it and they were thrilled that I wanted to learn another instrument. Dad was really excited.
'I wanted to play the guitar when I was a kid but my dad said that the piano was 'more respectable'. In those days it was. I'm glad I know how to play the piano but the guitar always seemed like a lot of fun to me,'� he said. He gave me a big grin and ruffled my hair.
They hadn't made any concrete plans about what to get me yet and they both thought it was a good idea to get me more involved in music. My dad said that on Saturday morning he would take me down to the music store where his bass player buys his equipment from and see what they had.
My dad and I used to spend a lot of time together on the weekends. When I was really young, the three of us would just hop in the car and drive to a new town each time just to see what it was like. Sometimes, just Dad and I would go. In the summer, we'd take our sleeping bags and sleep in the bed of the truck. We had a book of ghost stories that we took turns picking the story out of. When his band started playing on Saturday nights these trips happened less, usually if a show was cancelled. I didn't mind too much though, sadly, as I got older I was becoming less interested in going.
This Saturday we got up early and had breakfast together at the IHOP down the street from where we were going to look at guitars. My birthday wasn't until Friday, but we wanted to do this on a weekend. Better to do it the weekend before my birthday rather than after. I told him what kind of guitar I wanted but I didn't really know what the best kind of practice amp was so I told him to wing it on that one. We had consulted Rob, the guitarist in Dad's band about prices and the best equipment to get. He made a couple of suggestions but we'd have to make our decision after we looked at what the store had. Dad told me not to say too much so that the salesman wouldn't take us for suckers and try to cheat us.
A wave of noise hit us when we opened the door of the shop. There were people everywhere trying out different guitars, amps, and percussion equipment. A lot of these people were teenagers who were trying to recreate the songs they've heard on the radio. Looking back on my first visit to a music store I remember that they have always driven me crazy. I could never work at a music store, at least not a big chain store. Too many kids trying to play the same song that they've heard on the radio, only, they can't quite figure it out. They think they're playing really good but really they're just driving the workers crazy.
There was one guy that was actually playing good music. He was an older man, probably the same age as my dad. He looked up and saw me watching him.
'What are you playing?'� I asked him.
'Just something I made up.'� He said with a shrug. I couldn't believe that could be so casual about it. I didn't think I could make something up in a million years. He didn't say anything else to me and I just stood there listening to him. I watched his hands and wondered how long it took him to be able to play like that. Dad came over to see what I was so interested in. He couldn't help but smile. He ushered me away though so that we could get moving on the guitar buying.
We needed to talk to a salesperson but they were all helping someone else at the time so we decided to have a look around while we waited. We headed for the wall where the guitars were hanging and tried to find the one that I saw in the magazine.
My dad practically went right to it. It was a dark blue neck through with locking tuners; it had a good price attached to it because it was used. Dad checked it out to make sure that it was in good condition and agreed with the price.
'Well, maybe we don't need to haggle with a salesman. The price on this one is right in the range that Rob told me these should be in. Do you like this one?'�
'Yeah, it's exactly what I wanted.'� I told him
'O.K. then, let's get it.'� He said and took the Jackson off the wall and started for the front where the amps were gathered. We looked in this area for at least forty-five minutes before we found a small practice amp priced to our liking. My dad isn't a cheap man but he definitely makes sure that he doesn't pay too much for anything. I was just glad that I was getting anything at all. I mean, how many kids do you know whose parents can just walk into a store buy them band equipment? Even at this age I knew that Dad was more than happy to get me the things that I ask for as long as I make use of them. I picked up the guitar and tried to hold it right. The thing was nearly bigger than I was but I knew that I would grow into it. I would probably have to sit down to play it at first. I had complete faith that I would grow at least another five inches before I was done.
