`I plan to be self sufficient on music by age 28.’ These were the words of Mike Artamonov, spoken in 2004 at age 24, shortly after I was introduced to him by my friend Adam. Mike had heard rumors about the fledgling jam room in my house, and he was curious to investigate.
I had moved to San Diego a few years earlier to start a job as an Assistant Professor (similar to a Lecturer in the UK system) at UCSD, and Mike and Adam were both graduate students at the same university where I worked. I had made setting up a jam room a top priority after reaching the milestone of purchasing my first house, along with buying a billiards table and a big screen TV, and finding housemates to rent rooms.
Being a bachelor among bachelors, it may not surprise you that little else was purchased for the house subsequently, apart from a bigger, flatter TV, some rudimentary furniture, and, of course, more gear for the jam room. There was the minor problem, however, of the talent-to-gear ratio being quite low in this illustrious jam room, but this was to change when Mike arrived, guitar in hand.
I once played guitar, and even thought I had gotten quite good at it. The day I gave up guitar was not too long after seeing Mike plug into my amp and jam on Voodoo Child. I had of course seen countless videos of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Stevie Ray Vaughan and the like playing brilliantly, but I had never seen someone play guitar so well right before my eyes.
Fascinatingly, Mike had even less music instruction under his belt than I, yet his fretting hand was doing things beyond my comprehension, and seemingly beyond his, as well, based on his sincere inability to explain what he was doing. This wasn’t your average guitar hack, amusing himself by shredding, finger tapping and making a lot of noise — this was real music, with brilliant phrasing, the kind that at first appears simple, but ultimately leaves you puzzling for days to unravel how it was done.
My humbled housemates and I figured we wouldn’t see much of Mike after this episode, since our sorry musical abilities offered little incentive for him to return. To our surprise, Mike enjoyed jamming with us, and he even encouraged my songwriting ambitions and helped me make the transition to playing bass.
In the year or so that ensued, we formed a band of sorts with Mike on lead guitar, Adam on rhythm guitar, our friend Hugh on drums, and me on bass and vocals. We named ourselves Arbor Grove, taken from our street address. A more apt name might have been `Mike and a Number of Earnest Jackasses,’ but we were having a good time, and we figured Mike would eventually move on to catch a swifter musical current toward his age-28 musical milestone. Surely, we must have been standing in his way, no?
Eventually Adam was lured away to a lucrative investment banking job in New York City, and with only three of us left as 2006 came to a close, things looked grim for Arbor Grove. Indeed, shortly after New Year, Arbor Grove was put to rest, at least in name. But rather than calling it quits on me and Hugh, Mike made a decision that the three of us should get serious and turn our half-assed jam sessions and half-written songs into something real. Something that could get us gigs at the clubs around town. Something that could get us on the radio. Hugh and I were of course flattered at this opportunity, and thus was born SO3. (I suggested various forms of `The Mike Artamonov Experience’, but Mike, in a typical display of modesty, preferred something more anonymous, if not cryptic.)
Mind you, by this point, we all had full time jobs, all deeply in the decidedly non-rock-and-roll world. Between work, practice, and our unhappy girlfriends, there was time for little else, besides sleeping and eating. We gave in to the call of MySpace and Facebook and every other web based tool we could get our hands on to promote ourselves. We contacted dozens of clubs to try to get gigs, and failing at that, did our first couple of gigs at rec rooms in on-campus student housing.
The word of Mike’s musical prowess spread rapidly, and soon we were working our way up the venue hierarchy around San Diego. Hugh and I did our best to provide a worthy backline for the Mike Artamonov show, and for the first time we started to get some heartfelt compliments about our performances as a band — as three musicians playing cohesively. We loved performing for the crowd, and the crowd loved us.
Just as we were pondering the next step in our musical careers, we received an unexpected jolt that would ultimately draw us closer together as bandmates and as friends. One early Monday morning in October 2007 I was awakened by a phone call from Mike, who calmly relayed the news that massive wildfires had sprung up over night throughout southern California, and one of them was raging toward his home.
I told him to pack his most valuable possessions — `Guitar?’ ‘Check.’ — and get over to my house in a hurry.
Soon thereafter, my neighborhood was added to the evacuation list, and we found ourselves stuck in traffic, talking by cell phone from car to car, hoping to make it to a friend’s home in La Jolla, close to the coast. We had no reliable news about the fates of either of our homes. What we did have, however, was ample time to ponder what it would mean to lose all of our material possessions. And what, amid the chaos, was the number one thing on our minds? Was it the possibility of our homes burning down? Was it the ash in the air that made the simple act of breathing a health hazard? No.
What was troubling us was how the fires would impact the headlining gig we had scheduled for Thursday night at 710 Beach Club.
For Mike’s part, the week of fires ahead of us would be nothing more than a reaffirmation of his above stated passion to find his feet in a bona fide musical career by a deadline that was now less than two years away. He was already a believer, and the fires merely strengthened his resolve.
The surprise would be the effect it would have on me, for whom the only stated goal since age 10 had been to become a professor. And I did it, at age 26, straight out of my PhD from Berkeley, the youngest professor to be hired by the school of engineering at UCSD. I’d gotten tenure (similar to promotion to Reader in the UK system) at age 32, graduated 5 PhDs, founded two companies, and was named to MIT Technology Review’s list of 100 Top Young Innovators. I was a nerd, and suffice it to say that `most likely to be a rock star’ was not one of the `senior superlatives’ to which I was named at my high school commencement.
It’s not that I didn’t love music all the while, it’s just that I could not help but think back to the view I grew up with that anyone who seriously wanted to pursue a career in Rock was destined to wind up working at the corner store and living in their parents’ basement. Surely, such people were either lying to those around them (Rock as an excuse to rebel) or lunatics (Rock as a grand delusion).
Which of these was Mike? To be sure, he wasn’t bagging groceries — he had a great job, leading a development team at a well known company. Indeed, he’s the type of guy who could succeed at anything he so chooses. Was there a third option I had overlooked in this coarse taxonomy?
That day, as I sat in my unmoving car on the freeway, eyeing the red disk in the east that used to be the Sun, I started to believe. Is this what it feels like, I wondered, for the atheist who has an experience that causes them to believe in God? Or for the pastor who undergoes the opposite? What do they tell their friends, family, coworkers? Or do they reject the notion as absurd, and return to life as usual?
