June 10, 2025 • 58 mins
Before the fall, he was chasing a dream. After the fall, he found his sound.
Musician Blair Crimmins was spiraling—caught between fading dreams, destructive habits, and an unshakable feeling that something needed to change. Then one night, after a day of drinking and being dragged behind his dog on a skateboard, he cracked his skull on the pavement outside his apartment in Atlanta. He nearly died. He lost his sense of smell. He lost himself.
But that accident became a turning point.
In this episode, Blair shares the long and uncertain road to healing—physically, emotionally, and creatively. From vestibular therapy to olfactory training, from depression to the rediscovery of music through piano, banjo, and ukulele, Blair found his way not back, but forward. He left behind the rockstar dream and built something entirely new: a vibrant, genre-defying sound that would become Blair Crimmins and the Hookers.
This is a story about injury, isolation, and rebuilding—not just a career, but an identity. It’s about how the worst night of your life might just be the one that wakes you up.
For more about Blair and his band, Blaire Crimmins And The Hookers, chack out www.blaircrimminsandthehookers.com Here you can find his music, videos, a show calendar with all of his upcoming concerts and links to social media. You can also listen to Blair Crimmins And The Hookers on the iHeart Radio App, Spotify, and Apple Music
Story producer: Dan Bush.
Warning: This series contains graphic descriptions of trauma, violence, abuse, and other content that may not be suitable for certain listeners.
* If you have a transformative experience to share, we’d love to hear your story. Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psycopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I can't say that there was an inevitability that I
would get in this accident, but it needed to happen.
I'm Blair Kremins, and one of the dumbest things I
ever did ended up changing my life for the better,
even though I almost died. The way that the accident
(00:38):
went down is just a tremendous metaphor for what was
happening in my life. Because as this dog was pulling
me on a skateboard, that's just me letting the world
take me where it wants me to go.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:16):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener Discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I'm an Atlanta based musician, been playing with a kind
of I guess best way to describe it as a
swing band called Blair, Crimins and the Hookers. We've been
touring and playing around regionally and nationally and abroad for
about coming up on fifteen years. We had sort of
a unique blend of ragtime, Dixie Land, gypsy jazz, trad jazz,
(01:57):
New Orleans jazz with a worn section. I play an
old timey tenor banjo, which is sort of almost an
obsolete instrument but was very big during the early jazz
age and swing guitar. I'm a songwriter, guitar player, singer,
banjo player, and an arranger as well for the for
the horn section, at least for the first first couple albums. Now,
(02:19):
I like to sub that out to somebody else bigs
even better than me. But yeah, I've been a musician.
I've been playing guitar since I was very young. Started
at when I was eight years old, and it was
when I started this band, the swing band Blair Comes
the Hookers, that it really took off as being a profession.
(02:43):
When I picked up the guitar of just immediately I
knew all other aspirations as a kid. I want to
be an astronaut or you know, a marine biologist or anything.
Just I never spoke of anything else again. More importantly,
I was going to be a rock star. That was
what I was going to do. I was it was.
I was born in nineteen eighty, so at this time,
(03:05):
it was the late eighties, and MTV was just full
of the most insane rock stars, you know, bands like
Guns N' Roses and Poison and Motley Crue and the
Big Hair and everything, and it was all about this
kind of joyous like partying too. You know. It was
before the grunge stuff started making everything more depressing and existential.
(03:28):
It just looked like, these dudes are having the best
time in the world, and I want to do that
for my living, you know, if I want to do
that for a job. I was born in Atlanta. I
did not grow up in a religious family. My parents
were fairly liberal and allowed me to listen to what
(03:49):
I want, and it was never really forced to go
to church or anything. I joined youth group for maybe
a month or two and quickly fell out of that.
Once I took up guitar, I did become serious about music,
and I played relentlessly and became interested in all different genres.
I took lessons for classical and then became really heavily
(04:11):
into jazz before I went to college. So I did
become a student of music. But by the time we
get to where I was in the incident, I was
playing in a rock band and I was kind of
playing it defiantly. I had gone to Berkeley and was
put through the Academia of music and kind of left
(04:34):
with this bad taste in my mouth. They just kind
of ruined everything fun about music. So the pendulum had
swung back and forth a couple of times where it
was just I'm serious about music, and then why am
I so serious about music? You know, we need to
lighten up to play music for the reasons we started
playing music, not so we could be snooty and I
(04:57):
act like we're better than everybody else. You know, I'm
playing mus for the people. So I started doing the
rock thing that was in the early two thousands, and
it was something that I really really enjoyed and I
was super passionate about. And I was writing music for
the first time, writing my own songs, and my friends
(05:18):
were loving them. And that's kind of who we started
out playing for, was just big groups of friends and
we'd bring out all of our friends to the bar,
to the venue, and everybody would be partying and screaming,
and sure enough, I had that rock star feeling, you know.
Being that was the early two thousands, that back then
(05:39):
there was this thing called a record deal, which you
don't really hear about too much anymore. And in Atlanta
there was a music scene, a lot of rock bands
playing around, and I think there was an unspoken competitiveness,
and I mean it was something that was talked about,
for sure, but I think everybody was kind of wanting
to be that next group, the line to get signed.
(06:02):
That kind of scene really is more of a popularity contest.
I think it becomes it starts to feel like that.
I mean, all music is a popularity contest. It should
be based on your music is popular because it's good,
not as popular because you're cool, you know, or you
look you dress cool or whatever. So I guess I
(06:24):
felt the pressure to just be out every night and
to be partying. And and there's something to be said
for that. If you are going to be working in music,
you should be out, be seen, network, you know, go
to events, support the community. All that is great, great stuff.
But I was in my twenties. So it was not
(06:45):
I didn't have a real professional mindset about going out.
It was, We're going to go out and party every
every night. The only night I'm not going out is
when I'm too hungover from the night before. I was
not a terribly destructive person, but I did feel like
a bit of an exhibitionist, sometimes taking excessive risks, drinking
to excess, and you know, if if there was something
(07:10):
destroyed on stage, that was cool, you know, I wouldn't
have said that at the time. You know, I would
have been like, no, I'm not trying to prove anything.
I don't care what anybody thinks. But now, when I
think of about that time in my life, I think
I was more concerned than I let on about what
people think, because I was I was getting into well
(07:31):
into my twenties and that fantastic fairy Tale record deal
hadn't come and they don't give those out to people
in the thirties, so I felt like time was slipping by,
and for whatever reason, my instinct was to double down
on the bad stuff and not double down on making
(07:54):
important music. You know, I was trying to do what
I thought was expected of me, and the way I
looked in the way that I had behaved, and even
the places that I went and the people that I
hung out with, it was all that's what was expected
of somebody in a band. I was drifting, and I
wasn't necessarily super depressed about that, but I was just
(08:16):
letting time slip away, and in the back of my mind,
I knew that something needed to change, but I was
too afraid to let go of the dream. It would
mean I failed. It's a beautiful weekend in Atlanta, Georgia.
(08:36):
I'm twenty seven years old, and there was some kind
of festival that we went to. I met up with
some friends from out of town and we went to
the park, saw some live music. We were heading back
to my apartment. I lived in a little five points
in this apartment complex that was built into an old school.
It was called the Bass Lofts. It used to be
a high school, so all the rooms looked like classrooms
(08:57):
and there was a giant parking lot. So we get
back to my house and I decide I need to
walk the dog real quick, and I can't leave out
the fact that I had been drinking all day. I
let my friends hang out in the apartment grab my
roommates skateboard, which I did every day, and let my
American bulldog pull me through the parking lot. I was
(09:20):
doing this dog walk on the skateboard on a daily basis.
My neighbors would see me outside and the dog was
pulling me around on the skateboard and they would all laugh.
And it was an American bulldog, really muscular, basically a
pit bull, and I needed to give her some good exercise.
So this was something I did during the day quite often.
And this is something that I don't remember. I have
(09:45):
no recollection. I could try my hardest to just pull
up this fuzzy memory of kind of swaying in the
wind at night in the Atlanta humidity, through being pulled
through the darkness and this parking lot with nobody out there.
But that's only because I know that's what happened. I'm
(10:06):
not sure if that's a real memory or not. At
some point, the skateboard slips out from under me and
I crack my skull. I hit the pavement so hard
that I'm unconscious, and it fractured the base of my
(10:28):
skull into my ear canal and blood started pouring out
of my ear. The way that the accident went down
is just a tremendous metaphor for this mentality, for what
was happening in my life. Because as this dog was
pulling me on a skateboard, that's just me letting the
(10:49):
world take me where where it wants me to go,
there was something else pulling me.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
You know.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
I'm laying there in the parking lot, and luckily one
of the neighbors, a friend of mine, came out to
walk her dog and found me lying there in a
pool of blood. So she starts screaming and calling for help.
My friends they hear her and come running out. This
(11:20):
is where I start to piece together a couple of
things that I can call memories. I do remember fighting,
and I was very combative. One of my friends had
to tackle me because I wouldn't get into the into
the ambulance. I was so furious and so combative and
so in denial of what happened. I just did not
(11:42):
believe anybody. I thought they were pulling me into this ambulance,
that this is dumb. What are you doing. I'm going
to go in. I kept saying, I'm going to go
inside and just and go to sleep. I'll be fine.
And then they'd say, Blair, you are bleeding. Like feel
your ear, And I felt this wet substance coming out
of my ear, and I said, one of you jerks
(12:04):
poured beer in my ear while I was asleep. They're like, no,
it's blood, and and then it would register on my
face for a second and then snap right back into
just total total denial. I have these faint memories of
running and getting tackled. Eventually I'm tied down. I uh
(12:28):
have another faint memory of waking up in the hallway
in the corridor of the hospital triage, waiting to get
checked in, and hearing doctors screaming and patients screaming and
nurses yelling back and forth, not just for me, but
for the other you know, trauma that had been in
their gunshots and car wrecks and everything. And I was
(12:50):
only conscious for a few seconds and then and then
that's the last thing that I that I remembered. So
then I wake up in a hospital room surrounded by
(13:11):
family members, friends. They're looking at me and kind of laughing,
you know, and and say they say, what day is it?
And I said Sunday, I guess, I said, no, it's Tuesday.
