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“Wait a minute. Cut. Hold it.”
If I ever needed confirmation that my dad was always “on” even when he wasn’t on TV, this is how my dad started a home video message to me at my 9th birthday.
Over the holidays last year, I dug through some old VHS tapes that have sat in storage for years. After hours of watching and reminiscing over them with my mom, we found 45 minutes of raw footage from my 9th birthday party at Maple Lake in Bridgeport, WV. The video is mostly boring - lots of kids laughing and talking and eating. Some backyard games, some cake, some presents, the usual. As my mom and I were zoning out near the end, all of the sudden the video jump cuts to a 38 year old version of my dad sitting in a chair, looking directly at the camera through his square rimmed glasses. His hair was already gray, but his mustache was brown and his voice was that perfect weatherman baritone I would give anything to hear in person again.
“It’s your 9th birthday. You’ve only got about a hundred more to go, so use them wisely. And always remember one thing: Don’t let anybody ever make you something you don’t want to be.”. Smirk. Pause. Then he clasps his hands together, stands up and says “Ok?”.
This video shot through my heart and my head. No one had ever sat through this footage before to get to this part. My mom didn’t know it existed, I didn’t know it existed. But there it was. This insightful message that my dad had the forethought to leave me on my 9th birthday for the day when he wasn’t around. Just vague enough to be specific at any point in my life.
My dad passed away 16 years ago on May 3rd, 1997. I edit, amend, add to and repost this blog every year on this date. I’m so lucky to have had him for as long as I did and to have had such a meaningful relationship with him. I’d give up every ounce of everything I have right now to have him back but since that isn’t possible, I’m going to just keep making music and making him proud.
Thanks for reading.
s
Some things just happen.
They don’t happen because of us or in spite of us. They just happen.
I was finishing up my junior year at West Virginia University, spending the weekend studying for finals and music juries the following week. My dad had been in Baltimore accompanied by my mom for weeks preparing for a bone marrow transplant, a process that started with a complete depletion of his immune system. Aside from the discomfort caused by radiation and chemo, all was going smoothly. He had fully recovered from a triple bypass just 6 weeks earlier and my dad’s only sister was a perfect match for bone marrow. However, things took a turn for the worse and over the weekend I was told although the Aplastic Anemia seemed to be taking to the treatment, there was a complication and I should skip finals to make the trip to Baltimore. The doctors attached him to a respirator and maintained “cautious optimism”. The whole family, including my grandfather who had prematurely checked himself out of an oncology unit at a hospital in Philadelphia to come see his son, convened at Johns Hopkins and over the next 6 days monitored every move.
My dad never came off the respirator. He was 3 months short of his 50th birthday.
For 16 years, I’ve tried to make sense of it all. What started as a somewhat routine bone marrow transplant at one of the top, if not THE top, hospital in the United States, Johns Hopkins, ended on May 3, 1997 from an unexpected infection that gradually shut down his vital organs. That night standing over his bed alone, in the strange silence of machines no longer trying, I promised him over and over I’d take care of my mom and that I’d make him proud.
I can’t really explain how amazing of a person my dad, Mike Simons, was. I only had him in my life for 20 years but somehow, I have far more memories than could fit in just two decades.The pain of losing him never really gets easier. I just figure out a place in my heart and mind to put it. Each year, I lose a little piece of him but another little piece shows up in me. Sometimes my own laugh will imitate his and freak me out, or my signature on a credit card receipt will take the shape of his name, or a witty comeback will seemingly come to me out of nowhere as if fed to me by an earpiece. So much of who he was has shaped who I am and want to be.
My dad was born in Philadelphia, PA and shortly moved to the suburbs in southern New Jersey close to the Jersey shore. He spent his summers as a teen working in Atlantic City - sometimes valeting cars at Burlesque theaters then going inside to work the shows backstage. He acted in plays growing up, used neighborhood friends to cast scripted home war movies, broadcast radio shows from my grandparents’ basement, played clarinet in school and was obsessed with The Beatles. When it came time for college, he applied late and was accepted at a small college in West Virginia called Salem College, knowing nothing of the state.In college, my dad studied Drama and Broadcasting and before he graduated he was hired as a disc jockey at a local radio station. (I have reel to reel tapes in storage of his ridiculous 1970’s DJ voice.) After a first marriage that thankfully gave me my sister, Lori, my dad went to LA to pursue acting and directing. After 9 months and extra roles in 2 movies starring Martin Sheen, he was broke and returned to WV. He bounced back and forth between radio and TV and started his own advertising agency with a partner before finally becoming the weatherman and director of creative services at WBOY-TV - a job he took above and beyond his obligations.
My father kept an insanely busy schedule. He would work 9-5 everyday making commercials and promos for the TV station then do a 5:30pm and a 6pm newscast. He’d come home for family dinner and then go downstairs to take a nap - somehow sleeping while blasting either La Boheme, his favorite opera, Simon and Garfunkel or Billy Joel Live in Russia. Then he’d wake up at 10:15pm and go back to the station for his 11pm newscast and be home again by midnight, his shirt collar stained with makeup for television. He often told me, that despite his local celebrity, “I’m not a meteorologist. I can just ad lib without saying ‘um’”. On the weekends, he did appearances for the station or charities - most importantly the Muscular Dystrophy Association for which he hosted the local broadcast of the Labor Day telethon every year. Throughout the year he also acted and directed in community theatre productions. He loved his work but somehow I don’t remember him missing anything important of mine - performances, soccer games, pictures before school dances, etc. By the time he passed away, he was virtually a statewide celebrity because of his constantly being broadcast into people’s homes and his sincere interest in the community.
Somehow a Jewish guy from Philly fell in love with the state of West Virginia and had made it his home. After my parents met on the phone through work, my mom moved from Brooklyn to West Virginia and began teaching school at West Milford Elementary, where she still teaches. My parents immediately became active in local theatre and even put me in my first play at age 3 - a cameo in the musical Pippin.
Before my 6th grade year, local music store Bandland gave a demonstration to all of the prospective band students for the upcoming school year. Kids asked questions about all of the instruments, but I had my sights and heart set on the same instrument my dad played - the clarinet. Not realizing the torment I was signing up for by picking what many friends called “a girl’s instrument”, I asked to get a plastic Selmer Bundy clarinet. One night between newscasts, months ahead of my first band class, my dad set up two chairs and a music stand and put together his wooden professional model Selmer 9-star clarinet. He helped me put my shiny new clarinet together for the first time making sure I knew to hold down a certain key on the lower half of the clarinet so the bridge key didn’t bend. He advised putting the reed ‘just a fingernail’s length’ above the mouthpiece for proper tone. And he warned me to “take care of this damn thing”. We opened my “Best In Class - Clarinet Book One” and started with ‘open G’. Then a whole step lower to F, then E, D and finally C. When school started I walked in already ahead of the rest of the band and my dad promised me his wooden clarinet if I continued studying clarinet after high school.
