I Found All the Parts: Healing the Soul through Rock 'n' Roll is a book about my spiritual awakening as a rock music fan. Nearly six years ago, I asked why rock music fans such as myself were still so passionate about the bands that many of us became addicted to during our teen years. For me, one particular band kept me hooked. In the flash of an instant, I heard an answer, and knew I'd write a book about it. Yes, totally freaky, parallel world kind of stuff you see in a B-grade science fiction movie. But, this was real life, and my mystical experience altered my consciousness so that I could begin a journey which would delve deeper than I could ever imagaine into the recesses of my heart, mind, and soul.


Here's an excerpt from the beginning of I Found All the Parts:

“The rest of the band will follow me down any dark alley. Sometimes there’s a light at the end of the alley, and sometimes there’s a black hole. The point is, you don’t get an adventure in music unless you’re willing to take chances.” – Jerry Garcia

   
Teenage girls just wanna have fun, and for me, having a blast in the late 1970’s on Long Island included going to Friday night teen discos at the Knights of Columbus, whispering into the ear of my spandex clad girlfriend which cute boy was my latest crush, and playing “Freebird” on my electric guitar with the neighborhood guys in my parent’s basement. Mom always knew when we jammed downstairs, because the ear-splitting vibrations would make the decorative plates in her china closet dance several inches out of place. She’d walk in the house and bellow, “God dammit! Who moved my china again?”

My love of music went waaay back to the days I kept my mom awake at night with my rhythmic kicking in her womb. As a fetus I could hear her bellow, “God dammit. What are you doing in there, “The Locomotion”?” In 1963, my head emerged into the world thanks to the cold forceps which were locked on my skull, as I desperately tried to emerge from my heavily sedated, unconscious mother’s birth canal. But music made the ordeal worthwhile. The first time I saw a piano at age three, dad had to use a crow-bar to pry me away. Fortunately four years later, my neighbor bought a used upright, and started giving me piano lessons. That was the happiest day of my young life.

Playing music was like discovering a psychotropic drug an elementary school age child could take, and my parents even encouraged me to be a user. By studying classical music over the next few years, a world of harmony and an appreciation for the brilliance of the great Masters developed, but it was during my high school days that contemporary music became my melodic drug of choice, and I succumbed to being a total Rock-n-Roll junkie. Chopin? Mozart? Beethoven? Roll over dead guys, there’s a new kid in town, and they go by winsome names such as The Clash, AC/DC, The Cars, Foreigner and Aerosmith.

My teenage daydreams often landed me at Madison Square Garden playing in a rock band to thousands of screaming fans. I wasn’t interested in being in an all-girl band like The Runaways. This girl really wanted to have fun. I longed to be a rock goddess, to play better than Clapton, and be surrounded by boys who envied my prodigious talent. But reality bites big time.

The plan to be a rock star was very short lived, for at age 15, I realized that while my $65 black Les Paul copy edition Univox electric guitar (with humbucking pick-ups and holographic stickered on pin-stripes) looked spectacular, it couldn’t overcome my god-awful playing. Despite years of piano lessons, there wasn’t a molecule of musical talent in my DNA. My guitar was coveted by many a teenage boy who secretly hoped I would take up the glockenspiel, each wanting to inherit my awesome “black baby.” During one particularly loud pathetic jam session where my mother’s plates danced a mile off their assigned spot in the china closet, a kid who lived down my block told me about a band that his older brother was “totally into.”

“Do they have a guitar as fine as mine?” I inquired.

“No, they have even better guitars than yours, Laura. In fact, the lead guitarist has like, a couple hundred guitars!”

“No way, it can’t be true,” I replied with my nose stuck up in the air so high I could sniff a cirrus cloud. But one day, he brought me their first three albums and dared me to listen.

I hate it when dudes dare or double dare ya, so I finally caved and put the most recent album on my turntable.

“Whoop de friggin’ do. What’s all the fuss about? For a guy with hundreds of guitars, I’m so not impressed.” My nose was still a bit bent out of shape.

But as a few more songs caught my ear, some of the tunes weren’t so bad, so I decided to play their first album, and after a few spins, WHAM! A rapid succession of metaphoric 2x4’s walloped me between the eyes, accompanied by a voice inside my head which yelled, “Wake the Bleep Up Laura! This is the music you’ve been waiting for. This is it.” One moment, Laura was a normal deluded girl who thought she could be a rock star, then, in the flash of her Kodak instamatic camera, she transformed into a die-hard rock fan.