And then one of my friends says, uh, yeah, you
might want to give up your skateboarding career, Tony Hawk,
(13:33):
you know, and like what happened. I had dramatic brain injury,
major concussion. Had to do some healing, so obviously they
kept me sedated. That's why I, you know, woke up
two or three days later. I remember getting the news
that there was no brain damage and crying because I
(13:55):
felt out of sorts still, you know, you know, didn't
know how what my life was going to be like
moving forward. It was very very emotional. And then shortly
after that it was getting released in the hospital. All
I had to do was count count by seven, you know, seven, fourteen,
twenty one, twenty eight. They're like, okay, you could do it.
You're good to go head home, no medications, no suggestion
(14:19):
for a physical therapy or anything. Just go home and recover,
rest up. And so that's what I did. I went
down to stay with my parents. They had moved to Florida.
They had a doctor friend that came by and I
was asking him about some stuff because I still felt
very confused. The concussion was affecting me. I felt like
(14:42):
I was having a problem with word recall and just
just confusion in general. And he was like, give what
you geed to do is just rest, you know, go
go hang out at the beach, and you know, have
a drink. I said I should, I could, I could
have alcohol. And they're like, oh why not, don't overdo it,
but no reason why you can't have a beer. So
(15:04):
I'm like, okay. So I was just getting the impression
from the professionals around me that all it was going
to take was time. And then that night, my mom
was cooking and my dad was in the kitchen and
he said, oh, smells good in here. That was when
(15:26):
I noticed I don't smell anything. Why can't I smell anything?
Why can't I smell this garlic? Grabbed a lemon? Nothing?
I'm freaking out. I knew about this condition previously because
I had a friend who he had a head injury
(15:48):
and he lost his sense of smell at permanently. And
we all knew about this condition that he had because
it also affected a sense of taste, and we would
sometimes make jokes about it because he always wanted to
go to these places to eat that we thought were
terrible because he can't taste it. He doesn't know how
bad this freak of food is, and it's somebody I
(16:09):
just you know. I love food, I love smelling stuff.
I'm going to really miss this, the sense of smell.
So I went to a doctor and they told me
that it's called anasema and what happens when you hit
your head that impact. It can sever the old factory
nerves and your nose, yeah, something about the bone there
(16:33):
in your nose, right where your nose goes into your skull.
And they said it can come back, we just don't.
There's no way of predicting it. And the general rule
is if it doesn't come back in a year, it's
probably not going to I'm like, okay, a year of
this and that sums up my entire next year. It
(16:57):
was the weirdest damn year of my life. No sense
of smell. I had this vertigo type symptoms where whenever
I'd lean over or put my head in a position
other than upright, I would get dizzy, and as an
overall kind of malaise, I say confusion, but it was
also just me looking at the world and my surroundings
(17:20):
and not being terribly inspired or impressed, not finding the
humor in things. That I would normally laugh at. Imagine
yourself being in a room full of people that are
just cracking jokes one after another, and everybody's laughing, and
you're telling yourself you should laugh now, because everybody else
(17:42):
is why aren't you finding this funny? It was just
a strange, strange time. And that album came out, the
album with my band and that should heal nicely with
the name of it, and everybody had a big laugh
about that, including myself. I'm just going through the motions
and I'm still and I'm playing this music and releasing
(18:03):
this album, and it's a time when I would normally
be very elated, you know, this work of art that
I worked on and come out. I remember just taking
taking the CD and just kind of throwing it on
the desk, like, Okay, I guess this is this is done.
I did this thing, and we were playing shows, and
I did not feel the same enthusiasm. I wasn't amusing
(18:28):
myself with the usual rockstar bullshit. I was playing and thinking, man,
why did I write this song like this, you know?
And why do I not feel like playing this next
tune tonight? You know? I always liked it before I
was also in a state where I didn't really know
who I was anymore. Maybe you ever wrote this song
(18:51):
that represented them, But this, sir as hell, doesn't represent
the way I feel right now. It's not inspiring me.
When I look back at the music, I can look
at it with an outsider perspective, you know, and I could,
And like I said, whoever wrote this collection of songs
(19:13):
wasn't really sure what direction they wanted to go. No,
we sounded like we were trying to be a bunch
of different people at the same time. You know, one
album sounded like the Police, the other sounded like the
White Stripes, The other sounded like somebody completely different. One
sounded like Talking Heads, one sounded like Modest Mouse. You know,
all great groups, but not me. This doesn't seem like me.
(19:36):
I became very disenchanted with the whole thing, the music,
my life, and I was feeling depressed. I didn't really
have anybody that I was intimate with, not only physically,
but in that way where I could where they could
tell me if if I was acting strange. So I
(19:59):
began to speculate, I'm feeling strange. Does everybody think I'm weird?
You know, people are noticing so much as I called
family and I said, Hey, did the doctors tell you
something was wrong with me and then say not to
tell me about it? You like paranoia, Paranoia that I
(20:26):
wasn't you know, I wasn't being informed of some sort
of diagnosis and that I was going to be dealing
with the rest of my life. And somebody told me
that they had a massive concussion one time and they
felt strange for a year, and that checked out with
what the doctors were telling me about my sense of smell.
So I began to change things. I had a ukulele
(20:47):
that I bought at some point that I never really played.
I strommed around on it. You know, ukuleles are cheap,
little music shop things, and it's an open tuning. It's
very easy to play. It's kind of like an impulse buy.
You know. I had no plan to be a ukulele player,
but for some reason I picked it up. I was
drawn to it. It sounded, it sounded great. Some reading
that now I have this attraction to this instrument, and
(21:09):
I wrote a song on it. I wrote a song
about a girl that that I was infatuated with. It
wasn't returning, turning any interest at all. It was a
very romantic, lonely song called without You on ukulele, and
(21:30):
and it was unlike anything that I had written with
my old band. Well, the song started fitting locking the
old chats and wonder aulus.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Longer I could keep mind cool bone was always ringing, the.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Just harmonically, the chord progression, the entire just atmosphere of
the vibe, and on an instrument that I never played,
and I would play it for I was playing it
for people and they were really impressed this and let me,
this is this fantastic song. It was like a It
was like a jazz standard and it just came out
of nowhere, you know, like a like I mean, I'm
(22:08):
not relating myself the Coleport or a Gershwin, but it
was that kind of song where it felt like the
lyrics and the music were written at the same time.
Every day, Without You, it was a waste of my
time while I'm waiting aside and dream member, I'll sure
(22:31):
sleep ben without you. Without Previously, it seemed like my
songs were either the music directed where the lyrics were going,
Like I would write a song first and then I
have to write these tunes to fit into the to
fit into the song, and now it's just kind of
(22:53):
my whole mentality on writing a song is that when
people ask me do you write the song, that when
you write a song, do you write lyrics or music first?
The right answer is both at the same time. You know,
you change one, you change the other, just so it
seems like they were born together. I never felt so
proud of a tune before I brought it to a
(23:16):
band practice to play with my band, and uh just
couldn't make it work. You know, it just was not fitting.
It was putting a square peg in a round hole.
There was no way that the configuration, the instrumentation, and
the type of player that I was with was gonna
make the song work. Everybody just wanted to hear me
(23:38):
play by myself, and so that's where I was just like,
all right, it's time to follow this. This is the
first time I felt good about something in a while,
and I feel like more, more stuff is gonna come out,
you know, and I need it because I feel so empty. Anyways,
I need to follow this feeling. And I I wasn't
(24:00):
seeing the future in the band, so I did. I
quit the band. Everybody was really angry at me about that.
Not just band members but our friends and friends. Slash
fans who came out to all the shows were livid
and they, you know, just thought I was the biggest
(24:22):
asshole for doing this. But I didn't care at this point.
At this point, I felt so strange, you know, feeling
like an asshole wasn't that bad?
Speaker 1 (24:34):
You know.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
I started a job working at a bar and I
was still suffering no sense of smell, vertigo, social awkwardness
and everything. I had a regular that would come in
for lunch and sit at the bar, and she was
a doctor over at Emory. I don't know how long
it was, but eventually I told her about my accident
(24:59):
and she said, wait a second, so you haven't had
this test done. She gave me a list of things
to do. I told her about the loss of sense
of smell, vertigo and everything. She said, okay, well you
need to go and get this blood test where a
hormone scan, and what you have going on with your
head can be helped with vestibular therapy. And she also said,
(25:20):
they told you that you'll never get your sense of
smell back, or that it might never come back. But
what they didn't tell you is that you could. You
could train your senses to come back. You could regrow
those those neurons. And what you need to do is
go in your spice cabinet and grab all the different bottles,
close your eyes and smell them one at a time.
Train your old factory senses to come back. This was
(25:45):
this was like a new hope. You know, these things
could be fixed. I thought I was just supposed to
wake them out and they and it wasn't getting better
fast enough for me, so I just called this lady
my angel. She also said you need to exercise your brain.
(26:05):
Do some puzzles every day, do crossword puzzles and sudoku,
read and piano. She said piano works really well. Luckily
I inherited this little spinet piano. You know, my grandma's
(26:26):
piano almost like a spin It's like a piece of
furniture that's also a piano. But it put it but
you know, it fit in my apartment. It gave me
this new motivation. I'm gonna go home and play piano
because this doctor has told me that it's gonna be
good for my brain, and my brain is fucking broken.
So I start playing piano and I write a song
(26:47):
and it's the first song for my soon to be
new band. It's called March of the Hookers.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Dance, Babe and dance.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
They're gonna get all the cash and dance on your
Head's got a pass tax selling romance right away? You
run at loud for you And it's all about the
music industry and how and how you know we're all
hookers because we do whatever people ask of us. It
(27:28):
was me remembering who I was before in some way
and looking at it with disgust, but also some sort
of acceptance that that you know, that that is I'm
still in that industry. If I'm gonna write new music,
I'm still gonna be dealing with that. But it was
a jazz song, man. It was like a Tom Wait's
(27:48):
kind of style, cabaret jazz tune, sort of in the
same vein is what I wrote on the ukulele.
Speaker 4 (27:54):
Yeah, a hook.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Not a rock tune. And then I wrote another one
on the piano. I wrote two more songs. I wrote
like three songs within the same week on the piano.
I'm playing piano every day. Suddenly I'm a piano player.
