by Bobby DeVito
Two teachers in particular made great impressions on me. The first would be the only teacher I have ever had the icky “student crush” for. Her name was Maureen, she was Australian, and was the professor of Cultural Studies. I volunteered to be her TA, and ended up being her assistant for two semesters. She was one of the most brilliant minds I have ever known, and between her classes and Steve Mile’s music theory classes, I was consistently challenged. Maureen was possibly one of the most unusual looking women I have known, very gawky tall and skinny, like an ostrich at times. She had this huge shock of asymmetrically cut hair that was short in back, with enormous bangs. Her classes were some of the best at New College, and I slaved away week after week making her copies, labeling her slides, marveling at her. We completely bonded over the most random, yet important, thing – we both have a love and understanding of why Bon Scott of AC/DC was one of the greatest rock vocalists ever. A woman that can discuss the cultural importance of Bon Scott’s crotch to you in academic terms can make me wet in an instant.
The second instructor at New College that stood out in my education was a peculiar Buddhist professor named John Newman. He was a tall, thin athletic guy in his early 40s, always mild mannered and only occasionally annoyed. He was so translucently white that his nickname on campus was “The Other White Meat”. John had ended up getting to spend a great deal of time in Tibet after high school, and was a very knowledgeable professor in Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism. Naturally, I took nearly every course he offered. He knew I was a seeker, and took the study seriously. John was a very principled teacher, and was very careful not to let anyone put him in the guru position, however. While he did from time to time talk to me personally, it was usually pretty brief. One conversation still sticks with me. I asked him if he still meditated, and he thought for a moment and replied “Well, I play a lot of basketball”. Simple and direct. Through John, I was able to study Buddhism and Taoism, and explore their relationships to creativity and music.
When I say getting through New College can be a real gauntlet, nothing illustrates that better than the story of my good friend Patrick Denny. He was a musician as well, one of the coolest guys on campus. At that time, he was dating and living with two amazingly hot twin sisters named Miriam and Meridith, and was complaining that all the two of them wanted to do was to get high and have sex with him. I basically wished I could have had that problem myself. During our senior thesis year, Pat and I had gotten pretty close. One day he stopped by when I was stuck on my thesis, and we shared a six pack. He then pulled out a nice fat baggie of cocaine, and offered me some. I figured why not, it had been years since I had done some coke. The last time I had really done any was back when I had busted Beth at my apartment with that Cuban guy, and with Jimmy from Hatterfox. Pat threw down a gram, and away we went. Of course, before he left I bought the rest of the contents of that baggie. Cocaine offered free is the ultimate sales pitch ever. One line and you’re reaching for your wallet.
Pat left, and I spent the next two days in a flurry of cocaine-fueled writing on my thesis. I added about thirty pages of material, dramatically and concisely restructuring the entire work. It was a Herculean task, but the cocaine kept me going until I passed out at the computer in my apartment. I was awakened that evening by my then girlfriend Sara, who was soon to be my first wife. She found me hunched over the keyboard, completely passed out. I was supposed to have a thesis meeting with Steve Miles, but instead I just dropped off the re-write in his mailbox, and went home with Sara to recuperate. Later the next day I got an email from Steve congratulating me for making a “quantum leap” in my thesis.
As the spring wound towards the summer, we were all rushing to finish our work so we could graduate. Pat Denny, being the crazy guy that he was, had elected not only to learn Mandarin Chinese for his thesis, he wrote an entire thesis on international relations between China and Singapore that was close to 200 pages long! His thesis sponsor was a lovely ethnomusicologist named Helen Rees, and I knew Helen very well from taking her classes. She had done all of her graduate work in China and could speak and write fluent Mandarin, so she ended up being Pat’s thesis sponsor almost by default. I knew she was planning on flunking him due to his erratic behavior and poor performance, but I begged her to let him pass. He had gotten progressively and progressively worse during the semester, having auditory hallucinations and hearing people talk to him that weren’t there. Partially this was due to heavy drug use, and partially due to thesis stress. Believe me; I began to understand why New College has such a high suicide rate. I talked with Pat as much as I could, and begged Helen to allow Pat to graduate. I felt that I he flunked his thesis year and had to come back to try again next year, he would have killed himself.
