People have all kinds of dreams. There are the ones that, with a little luck and good timing, have a pretty good chance of actually happening. Going to school and having a career, finding a person to spend your life with, starting your own business, even hitting the lottery actually happens to ordinary people from time to time. You tend to dream a lot when you're on the road. In a rock-and-roll band that most people will never hear of, outside of loading gear and playing shows there's a lot of time to kill. Taking long roads to places you haven't been to before (I guess that is kind of a dream in and of itself, actually getting to do it), even if it's just because it's what you love to do. I mean, deep down, every musician is first and foremost a fan, right?

 

Then there are the kinds of dreams that are only meant to be dreams. You know, like the “which celebrity you would most want to go on a date with?” dream (I think everyone has a list with an ever-rotating top 5). Or the “things I would buy if I were a millionaire” dream. Mine was always Steve McQueen’s ‘68 Mustang Fastback from that movie Bullitt or Paul McCartney’s Hofner bass with the Candlestick Park set list still taped to it. Pinkus says that the first thing he would buy is an original Action Comics #1 released in June 1938 – the first super hero comic book ever! Pinkus is really into comic books and 50s science fiction stories by writers like Tom Godwin  and Philip K. Dick   Foster wants to buy John Bonham’s drum set, you know,the  really cool orange see-through one with the giant gong behind it.

 

Foster and Pinkus are my bandmates and my best friends. Our band is a power trio (though we keep talking about adding another member to fill out the sound). We are called “The Rye” after the book The Catcher in the Rye. (We all read it because we heard somewhere that it was banned for having curse words in it.)

 

We are actually pretty good and even though we get on each other's nerves sometimes, we are great friends. We have been playing music since we were in 9th grade, after they answered an ad I put up on the bulletin board at our school. The ad read “Guitar player/singer looking for drummer and bass player to jam with, contact JC Pennypacker,” and at the bottom it had all of these tear-away tabs with my number on it. Our first show was at a junior high pep rally in the gym and we've been playing together ever since. It seems like a long time ago but it really wasn't. A few months back we bought an old Chevy ambulance and converted it into our touring van. It's perfect for it. It has dual wheels and a 350 engine that runs great, but sucks up gas. It has all of these built in cargo areas on the sides to put cables and stands and stuff in. The heater is broken, which is no fun in the winter, but the flashing lights still work, which is kind of cool.

On the long road trips, especially coming from a great show, you can't sleep, you're too wired on adrenaline and gas station food. So, yeah, sure we talk about making it big (even though deep down we know that it probably won't ever REALLY happen). We talk about our favorite albums (mine is the Beatles’ White Album and anything by The Who). Pinkus is all about old Motown stuff and these jazz guys I've never heard of. I think he just says he likes it to sound like he is all “in the know” and stuff, you know, trying to one-up Foster and me. Crazy thing is I actually love the old stuff like that, the scratchier the better. Foster has pretty wild taste—that guy listens to everything. He’s really into Mozart and classical stuff this week (although I think he's trying to “out sophisticate” Pinkus). He keeps going on about how Mozart was a child rock star from a small town called Salzburg in Austria and toured all over Europe in a cold carriage in the winter, and he wore crazy wigs and stuff. Crazy thing is I really kinda love Mozart’s stuff, too. “Requiem Mass?” Come on, I'd stack that up against any rock album, and Foster says he was writing it when he died. Like a rock star, he died when he was young and they played it at his funeral, even though no one knows where he’s buried. I guess listening to Mozart isn't a far stretch for Foster. Last week it was glam rock and the week before that some kind of German electronic music and John Carpenter soundtrack stuff. Who doesn't like that?

 

So, we are always talking about music and, of course, even though it's kinda un-dude-like to admit, we also talk a lot about girls in all of their mysterious and elusive splendor, like this really cute blonde that has been at a couple of our shows. (I tried to talk to her once and I totally blew it and, of course, these guys won't stop laughing about it. I think she likes me anyway, though.) Sometimes, after a few weeks out on the road, we really want to be home so we drive long and straight through the night to get there. The shows back home are always a blast and it’s always the best when we pull into the city just as the sun is coming up. We always try to get there in time to stop and walk out on the bridge to see the sunrise. 

 

Pittsburgh has a lot of bridges. Clemente Bridge, Liberty Bridge, Rachel Cason Bridge, Ft. Pitt Bridge, Ft. Duquesne Bridge, we even have one named after Andy Warhol (the guy who painted the soup cans and discovered Lou Reed). He was from Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol that is. Most of the bridges are painted this certain yellow color that kind of matches the sunrise. So we stop, get out, breath in the morning air and look down the rivers and across all of the yellow bridges just as the sun is about to come up over the east end of the city. We usually just take it in and don't talk, having just talked all night about girls and how our whole rock star careers will play out start to finish, like one of those VH-1 Behind the Music episodes.

 

You know, Behind the Music episodes always start out so great and then there is the tragic turning point where things start to go bad. The second album is overproduced because the band is trying too hard, it's rushed to release and the fans all hate it (sometimes even the band hates it). Or, you know, the drummer quits and discovers Buddhism , or the lead singer cracks under the pressure and leaves the band for an ill-fated solo career. The lead guitar player goes missing and they find him living under an alias with a pretty young dancer he met on tour, or in some cases the unthinkable happens and one of them goes to sleep and doesn't wake up. So many great ones didn't make it past age 27! “If rock stars make it to 28,” says Pinkus, “usually they’re home free and they've defeated the curse.” Foster, being less superstitious and more scientific, adheres more to the “shooting star” philosophy whereby rock stars use up all of the energy of an otherwise long life in a short span of time. I just try not to think about it. These people aren't just my heroes who died for rock and roll, I feel like they are like friends that I've lost, as strange as that may sound. I like to think that they're all still alive out there, somewhere. That when it wasn't fun anymore they just found a new life somewhere else, where they could be free, which is why most of them became rock stars to begin with, right? Regardless, and in spite of the predictability, I still watch those shows just to see the part when the band is on the rise, when they were kinda like we are now. I love that part. I can almost feel it happening for them and it makes me feel like it can happen to anybody, even us. On those rare mornings at sunrise on the bridge, as we look out across the rivers and the yellow bridges and the city, our city, that's just waking up, I think that someday everyone here will know who we are and sing along with our songs on their way to school or to work, or to see the person they love the most, or to unlock the locks and lift the gate to their new business…. Or, even to pick up their lottery winnings. They’ll know us and know we are real and that somehow we know them too. So, yeah, people have all kinds of dreams. Sometimes your dream finds you, sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes in that moment just before you wake up from, you know, one of those actual “dream dreams,” the ones that come through in full color CinemaScope complete with soundtrack that wake you before they have officially ended, you struggle to remember what you can and piece the story together because it was so great. You try hard to go back to sleep just to get to the ending, to sustain the blurry feeling it gives you for just a little longer, but it's gone and you are almost awake. But for just a minute, the sweet, rare minute in between, when you're not sure if it really happened or not, you just kind of lay there feeling somehow triumphant and like the world is yours, if only for that swirling moment just before  the sunrise....