I continued clarinet but in 8th grade I began playing piano after seeing a classmate surrounded by girls while playing Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting For You” afterschool one day. My parents bought me a 47-key Yamaha keyboard and before I even knew what I was playing I started writing songs. I still remember the chords to the first song I wrote: Am F G C - based on the doorbell chime in our house. That year I was obsessed with 80’s rapper Young MC and even started penning my own raps under the name MC Snowbird, taken from my dad’s puppet penguin sidekick on TV that announced school closings in the winter.
On a road trip home from Myrtle Beach that summer, my dad changed my whole musical life. He handed me Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver on cassette and simply said “Learn these”. I did. Note for note, word for word. That started my obsession with the Beatles and I began to sift through my dad’s Beatles vinyl (which I still have), cassettes, magazines, pictures, videos, etc. He told me stories of when he saw them live twice - once in Philly and once in Atlantic City - while I watched the famous Shea Stadium concert on video being drowned out by shrill teenage screams. He told me about skipping school to buy the new Beatles record so he and his friends could sit and listen to it on repeat all day and night. And when the rest of the world thought that Beatles ‘got weird’, my dad thought they got even better.I grew up with my dad’s music all around me. Whether it was him singing the lyric “…counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike” at the top of his lungs to Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” or teaching me harmony by singing a third above the melody to Motown tunes on WOBG-FM. In hindsight, I feel like my dad was training and preparing me to be a professional songwriter and artist my entire childhood. I remember the night while I was pounding away at my keyboard that my dad told me, “You know, you can major in music composition in college?”. From that moment on, I knew I was going to be a songwriter. I just couldn’t decide if I was more John or more Paul.
As I got more proficient at piano, my dad would challenge me to learn songs. One evening after dinner he may have asked for “Piano Man” and the next night it was “Anything off of Rubber Soul”. I’d put on the cassette and hit stop and start to pick out each note and chord by ear. Then after a short while, he’d check back in to hear me perform the song along with the recording while he stood in the doorway of my bedroom and beamed. Eventually, despite not having a lot of money, my parents somehow managed to buy me a professional level Ensoniq SQ-2 keyboard with an onboard sequencer and hundreds of sounds which allowed me to program drums and several layers of instrumentation. Soon, my dad was lining up gigs at private parties, bars, restaurants and events around town for me and ANYTIME we were at anyone’s house with a piano, my dad would beg me to perform from my repertoire he had steadily crafted with post-dinner requests at home.During my sophomore year of high school, I was awarded first chair clarinet of the Bridgeport High School concert band and my dad proudly handed down his wooden clarinet a few years earlier than promised, which I still have to this day in its original case. When I was 16, he let me write the 22 second WBOY news theme and even credited me at the end of every news cast - “News theme composed by Scott Simons”. Any sample cassettes he received in the mail of national news and jingle packages he would hand off to me for me to listen and learn to what was out there so I could one day have the option of doing jingles. So while my friends were listening to ‘In Utero’ and ‘Siamese Dream’, I was probably in my room listening to ‘Intense News Sequence 2’.
The August after graduating high school, my parents drove me in my grandparents’ hand-me-down Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra to the campus of West Virginia University in Morgantown. I enrolled as a music composition major with the intent of going into jingles, or possibly film scoring, or most likely writing songs for other artists. I played in cover bands all around the state of West Virginia throughout college and my dad came to many of the shows - suffering through light dinner sets followed by disco medleys. I joined the WVU Marching Band, “The Pride of West Virginia”, and he would sit with the 60,000-plus fans in the stands at every home football game and swear he could pick me out me in the 350 identically-dressed person ensemble. After my college composition lessons, I would often run to a pay phone in the Creative Arts Center and call my dad at work to tell him everything I had just learned.
In the summer of 1996, my dad invited me to come with him to Los Angeles for the yearly NBC affiliates convention. I didn’t know I only had 11 months left with my dad at the time. We had a jam-packed week together with plenty of time to bond - stayed in the Beverly Hills HIlton, went to Disneyland and met celebrities all week. I never really considered that I’d end up living in LA years later but he would love to know that I did. In fact, not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could call my dad and say, “Guess what, Dad. I made it to LA. And I’m writing songs, like I told you I would.”.
Even though I wrote a lot of music growing up, my dad never heard most of my pop songs. He died before my old band “the Argument” formed and before I graduated with my composition degree. He did help me with some lyrics on songs I was starting to write for myself at 19 but that was about it. However, because of him, not only was I prepared to make music my life but I chose to. My dad gave me so much knowledge and taught me how to be passionate about music.
My dad was always “on”. He was consistently hilarious and quick witted and there are so many memories of him that revolve around hysterical laughter. At a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar, he commented that the chubby actor playing Judas seemed to have had ‘one too many last suppers’. He once told my mom she could sleep with Robert Redford for a million dollars à la Indecent Proposal - if she gave my dad time to get the money together. And his standard response to my asking “Dad, can I ask a stupid question?” was a snarky deadpan “Better than anyone I know.”.
My father was an amazing parent and I miss being able to tell him every little piece of news that happens in my life. After a few years in LA, I have so many stories to tell him - especially seeing Ringo get his star on Hollywood Boulevard in person, stopping to see Cirque Du Soleil LOVE in Vegas during my move out west or working on a project recently that gave me a temporary office at NBC/Universal - the same network he worked for. Most of all, I miss his ear. Aside from my dad’s quick wit and sense of humor, his strongest trait was probably his ability to listen, give advice and make big deals seem less big. Luckily, I have an equally amazing mother who is more than 100% supportive of my career despite the difficulty of being 2000+ miles apart from each other.
This blog is only a fraction of my memory of my dad. I could go on and on but I’d fill the entire internet. Losing my best friend, my idol, my father was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through in my life. It’s so personal but also universal because everyone loses someone in their life and is left with a huge hole and only tiny memories to fill it. Thanks for reading a few of my tiny memories.
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They held off as long as they could hoping things would take a turn for the better.
But they told me I should come to Baltimore.
It was the end of my hardest semester and I had my Junior year finals that week.
But they told me I should come to Baltimore.
A few years earlier, we were creating stories we could recount to each other when he was an old man and I was his age.
But they told me I should come to Baltimore.
A few months earlier, I laid my head on his chest and he told me he was going to be fine.
But they told me I should come to Baltimore.
A week earlier, I talked to him on the phone. He was tired from the chemo but he was seemingly healthy and talking about the future.
But they told me I should come to Baltimore.
A week earlier, it was my grandfather who didn’t seem like he was going to make it. I wanted to drive to Philadelphia to be with him.
But they told me I should come to Baltimore.
They said he had a 90% chance of a successful bone marrow transplant.
But they told me I should come to Baltimore.