On the morning that I had to defend my thesis before the baccalaureate committee, my girlfriend Sara broke up with me. She had graduated from New College the year prior, and was still working at the school as the Student Activities Director. Sara was a beautiful young blonde woman from Ohio and her nickname around college was “The Angel of All That’s Good and Nice”. I don’t know how the two of us ended up together. She was focused on getting her master’s and PhD in Public Health, and I was a wild, crazy drug using musician. We finally went out in February of that year, going on Valentine’s Day together to the Tiki Hut in Sarasota, where the legendary Mai Tais are so liquor-laden that the bar will only allow you two of them. Naturally, I had both of mine and half of Sara’s. We ended up back at my apartment that night, and I was sitting there showing her my photo albums, boring her to tear, until she finally threw them on the floor and threw me down on the bed. From then on, we were a campus couple. But on the morning of my baccalaureate exam, she decided to break up with me, and it completely freaked me out. Once again, I was on stage, watching myself from outside my body as I once again gave another of the performances of my career, albeit sans guitar. The only question that threw me for a loop was not from the faculty, however. I had already answered every question just perfectly. No, it was my good friend Curtis Hayes, who popped up with a doozy of a question right there in the free for all at the end. Somehow I managed to bullshit an answer, tie it up with a bow, and made mental notes to slice the tires on Curtis’s shiny new Nissan Sentra.
During this time, I had pined to do something artistically great in the music world with another instrumental guitar album. After the early success of “Guitar Salad”, I had recorded a second album called “High Wire” which featured more vocal oriented rock songs with plenty of guitar. But the album received a rather lukewarm reception from the music community. It was time to do something completely different. I knew a local friend named Mike “Sonic” Meengs, and I decided to do another guitar solo album like Guitar Salad, but in the ambient techno music genre. I knew Mike was the master of sequencing and sampling, some of the programming he had done for his band Sonic Erotica was simply stunning, major label quality work. So the last summer before my thesis, New College allowed me full access into the newly built Slavin Electronic Music Studios. By basically bribing Mike with good weed, good coffee, and few hundred dollars now and then, I managed to get all the backing tracks done and did all of the guitar recording, mixing, and mastering there at New College. I named the project LVX Nova, and had integrated it into my thesis, as my thesis was focused upon the rise of ambient music from Satie through Eno. LVX Nova means “new light”in Latin. I learned an important thing from that unfortunate choice – never name your band or project something that needs to be explained.
So in the summer of 96, I finally graduated New College. My thesis was an extensive history of ambient music from early pioneers like Erik Satie, through modern composers such as John Cage and Brian Eno. The written part of my thesis and the CD project LVX Nova combined my entire thesis project. It was an ambitious project that had gone quite well. But it wasn’t quite as ambitious as learning Mandarin Chinese for one’s thesis. Pat Denny graduated right next to me, and we were followed by some Amazon
ian science major I had never met who was dressed like Wonder Woman. New College usually has at least one naked graduate, body painted or just plain buck naked, and plenty of outlandish costumes. I simply wore black jeans and a black shirt. A few weeks after graduation, we all heard the news: Pat was found OD’ed in his parent’s closet in Gulf Breeze. He did manage to graduate and make it through New College, but to what end? It tormented me that I had interfered in his life at all. I hoped that his thesis sponsor had understood my argument that he would probably die if he flunked. But he died when he graduated any fucking way. I just didn’t figure he’d die the week after graduation. Pat was a talented, beautiful guy who just took on a bit more than he could handle both academically and with drug use. He was well-known on campus, and loved by most everyone that I knew. I am honored that we got to do the graduation walk together, and I hope he managed to find some peace. My thesis project was a pretty big undertaking, but his was Herculean.
That summer, I was at the peak of life – I had graduated from New College, I had a really good album on my hands, and I was destined to be married to the beautiful Sara. We had somehow made up; she tracked me down at a concert I was playing to thousands of bikers in Sarasota. I was impressed she made the effort to find me, and very happy that she had found me safely amidst thousands of drunk bikers. We took a “white trash road trip” and managed to get ourselves kicked out of Graceland. We ate friend peanut butter and banana sandwiches at Sun Studios. We went to Dollywood together. It was marital bliss, at least at first.
