My Life in Song

When I was a teenager, I played the drums. I played in a couple of bands, mostly light rock stuff—some Kinks covers, a few Beach Boys songs, with a couple of blues numbers thrown in for fun. None of the bands were ever very good, but once in a while we got a chance to perform and at one point even had a few groupies who’d come to our rehearsals.

We didn’t do much original material, but I wrote a song one time and my current band even practiced it a few times. The song never really caught on though, and after a while we dropped it from our repertoire. It only had one verse, and we just repeated it over and over, adding in some guitar riffs and an extended drum solo.

As a teenager, with long hair, ripped jeans, and a growing appetite for drugs, I thought the song captured the essence of life as I had experienced it to that point. Short as it was, it was an anthem for my time. I had envisioned the song containing a few more lyrics, but after the first verse, nothing else seemed to matter.

Accompanied by a driving melody, first I would sing the verse by myself, then the rest of the band would join in to sing it again. I would sing, they would respond; I would sing, they would respond, until finally the whole thing broke down into a long, discombobulating drum solo. The words? “I’m not like everybody else.” And the response? “No, I’m not like everybody else.”

I wasn’t crushed when the band dropped the song, but its one line really did set a direction for me over the next number of years, as I tried time and time again to both separate myself from everybody else and to prove—in one form or another—just how different I really was.

Eventually, I gave up playing the drums. My drinking picked up and I dropped out of school. My isolation grew and my inability to connect with people expanded exponentially. I moved from place to place, searching for somewhere to call home, and eventually landed back in New York City.

Over the years, I had fallen out of touch with my bandmates and had heard, through the grapevine, that a couple of them had actually died. My drinking continued, however, spinning out of control, much like my drum solos—devolving into a few incomprehensible paradiddles and a final chaotic crash of cymbals.

When it was over, I found myself on the other side of the equation, suddenly sober.

Life took on another, deeper complexion, and while I was able to recognize my differences from others—my uniqueness, if you will—I was more powerfully drawn into the warm embrace of recovery where I began to recognize, instead, just how similar I actually was, and am, to those around me, both in recovery and people I have come to know outside the loving confines of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I’ve never written another song, but the lyrics still represent a summation of my life, an anthem for my time. With one little change.

I was on the subway the other day, on my way downtown. As the train rumbled along, I looked up and down the car, taking in the range of faces of my fellow passengers—people on their way to work, people on their way home; black people, white people, Asian people, Hispanic people; old people, young people; scruffy people, well-dressed people; people with umbrellas, people without.

For some reason, the lyrics of that old song floated into my head, rising up above the clatter of the subway all around me. But, somehow, I remembered the lyrics differently this time. The melody was exactly the same, but as the words rolled out in my mind, I realized that something wasn’t quite right. It took me a moment to catch it, but I recognized that, unlike the original, unconsciously I was singing, “I’m just like everybody else”—over and over. 

And this time, I was smiling.