They thought the respirator would only be temporary and were “cautiously optimistic”.
But they told me I should come to Baltimore.
I got on a small plane and got to Johns Hopkins on April 26th. For 6 days, we held our breath while a machine controlled his. On May 3rd, they turned the respirator off. No one saw it coming. I was caught up in my own little world and I wouldn’t have had a chance to say good bye.
To see my grandfather check himself out of the hospital in Philadelphia and get to his son in the nick of time.
To catch my grandmother when they broke the news.
To make promises I wasn’t sure I could keep.
But they told me I should come to Baltimore. So I did.
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For all intents and purposes, we were broken up. We had tried for almost a year to pull out of our nose dive but it wasn’t happening. I was moving away. She was moving on. We were both about to be truly alone for the first time in 10 years. The only thing keeping us together was the reluctance of either of us to say the words first. That wouldn’t come until 3 months later on a long distance heart-wrenching late night phone call. For the time being, there was too much emotion to be making any kind of decisions and we had decided our last few days together should be a celebration.
We had mapped out our entire route across the United States but not all of the details so we could allow for some flexibility. We dog-eared pages of a few tourist books of oddities and interesting roadside attractions and updated the GPS. I piled everything in the living room knowing it wouldn’t all fit in my car but hoping it somehow would. The morning was frantic - last minute packing, lots of tears, saying a temporary goodbye to my cat who wouldn’t join me for another 3 months and a permanent goodbye to our dog we had adopted together less than 2 years before. I was sad. I was scared to death. And I was excited that for the first time I could hit a much needed reset on my life.
As expected, everything didn’t fit in the car. I shipped the majority of my clothes (which would later be stolen by a UPS employee along the way) and to make sure we had room to pack plenty of camping supplies, I left behind some musical equipment for a future trip. The plan was to crash with friends 2 nights and camp out for 3 nights in middle America taking detours along the way to make the most of our trip. From Pittsburgh to Chicago - where we saw the first McDonald’s - to Nebraska to Denver - just in time to catch the WVU football game on national TV in LoDo - to Moab, Utah to the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas - to see Cirque Du Soleil LOVE - to Cabazon, California - to see the dinosaurs from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure - and finally to Los Angeles. We pulled into West Hollywood midday on Sept 9th, 2008 and unloaded the car. She stuck around for a few days to make sure I was settled, just as I had done when she moved to New York City 6 years before.
Later that week, I dropped her off at the Long Beach airport. It was the second saddest goodbye I ever had to say. After surviving the ups and downs of 4 years living in the same college town, 5 years long distance and 1 year in the same house, we were out of do overs. We hugged for a long time and within minutes I watched our 10 year relationship disappear into an airport terminal.
Today is 4 years that I’ve been in LA. I try to be thankful for everyday that I’m here and what got me here.
What’s the quote? “Time heals all wounds.”? I don’t think I want my wounds to ever fully heal. They make me who I am. I’d rather time just help me tolerate them. The distance helps too. -
Not sure if I’m actually allowed to post this, but let’s see what happens. I could use one more sternly-worded legal notice in my life.
A couple of years ago, a friend asked me to score a commercial for an advertisement about the Winter Olympics. He sent me an unfinished rough cut of the commercial with no sound other than voiceovers. It featured ice skaters doing a routine, then pausing mid maneuver, having a discussion while the female skater was suspended in the air, then falling back down and finishing their routine. You’ll have to use your imagination for the green screen part since the commercial wasn’t done.This was what I sent back as a first draft. Hope you like.
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Email of the day: So, you’re saying you will be moving forward at some point???
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My new band with Dani Buncher, TeamMate, played the 2nd annual OutRaleigh Festival in Raleigh, NC this past weekend. Having lived in Los Angeles, specifically West Hollywood, for the last few years, I think I’ve begun to take for granted the struggles of the LGBT community. In Raleigh, I got to know some of the local LGBT community and was inspired by their passion and perseverance.
Being there, I got the sense that North Carolina is a state in the midst of a cultural transition from southern conservative stalwart to east coast centrist progressive (or possibly progressive centrist?). North Carolina is politically a “purple” state - meaning in any given election it can go “red” for Republican or “blue” for Democrat. On a national level, North Carolina is typically a red state, although it surprisingly went blue for Obama in 2008. On the state level, North Carolina had consistently elected a Democratic majority to its legislature from 1870 until 2010, when it elected a Republican majority for the first time since post-Civil War Reconstruction.
For some inexplicable reason, in the middle of one of our country’s worst economic recessions ever, the newly-elected legislature made one of its first priorities to amend the state constitution to establish opposite sex marriage as the only legal union in the state of North Carolina. On its face, this appears to be a gay marriage ban like several other states have instituted. The only catch? Gay marriages and civil unions are already banned in the state. Some counties and cities allow domestic partnerships, but this amendment would go the Draconian extra mile and outlaw these unions as well. In other words, the same state where former presidential candidate John Edwards is allowed to marry again despite royally fucking over his now-deceased wife Elizabeth, would not permit homosexuals to form a basic partnership for the first time.
Despite the inherent unfairness of a majority voting on the rights of a minority, the opposition to Amendment One has also listed its potential consequences ranging from women in gay or straight domestic partnerships not being able to obtain a restraining order to adopted children of currently recognized gay partnerships not being eligible for their parents’ insurance. Another possible fallout, as noted by former President Clinton, is businesses’ reluctance to put their companies LGBT employees in such a hostile environment. Although the measure looks to pass unfortunately, polls show that when voters are explained these details, it loses. So these last few hours are all about getting information out.
Why do I, a native of West Virginia and a resident of California (which have their own issues with LGBT rights), give a shit about a state to which I have no connection? Because we are the UNITED States of America and therefore, we’re all in this together. In a rapidly changing time, both sides of this issue are looking for the right path, precise wording, exact timing to pass or defeat amendments, bills and proposals regarding gay unions. So, each state sets a legal precedent for other states - and ultimately the federal government - to build upon. The voices on either side embolden the like minded in other states. This isn’t just about the LGBT community in North Carolina. This is about everyone in this country. This proposed amendment is an unnecessary, hateful, targeted attack on a minority. After the gays, then whose rights do we want to deny next?
I know voting seems futile sometimes, but there is no room for apathy on this one. Those of us for equal marriage and partnership rights for everyone need to vote and inform people around us to vote. If you have friends or family in North Carolina, it might be time to send them an email or give them a phone call.