I managed to send out over 700 copies of LVX Nova out myself before the record got signed. We charted in CMJ, NAV, and managed to get quite a bit of attention and 60 pages of press when we got signed by Miramar. As I was getting signed, I also had to let go of my job with BMG Distribution. Miramar was distributed through BMG, and I have always been grateful to all of the friends that I had worked with over the years were promoting my record.Things were really looking up. Sara and I got married at a nice outdoor ceremony at The Kapok Tree in Clearwater. My friend Eliot Rubison, the owner of Thoroughbred Music, had bought the historic location and made a music store out of it (it is currently occupied by Sam Ash Music). Curtis was my best man, and many of my relatives came. I thought this was it, I had a beautiful blonde wife that my family loved, I had just graduated from New College, and now I had a major label record deal. We lived in Hyde Park, a swanky little area of downtown Tampa where most of the artists and yuppies lived. I was continually in the press, on the radio, even on local television. Success was just around the corner, or so I thought.
Within a year, everything had gone completely to shit. My relationship with Sara had fallen apart quickly, and when I came home one night and saw all my stuff on the porch, packed taped and labeled, I knew it was over. LVX Nova did indeed get signed, and we even went to Seattle to do a music video, but although the album was critically acclaimed, it just didn’t sell too well. My partner Mike and I were a bit pissed off at each other, and Miramar had sent me alone to do a two week press and promotional tour. I went, partly to promote the album and partially to get away from Sara, and headed cross country with a cute little record company Goth office girl named Lisa. She had short blonde hair and cute horn-rimmed glasses, and was the sort of chick who would go to a country concert one night and go see The Smiths the next. Lisa was my compatriot and drinking buddy for that two week whirlwind. Somewhere I still have that itinerary, but I know we hit Boston, DC, New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Florida, New Orleans and more in two weeks of blindingly drunk travel. I might not have made a ton of royalties from that album, but I did get my share of bar tabs out of Miramar. Especially in Boston, where Lisa and I basically drank ourselves silly at Middle East, then did an interview with a local indie magazine, then headed to a late night Pub that was still open, then over to the journalist’s loft to drink until 8 am, leave to catch plane by 9:30 am, next city repeat. There was no funny business between Lisa and I on this trip, I was far too preoccupied with my destroyed marriage to Sara. We were far too drunk most of the time anyhow. Somehow we managed to get a lot of work done. Just try eBay if you want to find a copy of LVX Nova, I buy them all the time for 99 cents…with $3.99 shipping, of course.
Upon my return, I started to get the cold shoulder from the label. Basically, they didn’t see Mike and I as tour-worthy, and we weren’t…we were basically a studio project. I was happy to have signed with them, as we were signed with other artists like Tangerine Dream, Alan Parsons Project, Jonn Serrie, and Jan Hammer. It was a dream com true to make a video with Michael Boydstun, the Grammy award-winning director and creator of the “Gate to the Mind’s Eye” series of videos. We ate sushi at the best places in Seattle, and hung out and smoked pot at Jimi Hendrix’s grave and tried to film it. We did a hilarious live gig at the local bar where “Singles” was filmed to an audience that was at times bemused and at times perplexed at our blending of guitar and ambient techno music. But the thrill was gone, and unbeknownst to me, the label was being bought out by a motion picture company. As soon as that happened, it was over. Mike and I had gotten as far as rough mixes for the second album, but they would never give us an advance to complete it, and I didn’t have the cash to do it myself.
So here I sat a year later, newly single and soon to be divorced, major label deal has fallen apart, and I’m driving a beat up mint green 82 Pontiac Grand Prix with bad brakes. My life sucks at this point, according to poor me, poor me, pour me another drink – which is exactly what I did, night after night. I spent most of my time in Ybor City in Tampa at The Oak Barrel Tavern and the New World Brewery. I’m sure the bartenders got sick of me sitting there moping and drinking every night, but at least I always tipped. I really did start drinking a lot more heavily and regularly at this point. I felt like a complete failure. Why had God brought me back from certain death, turned my life around, given me so much success, and taken it all away within a year?
