Read It's So Easy: And Other Lies for Free Online Page A

myself that I had written it—for a girl I had a crush on in my kindergarten class. The music had the ability to conjure images in my head and help me drown out the tension and noise I was trying to avoid at my house.
    Another older brother, Bruce, was in a rock band. He had long hair and a sheepskin rug in his room. He drove a convertible. And he had a beautiful Gretsch hollow-body, six-string guitar and a Les Paul Custom left-handed bass. Bruce was always playing gigs and coming home with stories that reinforced my romantic image of rock and roll. He would also take time to let me sit with him and bang on his guitars and ask him questions. It was a big deal for me; he is fourteen years older than me and I am sure I was a pest at times.
    One day, Bruce asked me if I would play a gig with him. Me? What? I guess he hadn’t noticed I had yet to learn how to play an instrument. I told him sheepishly, thinking with despair as I did that my big chance was about to pass me by.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Bruce said. “I’ll teach you how to play bass.”
    All right!
    Bruce and I are both left-handed, so learning to play that way came naturally. (It was only after Bruce moved out with his guitars that I was faced with the dilemma of having to relearn to play on a dusty right-handed guitar I found forgotten in a corner of my mom’s garage.) The first song I learned how to play was the Beatles’ “Birthday.” Your first song always remains a musical touchstone and this one not only taught me finger dexterity, but also included the rudiments of the whole blues major scale, a scale that I would use and use again in my later career in Guns N’ Roses.
    From that day on, I realized how easy I found it to pick up songs by ear—any songs I wanted to learn. I think if I hadn’t been able to learn so quickly back then, I might have practiced a bit more and become a better technical guitar and bass player as a result. I guess we can all look back and see things in our lives that we could or should have done differently—and better—and that’s one for me. Still, learning to play other people’s music was only satisfying to a point. I felt there was more I could do, but I hadn’t the faintest idea how to write a song or start a band.
    Then, in seventh grade, I spotted a homemade flyer for an underground punk concert. I didn’t really know what it meant to be anti-establishment—and I had no notion of the music industry or what it meant to operate outside it—but it was clear these bands were not part of the same system that produced glossy handbills for shows at the Paramount Theatre or the Kingdome. That same week, I happened to hear Iggy and the Stooges for the first time. Maybe the Stooges’ garagerock simplicity echoed the Sonics and Don and the Goodtimes records I loved to listen to as a little kid; whatever it was, the Stooges hit me like an earthquake—I wasn’t moving so much as being moved. The back of my legs felt weak, chills ran from the base of my neck down my spine, the world began to crumble leaving just this pounding music.
    I experienced the most memorable dream of my life soon afterward, a dream that seemed to rewind and play over and over again in my mind for years. In the dream, I was singing in a band in a local church basement in front of all of my friends. I was possessed by the music, shrieking, snarling, grunting. There was no separation between the audience and the band, and everyone was jumping around as crazily as I was, dropping beer bottles and glasses, which smashed on the floor. I writhed around on the shards of glass yet felt no pain. I could hear and see exactly how rock should be: raw and fucked up with nothing held back, raw and fucked up with no boundaries left unbroken, raw and fucked up.
    When I woke up the next morning, I went straight to the record store and bought my own copy of Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges. My older siblings’ music had been supplanted by something all my