Hello! Tony has asked me to do a guest blog here for We Heart Arts, and I’m very honored for the opportunity. My name is Marc Sirdoreus. I perform music under the name Marc With a C, as well as doing some pop culture journalism at retrolowfi.com. But today… I’m going to tell you about how I fell in love with music.

I liked music as much as any kid growing up in the MTV generation, I suppose. I liked the songs I heard on the radio by Michael Jackson – “Thriller”, “Human Nature and “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)”, especially. Just thought they were fun to sing along with, even if I couldn’t make heads or tails of how you got a job where it would seem that your only assignment was to sing things for people. I also didn’t totally understand why the “in concert” clips you’d see of, say, Duran Duran doing “Union Of The Snake” didn’t sound as good as the versions on the radio. It was weird. You’d hear a song on the stereo, like it, stay up late to watch the band play… and they would almost universally be god awful. Few things scarred me for life the way that seeing Duran Duran’s performance at Live Aid did when I was a kid.

So one day, I come home from school, and a member of my household was watching a broadcast on HBO: The Who’s “farewell show”, filmed in Toronto, 1982. I sat on the carpet and watched it in full, the way a dog might stare at delicious-looking food that it isn’t allowed to eat. I didn’t know any of the songs, but each one seemed like it was already hit in some galaxy with really good taste. Not that I knew anything about taste at the time, really. I also didn’t know that this performance was indicative of a band going through the motions. All I saw were balls of energy, and songs that sounded absolutely brilliant in a precisely chaotic form. I’d never really heard anything like it, and these guys… they weren’t dancing, but they certainly had “moves”. No moonwalk, but that crazy guitarist would swing his arm to hit chords really, really hard. That stockier, bearded man playing the guitar with less strings? He seemed to be making all of the music on his own but wasn’t moving a millimeter. And the singer would twirl his microphone in dangerous ways that didn’t seem to have any purpose except to give him something to do during the solos.

But really? It was all about the songs. How could a band be so forceful just singing a song about pinball? Most of the songs I knew before this day were simply people talking about girls. How could this guitarist spend his turn at the microphone singing so joyfully about drowning? And… the guy with the beard scared the bejeezus out of me with the tune about the spider, but a fun type of scary. (C’mon. I was like six years old). For the first time, I liked every single song I’d heard from a singing group, and this was sort of the end of my life at the time.

From that moment on, I pumped my mom – a lifelong Who devotee, as it turned out – for any bits of information i could get about this revolutionary “new” group I’d found. All of the music I’d previously purchased with my allowance money practically ceased to exist at this point: “Weird Al”’s “Eat It” 7″, a cassette of Duran Duran’s “Seven & The Ragged Tiger” and an eight-track tape of Hall & Oates “Big Bang Boom”. Oh, and the great beat up tape of “Dark Side Of The Moon” I’d stolen from my dad, since he had three copies of it anyways. That one didn’t seem stupid in comparison, for sure, but it doesn’t really count, either.

I did everything in my power to obtain every bit of digestable music I could get my hands on starting right then, but first? I had to conquer The Who. I had to figure out what set them apart, what really flipped my switch about them. I went through other big weird phases for a kid my age at the time – Yes, Pink Floyd, The Monkees, Hank Williams Sr. – but The Who was the constant for me. And that only grew with each story I’d heard about them, and every album I acquired. I taped “Tommy” off of the radio when a local station broadcasted it in it’s entirety at midnight. I fell asleep during the first song, and right after the “Underture”, they went to a commercial because that was the end of the first act… and my tape ran out. For a few months, I assumed that Tommy’s story ended with him getting beaten up by his cousin and given away to some mythic woman known as the Acid Queen. Imagine my joy when I got to hear the REST of it!

This music rattled everything I knew, and literally was the soundtrack to every move I made in life afterwards. The next logical step was to start playing music in some capacity… trouble was that I didn’t know where to start. I couldn’t make music on any instruments that sounded very good, but I could carry a tune fairly well thanks to my years of singing along with my growing record collection. So in fourth grade, my choices were limited to musical lessons that we couldn’t afford… or joining the school chorus. I chose the latter, and we put on shows about a reindeer named Pablo and other sundries.

In the meantime, my friend Cassandra Brown and I would play “shows” on our street corner in our fake band: Thing Of The Past. She couldn’t play anything either, so we mostly just sang Monkees songs at the top of our lungs to passing cars. My mom was slightly embarrassed by this, and said “you can’t play any more of those concerts until you learn an instrument”, and I was crushed. I’d sulk in my bedroom, listen back to the tapes we’d made of our performances and mourn the breakup of my first “band”. Mom got me some keyboard lessons, but I just didn’t like that instrument very much. I wanted to play guitar… like Pete Townshend.

But I still kept on with the school music, as well. In fifth grade, our music teacher Mrs. LaFrance had us put on a pretty ahead of it’s time show called “The GIGO Effect” to a really baffled batch of students. It was us explaining the future of computers in 1988-89, how they should be properly programmed, etc. I got to play the part of a bumbling scientist that explained the “garbage-in-garbage-out” ethos, which I thought was pretty cool… even though most of the other kids had no idea what we were singing/talking about.

It should be noted that my request for our choir to do a version of “Tommy” was flatly denied.

When I was twelve, my grandmother bought me my first guitar. It was a cheap Spanish doohickey that wouldn’t stay in tune at all. Plus, my dear grandma had inadvertently bought me a saxophone strap to wear said guitar, but I made that work out by simply wrapping the strap around the back, hooking it into the sound hole and holding it close to my body. But none of that was important. The big deal was that now I had an instrument, and I could finally make some sounds like those of my heroes. My mom taught me how to play an E chord, and once I got that right… I then tried to figure out how to do a windmill with it. I got it right roughly four years ago, as those things are harder to do than they look. I also figured out how to do other things with the instrument that have come in handy as a musician. Namely… learning how to play it?

I’d be nowhere without creative arts in schools, cheap instruments and the influence of The Who. As a matter of fact, I reference the band every chance I get: maybe it’s through the “I wanted to be Pete Townshend” line in “Stuck With Me”, the cover of their “Mary Anne With The Shaky Hands” on my DVD, the way I try to interject “Pinball Wizard” into the bridge of “Music geek”… or sometimes it’s super blatant, like in “Jessica, I Heard You Like The Who”. Without creative arts in my life, I’m not sure where I’d be at all. All that restless energy can’t be good for me.

And if Cassandra Brown happens to be reading this? Please email me. I think that Thing of The Past is long overdue for a reunion, don’t you?

Love on ya,
Marc

marcwithac.com
myspace.com/marcwithac
retrolowfi.com