A noteworthy event was the 1997 Florida “Jammy” awards ceremony. Curtis Hayes and I went to the event, as Mike and I were still not speaking due to the LVX Nova debacle. LVX had been nominated as the “best electronic act” of the state in 1997, and we were up against a well known ten year veteran electronica DJ, Andy Hughes. Trust me, Andy deserved the award much more than we did. Curtis and I were completely drunk at the ceremony, drinking the free booze, not expecting to win anything but a free hangover from the cheap well liquor they were serving. It so happened that we did win the award, and I had to go up on stage and accept. Curtis and I stumbled to the stage, and I began to ramble in a somewhat drunken incoherent fashion “I’d like to thank the people, you know, THE PEOPLE….ahem….is this thing on?” Curtis in his drunken state managed to secure the microphone from me and quickly spoke the proper litany of thank yous and hail marys that needed to be said, and escorted me promptly offstage. I was in rare form, and immediately headed to the backstage hospitality bar. The awards show interviewed us backstage, but I have never seen that footage. I’m sure that stuff ended up on the editing room floor.
The award itself was a work of art, thick 4” glass and stainless steel, hand signed by the artist, an actual work of art. It was also fantastic as a coke mirror, which Curtis and I rapidly discovered later that weekend. So it wasn’t a Grammy, but at least I seemed to be on my way, and I was doing it in rock star fashion.
CHAPTer Four
THe BLueS
During this time I began to re-explore my youthful fascination with blues music. My guitar style had always been blues-rock based, but I wanted to play more traditional music. In a scene from my life many years before, I was out at The Blues Ship, a local blues venue in Ybor City Tampa. A local band was playing called “Nitro and the Tampa Bay Blues Machine”. Philip “Nitro” Bozeman was an old school harmonica player who had grown up on the south side of Chicago, and had been around all the old school guys like Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, and more. He ran a fairly tightly run ship, playing lots of traditional
stuff like Jimmy Reed and Sonny Boy Williamson type tunes. I caught up with Nitro on his break, and said the same thing to him I had said to Jon Allmightey years before in Tampa – “I love your band, but your guitar player sucks”. Nitro’s response was “well boy, you think you’re better?” I replied that I was, indeed. Nitro invited me to a rehearsal, and that turned into two years of steady gigs with that crazy loveable old black man. He was my “blues daddy”, and playing with him there in Tampa Bay helped me to develop the skills I would rely on when touring Europe with the royalty of the blues a few years later. It also enabled me to drink as much as I wanted nearly every night of the week for free. It’s an occupational hazard.
I was really beginning my descent into darkness. Although I liked performing with Nitro, I felt like a total and complete failure in the rest of my life. I was divorced from Sara, the record deal for LVX Nova had completely fallen apart, and I didn’t even have a place of my own to live. Luckily, Bob Phelps had moved to Boulder Colorado, and was running a group home for autistic adults. I had wanted to attend the Shambala Center in Boulder, and was looking into graduate school at Naropa, the only Buddhist university in the USA. I suddenly realized when interviewing at the school that I would emerge from there with a Masters in Engaged Buddhism – and another $70,000 in student loans. So, I spent most of my time at the Shambala Center, trying to focus, meditate, and get to the root of my problems. But as I’ve been told since then, it’s very difficult to fix a broken mind with a broken mind. One occurrence that still puzzles me to this day concerns an old Tibetan Lama who visited the center and taught a weekend course on Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy. At the end of this somewhat tedious course, we all had to line up one by one and file past the Lama, and as each student passed, the red-robed monk would gently tap each participant on the head with his silk-rolled prayer items as he or she went by. I was near the back of the line, and eagerly awaited my moment with the Lama. As I approached him, he looked at me with a smile and a sort of a laugh, and then completely WHACKED me on the head with his little bundle of accessories. This was evident to everyone, as the noise reverberated throughout the meditation hall. Why did this monk smack me like a petulant child? I headed out onto Pearl Street and had a smoke.