About Griz

About Bio Equipment The Nickname

Bio

Frankly, I can’t imagine why you would want to read this, but out of six and a half billion people in the world I guess there must be one or two that wants to know when I was born and where I have lived.

People always want to know how old you are. I’m not sure why. It must be a shared experience thing; if you’re around the same age as me and grew up around the same area, we can relate to each other. I’m not going to give you a number because in less than a year it’d be wrong. I was born in the final days of the Eisenhower administration. You can do that math and if you didn’t know when John F. Kennedy took office, then maybe you’ll learn something too.

Before moving to the mountains, even thought I lived in the city I had a vast appreciation of nature. I spent a lot of time with my Grandma and Grandpa and that meant camping and fishing. My family also had a cabin in the mountains above Lake Isabella. I learned to be in the outdoors and not fear it. Later interest in flora and fauna helped me understand that there are very few dangers in the wilds of North America that pose a threat to the prepared hiker or camper.

Living in the mountains was mostly good. I made lots of lifelong friends and loved the schools I went to. It was here that my sixth grade teacher gave me my first and only guitar lessons, probably the single most important formative event of my life.

I don’t know how to explain the ideas I have about “natural talent”. It’s certain nothing that the bearer of it can claim credit for. I believe it’s something that inside of you that’s like an oil well. If you find the right spot and drill deep enough you liberate it and it gushes out. There are some things in my life I have had to work hard the learn. Music wasn’t one of them. It’s almost like I already knew it and just needed to be reminded. And no, I don’t really buy into the idea of reincarnation. I think in years to come science will discover that the way your brain is wired predisposes you to certain abilities. I didn’t get the math one. I didn’t get the sports one. But thank god I got the music one.

Unfortunately towards the end of high school I discovered recreational inebriation. I spent a number of very enjoyable but blurry years in Western Montana where I earned the nickname “Griz”. There I lived in some very remote places and began to understand that being alone is nothing to fear. Many people can’t face aloneness because they hang on to their ties to earthly things. Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn this into some metaphysical rant. I only mean that being alone and having nothing doesn’t mean that you will always be that way. If you are in control of your life it’s up to you what keep and if you throw away something that find you needed, well, get another one. Nothing is permanent. Except brain damage, which is a good segue to:

I spent a few year abusing chemicals. At first, the chemicals enhanced other experiences. Then at some point they became the experience sought after. That’s the danger zone. After that, they are in control and the damage is much harder to undo. How much damage did I sustain? I don’t know, it’s hard to say. You are not the same person from one day to the next. How can you say what made you the person you are today?

My next dependency was on religion, but I believe it was a happy addiction. For one thing, when you take something out of your life that was a big part of who you were, in my case booze, you can to replace it with something else or your just going to go back to the old ways. I jumped into religion with both feet and stayed there for a number of years. And I’m not talking about just church on Sundays, I became youth pastor and licensed minister in rollingest of holy roller churches there was. Looking back, if I was able to relive my life, I might pass on the alcohol addiction but I don’t believe I would regret repeating the religious experience.

I got married, left the mountains, got a job. Actually I started a career. The only bad thing about the religion was that I got out of the mainstream music world entirely and about the only thing I did musically for nearly a decade was play in church bands. And that almost never went well. Even during the time when I was not growing musically and I was trying to be something other than a musician, it never let go of me.

Eventually my identity was established beyond the shadow of a doubt: I am and always will be tied completely to music. I see the world musically. Everything suggests a song to me. The only math I understand is music. There’s not a second of the day that I don’t have some song running through my head.

Sure, I have some minor regrets in life. I spent a lot of time trying to be a career person and not giving the music sufficient attention. That led to entrapment in the rat race and slavery to the establishment. But it has been through the music that I have come to see my way out of that. So I don’t think of those years as wasted so much as something I needed to go through to understand where I was headed.

In wake (literally) of the Northridge Earthquake, I move to Utah and have lived here ever since. Yes, Utah is very different from the real world. It took me a long time to understand how and why. For a long time I thought I didn’t like the people here when in fact, the people are great. For a long time I thought I was at odds with the local prevailing religion. That had a lot to do with brainwashing back in my holy roller days. In truth, the LDS Church is an awesome social organization with great values. As far as beliefs are concerned, when I got far enough from my dogmatic indoctrination into fundamentalism I realized that Mormons have no more realistic or fantastical beliefs than any other religion in the world.

I’ll tell you what, though: there’s one thing that I absolutely HATE about this place: snow. Yes, I know. You looked back at all this crap I’ve written and you see that for the majority of my life I have lived where it snowed, and done so for the most part voluntarily. Well I changed my damn mind, okay? Thank you very much, Jimmy Buffett, but I’m not interested in nine months a year of cold weather and slick roads. I want to lounge on the beach knowing that the weather report for day after day amounts to “night and morning low clouds clearing inland by noon.”

But, as I stated in my first Musing, it’s not really about where you are physically so much as where you’re heads at. My head is going to the beach and at this point everything else can eat rocks.

I have a wife, three kids, seven grandkids, one great grandkid, and I’m about to acquire a couple more great grandkids by marriage. I have a healthy respect for the power of the internet and so I do not intend to talk about these people at all on this web site. I would hate for my big mouth to be the cause of any problems for them. Please respect that. And yes, I am too young to have great grandkids. I have a very strange family tree, more a spreading bush, and I’m quite proud of it. Someday when we meet in person, I’ll bore the living hell out of you and tell you all about it.