When high school ended, nobody handed me a map.
Music was all I really wanted to do, but in 1976 Missouri wasn't exactly the kind of place where an eighteen-year-old kid could make a living with a guitar. My parents wanted me to go to college, and if I'm being honest, it seemed like the smartest option I had. I wasn't giving up on music. I just didn't know how music could become a life.
So I packed a few boxes, grabbed my guitar, and headed north to Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville.
I signed up as a Business major.
With a Music minor.
That probably tells you everything you need to know about where my head was.
I loved music.
I just didn't see much of a business case for making music and making a living at the same time.
I'd met a handful of musicians who were making a decent living.
I'd met a whole lot more who fit the description of "starving artist" perfectly.
I also liked to eat.
Business looked like a career. Music looked like a hobby. Turns out, appearances can be deceiving.
The First Lesson
Ironically, the first lesson I learned in college happened before I ever got there.
A buddy from home and I headed for Maryville in his Firebird. Between the two of us, we had enough long hair to convince just about every highway patrolman in northwest Missouri that we were probably headed somewhere to do something we shouldn't.
Sure enough...
Somewhere around Tarkio...
...the red lights came on.
Out of the car.
Search us.
Search the trunk.
Search under the seats.
Search under the hood.
They looked everywhere.
Eventually they shrugged, handed everything back, and sent us on our way.
Even today, every time I hear Brewer & Shipley's "Tarkio Road," I can't help but smile.
"...looking inside the trunk... under the hood... hoping to find the secret places where you always keep your mind."
That lyric takes me right back to that afternoon.
Let's just say...
The officers were looking in all the obvious places.
Fortunately for two long-haired college freshmen, the secret places where we kept our minds were considerably harder to search.
We climbed back into the Firebird and continued north.
College had officially begun.
The Wrestler
My second lesson had nothing to do with business.
It had to do with my roommate.
He was a wrestler.
Apparently wrestlers don't believe sleep is an essential part of the human experience.
About two o'clock every morning he'd leap out of bed and begin doing push-ups and sit-ups on the dorm room floor.
Grunting.
Counting.
More grunting.
More counting.
That arrangement lasted less than a week.
Since he looked like he could fold me into my own suitcase and carry me back to Independence, I decided it might be easier if I found another roommate instead.
Fortunately, I knew another guy from home.
Before long we were roommates.
That's when college really started.
Student Union Economics
I did attend classes.
At least...
...that was certainly my intention.
Truth be told, I spent considerably more time in the Student Union than I did in the classroom.
The Student Union had foosball tables.
Foosball had a remarkable ability to become beer money.
Beer money occasionally became...
...well...
...pizza and "other" supplies.
At eighteen, that was all the business plan I needed.
Six Flights of Music
The one thing that never left my side was my guitar.
No matter what else was happening...
...it always came with me.
One of my favorite places to play wasn't a stage.
It was the stairwell in Phillips Hall.
The acoustics were unbelievable.
Concrete walls.
Six flights of stairs.
Natural reverb you couldn't buy in a recording studio.
I'd sit on one of the landings and start playing.
At first I thought I was just entertaining myself.
Then a dorm room door would open.
Someone would wander out and sit on the steps.
A few songs later another door would open.
Pretty soon there would be people scattered all over the stairwell listening.
Nobody organized it.
Nobody announced it.
It just happened.
Sometimes somebody would hand me a beer.
Sometimes a shot.
Sometimes a Solo cup full of Spolly Olly.
If you know...
...you know.
Spolly Olly was college chemistry at its finest.
Somebody found an empty fifty-gallon trash can.
Everybody contributed whatever liquor they happened to have hidden away.
Then we'd fill it with Hi-C fruit drink, cut up fresh fruit, throw it all together, and let the whole thing marinate for a couple of days.
By then it actually tasted pretty good.
The fruit...
Well...
The fruit had absorbed enough liquor that it probably should have come with its own warning label.
