| Joan Hester died yesterday. Mrs. Hester, as I always called her, was my friend Sean Hester's mom. I've known Sean since we were both ten or eleven, when we met either in Boy Scouts or in a program they used to have in our school system called Signet. Sean was part of my "Gang Of Four" that moved to Seattle in the summer of 1993, to follow our Rock Star Dreams. While those particular plans never came to fruition, we've all remained in touch and have prospered here in the Pacific Northwest. We're all OK. But in the years immediately prior to our leaving our hometown, it would be hard for me to identify one person that had a greater impact on me than Joan Hester did. The fact that this is so really throws me for a loop, and it kind of bothers me that this obvious truth has only just occurred to me now that she is gone. She became, for several years, a kind of unlikely mentor for me. And I wonder if I ever expressed to her how grateful I am for that. I hope I did. I hope so. I started to get to know Sean Hester's parents toward the end of high school. I was in and out of their house, meeting up with Sean and various members of our Teenage Circle Of Dorks to do all the things you do at that age. Unlike a lot of other "grownups", the Hesters always engaged us, wanted to know what we were up to, what was on our minds. Not to say they understood, exactly - they didn't, a lot - but they never talked down to us, never discouraged us. Joan would often say, "Well, as long as you're having fun. When I was your age, I wanted to have fun." And she'd send us on our way. When I really got to know Joan Hester, it was a period of turmoil for me. I had gone off to William & Mary after high school, and I was a lost cause there. I didn't really know what I wanted, but I knew I didn't want to go to Calculus class. Or Sociology. Or any other dumb class. I spent a lot of time in the hallway of my dorm, my electric guitar plugged into my Scholz Rockman, practicing. Playing guitar was the one thing I knew that I really loved to do, and so that's what I did, for a semester-and-a-half, before in a rush of panic I went to the admissions office and told them I was dropping out. They tried to talk me out of it, but I was done. My parents didn't take the news well. There were a couple of weeks of tense negotiations before my Mom drove down to Williamsburg and picked me up. One of the conditions for returning home was that I'd have to get a job and pay rent. Joan Hester gave me a job. At the time she was the manager of a "lockbox" department at a local bank, that got consumed several times by ever larger banks during her tenure. I think it was Bank of Virginia when I started there. Later, and longest, it was Signet Bank. The job didn't pay a lot, and I wasn't a bank employee, I was a temp. The lockbox department processed mail for companies that sent out mass mailings to the public. When people would send back these mailings with checks enclosed, we received them, opened them, deposited the money into the bank accounts of the lockbox customers. One of the big customers was the Republican National Committee. I started working there in the spring of 1988. My last day was a week or so before we left for Seattle in July, 1993. I didn't have a car of my own early on, so my Mom would drop me off at the Hester house each morning, and I'd carpool in to the office in Springfield with Sean's mom every day. Even when I eventually did get my own vehicle, I'd still drive over to the Hester house nearly every weekday morning. Now, looking back, it's all those countless car rides to work that keep coming to mind. As the seasons changed and Sean's friends came home from school for the summer, many of them would join our morning carpools, as Joan gave many of them summer jobs at the lockbox. I'd venture to say that almost all of Sean's friends (and many of their friends) worked at the lockbox at various times. Sometimes there would be more of us in the morning than could fit into Joan's car, but we'd all meet up at her house anyway. Then as fall approached, gradually most of the kids would head off back to school, and it would be back to Joan and I alone. There were slow times at work, where most of the other temps would be let go, but Joan would always look out for me, and find something in the office that could justify my being there. Sean's mom was smart. No-nonsense. Blunt. Funny. Born and bred in Maine, she had the dry Yankee sense of humor that comes with being raised in that part of the country. In some ways she was very old-fashioned; when we'd need to get gas for her car in the morning, I had to get out and pump it, because that was "men's work." In other ways, she was very modern. She was stunned to find out that in high school I'd had a curfew, as she'd never imposed one on her own son, as she didn't see any benefit that would result. When Sean's friends came over to their house, we were to walk right in as if we lived there. Joan would get offended if we knocked and waited for her or Mr. Hester to open the door. This was hard for a lot of Sean's friends to get used to - but the message was clear: "You are welcome here. Now get inside and close the door before you let the cold in." She knew that I had left school to pursue what she called "your music." She took me seriously in that regard, moreso than any other adult in my life at the time. She forced me to look at the practical aspects of what "doing music" meant: how was I going to earn a living with it? Did I understand how the music business worked? In those early days I was all of 18 years old, and what I understood was that the only thing that mattered was my artistic integrity. She'd smirk at me, and I would get red-faced and blustery, but she wouldn't back down, even as she still fully supported me. "You're going to have to compromise," she'd say. "You need to make music people will like." "No, I won't," I'd reply. "All I have to do is be true to myself and everybody will understand. It's not my fault if they don't get it!" "And how will you pay the mortgage?" Joan loved music, of all kinds. I recall that in the first weeks of car rides to work we'd listen to the 50's station, or the country and western station on the radio. In December, we had to listen to ONLY CHRISTMAS MUSIC, and she had a big stash of holiday tapes we heard over and over again every year (Barbara Streisand and Elvis ones being the favorites). In our senior year of high school, Sean and I had begun making crude recordings of my earliest songwriting attempts. When Sean came back from school that summer of 1988, we continued. Joan wanted to hear all the recordings that Sean and I were making, and she'd want to listen to them over and over again. She was fascinated by the process, that we could make up these little ditties and put them on tape. At some point Joan said, "I'm tired of the radio. I want to hear the music you kids are listening to. Start bringing tapes in the morning." I believe the first thing I brought was the first They Might Be Giants album, which had songs on it with names like "Chess Piece Face", "Rabid Child", and "Boat Of Car." I can't remember which song it was, but upon hearing one of the more bizarre tunes on the album, she looked at me and pointedly said, "That's STUPID!" before dissolving into delighted cackles. She later ended up buying her own copy of the album after I got tired of bringing it back every day. I kept upping the ante with what I would play for her. I remember telling her that there were some things I listened to that I was NOT going to bring in the morning, like some of the really heavy stuff. She saw this as me throwing down the gauntlet, and SHE was not going to back away from such a challenge: "Why NOT!"
