Ken Rhodes

Emboldened by my experiences with the battle of the bands and the fact that I had finally gotten paid to play my guitar with Sceptor, I continued to search for a band that was a good fit.  Considering that I had grown up listening to everything from Simon & Garfunkel, Buck Owens, the Beatles, AC/DC, Judas Priest, ABBA, Duran Duran, and nearly everything in between; I didn't think it would be too hard to find another band.  This is probably the reason that I didn't work very hard at this "search".  I mostly just continued to practice and get better as a player - although I only really progressed when I had a teacher directing me.

 

Then one day, kind of out of the blue, Shannon Otte calls me up.  He was divorced from Tracy by now, and he was in a band called Shilo.  I knew of Shilo because my friend Kevin had been their drummer for a short time, and also because their original lead guitarist, Darren "Hawkeye" Pearce, was another friend of mine.  Hawkeye and Kevin had both quit the band by then, but Shannon called me up because they were looking for a new gutiarist.  The short story from here is that I came to a rehearsal, met the guy who was going to be the new drummer (it was his frist time meeting the band as well), Eric Wilson, and found out that they were going in a more pop/rock direction.  For about a year they had been making a name for themselves as a country band, but Shannon felt the need to expand the repertoire and change the name to reflect that.  The other members of the band at that time were Bill Sherritt and Stacy Taylor, both of whom were very country oriented.  Eric and I were decidedly rock oriented, and Shannon was bit of a mix of both.  During that first meeting, it was decided that the new name of the band would be C. C. Ryder - a name Shannon came up with based on a song that Elvis used to use to open all of his concerts.

 

About the same time, I started dating Lisa.  The only member of Sceptor that I kept contact with was the other guitarist, Lynn Dennett.  He was local, and he lived with his parents just around the corner from my apartment building.  He also worked on the college newspaper with my cousin, Nicole Bonham, and he and I started hanging out together and jamming once in a while.  He introduced me to Lisa one day, when she was at his house, and we got along pretty well.  We had met previously, when she and Nicole ran into me and Kevin after the first Sceptor gig.  She teases me about this because I don't remember any details about "Nicole's friend" that night.  I don't remember Nicole introducing us.  I had just played my first four-hour gig, it was about 2am, and all I wanted was to get a drink and a hot dog and go home to think about the gig.

 

That summer, Lisa was one of the few people that I knew well enough to call up socially that hadn't left town until the next fall, and we started going to movies together.  At first I thought of it as just a friendship, even though I was attracted to her almost immediately.  We would talk for long periods about politics and social issues, and it was the first time that I remember having a conversation (that wasn't about music) with a peer who knew more about what they were saying than I did.  Well, it was the first time since the last time I had seen my high school friend John.  Before Lisa, he was the only person I ever spoke with that got into the same kind of discussions.

 

I lasted as a member of C. C. Ryder for two years.  During that time we added Shannon's girlfriend, Lise Mills, as a backup singer, Stacy got married and moved to Missouri, and we replaced her with Michele Pinoch and added keyboardist/guitarist Mike Myers.  Mike worked at the new chemical plant that was just starting up, WECCO, as the IT director.  I was "taking a break" from college, working as a dish washer, and trying to make loan and insurance payments on a used car that was a replacement for the one I wrecked the previous summer.  Mike knew that I was studying computer science in college, and he needed an assistant with a small amount of computer knowledge for a temporary project.  I needed a better job than washing dishes, and I figured Mike would be a good boss to work for, so I got hired as a temporary employee for Western Electrochemical Company (WECCO), a subsidiary of American Pacific Corporation (AMPAC).  Mike's mom, Rhea, was the plant secretary, and was in charge of processing all the paper work.  Lisa and I were living together, planning to get married soon, and Rhea took it upon herself to process all of my paperwork as a permanent hire, instead of a temp, so that I was enrolled in the pension and insurance benefits.

 

During my time with C. C. Ryder, we played a lot.  It was the norm for bands to play both Friday and Saturday night at most places, and some places would have you play on Wednesday, too, for ladies night; and we played three out of every four weekends.  We had our ups and downs, but between Shannon looking like a stunt double for Patrick Swayze and a song list that spanned several genres and was always adding current hits, we ended up being the biggest draw in the area.  This was good, because we nearly always played for a cut of the door.  Now, being the biggest draw in southern Utah isn't nearly as prestigeous (or profitable) as it may sound.  But we had a good time.  It didn't take long, though, before I began to see that Shannon was an asshole, and he and I did not see eye-to-eye on many things where the band was concerned.  As time went on, I began to resent him more and more, to the point where I only played my guitar at band rehearsals and gigs.  Every time I picked it up at home, I was overwhelmed with thoughts of how much I hated Shannon.  I didn't like feeling that way, and being too emotionally immature to deal with it properly, I dealt with it by not playing my guitar.  Michele felt the same way, and she was constantly campaigning to have Shannon replaced, but I was the only one that felt strongly enough about it to support her openly.  One day Shannon just up and fired her from the band, and then the next Monday at work, after playing our first gig without a female lead vocalist, Mike told me that Shannon and Bill were auditioning guitarists to replace me.

