Biggest Regret

 

The pride of Castro Valley: Cliff Burton

I have my regrets from this one life I will live; things I’ve done and said that I wish I could rewind and undo so they never happened. In this, the year of the Lord 2023, I feel like the biggest regret in my life is that I never really played in a band. Man, what a miss—and I feel like it’s too late at this point to aspire for, and playing in a band just isn’t the same thing it was in the Before Times (before, you know, that virus no one wants to talk about came into our lives).

In the forty-four years I’ve been blessed and fortunate to live on this astounding planet we’ve thrown into disarray, I feel like music is the closest thing to actual magic I will ever witness. When I listen to an astounding song, I feel like I’m engaging with humanity at its finest. That’s how much I revere really fucking good music, the first artistic form I came to love.

In my mid-20s, I saw a lot of bands when I lived in San Francisco. Back then, I wanted to be in a band. That desire has consistently existed within me since my teens when I putzed around and played electric bass in a band with friends from high school. During my quarterlife years, the three things that deterred me from starting up a band or joining one was:

1. I had so many musical interests but I couldn’t determine one genre I could commit to playing (which is stupid because a bunch of musicians have side projects),
2. I was more interested in being a writer or a filmmaker and figured I wouldn’t be really good at any of them if I didn’t fully commit to one, and
3. I lacked the inner belief and determination needed to be a really good musician.

It wasn’t until I turned thirty-six and my first book was published that my inner confidence rose to a level requisite to turn myself into a focused, driven musician. And then, only two years back did I figure out what kind of band I’d really like to play in: a proto-punk band à la The Stooges that could eventually evolve into a post-punk band like Killing Joke, which could then blossom in a number of delectable musical directions, like industrial metal, or an assortment of other metal genres. I could’ve been a bad motherfucker bassist with raucous backing vocals—something like John Paul Jones meets Jason Newsted circa 1989. A steady anchor for the band. A high-energy role player who would physically give his all at live gigs.

That could’ve been me.

I believe it now, but it’s too late.

But it’s okay.