We may lose this time, but I know we will win eventually. At OutRaleigh, there were 100+ vendors, 60 more than the inaugural event last year. There were major corporations and local businesses showing support for gay rights. There were your usual suspects of gay rights proponents such as Human Rights Campaign. Most notably there were several churches with their doors wide open speaking out against Amendment One. There were performers of every stripe - school performance groups banned in their school districts, speakers from all over the country, touring comedians and musicians - including yours truly. There was so much love in the streets of Raleigh on Saturday. There were straight couples pushing their kids in strollers, same sex couples holding hands, drag queens and elderly church workers engaged in conversation. There were people of all ages and political views united on one social issue, enjoying the sunshine and defiantly walking in the intermittent rain - in the Bible Belt, of all places. If gay love truly leads to the destruction of society, the memo hadn’t reached this microcosm of the population.
Down the street, right next to the festival’s KidZone, were the protesting hateful religious nuts. All day, they were shouting selectively interpreted bible verses, holding signs that say “God Will Save You From Hell” and wearing t-shirts that say “Homo” with a big red Ghostbusters-like slash through it. I stepped up in front of them and snapped a quick photo (seen below). I figured someone should document the last of this dying breed before their extinction.
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I edit and repost this blog every year on the day my dad passed away, May 3rd. I’m posting today since I’ll be internet-less most of the day tomorrow.
I can’t believe this year is 15 years. I’ve had a few friends lose close people in their lives during the past year and I try to assure them it gets easier. That’s about 50% true and 50% false. It does get easier to cope, move on, deal with… but it doesn’t get any easier to understand or accept. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my dad, tell one of his jokes, recount a story, find myself imitating him or just imagine calling him to tell him, “Guess what, Dad. I made it to LA. And I’m writing songs, like I told you I would.”.
Thanks for reading.
s
Some things just happen.
They don’t happen because of us or in spite of us. They don’t even happen to us specifically. They just happen.
I was finishing up my junior year at West Virginia University, spending the weekend studying for finals and music juries the following week. My dad had been in Baltimore accompanied by my mom for weeks preparing for a bone marrow transplant, a process that started with a complete depletion of his immune system. Aside from discomfort caused by radiation and chemo, all was going smoothly. He had fully recovered from a triple bypass just 6 weeks earlier and my dad’s only sister was a perfect match for bone marrow. However, things took a turn for the worse and over the weekend I was told although the Aplastic Anemia seemed to be taking to the treatment, there was a complication and I should skip finals to make the 4 hour drive to Baltimore. The doctors attached him to a respirator and maintained “cautious optimism”. The whole family, including my grandfather who had prematurely checked himself out of an oncology unit at a hospital in Philadelphia to come see his son, convened at Johns Hopkins and over the next week monitored every move.
My dad never came off the respirator. He was 3 months short of his 50th birthday.
For 15 years, I’ve tried to make sense of it all. What started as a somewhat routine bone marrow transplant at one of the top, if not THE top, hospital in the United States, Johns Hopkins, ended on May 3, 1997 from an unexpected infection that gradually shut down his vital organs. That night standing over his bed alone, in the strange silence of machines no longer trying, I promised him over and over I’d take care of my mom and that I’d make him proud.
I can’t really explain how amazing of a person my dad, Mike Simons, was. I only had him in my life for 20 years but somehow, I have far more memories than could fit in just two decades. I think about him every day still. The pain never really gets easier, I just figure out a place in my heart and mind to put it. Each year, I lose a little piece of him but another little piece shows up in me. Sometimes my own laugh will imitate his and freak me out, or my signature on a credit card receipt will take the shape of his name, or a witty comeback will seemingly come to me out of nowhere as if fed to me by an earpiece. So much of who he was has shaped who I am and want to be.
My dad was born in Philadelphia, PA and shortly moved to the suburbs in southern New Jersey close to the Jersey shore. He spent his summers as a teen working in Atlantic City - sometimes valeting cars at Burlesque theaters then going inside to work the shows backstage. He loved movies, theatre and music. He acted in plays growing up, used neighborhood friends to cast scripted home war movies, broadcast radio shows from my grandparents’ basement, played clarinet in school and was obsessed with The Beatles. When it came time for college, he applied late and was accepted at a small college in West Virginia called Salem College, knowing nothing of the state. There wasn’t even an interstate highway between New Jersey and West Virginia yet.
In college, my dad studied Drama and Broadcasting and before he graduated he was hired as a disc jockey at a local radio station. (I have reel to reel tapes in storage of his ridiculous 1970’s DJ voice.) After a first marriage that thankfully gave me my sister, Lori, my dad went to LA to pursue acting and directing. After 9 months and extra roles in 2 movies starring Martin Sheen, he was broke and returned to WV. He bounced back and forth between radio and TV and started his own advertising agency with a partner before finally becoming the weatherman at WBOY-TV - a job he took above and beyond his obligations.
My father kept an insanely busy schedule. He would work 9-5 everyday making commercials and promos for the TV station then do a 530pm and a 6pm newscast. He’d come home for family dinner and then go downstairs to take a nap - somehow sleeping while blasting either La Boheme, his favorite opera, Simon and Garfunkel or Billy Joel Live in Russia. Then he’d wake up at 10:15pm and go back to the station for his 11pm newscast and be home again by midnight, his shirt collar stained with makeup for television. He often told me, that despite his local celebrity, “I’m not a meteorologist. I can just ad lib without saying ‘um’.”. On the weekends, he did appearances for the station or charities - most importantly the Muscular Dystrophy Association for which he hosted the local broadcast of the Labor Day telethon every year. Throughout the year he also acted and directed in community theatre productions. He loved his work but somehow I don’t remember him missing anything important of mine - performances, soccer games, pictures before school dances, etc. By the time he passed away, he was virtually a statewide celebrity because of his constantly being broadcast into people’s homes and his sincere interest in the community.
Somehow a Jew from Philly fell in love with the state of West Virginia and had made it his home. After my parents met on the phone through work, my mom moved from Brooklyn, NY to West Virginia and began teaching school at West Milford Elementary, where she still teaches. My parents immediately became active in local theatre and even put me in my first play at age 3 - a cameo in the musical Pippin. I grew up with my dad’s music all around me. Whether it was him singing the lyric “…counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike” at the top of his lungs to Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” or teaching me harmony by singing a third above the melody to Motown tunes on WOBG-FM. In hindsight, I feel like my dad was training and preparing me to be a professional songwriter and artist my entire childhood.
Before my 6th grade year, local music store Bandland gave a demonstration to all of the prospective band students for the upcoming school year. Kids asked questions about all of the instruments, but I had my sights and heart set on the same instrument my dad played - the clarinet. Not realizing the torment I was signing up for by picking what many friends called “a girl’s instrument”, I bought a plastic Selmer Bundy clarinet. One night between newscasts, months ahead of my first band class, my dad set up two chairs and a music stand and put together his wooden professional model Selmer 9-star clarinet. He helped me put my shiny new clarinet together for the first time making sure I knew to hold down a certain key on the lower half of the clarinet so the bridge key didn’t bend. He advised putting the reed ‘just a fingernail’s length’ above the mouthpiece for proper tone. And he warned me to “take care of this damn thing,”. We opened my “Best In Class - Clarinet Book One” and started with ‘open G’. Then a whole step lower to F, then E, D and finally C. When school started I walked in already ahead of the rest of the band and my dad promised me his wooden clarinet if I continued studying clarinet after high school.
