I was born in Chicago on June 8, 1962 at precisely the same hour that the
great Harpo Marx passed on to the afterworld, which implies one of two things: that in the
moment of our souls divergence there must lie some cosmic, unspeakable connection , or
that I am making this up in order to impress you. I must confess, the latter explanation
is the truthful one. I don't even know when Harpo Marx died, nor do I really care. I'm
actually a Groucho man anyway, but everyone knows he died in the 70s (and didn†t we all,
just a little?). As to the rest of the facts so far noted, I can attest to their veracity,
and from this point forward, you have my golden guarantee that I shall cease my
fabrications. It is time for the real David Callahan story to be told. I will give it the
working title: Get That Clown Off The Stage!: The David Callahan Story. In reality nobody
ever heckled me so mercilessly as to actually utter such a cruel, uncompromising phrase,
but I figure it sounds like a promising set up for a nitty gritty show biz biography. So
here we go: I never really picked up an instrument until I was in sixth grade, living in
Villa Park, California, and attending summer school at VPHS (Kevin Costner had gone
there!). So they had this guitar class and we played the chord of G major for the entire
summer. At night, my friend Chris Baumann, who had an electric Kay guitar, and I would jam
and record ourselves, and then move on to listening to our Black Sabbath , Aerosmith,
Zeppelin, etc. records and making prank telephone calls to people we†d choose from the
directory on the basis of the silliness of their names, i.e. Donald Longnecker, John
Wayne, Robert Grimm (well what do you want? we were only 12 years old). When I entered
seventh grade, I really wanted to start playing songs like the ones I was hearing. I had
been listening some cool radio stations in SoCal and turning on to Dylan, Bowie, the Who,
Pink Floyd, Neil Young, the Stones, Stevie Wonder, and Carole King and had just purchased
copies of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour (I had always loved the Beatles and as far
back as I can remember the Beatles were blowing my baby mind, dig?). So I bought half of a
drum set that one of the local juvenile delinquents was trying to unload, and I spent the
next four years pounding on a snare and a floor tom (both untuned) and a ride cymbal to
the beat of whatever record I fancied. It was at this time that I began piano lessons with
our neighbor, Eleanor Twitchell, who had vast reserves of patience and who would one day
begin teaching me how to play the organ. Maybe she figured the weirdness of that
instrument would capture my imagination in a way the piano obviously could not. At last,
it began to dawn on me that it would be ages until I†d be able to play Pinball Wizard
like Elton John so I set my sights on more modest goals, like learning some more chords on
the guitar and pounding the drums some more. My family moved back to Illinois in the
middle of my freshman year in high school and I got my first electric guitar, and I began
jamming with my new pals, a bunch of greasy glue-sniffing no-counts whose names I can't
even remember. It was during this period that I became involved in two separate musical
projects: the first was The Quacks, an imaginary supergroup that existed only in the
collective imagination of myself, my brother, Jim, and my cousin, Chris Sloan.  We left quite a recorded
legacy, probably about ten tape cassettes loaded with music from our different phases :
our country-western period, our psychedelic phase, and our death metal period, the last of
which yielded the classics Carnival of Souls, and Soviet Pyromaniac. Other greats
included, Sweet, Savage Love No One's a Redneck Anymore, and Pigs on Campus. But,
for the Quacks, success was not to be. Today Chris and Jim are leading normal lives in
Salt Lake, Utah, and suburban Chicago, respectively. In the summer of my sophomore year,
with my brother on vocals and myself on guitar, we teamed up with a kid from down the
block, named Tim Fletcher, who had a full drum kit. Together we became, alternately, Devil
Grass or, the Inner Sanctum. We couldn't decide which name we liked better, so we used
them both. Under these monikers we did a handful of garage and backyard performances,
mainly attended by the 3 to 11-year-old age group. But man, did they love us! I continued
with guitar playing, and later singing, through college and set my sights on being a
writer. I landed a job as a reporter for a suburban weekly newspaper and worked at it for
about four years before packing it in and fleeing to Europe to get my head together.
It was there, Antwerp, Belgium, to be exact, that I had the most wonderful revelation.
While staying at the Boomerang Hostel, a group of us, which included three guitarists, a
banjo player, a saxophonist and a pianist, decided to unwind with a bottle of Scotch and
case of beer after a day of busking in the city center. When the moment was right, we
grabbed our instruments and surged into the night to find an audience. We wound up in a
jazzy place where a pianist and a floutist were going at it. They invited us to play and
we warmed up a little with a couple of simple instrumentals before launching into a
bluegrass version of Eleanor Rigby. For this we were given free beer. I realized, this is
great! And my life was forever changed. |