I first heard Pat Metheny at Lulu's house, at a high school upperclassmen party where I felt very uncomfortable, being younger (and geekier) than everyone there. In a dark enclosed porch area off the living room where her family's stereo was kept, Lulu put the first side of the first disc of Travels on the turntable, and left to go hang out with her friends in the kitchen. I stayed in that dark room by myself, for the rest of the evening, mesmerized.
By now, I had heard some pretty weird and exciting music, courtesy of MTV and a few cool friends, but this was the first time I had ever heard jazz. Not swing jazz, not showy dance tunes from the forties, but jazz. Heart-wrenching, sing to the moon, offer-up-your-very-existence jazz. This is where you might laugh, which is fine. A lot of people consider Pat Metheny to be just a hair short of Muzak, jazz lite, crowd-pleasing crap. I'll admit that I'm a little embarrassed every time I hear him on a jazz station. But I'm also excited and happy at the same time, for very personal reasons.
It makes perfect sense to me that my introduction to jazz wasn't from Miles, or Coltrane, or Mingus, or Billy Holiday, or from any of the cool artists, the artists who actually coined the term, "cool". My portal into the real was opened by some geeky white guy playing a guitar through a synthesizer, on a recording of his tour through places like Sacramento, and Hartford, Connecticut. I hadn't yet learned that the most special places are often offered up to us by the unlikeliest of characters, and therefore I hadn't yet learned to ignore what was right before me. This might sound contradictory, but it isn't. Sometimes you have to learn to be fooled in order to be "unfooled". This hadn't happened to me yet, but as I listened to the music that night, I suspected that some other things had.
The mastery, the centeredness, the sipping at euphoria slowly, savoring it like the rare and precious thing that it was - how could I have these things? Where could I get them? How could I get to the here and now, instead of being caught between a thousand chaotic worlds, where every morning I woke up feeling like I had fought a battle whose purpose was intentionally being withheld from me? My deepest suspicion surfaced - that I was being slowly murdered. That I possessed a powerful wellspring of energy that everyone else got to use but which I was not allowed to touch, and that once I was sucked dry, no one would give a shit. And if I was lucky, I could dare to sip from my own fountain before that happened. Let's just say the Fountain of Youth wasn't yet a metaphor, in my mind.
The word "travels" suddenly had more significance to me; yes, I could go! I could put my feet on a road away from my psychotic mother, my spineless father, my wonderful friends who humored me but didn't understand, this insular, rigid town. I could move and move and move - in fact, I have been moving all along! Pat Metheny, my savior! (And yes, I also confused the doorman with the door - I'm still pretty slow in that regard.) I walked out of Lulu's house that night into a cool, clear starry world, with a secret discovery, and plans. And we all know how plans turn out.