Swear and welcome on top of that, I started doing
(28:24):
the exercises with the sense of smell and I went
to go get vestibular therapy. Inside your ears are these
little bags that hang in there like weights that keep
their counterbalances for you to you know, not fall over,
and they're filled with tiny rocks. And you might want
to fact check me on my pronunciation of things, but
(28:45):
they're called octaconia. I think ear rocks, you know. And
when I fell and hit my head, the ear rocks
came out of the little bag, and they're floating around
in my ear canal and the wrong place. So they
do is they put you on a table with your
head hanging off, and they manipulate your head, turning it
(29:06):
in all these different directions to move them through the
winding path of your ear canal, to get them either
back in the bag or to get them released into
your bloodstream so they're not not just like bouncing around
in a weird place, throwing you off. Do you remember
that game Labyrinth where you have like the little ball
on top of the of the piece of wood with
the holes in it, and you have to navigate the ball.
(29:27):
That's vestibular therapy inside your skull, and before that I
described the feeling I was having as it felt like
my head was only half full of blood, and sometimes
I would need to move my head around to completely
submerge my brain and the fluid that needed. So I
(29:54):
get the vestibular therapy. I'm getting over my vertigo. I'm
writing songs on the piano. I am now living in
Cabbage Town, which is a really small historic neighborhood in Atlanta.
All the houses of from the early nineteen hundreds. It's
built around a cotton mill factory. The town was built
for the workers, and so a big chunk of history.
(30:17):
Everything is old timey looking. Also a punt inheriting my
grandma's piano. I also got a lot of old furniture.
I was kind of surrounded by nostalgia and history, and
I think that was starting to inspire the songs I
was writing too. So at that point my record player
was getting a lot of use. I was putting on
(30:37):
vinyl records. Started digging into some of the records in
the back of the shelf. Louis Armstrong, Fat Swaller, Bessie Smith,
Johnny Mercer, Frank Sinatra, everything from the earliest incarnations of
jazz to the crooners, and that was just feeding into it,
got em jewet positive, and so I started going with that,
(30:59):
and I started writing writing more tunes that sounded like
rag time tunes, and then that dictated what instrument I needed.
I wrote a ragtime song, and I said, something's missing
from this. It needs a banjo. And and so then
I did my research on all the twenties recordings they had.
Banjo is a major percussive instrument in the background, and
what that particular type of banjo is not the bluegrass
(31:22):
banjo that you're familiar with in Georgia. It's a jazz
banjo of four string let's played with a pick, which
is perfect for me because I'm a guitar player. So
I figured that'd be pretty easy for me to pick
up anyway. So I get the instrument that I need
for that. Now it's one of my primary instruments. I
get a one hundred year old four string banjo, gorgeous instrument,
antique instrument. I'm playing that studying the guitar work of
(31:45):
Django Ryan Hart. My life at this point is just
sort of exploding with creativity and inspiration. I just never
felt like such an artist and the greatest sense of
the word. And this angel lady that I spoke of.
Another thing she said was and you're drinking still and
(32:07):
not because hey, dumb ass, you fell off a skateboard
while you're drunk. Why are you still drinking? But your
brain needs to heal, you know, you need to stop
doing that. So I was stone sober, you know, for
that period too, which also gave me this renewed energy,
which also meant that I wasn't hanging out with people
(32:28):
at bars. I was in this state of sober isolation,
but with this great urge to create. And I was
still feeling depression too sometimes because I was alone. But
I put all that into my work. I put all
that into the music. I'm looking back at what I
(32:51):
did before and looking at what I'm doing now and
thinking I was being lazy. I should be working harder,
try and make everything better, make the song better, make
your playing better, find the best players to play this
music with so it sounds as good as you could
possibly be when you're playing it. And just elevated my
(33:16):
standards for acceptability in the music that I was making.
I start writing these songs and I have nobody to
play them with. I record them. I do a four
song demo in my apartment where I'm playing pretty much everything,
(33:39):
and I just start throwing them underneath doors and record
stores samples, giving them out to people. Through that album,
I was able to start building a band drums, bass.
I did find a sax player. I knew when I
was writing the stuff I need a New Orleans style
horn section that's saxophone or clarinet, a trump but trombone.
(34:01):
And it wasn't coming all at once. I didn't have
the resources, I didn't know the people. These types of
musicians kind of wanted to get paid to play, so
it was a long road, but I was so inspired.
I was taking the show on the road as a
one man thing. I was going around all over the Southeast,
playing coffee shops, little singer songwriters in the round, me
(34:22):
and my dog, sleeping in the car in parking lots
and playing music and trying to collect fans. And then
I'd come back home and I'd play shows with the
band that i'd put together. We started playing shows at
same places I played with my rock band. I didn't
know where else to go. I wasn't going to go
and play a jazz club or Blues Club. I had
the contacts for the Star Bar and a Little five Points,
(34:45):
so that's where we went. And at first my old
friends and fans of the previous band they came out.
They came out and they were, like I said, not
happy with me. They were pretty pissed that I broke
up the band. I had a friend's band open up
for me at the show and they played one of
my old songs as like a slap in the face
(35:05):
to me. When I started playing, everybody in the crowd
moved to the back of the room as like a protest.
And so that was the moment I said, all right,
well fuck all you know. I mean, I wasn't that
I was in a weird place anyways, didn't feel like
I fit in with you guys. But now you've shown me,
(35:26):
you know where who the type of people you are,
you're not going to support me going forward, Then you
know I'm fine.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
I'll find new bands slow down.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Pretty quickly. I started playing the shows in Little Five
Points at the Star Bar, and suddenly there's a new
crowd and they're not people I know, you know, they're
people that just like the music and they come back,
not because they're my friend, and we drink beer together
and and barf later in the night. You know, like
(36:09):
but they're they're they're into what we're doing. And it
felt like a scene was starting.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Oh you know what.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
To do money lie and always spit in my face
and all those days through it, and there absolutely was.
We got a residency at the Star Bar where we
did every Wednesday, and I made each night a different theme,
so it was like a circus theme, and then a
(36:43):
puppetry theme and a cabaret theme, and I hired local
performers to collaborate with to make the whole room just
like just like a circus or a puppet show or whatever.
And and then and having puppets and dancers on stage. Someway,
I'm getting really into theatrics. You know, go harder, go home,
(37:05):
put everything you can into it, and work your ass
off and make a great show for these people. So
I really built a lot of fans there. We were
selling out the room every on every Wednesday, and people
would tell me after the show, Hey, you got a
great band. I think you got a good chance of
getting signed. I wouldn't give a shit about getting signed.
(37:28):
I felt like defiant, you know I'm not playing rock
music anymore. Fucked that. You know, I'm gonna play the
weirdest thing anybody would think of, you know, something that
nobody would think I do is playing ragtime, Dixie and swing.
And it turned out people people did like it, just
(37:49):
not none of my friends dream I'll sure sleep Ben
without you with And so that was the moment, was
being on stage and seeing a room full of people
(38:12):
that were truly truly digging it, enjoying it, buying buying
the CD and singing along and singing along with with
the songs, knowing the words. Unbelievable. Things were just falling
back together and in this wonderful way. I met my
(38:34):
then my my soon to be wife at the cab
the cabaret show that we put on. I was looking
for for girls that wanted to do a burlesque type
thing with me while I was playing, and got referred
to her, and by the end of the show we
were already an item. So finally I'm not single anymore.
(38:55):
And it was a long dry spell of of of
loneliness and very little companionship I got. I got my
ride or die girl with me. The band's doing doing
good and it just doesn't seem you know, it seems
like it's just going to keep getting better. I was
doing the the exercises for my old factory senses, and uh,
(39:20):
one day I went outside and it just rained and
I could smell it. You know what a perfect first smell,
you know.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Welcome back, This is Alive again joining me for a
conversation about today's story. Are my other Alive against story
producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski and Brent Dye, And I'm
your host Dan Bush.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
Of all of the stories that we have listened to,
his like the way he almost died, it's just ship, Yeah,
on a skateboard being pulled by a dog, Like, come on,
(40:46):
that's amazing. That's like if you gotta go first, you know,
quietly in your sleep, and secondly on a skateboard being
pulled by a dog.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
So Blair and I talked a lot about liminal states.
Do you guys know what liminal states are?
Speaker 5 (41:08):
In between?
Speaker 1 (41:09):
A liminal means in between. But in anthropology or in
you know, cultural anthropology, it's it's referred to specifically, often
as the state when one part of yourself dies and
the other one is not yet born. So for you know,
say the Ugliala Lakota sue, you have a vision quest
for three nights and days, you know, alone on a
(41:30):
mountaintop with no food. Anyway, liminal states are often you know,
accompanied with hardships. You have to endure certain hardships. Some
of these rituals are you know violent, some of them
there's blood letting, and there's there's all kinds of things
that you trials that these kids go through. And in
(41:52):
our culture we don't really have that. Our ceremonies have
lost their power. Then we might go to a bar mitzvah,
or we might turn six didn't have a sweet sixteen,
or you know, turn eighteen and we can drive a
car or get drafted. And Blair and I talked about
this quite a bit of like, you know, the childhood
self does it ever die? Does the adulthood self? Is
(42:14):
it ever born? Do we ever get that liminal state?
And these experiences, these traumatic experiences sometimes induce those liminal
states for us. So I often ask people when I'm interviewing, like,
you know, so if that was the you then and
then there's the new you that began after that, what
is the pathway that led you. So the incident happened,
It was stupid. He was trying, you know, to compensate,
(42:40):
maybe for a lack of a sense of belonging he was.
He was, you know, acting out and doing all these things,
maybe even somehow hoping for some change. He indicates that,
but it came to him big time, and all of
a sudden, he is after the incident, you know, with
the dog pulling him on the skateboard, and he has
(43:02):
this massive head injury and he's bleeding out of his ear.
He loses his sense of smell. Hezers into this great depression,
you know, he becomes very depressed, He becomes very lonely. Literally,
his old self is dead. He can no longer identify
with the music he was making, He can no longer
identify with like his friends, his friends. The album comes out,
(43:22):
he's like, yeah, I don't know what that is, you know,
and I just thought that was it was just fascinating
to me. And then slowly, over time, with the help
of a few strangers that are you know, people he'd
met along the way, kind of pointing him towards these things,
he had this liminal state where he had to rebuild
himself and eventually something happened where the new self was born, right,
(43:42):
so he was able to experience something that most I
think in our culture, a lot of people never experience.
You know, people you know, their childhood self never dies
and their adulthood self was never born, and they just
sort of, you know, they never have the liminal state.
But anyway, I just that's something that struck me about
(44:03):
his story is that's he's somebody who in this. For me,
I think in this culture, we don't get that, and
he got it in some weird way, and even if
he had to do it to himself, that that was
my takeaway. And just the miracle of him having like
ragtime Dixieland jazz, you know, gypsy jazz music just came
(44:23):
upon him and he couldn't stop it and it was
like a flood. I think that's so cool, man. I'm
just like, I want that happened to me.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
You know.