I continued clarinet but in 8th grade I began playing piano after seeing a classmate surrounded by girls while playing Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting For You” afterschool one day. My parents bought me a 47-key Yamaha keyboard and before I even knew what I was playing I started writing songs. I still remember the chords to the first song I wrote: Am F G C - based on the doorbell chime in our house. That year I was obsessed with 80’s rapper Young MC and even started penning my own raps under the nom de plume MC Snowbird, a name I took from my dad’s puppet penguin sidekick on TV that announced school closings in the winter.
On a road trip home from Myrtle Beach that summer, my dad changed my whole musical life. He handed me Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver on cassette and simply said “Learn these”. I did. Note for note, word for word. That started my obsession with the Beatles and I began to sift through my dad’s Beatles vinyl (which I still have), cassettes, magazines, pictures, videos, etc. He told me stories of when he saw them live twice - once in Philly and once in Atlantic City - while I watched the famous Shea Stadium concert on video being drowned out by shrill teenage screams. He told me about skipping school to buy the new Beatles record so he and his friends could sit and listen to it on repeat all day and night. And when the rest of the world thought that Beatles ‘got weird’, my dad thought they got even better. I remember the night while I was pounding away at my keyboard that my dad told me, “You know, you can major in music composition in college?”. From that moment on, I knew I was going to be a songwriter. I just couldn’t decide if I was more John or more Paul.
As I got more proficient at piano, my dad would challenge me to learn songs. One evening after dinner he may have asked for “Piano Man” and the next night it was “Anything off of Rubber Soul”. I’d put on the cassette and hit stop and start to pick out each note and chord by ear. Then after a short while, he’d check back in to hear me perform the song along with the recording while he stood in the doorway of my bedroom and beamed. Soon, my dad was lining up private gigs at parties and events around town for me and ANYTIME we were at anyone’s house with a piano, my dad would beg me to perform from my repertoire he had steadily crafted with post-dinner requests at home. By age 15, despite not having a lot of money, my parents somehow managed to buy me a professional level Ensoniq SQ-2 keyboard with an onboard sequencer and hundreds of sounds which allowed me to program drums and several layers of instrumentation - and play live gigs. My dad booked my friends and I for a New Year’s Eve gig at his friend Tony’s restaurant and when the clock struck 12, I hit play on my pre-sequenced arrangement of Auld Lang Syne and went to dance with my mom in the crowd while the adults grossly engaged in their New Year’s kisses around me. During my sophomore year of high school, I was awarded first chair clarinet of the Bridgeport High School concert band and my dad proudly handed down his wooden clarinet a few years earlier than promised, which I still have to this day in its original case. When I was 16, he let me write the 22 second WBOY news theme and even credited me at the end of every news cast - “News theme composed by Scott Simons”. Any sample cassettes he received in the mail of national news and jingle packages he would hand off to me for me to listen and learn to what was out there so I could one day have the option of doing jingles. So while my friends were listening to ‘In Utero’ and ‘Siamese Dream’, I was probably in my room listening to ‘Intense News Sequence 2’.
The August after graduating high school, my parents drove me in my grandparents’ hand-me-down Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra to the campus of West Virginia University in Morgantown. I enrolled as a music composition major with the intent of going into jingles, or possibly film scoring, or most likely writing songs for other artists. I played in cover bands all around the state of West Virginia throughout college and my dad came to many of the shows - suffering through light dinner sets followed by disco medleys. I joined the WVU Marching Band, “The Pride of West Virginia”, and he would sit with the 60,000-plus fans in the stands at every home football game and swear he could pick me out me in the 350 identically-dressed person ensemble. After my college composition lessons, I would often run to a pay phone in the Creative Arts Center and call my dad at work to tell him everything I had just learned.
My junior year of college, I finally had my first composition performed when a classmate added my saxophone quartet “Unsaid” to his senior saxophone recital. My mom and dad drove up from Bridgeport and my best friends Jean-Pierre and Mario drove down from college in Wheeling. We all sat in the sloped concert hall among the 50-75 very serious listeners. I even made sure to wear a pretentious black turtleneck and ponytail/goatee combo for my composition premiere. One of the pieces performed before mine was a very avant garde modern solo saxophone composition by a Japanese composer named Ryo Noda. The piece called for loud squawks and squeaks and honks and even a part where the saxophone mouthpiece was removed and played by itself (if I remember correctly). It required a certain level of proficiency but sonically, it was a bit silly. I was used to this kind of stuff from class but apparently my dad wasn’t. As I looked to my left, my dad was hunched over, sweating, face beet-red, eyes welling with tears, holding in laughter. He was fake coughing to cover any sudden laughs that leaked out. My mom and I shot him dirty looks but it was too late. Not only could he not stop, but the laughter and tears had spread to Jean-Pierre and Mario. After the recital, my dad half-apologized saying, it just felt like a Saturday Night Live skit. Some college kid just stands up and makes a bunch of sounds on an instrument he hasn’t practiced and the audience full of family and professors just seriously nods and listens approvingly.
In the summer of 1996, my dad invited me to come with him to Los Angeles for the yearly NBC affiliates convention. I didn’t know I only had 11 months left with my dad at the time. We had a jam-packed week together with plenty of time to bond - stayed in the Beverly Hills HIlton, went to Disneyland and met celebrities all week. I never really considered that I’d end up living in LA years later but he would love to know that I did.
Even though I wrote a lot of music growing up, my dad never heard most of my pop songs. He died before my old band “the Argument” formed and before I graduated with my composition degree. He did help me with some lyrics on songs I was starting to write for myself at 19 but that was about it. However because of him, not only was I prepared to make music my life but I chose to. My dad gave me so much knowledge and taught me how to be passionate about music.
My dad was always “on”. He was consistently hilarious and quick witted and there are so many memories of him that revolve around hysterical laughter. At a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar, he commented that the chubby actor playing Judas seemed to have had ‘one too many last suppers’. He once told my mom she could sleep with Robert Redford for a million dollars à la Indecent Proposal - if she gave my dad time to get the money together. And his usual response to my asking “Dad, can I ask a stupid question?” was a snarky deadpan “Better than anyone I know.”. Even days before his passing, we got a little laugh when the local rabbi confused my dad’s Hebrew name with an ex-Israeli Prime Minister and blessed the wrong person. The whole family had our heads down, sneaking peeks at each other smiling, thinking he was pulling some kind of prank.
