The Gift of Fire by Dan Caro

Author:Dan Caro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Hay House, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Finding My Own Way

School began to improve for me socially after the first semester. Students who’d heard me playing drums respected how serious I was about my music, and I made a few more good friends through the Mandeville High junior band. Music had a way of cutting through a lot of the social stigma that had always surrounded me. It wasn’t long before my brother Scott and I formed a band called Rain Dogs with a few friends.

I was loving music more and more. I started listening to all kinds of bands and genres that, I’m embarrassed to say, I’d never really heard before. The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix are just some of the artists I “discovered” during this period; and their music had a profound effect on my psyche, as it did for the generations that came before me.

I started reading books about the hippie movement back in the ’60s and found myself identifying with that whole culture of protests and questioning established values. My brother did, too, and often our views about music and society meshed perfectly.

What wasn’t meshing perfectly for me anymore was the drudgery of school. Topics I used to find interesting— which was just about everything—now seemed stilted and boring, and my grades started slipping. I simply stopped caring about what “the establishment” was telling me I had to learn. I knew for sure that I wanted to steer my life toward music and was eager to learn everything about music history, music theory, and playing the drums. But as Frank Sinatra, the most celebrated crooner of my grandparents’ generation, so famously sang, I wanted to do it my way.

I was becoming a bit of a rebel, which is often par for the adolescent course. My parents, however, weren’t at all happy when it came to my declining grade point average and nonchalant attitude toward schoolwork. It wasn’t unusual for me to be grounded for having blown off an essay or for getting into trouble in some other way at school. I was also not shy about blurting out my opinions on whatever social issue I’d convinced myself I suddenly knew more about than anyone else.

In my head, I was a “revolutionary.” But really, I was just a normal teenager in a not-so-normal body, with some pretty atypical issues to deal with. I needed to flex my intellectual muscles, assert my independence, and test the waters of freethinking individuality. In my mind, that included toying with a little marijuana and booze, partly to make things interesting, and partly to deal with some emotional pain I still hadn’t come to terms with.

I made darn sure that my parents didn’t get wind of this particular side of my rebellion—they would have gone ballistic if they’d known—so I became sneaky and learned how to cover my tracks. I think I pulled it off, but then again, my mother and father are very smart people. What I do know for sure is that

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