Speaker 4 (44:30):
I think what was really interesting for me is that,
like I feel like his liminal space seemed to start
much earlier than that, and I think that, like his
journey as an artist is really interesting because he had
this love of this music when he was younger. He
talks about getting into jazz and getting into that stuff
and he's younger, and then having the Berkeley School of
Music just beat it out of him, which I think
(44:52):
is something that a lot of us do get. We
get like the love of the thing that we're drawn
to when we're younger, beaten out of us by process
an education, and that the I think that the knock
on the head started him on the journey out. There's
a there's a phrase, you know, bill Ung's Roman is
(45:12):
you know, coming of age, but like Kunslo Raman is
the creation of the artist or the growth of the artist.
And I think that I think that, like the his
first death was really academia, you know, I think that
academia kind of killed the artist. He was going to
(45:33):
be in the cradle, and that the knock on the
head and the journey that it goes on afterward just
kind of brought him back to that.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (45:41):
And can I say to you you touched on this
sort of you know, these strangers kind of helping him
to kind of find his way when he's sort of
in the wilderness in that period. What really struck me
is the doctor that his his regular at the bar
that he tends and you know, because he hasn't really
had anybody tell give him like sound medical wisdom on
(46:03):
like what he should actually be doing. When she says like,
you know, you should be doing these, you should be
you know, trying new things. You should be doing crossword puzzles,
and my god, you shouldn't be drinking right now, and
it's sort of like, I love that. Her advice to him,
or sort of an official prescription to him, is basically grow,
(46:24):
you know, like grow as a person. That is what
you need to do. You need to be trying new things.
He tries new instruments, and he tries new things, and
it's basically she's told him to do that. And he
doesn't say that specific like, he doesn't say that in
so many words, but basically that's sort of sort of
the order marching orders that he's been given is like grow.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
We don't think about that much. We you know, when
bad things happen, when traumatic events happen, be they psychological
or be they physical, My first thought isn't like, oh,
I have an opportunity for some brain plasticity here, I
have an opportunity to rebuild, build brand new neurotransmitter, new
pathways in my brain. I don't think like that. But
(47:04):
that's the truth, isn't it. On some level, like there's
there's some opportunity despite how however horrific, whatever trauma you've endure,
it is there is some opportunity for growth.
Speaker 6 (47:15):
Right, Yeah, And to kind of have it forced on him,
coming from an environment where that is almost like a
terminal adolescence is expected of you as a rock and roller,
you know, like he was terminally held in this womb,
in this adolescent state.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
Everything he was doing was result oriented before. Yes, everything
he was it wasn't built on his art. It was like, Okay,
I can do this, so we're gonna do We're gonna
And he was like, I have songs sound like the Police.
I have songs that sound like you know, whatever was
in vogue at the time, and but it wasn't me.
It wasn't it didn't like, it wasn't a river pouring
out of me, like what happened later, you know. And
then then after his transformation, you know, if we can
(47:53):
call it a liminal state in a transformative experience, He's like,
I didn't give a fuck about being signed, you know,
that result was the last thing I could give a
shit about.
Speaker 6 (48:03):
But yeah, it's really hard to get to that place,
isn't it where what we produce is not who we
are well.
Speaker 4 (48:08):
And I also just think, you know, going back to
Berkeley and going we're trained in academia to function in
the society that we live in, and so you know,
we might gain like technical skills and everything like that,
but it's technical skills we can join the workforce, and
a lot of us just I mean, we're just we're
(48:29):
raised with that understanding, and once we get there, it's
like I know, I mean as a writer, as an
artist period, it's you know, you reach a certain point
where you get far enough in you're making money at it,
you figured out a way to like cut through and survive,
(48:51):
and like anything else, you kinda you realize it's kind
of boring and soulless to behave that way to work
under that understanding, to look at this as a job
and not as a vocation or or something that you love.
And it's really hard to break out of that because
as a society, they're just people who do that are
(49:14):
kind of considered koops.
Speaker 1 (49:15):
I had the same problem when I got out of
film school. I was like, I need I have to. Like,
I used to have an instinct of pre visualization that
I had for making movies and sequences, and then I
started doing things because I understood the psychology of the
camera angle and understood Hitchcock, and I understood you know,
these these greats, and I knew what they were doing.
And so you start to pick up that language, and
you start to use it almost as if you're, you know,
(49:37):
a writer who's using language that is sort of you know,
injected into them from having to read you know, all
these other great writers, as opposed to it just being
organic and being from yourself in the cat. Yeah, So
so I I similarly out save the cat. So I
similarly was like, okay, if this is anything wrong with that, no,
(49:57):
But I'm like I had a similar experience where I
was like, okay, and this is probably why none of
my movies are big commercial successes, because I was like,
I'm going to fracture the entire cathartic structure here and
do some really weird shit. And you know, sometimes I
look back and go, maybe I should have just saved
the cat.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (50:16):
You know, here's the thing. I look back at my
writing from college and well, into my twenties, before I
had any kind of success, when I was still writing
children's plays for a theme park, and that's the stuff
then was wild and sloppy as shit and all over
(50:39):
the place, but in it you could sense the joy
of flight. And I think as I as my craft
grew and as I tightened everything up, the better structured
my work becomes later on, the less I can see
the joy of flight in there. Until I think I
(51:02):
realized at a point like five or six years ago,
it's like there's there's no love in this anymore. It's technically.
I feel very good about the writing. I feel like
this is a very decent story that could sell, but
I feel almost nothing for it. And that I think
that you have to You have to learn to love
(51:24):
to fly again, you know, if you like. After a
certain point, it's important to gain the technical skills. It's
important to learn all these things, but it's it's equally
as important to unlearn them and to refine the spark
that brought you to this place. Otherwise you might as well,
you know, you might as well have any job. You
(51:45):
might as well be working in insurance. And nothing against
people in insurance except for health insurance, you can a
go to hell. But like, but you know, I mean,
it's just it turns into another job if you don't
reignite that fire and if it takes a com on
the head. Yeah, after riding on your buddy's skateboard being
(52:06):
pulled by your buddy's dog, I mean, that's a good
story right there.
Speaker 5 (52:11):
I love that as being the entry point to this story.
He says, you know, like, as this dog was pulling
me on a skateboard, that's just the world telling me
where it wants me to go.
Speaker 6 (52:21):
And it sounds so beautiful.
Speaker 5 (52:23):
And I was listening to it and I said to myself,
that's either the most beautiful thing I've ever heard or
the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 6 (52:30):
A fine line between poetry and.
Speaker 4 (52:33):
Yeah, the veil is completely see through.
Speaker 6 (52:37):
Another part of being in rock and roll is he
embraced the whole lifestyle and that became part of his job.
Who he was seen with and it became a rat
race and not just this thing. As fourteen year old
boys we all want to be like Keith Richards. It
was like, this is not who I am, and it's
wearing me out, and I just think it's fascinating that
(52:59):
that we create these characters for people in our society.
You're an insurance man, you're a rock star, and you
must act this way, and he picked something that didn't
realize that that part of it would take so much
out of him.
Speaker 1 (53:13):
Maybe his friends hated him or you know, were so
so pissed at him after this event because maybe they
saw him escaping that and maybe they were jealous, or
maybe that you know, there was some envy, or maybe
they were like, wait a minute, you actually because it
was an insult to them. It was an insult to
what they were still doing, wasn't it In.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
Some weird way.
Speaker 1 (53:33):
Yeah, it's like you're telling me what my what I'm
still working on is not worth it is sort.
Speaker 6 (53:37):
Of kind of but I think it's I think it's
like I always liked when a band was starting out,
because that energy you were talking about as a writer
is captured on their first few records, and then when
they start to polish it, you think you're making this
move because you want to make money on it. And
I bet that's what his audience was responding to. They're thinking,
you're changing your sound because you want to You're making
(53:57):
a cynical move. The audience doesn't know why you're doing
what you're doing as an artist, you know, and so
I don't didn't happen above Dylan, he also was established
enough that he could make a move like that, you know.
So yeah, I think it's hard for an independent artist
(54:17):
today to build an audience and then to turn around
and go, now, I'm going to turn this sound one
hundred and eighty degrees and I want you to follow
me where I'm going. And kudos to Blair for doing it.
I mean, geez wow.
Speaker 1 (54:30):
I asked him the same question that we've asked some
of these people of like is there did you have
any premonition that this would happen? And he's he did.
He wouldn't say that there was a specific premonition, you know,
he didn't get a message, you know, in a dream
or anything. But but he says, I knew, I knew
that I had. I knew that something was coming. I
knew that it was there was going to be change,
(54:51):
and I knew it was coming, and I just didn't
know where. And I think that part of him letting
the world pull him along was like it's it's sort
of like just a your arms in a battle, you know, like,
let's see what happens.
Speaker 6 (55:03):
And I don't know, can I just interject real quick,
like how badass he would be to b C live
back when he's doing his rock and roll thing, and
how great his ragtime music is. I mean, anyone listening
should really go check it out. I mean, but go
support this, support all your local artists. He's got a
lot of gigs coming up, So yeah.
Speaker 4 (55:21):
I like music shows. I can sit down at it. God,
you know, bring along a nice herbal tea.
Speaker 1 (55:31):
It's the knees.
Speaker 4 (55:32):
It's the knees and the back and the feet, and honestly,
just I'm so tired all the time.
Speaker 1 (55:44):
Next time on a Live Again, we hear the miraculous
story of David Ditchfield, who was dragged under a train
and nearly died. His near death experience led to an
unexpected surge in artistic creativity, and later he created many
paintings and composed a complete symphony. When the's formal musical
or artistic training.
Speaker 7 (56:03):
I was sucked between the edge of the platform, then
under the train itself. I heard and fell every gear shift.
It's like time it's stretched. I could see my friend Anna.
The look of horror in our eyes filled me with
absolute inevitability that this could be the end for me.
(56:24):
I suddenly felt like I was staring death in the
eyes at that point.
Speaker 1 (56:29):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dakaski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio engineers are Rima el Kali and
(56:50):
Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gearhart Slovitch, Gat,
Brent Die, and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and
Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Damn Bush. Special thanks to
Blair Crimins for sharing his story. To learn more about
his music and his band, go to Blair Crimminsondookers dot com.