 

I remember thinking that it was a good thing that I was finally going to get out of that band.  I wasn't a strong enough person to quit on my own, and Mike and Eric were such great friends and musicians to work with, that I kept holding out for Shannon to leave.  But Eric was going to be going on a mission for his church in a couple of weeks, so I was feeling less committed to sticking around.  I remember thinking that if Shannon and Bill - especially if Bill had done so - but if they had come to me and said that they didn't feel I was a good fit any longer, I would have agreed with them.  If they had asked me to stick around and play the scheduled gigs while they find someone to fill in and/or replace me, I'd have been happy for the chance to play more.  But with them going behind my back, I decided that I didn't owe them a damn thing.  I told Mike to tell them that I quit, and that was that.

 

For the next two years, however, I was still consumed with hatred for Shannon every time I picked up my guitar, so I didn't ever pick it up.  I finally got over myself and found the desire to play again, but I had a young child now.  Lisa and I had been married for more than two years, Charlie was almost a year old, and we had finally moved out of our apartment and into our first house.  I was practicing in the bedroom, and watching Charlie.  He crawled up to my amp and, before I knew what he was doing, he cranked the master volume up to about 8 or 9.  Poor little guy was scared half to death and started bawling right away.  I made a mental note that I wouldn't practice while he was up and around, and that I would focus on giving him my attention instead.  It didn't take long before I realized that, by the time Charlie was down for the night, I was too damn tired to think straight, let alone practice my guitar.  I also had been moved into production at the plant by this time, and my work schedule didn't make it easy for me to commit to a band, so I had no motivation.

 

For the next eight years, about once a month, or so, I would get my guitar out, spend about 10 to 15 minutes remembering bits and pieces of my old repertoire, and then put the guitar away for another few weeks.  That is, until I had an accident at work one day.  I got my finger pinched in a peice of equipment and split open my left hand ring finger.  It was only four stitches, but it was right on the part of the finger that contacts the strings when you play power chords.  Being primarily a hard rock and metal guitarist, I played more power chords than anything else, and the part of my finger that is used for scales was also affected.  It took more than a year before I was brave enough to force the flesh to toughen up so I could play steel strings again.

 

By then I was working a desk job at work, and I was really starting to enjoy work again.  I had a "regular" schedule, which made it possible to consider looking for another band, but then I went and started going back to school for a degree, which sucked up way too much time away from my family.  Lisa struggled with three children at home, while working a full-time job at the university, and I was always either in class or at work, working long hours to make up for the time I was at school.

 

It was a difficult time for our family, and our marriage, but we survived it.

 

Next time:  Part 5, the conclusion that brings us up to date.

The Early College Years

(Note: This is a little longer than I originally thought it would be, so, in order to keep true to my intention of only five parts, part four will be split into two parts.)

 

My first year at college, I attended Southern Utah State College (now, Southern Utah University), and I poured over the course catalog until I found what I was looking for - Private Instrument Instruction, String Instruments.  I registered for the course and, a couple of weeks after fall quarter started, I had a meeting with the Dean of the school of music, C. David Nyman.  He needed more details to match me up with an appropriate instructor.  I believed that I would get snubbed if I asked about rock gutiar, and I wanted so badly to have a guitar teacher, so I told him I was looking for someone that taught classical guitar.

 

One of my favorite guitar players at the time was Randy Rhoads, and I knew that he had learned classical guitar before playing rock guitar, and I liked the ideas he spoke of in interviews about merging the two styles.  Randy had died a few years before in a plane crash and I remember thinking how cool it would be to, as I saw it, continue his work in this area.  But I needed to understand the world of classical guitar in order to do that, and although learning "Stairway To Heaven" in the classical style helped me realize that I could like it, I knew that I would need a more formal plan and instruction from someone who already knew what they were talking about.

 

In a few more weeks, I was contacted by Joe Costello, who had been referred as my new classical guitar teacher.  I bought a mid-line Yamaha classical guitar (or, rather, my mom bought it for me - I was a poor college student who didn't have a job), and started taking lessons from Joe.  I found out that Joe had grown up on an army base in Germany where he first started playing electric bass.  He even had a record that his band made when he was living there.  He said he started taking classical guitar lessons to improve his bass playing (something about classical technique using four fingers and a bass guitar have four strings made sense to him - it made sense to me, too, at the time), and that his former classical guitar teacher had been a student of the late, great, Andres Segovia.

