I'll Stop the World
How a metalhead guitar teacher, Modern English and a cockroach changed the course of my life when I was 12 years old.
Hello. You’ve reached Time & Temperature.
It was early winter 1982 in Dallas, Texas. Danny White’s Cowboys had just lost to the hated 49’ers thanks to Dwight Clark and “The Catch.” J.R. Ewing had been shot and we were all in the process of finding out by whom. I was a sixth-grader in the midst of my first semester at St. Mark’s, the all-boys private school where I’d fled after public school had proved too brutal for a sensitive kid like me. At the old school I’d been bullied and called names like “Opera Singer” and “Professor Encyclopedia,” all the while convinced I was surrounded by idiots. At the new school I was surrounded by kids who were smarter than me, and the only name I got called was my own except for when Chance Miller called me “Retch,” which I had to admit was pretty clever.
You know what they say though, wherever you go there you are. And I’d brought my noisy brain and inner turmoil with me when I’d traveled from public to private school. I might have found my place but I hadn’t found myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have been too concerned with this at 12 years old, but as previously mentioned, my brain was a noisy place. That’s where guitar lessons came in.
My brother Ross and I used to walk to a guitar store called Arnold & Morgan just down the street from our house and spend hours looking at the guitars. Before long we started taking guitar lessons from a young rocker named Tommy Hiett1. He had long hair and an easy smile and my brother and I both idolized him immediately. Our dad had been extricating himself from the family unit for a few years by then, leaving me as the oldest male, the man of the house, a role I felt unsuited for but obliged to fill. When Tommy showed up, he was less a father figure than a kickass uncle. Tommy took the pressure off me a little, and I tried to pay him back by practicing my scales, doing my finger exercises and studying my tablature, none of which actually interested me very much.
I quit my guitar lessons for a few months when the callouses on my fingers refused to provide sufficient padding and the exercises bored me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the opportunities presented by the instrument. I kept getting ideas for songs—my own songs. When I went back in to Tommy and asked if he’d teach me a simpler version of guitar, more of a folky songwriter style than his preferred metal shredder style, he didn’t blink an eye. He told me to bring in a cassette each week of a song that I’d like to learn, and he’d help me figure out how to play guitar in whatever way interested me. He never judged me for my choices even when I brought in Peter, Paul and Mary or The Kingston Trio. He just smiled his big smile and got to work.
My brother Ross and me a year or so before we discovered the guitar.
Tommy must have recognized something in Ross and me. Perhaps he sensed our gratitude for his kindness and attention. It’d be weird to say he loved us, but he definitely seemed to care about us more than twenty bucks an hour would normally buy from a young long-haired rocker. Needless to say we thought he was the absolute coolest. When he invited us to see his band Razin Cain play at a club called The Ritz, Ross and I waged a relentless campaign to convince our mom to take us to the show. If you know our mom, you know she said yes. This was the woman who’d taken us out of grade school to go to the local arthouse theater to see Stop Making Sense and The Wall.
Tommy did some fast talking to get the Ritz to let us into the club that night. Needless to say, we were the only preteens in the smoky nightclub. Tommy assured the security crew that he would keep us with him throughout the night. During Razin Cain’s set, he stationed us next to the monitor board, basically on stage five feet away from him. The band was right there! Razin Cain’s music wasn’t my cup of tea, but their energy was undeniable. Unfortunately, the crowd booed Tommy’s band mercilessly throughout their short set.
The crowd was a pre-goth, post-punk, proto-hipster bunch, there specifically to see the the headliner, a British new wave band called Modern English whose second album After the Snow had just been released overseas on the uber-hip 4AD label, and stateside via Seymour Stein’s Sire Records2. The second single off that album, a little song called “I Melt With You” had recently started to climb the Billboard charts but that night, in that humble venue, they were just some underground British band that owed an enormous debt to Joy Division and, from our vantage point next to the monitor board, seemed only vaguely interested in performing.
Modern English circa 1982
They were good though. So good, I thought. An acoustic guitar-wielding frontman playing mopey yet upbeat songs with twisty, inscrutable lyrics, backed by a tight, loud band. This was something very different from the wide-eyed folk to which I’d previously been exposed. And it was live, happening in real time before my eyes. They closed with “I Melt With You” and it was an incredible moment, as if everyone in that room already knew the song would be a classic.
After Modern English finished their set, Tommy took me, Ross and our mom upstairs to the headliner’s dressing room. The band members were all smoking cigarettes, toweling off sweat, and sneering at cans of American beer. Tommy introduced himself and asked if his two young guitar students might get their albums signed. As the guitar player signed my LP, I sat next to him on the filthy couch. Once he’d handed back my album, I stayed there for a minute taking it all in. The smoke. The exclusivity of the backstage. The sense of a job well done. However jaded and cynical these English rockers may have been, they still gave off an aura of confidence, not just in their professional expertise, but in who they were.
Just then the guitarist pointed at the wall above our head where a cockroach was trying to look inconspicuous, and announced, “Oi! Another black beetle.” Then he spun his sweaty stage towel into a rat’s tail and snapped it at the bug, scoring a direct hit, then returning the towel to around his neck. In that moment, I knew in my bones that my future lay in smoky nightclubs and dank dressing rooms.
In the ensuing months, I worked on my guitar skills with renewed diligence. I would never be as technically proficient as my brother Ross, but I only needed to be able to strum chords enough to write songs and front a band. I could hire proper musicians to do the fiddly bits. Within a year I had started writing my own songs and never looked back, and in the immortal words of Modern English, “It’s getting better all the time.”
yrs,
Rhett
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