Mark Andrew

I the traveler; you the native son.

When I came to Columbus in 1985 to start my college career I was technically only a couple hundred miles from my Western Pennsylvania home, but to me there was a vast gulf between those verdant, rolling hills and the comparatively defoliated flatland of Central Ohio. You helped this place feel real to me by showing me the things you loved about it, a tamer Ferris Bueller to my less introverted Cameron; this city every bit a Chicago to my rural eyes. Although my waistline curses you now, the BW3s and Skyline Chili you introduced me to remain my favorite foods. (And can it be true that Tuesdays were .10 cent wing nights back then?)

We shared a love of many styles of music, but yours was always the broader view. You got me to hear the rock & roll in Shostakovitch and the jazz in Joe Jackson, and every time I said, "Oh, that stuff doesn't do anything for me," your hand was reaching for the needle of your record player as you unsleeved something else I'd heard but never actually listened to before. Together we discovered the space between notes in Basie's "L'il Darlin'" and the divine in Coltrane's "Alabama." And the sheer genius in every note Paul Simon's Graceland album, even as we tried to rethink our entire record collections in terms of those new Compact Disc things.

Those were the days of lasers in the jungle; lasers in the jungle somewhere. Staccato signals of constant information; a loose affiliation with millionaires and billionaires and baby...

We couldn't stop laughing when Professor C. told us that the tritone was the devil's interval, then played one on the piano and peered nervously over the soundboard in anticipation. But when I found myself crying over some damaged girl cutting her own swath of destruction, you peered at me through those round glasses and let me know the script didn't call for my extra drama. Of course that was easy for you to say, seeing as how you were sitting next to the same girl you're with right now, these 23 years later, but the lesson was no less needed.

Drama was far overshadowed by the music though. We and the others on Schaaf 1st-South ate, slept, lived and breathed music. We toured the country playing for others and were taught by pros and legends. We strung about a mile of quarter-inch Ampex tape between two open-reel machines to create the Musique Concrète magnum opus, "Five Is Right Out" for our final project in Doc Rock's class. We spent a summer in a slice of Appalachia known as Massieville that also happened to have a state of the art recording school embedded on the banks of Trego Creek, which yes, was rightly pronounced "crick," howling with laughter as Martin (aka Motown) did the bee dance on our front lawn and resigning ourselves tacitly that we'd never be as good as Ciampa and Oliver as we laid down Zero One tracks at 2:30 in the morning in Studio E.

But we practiced like hell anyway.

You amazed me with your vulnerability when you told me how seeing a shooting star at just the moment you needed it pulled you back from the brink of despair. Then a year later you had the bravery to rightly call me a hypocrite when I wrote a column in the paper bemoaning drunken vandals at the college, then a week later went around defacing every Bush/Quayle sign I saw.

A year after that we were graduates. I went to your home for a holiday party and during the grand tour, I saw that beautiful Pedulla bass propped up against the Trace Elliot amp in a darkened corner of the basement, a fine coat of dust covering the entire rig. It was then that I felt the gulf of Ohio flatland had somehow worked itself between us, an unexpected divergence in a road I thought we were on.

And sorry I could not travel both.

Today, 20 years later, I listened to Graceland on my way to work and thought of you in that hospital bed, wondering if I visited you if I'd be able to say any of this and if you'd be well enough yet to hear me anyway. It seemed like a good time to pause and write it down. Whatever good resides within me is the result of my contact, however lengthy or brief, with truly remarkable human beings who have shaped me. I would be remiss in not publicly recognizing your place in that. I hope you get well soon.