I carried my new friend Jackson to the counter followed by my father who was having trouble getting the cord on the amp to stay bundled. We arrived at the counter just as a salesman was. He was the first person that worked in the store that actually spoke to us. His name was Steve. Steve filled us in on all the accessories that we would need for our new set up and gave me some advice about the controls. I left the store with my new guitar, amp, a guitar cord, a guitar strap and a handful of picks in assorted weights so that I could decide for myself which ones I liked the best. Rob had mentioned something about setting it up. I wasn't sure exactly what that meant but, I didn't want to ask the guy at the counter in case it was a stupid question. I'll have to remember to ask Rob about it later.
My lessons didn't start for another week. I wanted to play so bad but I didn't know where to start. By the time the first day for lessons came I was so excited I couldn't sit still. We had taken Jackson to an instrument repair shop to get it set up. I found out that this meant they would take the whole thing apart, clean it, and straighten the neck so that it would remain in tune. They also put new strings on it for me, which was a relief because I didn't know how to do that yet. We stopped by and picked up the guitar and went straight to my first lesson. The address on the card was for a house over in Chandler kind of close to where Aunt Tina lived. When my dad rang the doorbell a black Labrador came to the screen door to greet his new guests. A stout man, who appeared to be in his late thirties, early forties soon followed his Labrador companion to see who was at the door.
'Hello.'� He said
'Hi, I'm Jack Rafferty and this is my son Sean.'�
'Oh yes, you're here for the lesson. Come on in.'� He said. He motioned us past him into the house and shut the screen door behind us. Upon checking that the door was secure he let go of the Labrador's collar. Seeing that he was free he subsequently rushed over to accost my crotch with his snout.
'Harley, cut that out!'� he cried and wrenched the dog away from me with his collar. 'I'm sorry about that he's a little too friendly sometimes,'� he said apologetically. 'Well Sean, I'm George and this is Harley. The first order of business is figuring out what kind of schedule you want. Mrs. Malone paid for a year of lessons three hours a week. You can break that up anyway you want as long as it fits into my roster. Go ahead and have a seat and I'll go get my book.'� He said and went down the hallway. Thankfully his good buddy Harley followed him. George had a shaved head and lots of tattoos. He was pretty well built and looked like your typical rocker.
My dad and I took a seat on the couch and surveyed the place. The decorations were simple and uncluttered which showed that either he lived alone or someone had the monopoly on decorating the place. The living room consisted only of the couch we were sitting on, one easy chair and a modest entertainment center against the wall. The wall decorations were the most interesting part about the room. There were framed concert posters sprinkling the walls in both the living room and dining room areas. The dates of these concerts ranged through three decades. There were ones from the sixties with the typical folk headliners, from the seventies for the rock icons. As you got to the ones in the eighties more of them were for heavy metal concerts.
George came back with a calendar in his hands and a pen in his mouth.
'Okay, did you guys decide how you want to split up the hours?'� he asked us. Since we hadn't, I decided to make a suggestion.
'I would like to have lessons one hour a day, three days a week.'�
'Okay, let's see what times I have open.'� He flipped through a few pages of his calendar and then looked up at me. 'What about 3:30 Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?'� he asked.
'That would be perfect for me. School gets out at 2:00 right now and then in August I start high school and that gets out at 2:30.'� I told him. I looked over at my dad and he smiled at me and nodded his head. He knew that he didn't have to worry about me not doing my homework since I spent so much time in the library during lunch.
'Okay then that sounds like a plan; three-thirty to four-thirty three times a week from June to June.'� He confirmed. 'Well today's Sunday so what we'll do today is check out all your equipment and set everything on the right channels and what not so that we can just start right away tomorrow'� he said.
My dad helped me get all my stuff out of the car and George showed me how to hold my guitar properly, how to tune it and how to set the knobs and channels on my amp. We were there for nearly an hour. I was glad that we did this stuff today so that it wouldn't take up any valuable learning time tomorrow. When we left his house I was more excited than ever. It was two weeks until summer began and I just wanted to sit around and play my guitar as much as I could so that I learn faster.

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