(57:10):
Alive Again is a production of iHeartRadio and Psychopia Pictures.
If you have a transformative near death experience to share,
we'd love to hear your story. Please email us at
Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l
I v e A g A I N P R
O j E C T at gmail dot com.
Speaker 3 (57:31):
Through the night, hope you get a bud, but you
ain't had ahead here lately.
Speaker 2 (57:41):
You're watching your fantasy fade away to a broken dream,
go down with dogs, and you wake.
Speaker 3 (57:50):
Up with disease. Bo Babe, can't you see?
Speaker 2 (57:53):
I been a genius is since nineteen but it's the
thanks that
Speaker 3 (57:58):
You were one of the few they made a hooker
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psycopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I can't say that there was an inevitability that I
would get in this accident, but it needed to happen.
I'm Blair Kremins, and one of the dumbest things I
ever did ended up changing my life for the better,
even though I almost died. The way that the accident
(00:38):
went down is just a tremendous metaphor for what was
happening in my life. Because as this dog was pulling
me on a skateboard, that's just me letting the world
take me where it wants me to go.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:16):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener Discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I'm an Atlanta based musician, been playing with a kind
of I guess best way to describe it as a
swing band called Blair, Crimins and the Hookers. We've been
touring and playing around regionally and nationally and abroad for
about coming up on fifteen years. We had sort of
a unique blend of ragtime, Dixie Land, gypsy jazz, trad jazz,
(01:57):
New Orleans jazz with a worn section. I play an
old timey tenor banjo, which is sort of almost an
obsolete instrument but was very big during the early jazz
age and swing guitar. I'm a songwriter, guitar player, singer,
banjo player, and an arranger as well for the for
the horn section, at least for the first first couple albums. Now,
(02:19):
I like to sub that out to somebody else bigs
even better than me. But yeah, I've been a musician.
I've been playing guitar since I was very young. Started
at when I was eight years old, and it was
when I started this band, the swing band Blair Comes
the Hookers, that it really took off as being a profession.
(02:43):
When I picked up the guitar of just immediately I
knew all other aspirations as a kid. I want to
be an astronaut or you know, a marine biologist or anything.
Just I never spoke of anything else again. More importantly,
I was going to be a rock star. That was
what I was going to do. I was it was.
I was born in nineteen eighty, so at this time,
(03:05):
it was the late eighties, and MTV was just full
of the most insane rock stars, you know, bands like
Guns N' Roses and Poison and Motley Crue and the
Big Hair and everything, and it was all about this
kind of joyous like partying too. You know. It was
before the grunge stuff started making everything more depressing and existential.
(03:28):
It just looked like, these dudes are having the best
time in the world, and I want to do that
for my living, you know, if I want to do
that for a job. I was born in Atlanta. I
did not grow up in a religious family. My parents
were fairly liberal and allowed me to listen to what
(03:49):
I want, and it was never really forced to go
to church or anything. I joined youth group for maybe
a month or two and quickly fell out of that.
Once I took up guitar, I did become serious about music,
and I played relentlessly and became interested in all different genres.
I took lessons for classical and then became really heavily
(04:11):
into jazz before I went to college. So I did
become a student of music. But by the time we
get to where I was in the incident, I was
playing in a rock band and I was kind of
playing it defiantly. I had gone to Berkeley and was
put through the Academia of music and kind of left
(04:34):
with this bad taste in my mouth. They just kind
of ruined everything fun about music. So the pendulum had
swung back and forth a couple of times where it
was just I'm serious about music, and then why am
I so serious about music? You know, we need to
lighten up to play music for the reasons we started
playing music, not so we could be snooty and I
(04:57):
act like we're better than everybody else. You know, I'm
playing mus for the people. So I started doing the
rock thing that was in the early two thousands, and
it was something that I really really enjoyed and I
was super passionate about. And I was writing music for
the first time, writing my own songs, and my friends
(05:18):
were loving them. And that's kind of who we started
out playing for, was just big groups of friends and
we'd bring out all of our friends to the bar,
to the venue, and everybody would be partying and screaming,
and sure enough, I had that rock star feeling, you know.
Being that was the early two thousands, that back then
(05:39):
there was this thing called a record deal, which you
don't really hear about too much anymore. And in Atlanta
there was a music scene, a lot of rock bands
playing around, and I think there was an unspoken competitiveness,
and I mean it was something that was talked about,
for sure, but I think everybody was kind of wanting
to be that next group, the line to get signed.
(06:02):
That kind of scene really is more of a popularity contest.
I think it becomes it starts to feel like that.
I mean, all music is a popularity contest. It should
be based on your music is popular because it's good,
not as popular because you're cool, you know, or you
look you dress cool or whatever. So I guess I
(06:24):
felt the pressure to just be out every night and
to be partying. And and there's something to be said
for that. If you are going to be working in music,
you should be out, be seen, network, you know, go
to events, support the community. All that is great, great stuff.
But I was in my twenties. So it was not
(06:45):
I didn't have a real professional mindset about going out.
It was, We're going to go out and party every
every night. The only night I'm not going out is
when I'm too hungover from the night before. I was
not a terribly destructive person, but I did feel like
a bit of an exhibitionist, sometimes taking excessive risks, drinking
to excess, and you know, if if there was something
(07:10):
destroyed on stage, that was cool, you know, I wouldn't
have said that at the time. You know, I would
have been like, no, I'm not trying to prove anything.
I don't care what anybody thinks. But now, when I
think of about that time in my life, I think
I was more concerned than I let on about what
people think, because I was I was getting into well
(07:31):
into my twenties and that fantastic fairy Tale record deal
hadn't come and they don't give those out to people
in the thirties, so I felt like time was slipping by,
and for whatever reason, my instinct was to double down
on the bad stuff and not double down on making
(07:54):
important music. You know, I was trying to do what
I thought was expected of me, and the way I
looked in the way that I had behaved, and even
the places that I went and the people that I
hung out with, it was all that's what was expected
of somebody in a band. I was drifting, and I
wasn't necessarily super depressed about that, but I was just
(08:16):
letting time slip away, and in the back of my mind,
I knew that something needed to change, but I was
too afraid to let go of the dream. It would
mean I failed. It's a beautiful weekend in Atlanta, Georgia.
(08:36):
I'm twenty seven years old, and there was some kind
of festival that we went to. I met up with
some friends from out of town and we went to
the park, saw some live music. We were heading back
to my apartment. I lived in a little five points
in this apartment complex that was built into an old school.
It was called the Bass Lofts. It used to be
a high school, so all the rooms looked like classrooms
(08:57):
and there was a giant parking lot. So we get
back to my house and I decide I need to
walk the dog real quick, and I can't leave out
the fact that I had been drinking all day. I
let my friends hang out in the apartment grab my
roommates skateboard, which I did every day, and let my
American bulldog pull me through the parking lot. I was
(09:20):
doing this dog walk on the skateboard on a daily basis.
My neighbors would see me outside and the dog was
pulling me around on the skateboard and they would all laugh.
And it was an American bulldog, really muscular, basically a
pit bull, and I needed to give her some good exercise.
So this was something I did during the day quite often.
And this is something that I don't remember. I have
(09:45):
no recollection. I could try my hardest to just pull
up this fuzzy memory of kind of swaying in the
wind at night in the Atlanta humidity, through being pulled
through the darkness and this parking lot with nobody out there.
But that's only because I know that's what happened. I'm
(10:06):
not sure if that's a real memory or not. At
some point, the skateboard slips out from under me and
I crack my skull. I hit the pavement so hard
that I'm unconscious, and it fractured the base of my
(10:28):
skull into my ear canal and blood started pouring out
of my ear. The way that the accident went down
is just a tremendous metaphor for this mentality, for what
was happening in my life. Because as this dog was
pulling me on a skateboard, that's just me letting the
(10:49):
world take me where where it wants me to go,
there was something else pulling me.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
You know.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
I'm laying there in the parking lot, and luckily one
of the neighbors, a friend of mine, came out to
walk her dog and found me lying there in a
pool of blood. So she starts screaming and calling for help.
My friends they hear her and come running out. This
(11:20):
is where I start to piece together a couple of
things that I can call memories. I do remember fighting,
and I was very combative. One of my friends had
to tackle me because I wouldn't get into the into
the ambulance. I was so furious and so combative and
so in denial of what happened. I just did not
(11:42):
believe anybody. I thought they were pulling me into this ambulance,
that this is dumb. What are you doing. I'm going
to go in. I kept saying, I'm going to go
inside and just and go to sleep. I'll be fine.
And then they'd say, Blair, you are bleeding. Like feel
your ear, And I felt this wet substance coming out
of my ear, and I said, one of you jerks
(12:04):
poured beer in my ear while I was asleep. They're like, no,
it's blood, and and then it would register on my
face for a second and then snap right back into
just total total denial. I have these faint memories of
running and getting tackled. Eventually I'm tied down. I uh
(12:28):
have another faint memory of waking up in the hallway
in the corridor of the hospital triage, waiting to get
checked in, and hearing doctors screaming and patients screaming and
nurses yelling back and forth, not just for me, but
for the other you know, trauma that had been in
their gunshots and car wrecks and everything. And I was
(12:50):
only conscious for a few seconds and then and then
that's the last thing that I that I remembered. So
then I wake up in a hospital room surrounded by
(13:11):
family members, friends. They're looking at me and kind of laughing,
you know, and and say they say, what day is it?
And I said Sunday, I guess, I said, no, it's Tuesday.
And then one of my friends says, uh, yeah, you
might want to give up your skateboarding career, Tony Hawk,
(13:33):
you know, and like what happened. I had dramatic brain injury,
major concussion. Had to do some healing, so obviously they
kept me sedated. That's why I, you know, woke up
two or three days later. I remember getting the news
that there was no brain damage and crying because I
(13:55):
felt out of sorts still, you know, you know, didn't
know how what my life was going to be like
moving forward. It was very very emotional. And then shortly
after that it was getting released in the hospital. All
I had to do was count count by seven, you know, seven, fourteen,
twenty one, twenty eight. They're like, okay, you could do it.
You're good to go head home, no medications, no suggestion
(14:19):
for a physical therapy or anything. Just go home and recover,
rest up. And so that's what I did. I went
down to stay with my parents. They had moved to Florida.