My father was an amazing parent and I miss being able to tell him every little piece of news that happens in my life. After a few years in LA, I have so many stories to tell him - especially seeing Ringo get his star on Hollywood Boulevard in person and stopping to see Cirque Du Soleil LOVE in Vegas during my move out west. Most of all, I miss his ear. Aside from my dad’s quick wit and sense of humor, his strongest trait was probably his ability to listen, give advice and make big deals seem less big. His passing away keeps me grounded. It reminds me why I do what I do through the ups and the downs of the music industry with no promise, just the hope of success and/or stability. Luckily, I have an equally amazing mother who is more than 100% supportive of my career despite the difficulty of being 2000+ miles apart from each other.
This blog is only a fraction of my memory of my dad. I could go on and on but I’d fill the entire internet. Losing my best friend, my idol, my father was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through in my life. It’s so personal but also universal because everyone loses someone in their life and is left with a huge hole and only tiny memories to fill it. Thanks for reading a few of my tiny memories. -
I don’t mean in anyway to diminish the importance of today’s holiday or the invaluable history-altering contribution of its namesake. I don’t even mean to draw a direct parallel between the ongoing civil rights struggle in our country and current day politics. I only mean to say we can and should draw inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement of the 60’s.
We have major political party leaders and religious leaders in this country who have no trouble preaching bigotry right into a TV camera or in print or online and a media that gives them equal deference to those who believe in equal rights. Despite all of our progress as a country, homosexuals are treated as second-class citizens in this country while leaders hide behind the Bible and the Constitution to justify their hate. And although I still support him overall, we also have a president who won’t stand up for a community that helped put him into office in 2008.
Whether its access to marriage or adoption rights or simply the ability to visit a dying partner in the hospital, it’s time to demand these privileges for all to hold every state to a higher standard and shut down the voices who support hate - regardless of party, generation, race or region.
Hopefully, 2012 is the year when we outside of the gay community speak even louder to tip things towards fair, logical and humane social progress for all.
(stepping off soapbox)
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Exactly a year ago, I was heading east to play on another Jammin’ Java Santa Clausterf%&* just like I’m about to do now. Except… I missed my flight out of LA and had to spend the night in Terminal D of the Dallas - Fort Worth airport. In my boredom, I did this…
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While other kids my age had their sights set on being an all-star quarterback, world-renowned bioscientist or genius-inspiring teacher, when I was 15, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a professional jingle writer when I grew up. My dad had run an ad agency and at the time, produced all the identification commercials for the local NBC affiliate, often letting me write the music.
About a week after I graduated college, I left West Virginia for New York City, crashed in my aunt’s basement in Livingston, NJ and gave it a go. I got an internship at a big jingle house in NYC and after a few days, I thought to myself… “Holy shit. This sucks.”. That particular week, 8 or so in-house jingle writers were frantically composing and revising a pitch for Fruit Gushers snacks that only one of them would get. It was a lot of fake hip hop beats synced up to smiling faces and the sounds of kids cheering and I remember the late 90’s Pro Tools rig taking up about half of the room. Scared and uninspired, I returned home to WV and continued being in my original rock band. Playing my own music in front of tens of college kids around the country was a no brainer.
*Yo! It’s squirty chemicals that taste like fruit!*Since then, I’ve maintained doing a few jingles a year. The communication with the ad agency or client never gets easier. Often, the only directive from the suits is “Well, as you know, our logo is red so….” or “We want something uptempo but not fast.”.
Recently, I got asked to pitch a jingle to a big toy company releasing, of all things, an ATM-card that kids could use to buy endless items in a board game. While I don’t think Quicken for Kids would be a big hit, this pretend credit card definitely didn’t preach fiscal responsibility to pre-adolescents.
Usually, when asked to pitch a jingle you get the brief, which contains the basic gist of the product and the music they want for the cue. For this cue, the agency said:
Think sophisticated, fun, sing-able and memorable; lyrics will be simple and relatable for all. The lyrics will be all about the benefits of having money to buy anything you desire- and loving it.
Sometimes, there is a story board or a reference song (in this case, just about every “four on the floor” hit out now) but my favorite part by far is the agency-provided lyric ideas. These are lyrics written regardless of any meter, rhyme scheme or common sense that the jingle writer has to adapt and incorporate into the final song.For this specific jingle check out some of the wordsmithery:
(Spoken in that cool- talk-your-way-into-the-music way):
Are you all ready? ‘Cause this is gonna be big. No- wait- huuuuge……
It’s all about my plastic-
My wallet is elastic-
I’ll be spending extreeeemely-
So people enveeee- me-
I’ll be wearing some big bling-
When I go yacht-ting-
So with ALL of that in mind, I wrote this jingle pitch which was ultimately passed on for a very popular current hit. It’s a 30-second shitshow of auto-tuned pop to educate kids about the wonders on unchecked American capitalism called “All About My Plastic”. Hope you enjoy.
Click right hurrrrr… “ALL ABOUT MY PLASTIC”
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THE X FACTOR AUDITIONS
Over the summer, I played on 2 episodes of the new Simon Cowell show The X Factor. It was one of the most interesting & nerve-racking experiences of my life. Simon is an intimidating dude… The show starts tomorrow night. I’m in the back playing piano for some people, so I’m not sure how much, which episodes or if I’ll even make the final edit, but check it out!
Here’s a preview video they’ve posted. The part at 2:20 ish where Simon is complaining about something… yeeeahhhh… He wasn’t happy with the keyboard & loops we were using in the band. -
Last night, I lost a cousin to cancer.
My cousin Earl Kress was my only relative living in LA and one of my dad’s surviving first cousins. They practically grew up as siblings in south NJ and in the early 70’s Earl moved to LA to become a writer for cartoons. He was a writer on Disney’s “The Fox and The Hound” and later won Emmy’s for his work on “Pinky and The Brain” and “Animaniacs”. If you’ve seen a cartoon in the last 30 years, chances are Earl worked on an episode of it somehow.
We weren’t super close given our distance while I was growing up but we were able to connect more since I moved to LA, despite the less than 10 mile drive to Burbank from the Grove sometimes feeling like I would’ve been quicker to fly from WV.
Earl was different than my dad in his quiet demeanor, but very much like my dad with his sharp wit, constant creativity and being a student of his craft. He was an expert on classic Hanna Barbera cartoons and a trove of trivia about that era of animation.
For me, it’s another connection to my father lost. I was able to get a few stories about my dad from Earl and I’m very grateful for that. Also, having to deal with another death on my dad’s side of the family brings up feelings and thoughts I haven’t had to deal with in a good while.
I guess the hardest part about being an east coast(-ish) transplant in LA is trading in the happiness of work and weather and artistic community at the cost of missing valuable years with family, although I wouldn’t have it any other way right now.
So… RIP cousin Earl. Thank you for paving the way creatively a generation ahead in my family and thank you for helping me get on my feet in LA. I’ll do ya proud out here. “Pinky” swear.
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I’m about to go to a meeting with an A/R rep that I haven’t met before in NYC to play him some songs I’ve written and produced.
