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always knew I could run faster than them anyway.
    I guess you could compare my approach to what it would be like going into prison for the first time, where you hit the biggest guy you can get your fucking hands on in order to get immediate respect. All the other inmates would say, “Fuck, this dude must be badass,” and would leave you alone. That’s how I had to live my life. Remember, I had no father, my mother would never re-marry, and while my sister’s husband Buddy would do his level best to fill the paternal role, I pretty much had to raise myself.
    My mom did do her best, though, and she definitely wanted to instill good morals in me. She also wanted to get me into something that kept me occupied, so the local church—the First Presbyterian denomination to be precise—fitted both bills because it had a really good youth squad. And there were a lot of hot chicks there. I don’t know whether I went more for strictly religious reasons or for the interaction with chicks, but I’m sure you can figure that out.
    Either way, I sang in the church choir and had a lot of other activities going on that were connected to the church. Mom wanted to keep me really busy with singing trips—camps where you’d go away for a week on a bus to sing in different cities, that kind of thing. We’d go to the Little Rocks, the Shreveports, all over the place really, staying with other families from other parishes. Then we’d do our little bit during their Sunday service, and usually I was singing lead in something , I was that good.
    The choir director’s name was Michael Kemp, and when I look back on it, he really helped bring out my talent by making me feel comfortable singing in front of an audience and the whole bit. He wasn’t a father figure as such, but he was definitely a mentor and he saw the talent and probably already knew that I was going to be some kind of a musician.
    This church was cliquey though. Not only was the size of its congregation large, it was also organized religion to the extreme—while I probably didn’t see the writing on the wall at the time, in terms of what organized religion actually was, I was aware that it seemed to be all about who’s got the most money, who’s got the best shoes or the biggest house, and all that. Maybe when you’re going through your formative years you don’t really pay too much attention to the wider issues of a subject like organized religion; other things seem much more important. There are enough school studies that you’re trying to deal with, so a class subject such as religious study was just one more on a long list I had to take.
CHERYL PONDER

The church had a very active youth group. In 1975, the church hired a new music director called Michael Kemp, and he and his wife had just gotten their degrees in music and moved to Arlington. He was just so talented and he put together a church choir with the kids, and our daughter Charlotte and Rex joined and immediately.
Michael took to Rex because he could see the talent that he had. The kids went on all kinds of trips, and Mike became increasingly proud of Rex, gave him more and more responsibility.
     
    While you could hardly say that I was an academic genius in class, I did take my studies seriously but always with this underlying sense that the subjects weren’t going to be too relevant to my future career, almost as if I knew my destiny. Fortunately I didn’t have to try too hard and was a solid B-student—initially at least—because I always had this insatiable appetite for knowledge. I always liked to read books: history, geography, you name it, I read them. I still do.
    Around the same time I got into junior high band, which was an important move in the right direction for my musical aspirations but a backward step for my academics. Of course I wanted to be on the drum line because that’s where all the good stuff was—the part of the band that was most fun—but they needed me somewhere else.
    So they