When I finally took the time to look at the album covers, the lead singer with his long goldilocks hair blew me away. There was a dramatic moment of recognition, as if I’d somehow known him before…he seemed so damn familiar, but it was the sultry resonance of his voice which drew me into a hypnotic whirlpool of teenage fantasy. Every guy in the band was groovy, even the lead guitarist in his baseball cap and zany clothing was cool. But not too cool. They weren’t untouchable superstars like the Stones, or Led Zeppelin; I could relate to the band (hereby referred to as “TBIF” or The Band I Followed) and their music.

Though officially “hooked” on their sound, my snooty high-brow nose was now sniveling in the dirt regarding my lack of musical talent. Even the lead guitarist simply breathing on his six strings created a far superior sound than the dreck that came out of my shiny black baby. He played about a gazillion times better than me. Deaf amputees with one eye missing played better than me. My dreams of rock stardom dashed, I consoled myself by playing in the High School band and took up the French horn (no glockenspiels were available at school) much to my mother’s chagrin. “Why can’t you play something nice and soft, something that won’t move my dishes, like the flute?” she’d ask. It killed my mom that her only child, who anatomically would be classified a girl, dressed like a disheveled lumberjack and liked loud, unfeminine musical instruments.

Many bands and artists graced my turntable back then, but my feeling towards this group was vastly different. The heavier the song, the harder I fell. Something about the bassist’s intoxicating riffs on his Hamer 12-string bass hooked me like a night crawler on the end of a fishing lure. I couldn’t get enough of those deep, pounding vibrations in my body, and without comprehending why, their music touched my soul like nothing else I’d ever heard.

For a long time I had hoped to connect with others who shared my passion, but knew less than a handful of fellow TBIF fans. I tried to turn other kids onto them, but no one was interested until their popular live album was released in the United States. Yet within what felt like nanoseconds, they went from Superstars to Superhasbeens, and by the time college rolled around, me, myself, and I, were the only beings in my circle of friends who liked TBIF.

For nearly twenty years, I watched them perform from afar, until 1997, when they played a gig in Denver. I’d heard you could buy pricey VIP tickets for the 1st and 2nd row, and imagined what fun it would be to have a seat so close to the stage. In the past, I’d usually wind up in row ZZZ, and needed the Bionic Woman’s funky telescopic eyeball to zoom in on those little dots that were supposed to be rock stars. By the time I checked into tickets, there weren’t any seats closer than the far right side of the 13th row available. I’d been to at least a dozen TBIF concerts over the years, and going to another show with crummy seats seemed pointless. My enthusiastic fandom had waned over the decades, but a little voice inside urged me to buy a ticket anyway.

My arrival to the concert was, as some fans refer to it, “stupid early.” There was hardly anyone in the theater except for me, and a completely inebriated dude. As luck would have it, his seat was one over from mine. He kept trying to talk to me throughout the warm-up band’s set, but his sluuuuuured speeeeeech rendered conversation pointless.

After the warm-up band ended, he stumbled back to the bar and a female security guard got my attention. She asked, “Is that guy bothering you?”

I replied that he was a bit annoying, but harmless.

She said, “Follow me.”

Before I realized what was going on, Laura was being escorted by a male security guy to a seat in the second row, right in front of the lead guitarist! The smile on my face stretched all the way to Toledo for days on end. Something magical happened during that concert. It felt like the light switch which had turned on after listening to TBIF when I was 15 years old, went from 100 to 100,000 watts of power. I was totally hooked on them again. At the time, getting closer to TBIF seemed like dumb luck, not a serendipitous event. But it was most certainly fate. This concert was essential for my spiritual awakening, for after that night, a voice I’d heard for many years when thinking about the band became louder and louder. It yelled:
One warm day in June 1998, TBIF performed at the Boulder Reservoir in Colorado. As I stood among the crowd waiting for them to come on stage, the names of the guys in the band did the fox trot in my head. “Huh. That’s weird” I thought. Then, their first names transformed into initials: R-B-R-T; R-B-R-T, over and over again. “It’s just a silly acronym. I must be doing too many crossword puzzles. Faggedaboutit.” I tried to forget about it, but it kept popping into my noggin’, usually out of the blue.

Several weeks after “R-B-R-T” inserted its way into my consciousness, I got up from my chair and walked toward a picture of the band on the wall in my office. Nothing fancy. Just their 1997 Christmas postcard for fan club members. (Don’t laugh. I wear my fan club member #273 with great pride!) With colossal intensity, I looked straight at the photo and shouted inside my head, “Why am I so freaking obsessed with you and your music?!” A loud and clear thought rang through my mind, “Because you’ve been together before.” Been together before??? NO WAY. NO BLEEPING WAY! But after a moment of knee-jerk disbelief, I thought, “Oh, so that’s why I can’t get these guys out of my head!” Suddenly, it all clicked into place, and made complete sense. It meant I had a past life with TBIF.