"Oh, no way," I replied. "You wouldn't like that stuff. It's far too aggressive."
My thinking was - she's a Mom, I can't play the REALLY HEAVY STUFF for her!
"BRING IT!" she ordered.
The next day I brought Metallica's ...And Justice For All. She LOVED it. "I like the DRUMS," she said about it. She got her own copy of that one, too, and I remember several commutes in the years following where, after a particularly stressful day at work, she would crank the hell out of her Metallica tapes for the ride home. Over that five-year period I eventually brought and played for Joan everything I was into: R.E.M., Van Halen, Public Enemy, Ministry, Steve Vai, Led Zeppelin, Red Hot Chili Peppers, you name it. Joan didn't like all of it, but she wanted to hear it all, and she'd ask me why I liked one song or band over another. I'd explain which ones I wanted to emulate and why. There were plenty of songs that got the "That's STUPID!" pronouncement. I was getting pressure from my family to go back to SOME sort of school. I knew that Steve Vai had gone to some place called Berklee College of Music in Boston, so I figured if I had to go to school, then going to one where I could learn to play guitar like Steve Vai would be the one to go to. I applied, but Berklee wanted me to send an "audition tape", since at that time I'd only been playing guitar for a couple of years. I spent some savings to get a four-track recorder, and Sean and I got to work on recording a few of my little instrumental songs. I brought over my newly purchased Carvin half-stack guitar amp to his house (read: LOUD) and we set to work. As always, the Hesters were supportive and bent over backwards to help us out. Sean had all his recording gear in his bedroom initially, but since we couldn't record my VERY LOUD GUITAR AMP in the same room with us, we set it up right smack-dab in the middle of the Hester living room. This was the beginning of a stretch of time where the Hesters essentially surrendered their living room to us to use as our recording studio. As Sean invested in more and more gear, it no longer fit in his room, so out in the living room it went. The Hesters moved their TV out to another section of their rambler, and would close the door and watch TV while we made nearly unimaginable amounts of racket, slowly learning how to make recordings of our rock songs. Every now and then they'd check on us, listen to our progress, and very often, feed us. Mountains of hamburgers would materialize out of nowhere, or on other occasions, stacks of large pizzas. Never once did I hear a complaint for having commandeered their house. We would show up at all hours, any day of the week. Sometimes when I'd get back to the house with Joan after a long day at work, I wouldn't even go home, instead I'd march right inside Sean's house and power up the studio gear and record for several hours. All kinds of things resulted from all that work and creativity: my Berklee audition tape (which did the trick, I was admitted to the school), a whole slew of recordings of my first band Copper Einstein, and a whole lot of work on the Oom Fala Skepsis CD, written and performed by Funhouse, the band of high school buddies Sean was playing with at Virginia Tech, led by Tobe Ramsey. It was in Joan Hester's living room that Tobe asked me to move to Virginia Tech and be in Funhouse with him. It was in Joan Hester's living room that I played my first Funhouse rehearsal. Later, when we were preparing to head to Seattle, we made our first post-Funhouse recordings in the Hester house. Chris G set up his drumkit out in the TV room we had driven the Hesters into and recorded his parts for "Future Boy" out there. Thinking about those days now, I realize what a happy time that was, and I'm still flabbergasted by the extreme generosity the Hesters showed us. For a bunch of creative kids, it's hard to overstate the importance of us having a supportive environment to come together and just go bananas with whatever ideas came into our heads. For a very long time, the Hester house on Fitzhugh Lane was the place where I went to do that. It was our clubhouse, in a way, and for me, almost a second home. When it was time for us to leave for the west coast, Joan was again nothing but supportive. "I'm really glad you're going," she said. "You're going to be fine. And you're going to have fun." ***** Joan Hester was my friend's mom, she was my boss, she was a mentor, she was our biggest fan, a hilarious lady, and best of all, she was a great friend to me. I am so grateful that I got to know her so well. Now I'm very sad. |