The meeting will start with his assistant offering me water or coffee while I wait outside of his door. Once he finishes his BBM conversation about the weekend, he’ll ask his assistant to send me in. We’ll engage in disingenuous small talk and then awkwardly cut to the chase with him leaning back in his office chair and asking “So what have you been working on?” - a question that I’m always inexplicably not prepared to answer.
The label rep will then unplug the 1/8” cable from his laptop and hand it to me to plug into my iPhone. I’ll thumb to the iPod playlist called “Meeting Demos” and give him the brief on the first project and hit play. I’ll let the song get through the first chorus before I fade it out manually while he checks his email and replies to texts. This process will repeat 5-7 times, punctuated by advice like “I didn’t expect the pre-chorus to go there, but I think it works the way you have it.” or “With the right beat, I could hear that being a good song for [globally successful music mega-star that has no chance of ever hearing this song].”.
After being marginally entertained, he’ll ask me to hand him back the audio cable and will start playing me some projects he’s working on, probably at a louder volume than he played mine. Then he’ll explain to me how important it is to “write hits” and give his thoughts on the decline of the music industry with most of the sentence starting with “Listen…” and “At the end of the day…”.
After some conversation to wrap up the meeting about how much he “loves LA” and can’t wait to get back out there, he’ll shake my hand, walk me to the elevators and tell me “we’ll be in touch”. I’ll make some joke or a pun that will be more entertaining to me than to him, and be on my way.
On the way back to my hotel on the subway, I’ll listen to a playlist on my iPhone that doesn’t contain songs I’ve written.
Wish me luck!
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Some things just happen.
They don’t happen because of us or in spite of us. They don’t even happen to us specifically. They just happen.
I was finishing up my junior year at West Virginia University, spending the weekend studying for finals and music juries the following week. My dad had been in Baltimore accompanied by my mom for weeks preparing for a bone marrow transplant, a process that started with a complete depletion of his immune system. Aside from discomfort caused by radiation and chemo, all was going smoothly. He had fully recovered from a triple bypass just 6 weeks earlier and my dad’s only sister was a perfect match for bone marrow. However, things took a turn for the worse and over the weekend I was told although the Aplastic Anemia seemed to be taking to the treatment, there was a complication and I should skip finals to make the 4 hour drive to Baltimore. The doctors attached him to a respirator and maintained “cautious optimism”. The whole family, including my grandfather who had checked himself out of an oncology unit at a hospital in Philadelphia to come see his son, convened at Johns Hopkins and over the next week monitored every move.
My dad never came off the respirator. He was 3 months short of his 50th birthday.
For 14 years, I’ve tried to make sense of it all. What started as a somewhat routine bone marrow transplant at one of the top, if not the top, hospital in the United States, Johns Hopkins, ended on May 3, 1997 from an unexpected infection that gradually shut down his vital organs. That night standing over his bed alone, in the strange silence of machines no longer trying, I promised him over and over I’d take care of my mom and that I’d make him proud.
I can’t really explain how amazing of a person my dad, Mike Simons, was. I only had him in my life for 20 years but somehow, I have far more memories than could fit in just two decades. I think about him every day still. The pain never really gets easier, I just figure out a place in my heart and mind to put it. Each year, I lose a little piece of him but another little piece shows up in me. Sometimes my own laugh will imitate his and freak me out, or my signature on a credit card receipt will take the shape of his name, or a witty comeback will seemingly come to me out of nowhere as if fed to me by an earpiece. So much of who he was has shaped who I am and want to be.
My dad was born in Philadelphia, PA and shortly moved to the suburbs in southern New Jersey close to the Jersey shore. He spent his summers working in Atlantic City - sometimes valeting cars at Burlesque theaters then going inside to work the shows backstage. He loved movies, theatre and music. He acted in plays growing up, used neighborhood friends to cast scripted home movies, broadcast radio shows from my grandparents’ basement, played clarinet in school and was obsessed with The Beatles. When it came time for college, he applied late and was accepted at a small college in West Virginia called Salem College, knowing nothing of the state. There wasn’t even an interstate highway between New Jersey and West Virginia yet.
In college, my dad studied Drama and Broadcasting and before he graduated he was hired as a disc jockey at a local radio station. (I have reel to reel tapes in storage of his ridiculous 1970’s DJ voice.) After a first marriage that thankfully gave me my sister, Lori, my dad went to LA to pursue acting and directing. After 9 months and extra roles in 2 movies starring Martin Sheen, he was broke and returned to WV. He bounced back and forth between radio and TV and started his own advertising agency with a partner before finally becoming the weatherman at WBOY-TV - a job he took above and beyond his obligations.
My father kept an insanely busy schedule. He would work 9-5 everyday making commercials and promos for the TV station then do a 530pm and a 6pm newscast. He’d come home for family dinner and then go downstairs to take a nap - somehow sleeping while blasting either La Boheme, his favorite opera, or Billy Joel Live in Russia. Then he’d wake up at 10:15pm and go back to the station for his 11pm newscast and be home again by midnight, his shirt collar stained with makeup for television. He often told me, that despite his local celebrity, “I’m not a meteorologist. I can just ad lib without saying ‘um’.”. On the weekends, he did appearances for the station or charities - most importantly the Muscular Dystrophy Association for which he hosted the local broadcast of the Labor Day telethon every year. Throughout the year he also acted and directed in community theatre productions. He loved his work but somehow I don’t remember him missing anything important of mine - performances, soccer games, pictures before school dances, etc. By the time he passed away, he was virtually a statewide celebrity because of his constantly being broadcast into people’s homes and his sincere interest in the community.
Somehow a Jew from Philly fell in love with the state of West Virginia and had made it his home. After my parents met on the phone through work, my mom moved from Brooklyn, NY to West Virginia and began teaching school at West Milford Elementary, where she still teaches. My parents immediately became active in local theatre and even put me in my first play at age 3 - a cameo in the musical Pippin. I grew up with my dad’s music all around me. Whether it was him singing the lyric “…counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike” at the top of his lungs to Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” or teaching me harmony by singing a third above the melody to Motown tunes on WOBG-FM. In hindsight, I feel like my dad was training and preparing me to be a professional songwriter and artist my entire childhood.
Before my 6th grade year, local music store Bandland gave a demonstration to all of the prospective band students for the upcoming school year. Kids asked questions about all of the instruments, but I had my sights and heart set on the same instrument my dad played - the clarinet. Not realizing the torment I was signing up for by picking what many friends called “a girl’s instrument”, I bought a plastic Selmer Bundy clarinet. One night between newscasts, months ahead of my first band class, my dad set up two chairs and a music stand and put together his wooden professional model Selmer 9-star clarinet. He helped me put my shiny new clarinet together for the first time making sure I knew to hold down a certain key on the lower half of the clarinet so the bridge key didn’t bend. He advised putting the reed ‘just a fingernail’s length’ above the mouthpiece for proper tone. And he warned me to “take care of this damn thing,”. We opened my “Best In Class - Clarinet Book One” and started with ‘open G’. Then a whole step lower to F, then E, D and finally C. When school started I walked in already ahead of the rest of the band and my dad promised me his wooden clarinet if I continued studying clarinet after high school.