 

For nine months, Joe worked very hard at getting my fingers to do what they were supposed to do, especially my right hand.  I found classical technique to be, over all, much more challenging on a technical level than the rock technique that I was using.  Because of my basically lazy nature, this ended up making me a less outstanding student than I should have been.  Therefore, it seemed to take me forever to get the hang of that right hand technique.  But Joe patiently persevered and never let me feel like I failing.

 

After that school year ended, Joe got married (ironically, to a girl from Kanab that I had known in high school), graduated college, and then moved away from Cedar City in search of a location where he could make a decent living as a musician.  During this school year I played in the college jazz band (which doubled as the pep band sometimes) and learned a lot about reading chord charts and playing chord fingers other than just major, minor, and "5" chords (power chords).

 

I also met Mr. John Houtson in that jazz band.  John played piano/keyboards, but was also very good on guitar.  He taught me how to substitute chords when you could get away with it, and always made me feel better about my own playing.

 

Also during my first year at college, I hooked up with Shannon Otte and his wife, Tracy.  Shannon and Tracy were playing occasionally in town as a two piece (Shannon played bass, Tracy played keyboards, both of them sang, and they used a drum machine), but were interested in jamming with others in order to form a larger band.  I jammed with them a coule nights a week and at the end of the school year, we found out about a battle of the bands that was going to be hosted on campus.  I recruited a friend that played rhythm gutiar and nother friend that sang.  The gutiar player had a friend that played drums, and we all met in Shannon and Tracy's basent apartment.  We picked four or five songs (don't remember all of them), practiced together six or seven times, and then competed in the battle of the bands.  The other two bands were a jazz fusion band that John Houston had put together, and a locally known bar band called Crossroads, that played mostly country music.  Since I was neighbors with several football players, and our song list was all current top 40 pop hits, we got the most applause, which was how the contest was judged.  It was my first time playing electric guitar in front of an audience and I was hooked on it!  I had been playing gutiar for less than two years at this point, and I was blown away by having won the battle of the bands my first time entering one.

 

One other musically significant meeting during this first year was when I met Kevin Chronister in my music theory class.  Kevin was a drummer and we hit it off almost immediately.  He was only at SUSC for a quarter before he left to attend Musician's Institute in Hollywood, but he and I are still good friends and keep in touch.

 

I met so many other people that influenced my musical life in some way or another, I'm not sure I can remember all of them to list them.  Rather than forget about someone, I'll just say that they know who they are, and I am still glad to have met most of them (some not so much, but they are the exceptions, thankfully).

 

The next school year I answered an ad to audition for a metal cover band.  I actually answered other ads where I didn't get the job, but I soon became the fifth member (and rhythm gutiarist) for the band Sceptor.  After a couple of months of rehearsals, we finally booked our first gig as a band and I played my first paying gig as a guitar player.  The rest of the band didn't like my playing much, I guess, 'cause they decided to kick me out fo the band after that gig.  The bass player spent the night drinking enough beer for three people, the sound guy had my channel turned all the way down most of the time, and the bass player and singer were both doing a lot of drugs.  Eventually the band fell apart after the bass player and singer got into an argument about something to do with the dealer they both bought their drugs from.

 

Adam turned out to be a really good teacher.  Again, I was not as good of a student as I needed to be, but I did learn a lot from him before he, like so many others, moved away in search of the dream of making a good living as a musician.

 

Next time, Part 4b, Life After Sceptor.

Well, more than a month later, here is part 3.  Life is finally settled down as much as it will, given the time of year (school year starting, soccer games, etc.), and my house is almost back to the state it was in before the water damage...

 

Although the Metal Method course was doing well to demystify the guitar for me, the guitar my mom bought at the swap meet was an incredibly inferior guitar.  To top it off, although the course was good, I was losing motivation because I couldn't play anything that sounded like music.  Also, I was trying to tackle barre chords right off the bat, and that proved to be extremely difficult without a teacher's advice.  My left hand was always in pain after practicing, and I was beginning to wonder if I would ever get the hang of it well enough to start making music.

 

I had a friend who played saxophone in the school band.  He was part of a very musical family (I think he had eight siblings, and everyone in the family played at least one instrument, including both parents).  One day he was visiting at my house and I was trying to get my hand to do a barre chord.  He said, "Hey, I can show you a couple of songs my brother taught me."

