Chris Matarazzo
Mr. Matarazzo
College Writing
October 15, 2013
From Crushed Dreams to Revelations
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” my uncle asked me.
At the age of ten, I was ready with an answer: “I want to be a conductor of an orchestra.” I
waited, expecting praise for being so ambitious.
He wrinkled his brow. He smiled sadly. “Well,” he said, “Guys who conduct symphony
orchestras have mastered instruments by your age; they get music degrees in their teens…”
I knew what he was telling me. He was saying it was too late. I was ten, and it was too late. I
dropped the dream, then and there. And, music faded away from me for the next three years. It wasn’t
until the eighth grade that my feet were set back on the path.
My need to be a musician came back and I slowly realized that I was not just a musician; I was a
communicator. Maybe, in the end, that statement above was the thing that allowed me to learn this and
taught me not to not to be a single-minded person.
In eighth grade, we were assigned a group project. We had to use a cassette tape and pretend to be
disk-jockeys on a radio station. We were to pick songs to play, record them onto the tape and insert our
“DJ” voices into the mix. I partnered up with a friend of mine, Nick – a slightly overweight kid with curly
black hair and a very intense personality. When he asked what songs I wanted to add to the tape, I was
baffled. I really didn’t know what was on the radio at the time – what was popular.
My parents are both musicians, so I heard music constantly. But it was never popular music.
My diet of tunes, by random exposure, was classical, jazz and songs from musicals. My parents were not
into “pop” music, so neither was I. In fact, I really wasn’t a “fan” of anything in particular.
I told Nick just to pick them.
The next day, he came in with a song by the progressive rock trio, Rush: “Tom Sawyer.” This
was from their current release (1982) Moving Pictures, which would go on to become one of the most
critically acclaimed progressive rock albums of all time. Of course, no one knew this would happen, but I
did know that, as soon as Nick pressed “play,” my jaw dropped. I heard Neil Peart play the drums and
everything changed. The next weekend, I found myself picking out a drum kit with my dad: a beautiful,
silver Pearl five-piece. I was officially hooked and I have been in one band or another ever since. But,
something else happened, and I owed this to Peart, too.
I began listening to Rush every chance I got -- in particular, Moving Pictures, which never left
my cheap turntable. One night, when I was supposed to be asleep, I was in bed with the headphones on,
listening and following along with the lyrics on the album jacket and I saw (really saw) this,
from the song “Limelight”:
Living in the Limelight,
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem.
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation,
Get on with the fascination,
The real relation,
The underlying theme.
I had heard it a thousand times, but this time, it hit me: Neil Peart, the drummer, wrote these lyrics (as he
did all of Rush’s lyrics) and he was a genius. I learned, from example, that just because you are banging
on things, it doesn’t mean you can’t be smart. (Heck – Peart even quotes Shakespeare elsewhere in the
lyric.) He was talking about fame and reality – about keeping perspective. He was sending messages
below the text, like a poet. He was entertaining both sides of his human nature: the animalistic and the
intellectual.
Because of this lyric, I began really thinking about the other things he had written and I started
exploring and writing lyrics and poetry on my own. My fascination with words had begun; and I owed it,
ironically, to a heavy metal drummer; to one of those long-haired rock musicians my dad was always
complaining about.
The drumming continued and the writing continued and, junior year, I found myself sitting in a
history class with a substitute teacher. He was flirting with some of the girls (very creepy) and not paying
attention to the group work we had been assigned, so a bunch of my friends and I were talking about
everything under the sun. At one point, my friend Blair reached down to get something out of his book
bag and I saw a paperback in there: The Return of the King by J.R. R. Tolkien.
At this point in my life, I was not a reader, though I had always wished I was. I still wanted to
find books I liked. I asked him about the book. He explained to me that it was part of a trilogy of books
called The Lord of the Rings. He loved the books and encouraged me to read them. Pete, another friend of
mine, said: “Get The Hobbit first – it set up the background.”
That night, I found myself standing in front of an imposing wall of books at the mall bookstore. I
remember feeling intimidated. I didn’t have much confidence in my own intelligence. I remember
thinking: “What if I don’t understand this? What if I’m not smart enough to get through books that are
that long?” Regardless, I made the purchase, went home and dug in to reading…
Tolkien’s work transported me. A few months later, I found myself awake at three in the
morning, pacing the floor of my room reading the final clash between Gollum and Bilbo as the Ring
finally plummeted, along with poor Gollum, into the fires of Mount Doom.
I have been in the middle of a book of some kind ever since…
So, now, I knew that music and words would always be part of my life, so I studied English in
College, earned my degree, and kept playing and studying composition privately, until I got to graduate
school. My family couldn’t afford the tuition, so I applied for a “teaching assistantship.” Happily, I was
awarded the position: free tuition and a salary of twenty thousand dollars a year to teach writing to
college freshmen.
I had never really wanted to teach, but, one night, standing in front of the class, I remember that a
conversation really “took off” and that the students had really grasped what I was trying to teach them. I
literally got chills. I had managed to change the thinking of a group of young people – to challenge their
perspectives and to lead them to their own individual conclusions. It was then that it hit me…
…people make a mistake when they label themselves as one thing, only. We are all too complex
for that. If we focus on one label for ourselves, we are in danger of neglecting all of the facets that make
us up as people. I was not a writer. I was not a musician. I was not a teacher. I was a communicator.
Communicating both ideas and emotions was my “thing.”
After a life of connected experiences, from the music project to The Lord of the Rings, to the
classroom, I realized I needed to commit to communicating – not just to drums; not just to writing, not
just to composing or teaching, but to all of it. It all amounted to what makes me feel complete as a person.
So I suppose I should thank my uncle for crushing my dream.