Several years ago (OK, it was SEVERAL years ago - like 1991) I keynoted a high school youth camp in east Texas. My presentations that year used as a springboard a recently released song by the rock group, Styx, called "Show Me the Way." It struck me at the time to be an unusual kind of rock song - reflectively serious and almost anthemic in character; putting its musical finger on the disillusionments of the time and the questions of the ages.
Every night I say a prayer
in the hope that there's a heaven
And every day I'm more confused
as the saints turn into sinners
All the heroes and legends I knew as a child
have fallen to idols of clay
And I feel this empty place insideso afraid that I've lost my faith
… Show me the way,show me the way
Take me tonight to the river
And wash my illusions away
Show me the way
It all sounds rather current now that I listen to it again, and still swells a lump in my throat for sentimental and even spiritual reasons. I've asked those questions myself, after all, and prayed those very prayers. I've sifted through the broken shards of those "idols of clay" and plumbed the depths of that empty place inside. I know what it's like to "wake up each morning and turn on the news to find we've so far to go..." So far, indeed.
I hadn't thought of the song - or heard it - in years, but it came to mind this week as I prepared to start recording the audiobook version of the memoir I wrote a few years ago about finding a home at Taproot Garden. Talking with the owner/sound engineer of the recording studio in which I had booked time - a relatively new operation that opened just before the pandemic - I learned that he had purchased the mixing board that now anchors his studio from the widow of a sound engineer in Chicago who had recorded all or at least most of the Styx songs during the '80's and early '90's - Styx being a Chicago-based band.
I pondered the poignancy and possibilities of how all those various vocal and instrumental tracks that translated all those angsts and questions and disappointments and discontents and higher aspirations - the musical and emotional raw materials - had passed through this board to create "Show Me the Way" and others of those well-known hits of the time; and how now, all these years later, my voice speaking aloud some of those same questions and searchings and aspirations would be passing through the same board, subject to the same knobs and slides and levels, in service to my own humble project.
And it has felt good.
I finished up my part of the project today, 5 days early. Bob, the engineer, said I had done well - my efficient use of time credited to few mistakes and vocal persistence. I arrived each day, I got to work, I read my best. True, I brought those virtues to the task. But I give the board much of the credit. Every day it demanded my best. Every day it made me smile at the presumed collegiality.
The rest is now up to Bob and the board - removing the random breath sounds and extraneous pops and flops, and getting the tempo right. I look forward to the finished product, and releasing it "into the wild."
In the meantime, and for this very brief moment, I'm feeling like a rock star. My vibes mingled with those of the big guys. I had, as it were, help.
Moral support, if only in my imagination.
A legacy to live up to.
A "cloud of witnesses".
Resident in - channeling through - the board.
And there, with the mixer board and all that it has heard through the years and digested - mistakes and harmonies, discords, resolutions and all - I got to add my voice. You gave me, "the strength and the courage to believe that I'll get there someday."
And at 1 pm today, with the reading aloud of the book's final page, I arrived.