They had a doctor friend that came by and I
was asking him about some stuff because I still felt
very confused. The concussion was affecting me. I felt like
(14:42):
I was having a problem with word recall and just
just confusion in general. And he was like, give what
you geed to do is just rest, you know, go
go hang out at the beach, and you know, have
a drink. I said I should, I could, I could
have alcohol. And they're like, oh why not, don't overdo it,
but no reason why you can't have a beer. So
(15:04):
I'm like, okay. So I was just getting the impression
from the professionals around me that all it was going
to take was time. And then that night, my mom
was cooking and my dad was in the kitchen and
he said, oh, smells good in here. That was when
(15:26):
I noticed I don't smell anything. Why can't I smell anything?
Why can't I smell this garlic? Grabbed a lemon? Nothing?
I'm freaking out. I knew about this condition previously because
I had a friend who he had a head injury
(15:48):
and he lost his sense of smell at permanently. And
we all knew about this condition that he had because
it also affected a sense of taste, and we would
sometimes make jokes about it because he always wanted to
go to these places to eat that we thought were
terrible because he can't taste it. He doesn't know how
bad this freak of food is, and it's somebody I
(16:09):
just you know. I love food, I love smelling stuff.
I'm going to really miss this, the sense of smell.
So I went to a doctor and they told me
that it's called anasema and what happens when you hit
your head that impact. It can sever the old factory
nerves and your nose, yeah, something about the bone there
(16:33):
in your nose, right where your nose goes into your skull.
And they said it can come back, we just don't.
There's no way of predicting it. And the general rule
is if it doesn't come back in a year, it's
probably not going to I'm like, okay, a year of
this and that sums up my entire next year. It
(16:57):
was the weirdest damn year of my life. No sense
of smell. I had this vertigo type symptoms where whenever
I'd lean over or put my head in a position
other than upright, I would get dizzy, and as an
overall kind of malaise, I say confusion, but it was
also just me looking at the world and my surroundings
(17:20):
and not being terribly inspired or impressed, not finding the
humor in things. That I would normally laugh at. Imagine
yourself being in a room full of people that are
just cracking jokes one after another, and everybody's laughing, and
you're telling yourself you should laugh now, because everybody else
(17:42):
is why aren't you finding this funny? It was just
a strange, strange time. And that album came out, the
album with my band and that should heal nicely with
the name of it, and everybody had a big laugh
about that, including myself. I'm just going through the motions
and I'm still and I'm playing this music and releasing
(18:03):
this album, and it's a time when I would normally
be very elated, you know, this work of art that
I worked on and come out. I remember just taking
taking the CD and just kind of throwing it on
the desk, like, Okay, I guess this is this is done.
I did this thing, and we were playing shows, and
I did not feel the same enthusiasm. I wasn't amusing
(18:28):
myself with the usual rockstar bullshit. I was playing and thinking, man,
why did I write this song like this, you know?
And why do I not feel like playing this next
tune tonight? You know? I always liked it before I
was also in a state where I didn't really know
who I was anymore. Maybe you ever wrote this song
(18:51):
that represented them, But this, sir as hell, doesn't represent
the way I feel right now. It's not inspiring me.
When I look back at the music, I can look
at it with an outsider perspective, you know, and I could,
And like I said, whoever wrote this collection of songs
(19:13):
wasn't really sure what direction they wanted to go. No,
we sounded like we were trying to be a bunch
of different people at the same time. You know, one
album sounded like the Police, the other sounded like the
White Stripes, The other sounded like somebody completely different. One
sounded like Talking Heads, one sounded like Modest Mouse. You know,
all great groups, but not me. This doesn't seem like me.
(19:36):
I became very disenchanted with the whole thing, the music,
my life, and I was feeling depressed. I didn't really
have anybody that I was intimate with, not only physically,
but in that way where I could where they could
tell me if if I was acting strange. So I
(19:59):
began to speculate, I'm feeling strange. Does everybody think I'm weird?
You know, people are noticing so much as I called
family and I said, Hey, did the doctors tell you
something was wrong with me and then say not to
tell me about it? You like paranoia, Paranoia that I
(20:26):
wasn't you know, I wasn't being informed of some sort
of diagnosis and that I was going to be dealing
with the rest of my life. And somebody told me
that they had a massive concussion one time and they
felt strange for a year, and that checked out with
what the doctors were telling me about my sense of smell.
So I began to change things. I had a ukulele
(20:47):
that I bought at some point that I never really played.
I strommed around on it. You know, ukuleles are cheap,
little music shop things, and it's an open tuning. It's
very easy to play. It's kind of like an impulse buy.
You know. I had no plan to be a ukulele player,
but for some reason I picked it up. I was
drawn to it. It sounded, it sounded great. Some reading
that now I have this attraction to this instrument, and
(21:09):
I wrote a song on it. I wrote a song
about a girl that that I was infatuated with. It
wasn't returning, turning any interest at all. It was a
very romantic, lonely song called without You on ukulele, and
(21:30):
and it was unlike anything that I had written with
my old band. Well, the song started fitting locking the
old chats and wonder aulus.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Longer I could keep mind cool bone was always ringing, the.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Just harmonically, the chord progression, the entire just atmosphere of
the vibe, and on an instrument that I never played,
and I would play it for I was playing it
for people and they were really impressed this and let me,
this is this fantastic song. It was like a It
was like a jazz standard and it just came out
of nowhere, you know, like a like I mean, I'm
(22:08):
not relating myself the Coleport or a Gershwin, but it
was that kind of song where it felt like the
lyrics and the music were written at the same time.
Every day, Without You, it was a waste of my
time while I'm waiting aside and dream member, I'll sure
(22:31):
sleep ben without you. Without Previously, it seemed like my
songs were either the music directed where the lyrics were going,
Like I would write a song first and then I
have to write these tunes to fit into the to
fit into the song, and now it's just kind of
(22:53):
my whole mentality on writing a song is that when
people ask me do you write the song, that when
you write a song, do you write lyrics or music first?
The right answer is both at the same time. You know,
you change one, you change the other, just so it
seems like they were born together. I never felt so
proud of a tune before I brought it to a
(23:16):
band practice to play with my band, and uh just
couldn't make it work. You know, it just was not fitting.
It was putting a square peg in a round hole.
There was no way that the configuration, the instrumentation, and
the type of player that I was with was gonna
make the song work. Everybody just wanted to hear me
(23:38):
play by myself, and so that's where I was just like,
all right, it's time to follow this. This is the
first time I felt good about something in a while,
and I feel like more, more stuff is gonna come out,
you know, and I need it because I feel so empty. Anyways,
I need to follow this feeling. And I I wasn't
(24:00):
seeing the future in the band, so I did. I
quit the band. Everybody was really angry at me about that.
Not just band members but our friends and friends. Slash
fans who came out to all the shows were livid
and they, you know, just thought I was the biggest
(24:22):
asshole for doing this. But I didn't care at this point.
At this point, I felt so strange, you know, feeling
like an asshole wasn't that bad?
Speaker 1 (24:34):
You know.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
I started a job working at a bar and I
was still suffering no sense of smell, vertigo, social awkwardness
and everything. I had a regular that would come in
for lunch and sit at the bar, and she was
a doctor over at Emory. I don't know how long
it was, but eventually I told her about my accident
(24:59):
and she said, wait a second, so you haven't had
this test done. She gave me a list of things
to do. I told her about the loss of sense
of smell, vertigo and everything. She said, okay, well you
need to go and get this blood test where a
hormone scan, and what you have going on with your
head can be helped with vestibular therapy. And she also said,
(25:20):
they told you that you'll never get your sense of
smell back, or that it might never come back. But
what they didn't tell you is that you could. You
could train your senses to come back. You could regrow
those those neurons. And what you need to do is
go in your spice cabinet and grab all the different bottles,
close your eyes and smell them one at a time.
Train your old factory senses to come back. This was
(25:45):
this was like a new hope. You know, these things
could be fixed. I thought I was just supposed to
wake them out and they and it wasn't getting better
fast enough for me, so I just called this lady
my angel. She also said you need to exercise your brain.
(26:05):
Do some puzzles every day, do crossword puzzles and sudoku,
read and piano. She said piano works really well. Luckily
I inherited this little spinet piano. You know, my grandma's
(26:26):
piano almost like a spin It's like a piece of
furniture that's also a piano. But it put it but
you know, it fit in my apartment. It gave me
this new motivation. I'm gonna go home and play piano
because this doctor has told me that it's gonna be
good for my brain, and my brain is fucking broken.
So I start playing piano and I write a song
(26:47):
and it's the first song for my soon to be
new band. It's called March of the Hookers.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Dance, Babe and dance.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
They're gonna get all the cash and dance on your
Head's got a pass tax selling romance right away? You
run at loud for you And it's all about the
music industry and how and how you know we're all
hookers because we do whatever people ask of us. It
(27:28):
was me remembering who I was before in some way
and looking at it with disgust, but also some sort
of acceptance that that you know, that that is I'm
still in that industry. If I'm gonna write new music,
I'm still gonna be dealing with that. But it was
a jazz song, man. It was like a Tom Wait's
(27:48):
kind of style, cabaret jazz tune, sort of in the
same vein is what I wrote on the ukulele.
Speaker 4 (27:54):
Yeah, a hook.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Not a rock tune. And then I wrote another one
on the piano. I wrote two more songs. I wrote
like three songs within the same week on the piano.
I'm playing piano every day. Suddenly I'm a piano player.
Swear and welcome on top of that, I started doing
(28:24):
the exercises with the sense of smell and I went
to go get vestibular therapy. Inside your ears are these
little bags that hang in there like weights that keep
their counterbalances for you to you know, not fall over,
and they're filled with tiny rocks. And you might want
to fact check me on my pronunciation of things, but
(28:45):
they're called octaconia. I think ear rocks, you know. And
when I fell and hit my head, the ear rocks
came out of the little bag, and they're floating around
in my ear canal and the wrong place. So they
do is they put you on a table with your
head hanging off, and they manipulate your head, turning it
(29:06):
in all these different directions to move them through the
winding path of your ear canal, to get them either
back in the bag or to get them released into
your bloodstream so they're not not just like bouncing around
in a weird place, throwing you off. Do you remember
that game Labyrinth where you have like the little ball
on top of the of the piece of wood with
the holes in it, and you have to navigate the ball.
(29:27):
That's vestibular therapy inside your skull, and before that I
described the feeling I was having as it felt like
my head was only half full of blood, and sometimes
I would need to move my head around to completely
submerge my brain and the fluid that needed. So I
(29:54):
get the vestibular therapy. I'm getting over my vertigo. I'm
writing songs on the piano. I am now living in
Cabbage Town, which is a really small historic neighborhood in Atlanta.