 

I handed him my guitar and he proceeded to play parts of "Livin' After Midnight" by Judas Priest and "Rock You Like A Hurricane" by the Scorpions.  The way he played it, I didn't need to do a barre at all, and I was able to memorize the simple patterns quickly.  For the next few weeks, while I continued to struggle with the difficulties of barre chords, I was able to jam on some songs that actually sounded like something I wanted it to sound like.

 

This was my saving grace.  I began to buy a magazine called "Guitar For the Practicing Musician" because it had full songs transcribed in TAB, and they were songs that I was interested in learning.  If I had not achieved the limited success of being able to play a small part of those first two songs, I don't think I would have stuck with it much longer at that point.

 

The first song I tried to learn from TAB in the magazines was "Stairway To Heaven" by Led Zeppelin.  Yes, it's cliche.  Yes, I knew others who played that song all the time.  This transcription seemed more accurate, though.  Let's be honest here.  This is one of the most popular rock songs ever recorded, especially back in the mid-1980s, and the reason most people are sick to death of hearing amatuers hack through it has very little to do with it being over-played on the radio, and much more to do with the fact that most gutiarists aren't playing true to the original.

 

This is a concept that classical musicians not only embrace, but adamantly insist on.  The composer's original intent is to be held in highest regard, and not strayed too far from.  I'm not a very big fan of the level of intensity many of them put into this ideal, but there it is, anyway.  for the most part, blues and rock musicians pretty much ignore such a concept.  But there are a few songs, and "Stairway" is one of them, where deviation is frowned upon, if it goes "too far."  The original is played as a fingerstyle piece, and most guitarists that I knew at the time played it with a flat pick, and missed about a quarter of the notes that were in the original.  That wouldn't be so bad if they were hitting the melody notes, but it seems most of them chose to play the harmony notes instead.  It sounded fine when played along with the original recording, but not so much all by itself.

 

So I started learning this song that "everybody knows how to play," and my motivation increased as it started sounding better all the time.  One of my biggest inspirations at the time, Randy Rhoads, was known for his skill at playing classical guitar.  The fact that "Stairway" was played in a classical style (rather than a blues fingerstyle - very odd for a famous blues man like Jimmy Page, don't you think?) only increased my motivation to learn it "properly."

 

By the end of that school year, I had learned 10 or 15 songs, I owned an electric guitar (from the Sears catalog...) and amplifier (a bass amp, from the same catalog...), and I found out that the band teacher in the next town over was taking private guitar students.  Finally I had a real, flesh-and-blood teacher.  He taught me quite a bit about adding musicality to what I was playing, rather than just being a slave to the "text" of the music, but after only three or four lessons he moved away.  This was to become a recurring theme in my gutiar playing development...

 

Next time, Part 4 - The Early College Years.

Well, the saga of the leaking shower has not come to an end yet, but last weekend was definitely a high point.

 

In the interest of replacing furniture in a room that is shared by two girls, and is barely large enough for one of them, we went to the specialists on living in small spaces, Ikea.  After getting what we needed from the store (and under budget, too!), we were treated to some delicious steaks and dutch oven potatoes at the home of our friends, Leighn & Jody.  We are not sure, but we're guessing it's been at least 12 years since we saw each other for more than 10 minutes, and it was definitely a highlight for us to just relax and catch up on life for a few hours (too few, but that's how it works, sometimes).

 

So while the girls still don't have a bedroom yet (cross your fingers for a Wednesday night goal), it was worth it to have an excuse to shop Ikea and visit with very dear old friends.

 

Ok, out of time for now.  Coming soon, the continuation of my little story.

Well, obviously, Part 3 of my story is a bit delayed.  If you're curious, it is planned to be 5 parts.  I'll be resuming that in a day or so.

 

In the meantime, I've been very busy dealing with some water damage in my home.  And on top of that, our new kitten is not as healthy as we would like.

 

My son and one daughter are at their grandmother's house, and the other daughter is at her friend's house, because the girls' bedroom is not livable in its current state.  The water leaking inside the wall went un-noticed until it caused a problem.  Thankfully the source of the leak has been identified.  But I can't get in there to fix it yet, because there is a cahnce that not all of the damage has been located yet.  Fixing the leak, only to have the leaking line removed in teh search for more water damage, seems a little counter-productive right now.  So in the meantime, I sit and wait and do nothing to improve the situation, because I can't do anything yet.

 

But the clean-up crews have come and removed some of the damage.  I want the fans and de-humidifiers out of my house.  I want the damage repaired and I want my daughters to have a safe, warm place to sleep that is in the same house I'm in.  I don't care if I have to do the work myself, as long as I know that all the work necessary is getting done.

 

But mostly, I want my life to move forward without all this crap getting in the way any more.  And yet, I'm stuck at work because company policy prohibits me from taking time off to take care of this kind of thing.  Stupid "day" job.