Maybe don’t become a musician
Article by Sam Johnson Art by Jennifer Martinez
I stole beers from the bar at my parent's restaurant. I worked shifts on Friday and Saturday nights, so I was always late to the party, but never empty-handed. My dad never noticed the missing stock because it was my job to take inventory.
I was a terrible employee. I started working at my parent's restaurant when I was eight years old. You could find me hiding in the back closet and playing games on my phone during the rush. My dad fired me several times only to hire me back the next day washing dishes.
I was shafted the shit jobs working with my two older siblings. Sometimes involving actual shit. The basement flooded with sewer water on several occasions, and my dad would send me down there with a water pump. I was like fucking Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs.
When my siblings left for college I took over doing the cool things. I became a pit master and smoked meats and built fires for the pit. I started to smell like smoke everywhere I went.
My dad smelled like BBQ all the time. His aesthetic was greasy. He only wore white Stan-Smiths (that turned black), jeans, and a beige Carhartt jacket. He never had time to change, so he would show up to parent-teacher conferences looking like Ricky from Trailer Park Boys. A lot of people saw my dad as a little odd. During my youth baseball games, he would sit far away from the other parents and read the newspaper the whole game. Opening a BBQ was crazy considering his only knowledge of smoking meats came from books. Because he was good at everything, it didn’t take long for him to perfect the craft.
When I was twelve, I met Guy Fieri when the restaurant was featured on Triple D. Fieri had the swagger of a stepdad. He gave me knucks and drank Heineken. Word got out in my small town that I was going to be on TV, and all my classmates watched my family take Guy to Flavor Town. I ruled sixth grade that week. People ask me what he was like, and I only remember that he was kind of drunk the whole time. Sorry, Guy.
Although being on the show was a big deal for my family, my dad was more excited about having his favorite musicians play shows at the restaurant. When I was ten, Kenny Brown came up from Mississippi to play in the little dining room of the restaurant. This was a big deal for my dad (and underground blues fans of the Twin Cities area) because he played slide guitar for legendary hill country bluesman RL Burnside. The place was packed and fire codes were broken. Fuck the authorities. It was the first time I realized that my dad was doing something special here. My dad gave everyone a chance to play, even the shit shows. There were nights when no one would show up to listen to music. During one of these desolate sets, my dad turned to me and said never to become a musician.
After my freshman year of college, the restaurant had been sold and my summer was free from mopping floors and making cornbread. I told my dad I wanted to do something with music for my summer gig. He got me an unpaid internship with this guy named Johnny Walker. He was in a band called the Soledad Brothers that made it big in the late 90s and early 2000s. They were part of the Detroit rock scene alongside the White Stripes. Johnny taught Jack White how to play slide guitar, and they spent a lot of time together being broke in Detroit.
Now Johnny has a PhD and is a licensed psychiatrist. He lives in Cincinnati and runs a recording studio when he is not being a doctor. He lives in a large house on top of a hill that overlooks the Ohio River. It was one of the last stops on the underground railroad, and they used it to check if it was clear to cross into Ohio.
I slept on his couch in his “living room.” The room only consisted of said couch that I think was there when he bought the place. Johnny told me the house was only haunted by friendly ghosts and not to worry if I saw anything. It wasn’t the ghosts that kept me up, though; it was his gross-ass cat. It was albino and had red eyes and I would wake up with this thing crawling on my stomach.
I worked at his studio for little over a month and learned some things about the recording process, but for the most part I hung out with the band that was there recording. They were a group of three dudes who were the same age as me from Detroit. Johnny told me that part of my job was to roll joints for them and to keep them fed. I had to use my fake ID when they would send me off on beer runs or to buy them more Camels.
I must have done a decent job working for Johnny because he hired me as his tour manager for the next month in the UK. Considering I had nothing lined up for the rest of summer I got on a plane and flew to London. I was in charge of selling merch, driving the van, booking hotel rooms, etc. But my least favorite responsibility was to get Johnny’s girlfriend into the van after every show. Talk about a fucking Yoko Ono.
I met a lot of good people on this tour. Most of them offered me some sort of drug. One guy who we stayed with lived on a houseboat in London. He was also the first person to ride a motorcycle around the world. His wife was the first to ride a motorcycle through Iran and published several books about her adventures. He told me it was good that I'm studying math, but also that life is supposed to be more adventurous than reading a textbook.
My dad also studied math and he ended up doing nothing related to it. I guess at some point someone gave him similar advice to take a risk and see what happens.
I complained a lot growing up about having to work. I just wanted to be a kid and play with Legos. Yet, I think my dad knew that one day I would appreciate everything he did for me. The restaurant was my dad’s big adventure, and he took his family along with him. There are nights when I wish my dad and I were sitting in that dining room watching a show, just the two of us.