All the houses of from the early nineteen hundreds. It's
built around a cotton mill factory. The town was built
for the workers, and so a big chunk of history.
(30:17):
Everything is old timey looking. Also a punt inheriting my
grandma's piano. I also got a lot of old furniture.
I was kind of surrounded by nostalgia and history, and
I think that was starting to inspire the songs I
was writing too. So at that point my record player
was getting a lot of use. I was putting on
(30:37):
vinyl records. Started digging into some of the records in
the back of the shelf. Louis Armstrong, Fat Swaller, Bessie Smith,
Johnny Mercer, Frank Sinatra, everything from the earliest incarnations of
jazz to the crooners, and that was just feeding into it,
got em jewet positive, and so I started going with that,
(30:59):
and I started writing writing more tunes that sounded like
rag time tunes, and then that dictated what instrument I needed.
I wrote a ragtime song, and I said, something's missing
from this. It needs a banjo. And and so then
I did my research on all the twenties recordings they had.
Banjo is a major percussive instrument in the background, and
what that particular type of banjo is not the bluegrass
(31:22):
banjo that you're familiar with in Georgia. It's a jazz
banjo of four string let's played with a pick, which
is perfect for me because I'm a guitar player. So
I figured that'd be pretty easy for me to pick
up anyway. So I get the instrument that I need
for that. Now it's one of my primary instruments. I
get a one hundred year old four string banjo, gorgeous instrument,
antique instrument. I'm playing that studying the guitar work of
(31:45):
Django Ryan Hart. My life at this point is just
sort of exploding with creativity and inspiration. I just never
felt like such an artist and the greatest sense of
the word. And this angel lady that I spoke of.
Another thing she said was and you're drinking still and
(32:07):
not because hey, dumb ass, you fell off a skateboard
while you're drunk. Why are you still drinking? But your
brain needs to heal, you know, you need to stop
doing that. So I was stone sober, you know, for
that period too, which also gave me this renewed energy,
which also meant that I wasn't hanging out with people
(32:28):
at bars. I was in this state of sober isolation,
but with this great urge to create. And I was
still feeling depression too sometimes because I was alone. But
I put all that into my work. I put all
that into the music. I'm looking back at what I
(32:51):
did before and looking at what I'm doing now and
thinking I was being lazy. I should be working harder,
try and make everything better, make the song better, make
your playing better, find the best players to play this
music with so it sounds as good as you could
possibly be when you're playing it. And just elevated my
(33:16):
standards for acceptability in the music that I was making.
I start writing these songs and I have nobody to
play them with. I record them. I do a four
song demo in my apartment where I'm playing pretty much everything,
(33:39):
and I just start throwing them underneath doors and record
stores samples, giving them out to people. Through that album,
I was able to start building a band drums, bass.
I did find a sax player. I knew when I
was writing the stuff I need a New Orleans style
horn section that's saxophone or clarinet, a trump but trombone.
(34:01):
And it wasn't coming all at once. I didn't have
the resources, I didn't know the people. These types of
musicians kind of wanted to get paid to play, so
it was a long road, but I was so inspired.
I was taking the show on the road as a
one man thing. I was going around all over the Southeast,
playing coffee shops, little singer songwriters in the round, me
(34:22):
and my dog, sleeping in the car in parking lots
and playing music and trying to collect fans. And then
I'd come back home and I'd play shows with the
band that i'd put together. We started playing shows at
same places I played with my rock band. I didn't
know where else to go. I wasn't going to go
and play a jazz club or Blues Club. I had
the contacts for the Star Bar and a Little five Points,
(34:45):
so that's where we went. And at first my old
friends and fans of the previous band they came out.
They came out and they were, like I said, not
happy with me. They were pretty pissed that I broke
up the band. I had a friend's band open up
for me at the show and they played one of
my old songs as like a slap in the face
(35:05):
to me. When I started playing, everybody in the crowd
moved to the back of the room as like a protest.
And so that was the moment I said, all right,
well fuck all you know. I mean, I wasn't that
I was in a weird place anyways, didn't feel like
I fit in with you guys. But now you've shown me,
(35:26):
you know where who the type of people you are,
you're not going to support me going forward, Then you
know I'm fine.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
I'll find new bands slow down.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Pretty quickly. I started playing the shows in Little Five
Points at the Star Bar, and suddenly there's a new
crowd and they're not people I know, you know, they're
people that just like the music and they come back,
not because they're my friend, and we drink beer together
and and barf later in the night. You know, like
(36:09):
but they're they're they're into what we're doing. And it
felt like a scene was starting.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Oh you know what.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
To do money lie and always spit in my face
and all those days through it, and there absolutely was.
We got a residency at the Star Bar where we
did every Wednesday, and I made each night a different theme,
so it was like a circus theme, and then a
(36:43):
puppetry theme and a cabaret theme, and I hired local
performers to collaborate with to make the whole room just
like just like a circus or a puppet show or whatever.
And and then and having puppets and dancers on stage. Someway,
I'm getting really into theatrics. You know, go harder, go home,
(37:05):
put everything you can into it, and work your ass
off and make a great show for these people. So
I really built a lot of fans there. We were
selling out the room every on every Wednesday, and people
would tell me after the show, Hey, you got a
great band. I think you got a good chance of
getting signed. I wouldn't give a shit about getting signed.
(37:28):
I felt like defiant, you know I'm not playing rock
music anymore. Fucked that. You know, I'm gonna play the
weirdest thing anybody would think of, you know, something that
nobody would think I do is playing ragtime, Dixie and swing.
And it turned out people people did like it, just
(37:49):
not none of my friends dream I'll sure sleep Ben
without you with And so that was the moment, was
being on stage and seeing a room full of people
(38:12):
that were truly truly digging it, enjoying it, buying buying
the CD and singing along and singing along with with
the songs, knowing the words. Unbelievable. Things were just falling
back together and in this wonderful way. I met my
(38:34):
then my my soon to be wife at the cab
the cabaret show that we put on. I was looking
for for girls that wanted to do a burlesque type
thing with me while I was playing, and got referred
to her, and by the end of the show we
were already an item. So finally I'm not single anymore.
(38:55):
And it was a long dry spell of of of
loneliness and very little companionship I got. I got my
ride or die girl with me. The band's doing doing
good and it just doesn't seem you know, it seems
like it's just going to keep getting better. I was
doing the the exercises for my old factory senses, and uh,
(39:20):
one day I went outside and it just rained and
I could smell it. You know what a perfect first smell,
you know.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Welcome back, This is Alive again joining me for a
conversation about today's story. Are my other Alive against story
producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski and Brent Dye, And I'm
your host Dan Bush.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
Of all of the stories that we have listened to,
his like the way he almost died, it's just ship, Yeah,
on a skateboard being pulled by a dog, Like, come on,
(40:46):
that's amazing. That's like if you gotta go first, you know,
quietly in your sleep, and secondly on a skateboard being
pulled by a dog.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
So Blair and I talked a lot about liminal states.
Do you guys know what liminal states are?
Speaker 5 (41:08):
In between?
Speaker 1 (41:09):
A liminal means in between. But in anthropology or in
you know, cultural anthropology, it's it's referred to specifically, often
as the state when one part of yourself dies and
the other one is not yet born. So for you know,
say the Ugliala Lakota sue, you have a vision quest
for three nights and days, you know, alone on a
(41:30):
mountaintop with no food. Anyway, liminal states are often you know,
accompanied with hardships. You have to endure certain hardships. Some
of these rituals are you know violent, some of them
there's blood letting, and there's there's all kinds of things
that you trials that these kids go through. And in
(41:52):
our culture we don't really have that. Our ceremonies have
lost their power. Then we might go to a bar mitzvah,
or we might turn six didn't have a sweet sixteen,
or you know, turn eighteen and we can drive a
car or get drafted. And Blair and I talked about
this quite a bit of like, you know, the childhood
self does it ever die? Does the adulthood self? Is
(42:14):
it ever born? Do we ever get that liminal state?
And these experiences, these traumatic experiences sometimes induce those liminal
states for us. So I often ask people when I'm interviewing, like,
you know, so if that was the you then and
then there's the new you that began after that, what
is the pathway that led you. So the incident happened,
It was stupid. He was trying, you know, to compensate,
(42:40):
maybe for a lack of a sense of belonging he was.
He was, you know, acting out and doing all these things,
maybe even somehow hoping for some change. He indicates that,
but it came to him big time, and all of
a sudden, he is after the incident, you know, with
the dog pulling him on the skateboard, and he has
(43:02):
this massive head injury and he's bleeding out of his ear.
He loses his sense of smell. Hezers into this great depression,
you know, he becomes very depressed, He becomes very lonely. Literally,
his old self is dead. He can no longer identify
with the music he was making, He can no longer
identify with like his friends, his friends. The album comes out,
(43:22):
he's like, yeah, I don't know what that is, you know,
and I just thought that was it was just fascinating
to me. And then slowly, over time, with the help
of a few strangers that are you know, people he'd
met along the way, kind of pointing him towards these things,
he had this liminal state where he had to rebuild
himself and eventually something happened where the new self was born, right,
(43:42):
so he was able to experience something that most I
think in our culture, a lot of people never experience.
You know, people you know, their childhood self never dies
and their adulthood self was never born, and they just
sort of, you know, they never have the liminal state.
But anyway, I just that's something that struck me about
(44:03):
his story is that's he's somebody who in this. For me,
I think in this culture, we don't get that, and
he got it in some weird way, and even if
he had to do it to himself, that that was
my takeaway. And just the miracle of him having like
ragtime Dixieland jazz, you know, gypsy jazz music just came
(44:23):
upon him and he couldn't stop it and it was
like a flood. I think that's so cool, man. I'm
just like, I want that happened to me.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
You know.
Speaker 4 (44:30):
I think what was really interesting for me is that,
like I feel like his liminal space seemed to start
much earlier than that, and I think that, like his
journey as an artist is really interesting because he had
this love of this music when he was younger. He
talks about getting into jazz and getting into that stuff
and he's younger, and then having the Berkeley School of
Music just beat it out of him, which I think
(44:52):
is something that a lot of us do get. We
get like the love of the thing that we're drawn
to when we're younger, beaten out of us by process
an education, and that the I think that the knock
on the head started him on the journey out. There's
a there's a phrase, you know, bill Ung's Roman is
(45:12):
you know, coming of age, but like Kunslo Raman is
the creation of the artist or the growth of the artist.