At the time, I thought I was simply passing the time between classes.
I had played for audiences before college.
But Phillips Hall was different.
Nobody had booked me.
Nobody had bought a ticket.
I would simply start playing, and people would gather.
Many years later, a message showed up on my website.
It simply said:
"Bill,
I met you in Phillips Hall at NWMSU playing in the staircase!
We have to get together. I remember the Brewer and Shipley story."
I sat there staring at those words for a long time.
I'd almost forgotten those afternoons.
He hadn't.
It finally dawned on me...
Those stairs weren't where I learned to play for an audience.
They were where I began to understand how music could turn a group of strangers into a shared memory.
Pizza... Fraternities... and Complete Musical Nonsense
A couple of nights each month I'd play at a little pizza place in town.
Then there were the fraternity parties.
Those weren't concerts.
They were organized chaos.
I'd start making up songs about people in the room.
Completely off the top of my head.
Usually making fun of somebody.
Most of the time they loved it.
Occasionally...
Not so much.
One of my favorite targets was our Resident Assistant.
One night it went something like this:
[RA's Name], that son of a bitch…
He's got the clap, he's got the itch...
He met a girl he called his all...
But it really was not a girl at all...
It wasn't exactly Shakespeare.
But it usually got a laugh.
Then I'd settle everyone down with a few love songs.
Funny how that worked.
One night I was halfway through one of those songs when a football player wandered over.
He was a very large football player.
He leaned down and said,
"You're offending my date."
There are moments in a young man's life when arguing seems like an exceptionally poor career choice.
This was one of them.
So instead of looking at him...
I looked at her.
"What would you like to hear?"
She smiled.
She told me.
I played it.
The football player eventually wandered away.
She didn't.
Let's just say we ended up having quite an evening.
But I've never been one to kiss and tell.
History has a funny way of rewarding good song selection.
Only years later did I realize that was one of the first nights a guitar truly leveled the playing field.
Making It Up As I Went Along
Here's the funny part.
I never had much of a plan.
I wasn't trying to become an entertainer.
I wasn't trying to become a songwriter.
I wasn't trying to become anything.
I was just making shit up as I went along.
Making up songs.
Making up verses.
Making up jokes.
Making up my future.
And loving every minute of it.
What I didn't understand then was that every one of those nights was teaching me something no business professor ever could.
How to read a room.
How to make people laugh.
How to recover when a joke bombed.
How to make strangers feel like friends.
How to turn a guitar into a conversation.
Incomplete
As for my business degree...
Well...
Classes had an unfortunate habit of interfering with everything else I enjoyed.
Little by little...
I simply quit going.
I believe every grade I received during my first...
...and only...
...semester was marked exactly the same.
Incomplete.
At the time I thought I'd failed college.
Age has a funny way of changing your perspective.
I went to Northwest Missouri State to earn a business degree.
Instead...
I accidentally started a business.
Play a few songs.
Make people laugh.
Take requests.
Accept payment.
Sometimes it was money.
Sometimes it was pizza.
Sometimes it was beer.
Sometimes it was the phone number of a pretty girl.
Without ever sitting through a single business lecture...
I was quietly developing a business plan.
I just didn't know it yet.
That business plan turned out to be worth a whole lot more than the one I was supposed to be studying.
Epilogue
Many years later I was playing a concert when, from somewhere in the back of the room, someone suddenly yelled:
"Phillips Hall! Room ___!"
For a split second I had no idea what he was talking about.
Then I looked toward the back of the room...
...and there he was.
My old college roommate.
For just a moment, I wasn't standing on a stage.
I was back in Phillips Hall.
Back in that dorm room.
Back in the stairwell with my guitar.
Funny how memory works.
Sometimes it isn't an old photograph that takes you back.
Sometimes it's a room number shouted across a concert hall.
Maybe that's why those years still feel so close.
I never really left them behind.
I simply carried them with me every time I walked on stage.