And I think that I think that, like the his
first death was really academia, you know, I think that
academia kind of killed the artist. He was going to
(45:33):
be in the cradle, and that the knock on the
head and the journey that it goes on afterward just
kind of brought him back to that.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (45:41):
And can I say to you you touched on this
sort of you know, these strangers kind of helping him
to kind of find his way when he's sort of
in the wilderness in that period. What really struck me
is the doctor that his his regular at the bar
that he tends and you know, because he hasn't really
had anybody tell give him like sound medical wisdom on
(46:03):
like what he should actually be doing. When she says like,
you know, you should be doing these, you should be
you know, trying new things. You should be doing crossword puzzles,
and my god, you shouldn't be drinking right now, and
it's sort of like, I love that. Her advice to him,
or sort of an official prescription to him, is basically grow,
(46:24):
you know, like grow as a person. That is what
you need to do. You need to be trying new things.
He tries new instruments, and he tries new things, and
it's basically she's told him to do that. And he
doesn't say that specific like, he doesn't say that in
so many words, but basically that's sort of sort of
the order marching orders that he's been given is like grow.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
We don't think about that much. We you know, when
bad things happen, when traumatic events happen, be they psychological
or be they physical, My first thought isn't like, oh,
I have an opportunity for some brain plasticity here, I
have an opportunity to rebuild, build brand new neurotransmitter, new
pathways in my brain. I don't think like that. But
(47:04):
that's the truth, isn't it. On some level, like there's
there's some opportunity despite how however horrific, whatever trauma you've endure,
it is there is some opportunity for growth.
Speaker 6 (47:15):
Right, Yeah, And to kind of have it forced on him,
coming from an environment where that is almost like a
terminal adolescence is expected of you as a rock and roller,
you know, like he was terminally held in this womb,
in this adolescent state.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
Everything he was doing was result oriented before. Yes, everything
he was it wasn't built on his art. It was like, Okay,
I can do this, so we're gonna do We're gonna
And he was like, I have songs sound like the Police.
I have songs that sound like you know, whatever was
in vogue at the time, and but it wasn't me.
It wasn't it didn't like, it wasn't a river pouring
out of me, like what happened later, you know. And
then then after his transformation, you know, if we can
(47:53):
call it a liminal state in a transformative experience, He's like,
I didn't give a fuck about being signed, you know,
that result was the last thing I could give a
shit about.
Speaker 6 (48:03):
But yeah, it's really hard to get to that place,
isn't it where what we produce is not who we
are well.
Speaker 4 (48:08):
And I also just think, you know, going back to
Berkeley and going we're trained in academia to function in
the society that we live in, and so you know,
we might gain like technical skills and everything like that,
but it's technical skills we can join the workforce, and
a lot of us just I mean, we're just we're
(48:29):
raised with that understanding, and once we get there, it's
like I know, I mean as a writer, as an
artist period, it's you know, you reach a certain point
where you get far enough in you're making money at it,
you figured out a way to like cut through and survive,
(48:51):
and like anything else, you kinda you realize it's kind
of boring and soulless to behave that way to work
under that understanding, to look at this as a job
and not as a vocation or or something that you love.
And it's really hard to break out of that because
as a society, they're just people who do that are
(49:14):
kind of considered koops.
Speaker 1 (49:15):
I had the same problem when I got out of
film school. I was like, I need I have to. Like,
I used to have an instinct of pre visualization that
I had for making movies and sequences, and then I
started doing things because I understood the psychology of the
camera angle and understood Hitchcock, and I understood you know,
these these greats, and I knew what they were doing.
And so you start to pick up that language, and
you start to use it almost as if you're, you know,
(49:37):
a writer who's using language that is sort of you know,
injected into them from having to read you know, all
these other great writers, as opposed to it just being
organic and being from yourself in the cat. Yeah, So
so I I similarly out save the cat. So I
similarly was like, okay, if this is anything wrong with that, no,
(49:57):
But I'm like I had a similar experience where I
was like, okay, and this is probably why none of
my movies are big commercial successes, because I was like,
I'm going to fracture the entire cathartic structure here and
do some really weird shit. And you know, sometimes I
look back and go, maybe I should have just saved
the cat.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (50:16):
You know, here's the thing. I look back at my
writing from college and well, into my twenties, before I
had any kind of success, when I was still writing
children's plays for a theme park, and that's the stuff
then was wild and sloppy as shit and all over
(50:39):
the place, but in it you could sense the joy
of flight. And I think as I as my craft
grew and as I tightened everything up, the better structured
my work becomes later on, the less I can see
the joy of flight in there. Until I think I
(51:02):
realized at a point like five or six years ago,
it's like there's there's no love in this anymore. It's technically.
I feel very good about the writing. I feel like
this is a very decent story that could sell, but
I feel almost nothing for it. And that I think
that you have to You have to learn to love
(51:24):
to fly again, you know, if you like. After a
certain point, it's important to gain the technical skills. It's
important to learn all these things, but it's it's equally
as important to unlearn them and to refine the spark
that brought you to this place. Otherwise you might as well,
you know, you might as well have any job. You
(51:45):
might as well be working in insurance. And nothing against
people in insurance except for health insurance, you can a
go to hell. But like, but you know, I mean,
it's just it turns into another job if you don't
reignite that fire and if it takes a com on
the head. Yeah, after riding on your buddy's skateboard being
(52:06):
pulled by your buddy's dog, I mean, that's a good
story right there.
Speaker 5 (52:11):
I love that as being the entry point to this story.
He says, you know, like, as this dog was pulling
me on a skateboard, that's just the world telling me
where it wants me to go.
Speaker 6 (52:21):
And it sounds so beautiful.
Speaker 5 (52:23):
And I was listening to it and I said to myself,
that's either the most beautiful thing I've ever heard or
the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 6 (52:30):
A fine line between poetry and.
Speaker 4 (52:33):
Yeah, the veil is completely see through.
Speaker 6 (52:37):
Another part of being in rock and roll is he
embraced the whole lifestyle and that became part of his job.
Who he was seen with and it became a rat
race and not just this thing. As fourteen year old
boys we all want to be like Keith Richards. It
was like, this is not who I am, and it's
wearing me out, and I just think it's fascinating that
(52:59):
that we create these characters for people in our society.
You're an insurance man, you're a rock star, and you
must act this way, and he picked something that didn't
realize that that part of it would take so much
out of him.
Speaker 1 (53:13):
Maybe his friends hated him or you know, were so
so pissed at him after this event because maybe they
saw him escaping that and maybe they were jealous, or
maybe that you know, there was some envy, or maybe
they were like, wait a minute, you actually because it
was an insult to them. It was an insult to
what they were still doing, wasn't it In.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
Some weird way.
Speaker 1 (53:33):
Yeah, it's like you're telling me what my what I'm
still working on is not worth it is sort.
Speaker 6 (53:37):
Of kind of but I think it's I think it's
like I always liked when a band was starting out,
because that energy you were talking about as a writer
is captured on their first few records, and then when
they start to polish it, you think you're making this
move because you want to make money on it. And
I bet that's what his audience was responding to. They're thinking,
you're changing your sound because you want to You're making
(53:57):
a cynical move. The audience doesn't know why you're doing
what you're doing as an artist, you know, and so
I don't didn't happen above Dylan, he also was established
enough that he could make a move like that, you know.
So yeah, I think it's hard for an independent artist
(54:17):
today to build an audience and then to turn around
and go, now, I'm going to turn this sound one
hundred and eighty degrees and I want you to follow
me where I'm going. And kudos to Blair for doing it.
I mean, geez wow.
Speaker 1 (54:30):
I asked him the same question that we've asked some
of these people of like is there did you have
any premonition that this would happen? And he's he did.
He wouldn't say that there was a specific premonition, you know,
he didn't get a message, you know, in a dream
or anything. But but he says, I knew, I knew
that I had. I knew that something was coming. I
knew that it was there was going to be change,
(54:51):
and I knew it was coming, and I just didn't
know where. And I think that part of him letting
the world pull him along was like it's it's sort
of like just a your arms in a battle, you know, like,
let's see what happens.
Speaker 6 (55:03):
And I don't know, can I just interject real quick,
like how badass he would be to b C live
back when he's doing his rock and roll thing, and
how great his ragtime music is. I mean, anyone listening
should really go check it out. I mean, but go
support this, support all your local artists. He's got a
lot of gigs coming up, So yeah.
Speaker 4 (55:21):
I like music shows. I can sit down at it. God,
you know, bring along a nice herbal tea.
Speaker 1 (55:31):
It's the knees.
Speaker 4 (55:32):
It's the knees and the back and the feet, and honestly,
just I'm so tired all the time.
Speaker 1 (55:44):
Next time on a Live Again, we hear the miraculous
story of David Ditchfield, who was dragged under a train
and nearly died. His near death experience led to an
unexpected surge in artistic creativity, and later he created many
paintings and composed a complete symphony. When the's formal musical
or artistic training.
Speaker 7 (56:03):
I was sucked between the edge of the platform, then
under the train itself. I heard and fell every gear shift.
It's like time it's stretched. I could see my friend Anna.
The look of horror in our eyes filled me with
absolute inevitability that this could be the end for me.
(56:24):
I suddenly felt like I was staring death in the
eyes at that point.
Speaker 1 (56:29):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dakaski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio engineers are Rima el Kali and
(56:50):
Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gearhart Slovitch, Gat,
Brent Die, and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and
Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Damn Bush. Special thanks to
Blair Crimins for sharing his story. To learn more about
his music and his band, go to Blair Crimminsondookers dot com.
(57:10):
Alive Again is a production of iHeartRadio and Psychopia Pictures.
If you have a transformative near death experience to share,
we'd love to hear your story. Please email us at
Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l
I v e A g A I N P R
O j E C T at gmail dot com.
Speaker 3 (57:31):
Through the night, hope you get a bud, but you
ain't had ahead here lately.
Speaker 2 (57:41):
You're watching your fantasy fade away to a broken dream,
go down with dogs, and you wake.
Speaker 3 (57:50):
Up with disease. Bo Babe, can't you see?
Speaker 2 (57:53):
I been a genius is since nineteen but it's the
thanks that
Speaker 3 (57:58):
You were one of the few they made a hooker
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