I continued clarinet but in 8th grade I began playing piano after seeing a classmate surrounded by girls while playing Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting For You” afterschool one day. My parents bought me a 47-key Yamaha keyboard and before I even knew what I was playing I started writing songs. I still remember the chords to the first song I wrote: Am F G C - based on the doorbell chime in our house. That year I was obsessed with 80’s rapper Young MC and even started penning my own raps under the nom de plume MC Snowbird, a name I took from my dad’s puppet penguin sidekick on TV that announced school closings in the winter.
On a road trip home from Myrtle Beach that summer, my dad changed my whole musical life. He handed me Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver on cassette and simply said “Learn these”. I did. Note for note, word for word. That started my obsession with the Beatles and I began to sift through my dad’s Beatles vinyl (which I still have), cassettes, magazines, pictures, videos, etc. He told me stories of when he saw them live twice - once in Philly and once in Atlantic City - while I watched the famous Shea Stadium concert on video being drowned out by shrill teenage screams. He told me about skipping school to buy the new Beatles record so he and his friends could sit and listen to it on repeat all day and night. And when the rest of the world thought that Beatles ‘got weird’, my dad thought they got even better. I remember the night while I was pounding away at my keyboard that my dad told me, “You know, you can major in music composition in college?”. From that moment on, I knew I was going to be a songwriter. I just couldn’t decide if I was more John or more Paul.
As I got more proficient at piano, my dad would challenge me to learn songs. One evening after dinner he may have asked for “Piano Man” and the next night it was “Anything off of Rubber Soul”. I’d put on the cassette and hit stop and start to pick out each note and chord by ear. Then after a short while, he’d check back in to hear me perform the song along with the recording while he stood in the doorway of my bedroom and beamed. Soon, my dad was lining up private gigs at parties and events around town for me and ANYTIME we were at anyone’s house with a piano, my dad would beg me to perform from my repertoire he had steadily crafted with post-dinner requests at home. By age 15, despite not having a lot of money, my parents somehow managed to buy me a professional level Ensoniq SQ-2 keyboard with an onboard sequencer and hundreds of sounds which allowed me to program drums and several layers of instrumentation - and play live gigs. My dad booked my friends and I for a New Year’s Eve gig at his friend Tony’s restaurant and when the clock struck 12, I hit play on my pre-sequenced arrangement of Auld Lang Syne and went to dance with my mom in the crowd while the adults grossly engaged in their New Year’s kisses around me. During my sophomore year of high school, I was awarded first chair clarinet of the Bridgeport High School concert band and my dad prematurely and proudly handed down his wooden clarinet, which I still have to this day in its original case. (In fact, just last month, I got it out of storage, carried it on my flight back to LA and played it for the first time in 13 years.) When I was 16, he let me write the 22 second WBOY news theme and even credited me at the end of every news cast - “News theme composed by Scott Simons”. Any sample cassettes he received in the mail of national news and jingle packages he would hand off to me for me to listen and learn to what was out there so I could one day have the option of doing jingles. So while my friends were listening to ‘In Utero’ and ‘Siamese Dream’, I was probably in my room listening to ‘Intense News Sequence 2’.
The August after graduating high school, my parents drove me in my grandparents’ hand-me-down Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra to the campus of West Virginia University in Morgantown. I enrolled as a music composition major with the intent of going into jingles, or possibly film scoring, or most likely writing songs for other artists. I played in cover bands all around the state of West Virginia throughout college and my dad came to many of the shows - suffering through light dinner sets followed by disco medleys. I joined the WVU Marching Band, “The Pride of West Virginia”, and he would sit with the 60,000-plus fans in the stands at every home football game and swear he could pick me out me in the 350 identically-dressed person ensemble. After my college composition lessons, I would often run to a pay phone in the Creative Arts Center and call my dad at work to tell him everything I had just learned.
My junior year of college, I finally had my first composition performed when a classmate added my saxophone quartet “Unsaid” to his senior saxophone recital. My mom and dad drove up from Bridgeport and my best friends Jean-Pierre and Mario drove down from college in Wheeling. We all sat in the sloped concert hall among the 50-75 very serious listeners. I even made sure to wear a pretentious black turtleneck and ponytail/goatee combo for my composition premiere. One of the pieces performed before mine was a very avant garde modern solo saxophone composition by a Japanese composer named Ryo Noda. The piece called for loud squawks and squeaks and honks and even a part where the saxophone mouthpiece was removed and played by itself (if I remember correctly). It required a certain level of proficiency but sonically, it was a bit silly. I was used to this kind of stuff from class but apparently my dad wasn’t. As I looked to my left, my dad was hunched over, sweating, face beet-red, eyes welling with tears, holding in laughter. He was fake coughing to cover any sudden laughs that leaked out. My mom and I shot him dirty looks but it was too late. Not only could he not stop, but the laughter and tears had spread to Jean-Pierre and Mario. After the recital, my dad half-apologized saying, it just felt like a Saturday Night Live skit. Some college kid just stands up and makes a bunch of sounds on an instrument he hasn’t practiced and the audience full of family and professors just seriously nods and listens approvingly.
In the summer of 1996, my dad invited me to come with him to Los Angeles for the yearly NBC affiliates convention. I didn’t know I only had 11 months left with my dad at the time. We had a jam-packed week together with plenty of time to bond - stayed in the Beverly Hills HIlton, went to Disneyland and met celebrities all week. I never really considered that I’d end up living in LA years later but he would love to know that I did.
Even though I wrote a lot of music growing up, my dad never heard most of my pop songs. He died before my old band “the Argument” formed and before I graduated with my composition degree. He did help me with some lyrics on songs I was starting to write for myself at 19 but that was about it. However because of him, not only was I prepared to make music my life but I chose to. My dad gave me so much knowledge and taught me how to be passionate about music.
My dad was always “on”. He was consistently hilarious and quick witted and there are so many memories of him that revolve around hysterical laughter. At a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar, he commented that the chubby actor playing Judas seemed to have had ‘one too many last suppers’. He once told my mom she could sleep with Robert Redford à la Indecent Proposal - if she gave my dad time to get the money together. And his usual response to my asking “Dad, can I ask a stupid question?” was a snarky deadpan “Better than anyone I know.”. Even days before his passing, we got a little laugh when the local rabbi confused my dad’s Hebrew name with an ex-Israeli Prime Minister and blessed the wrong person. The whole family had our heads down, sneaking peaks at each other smiling, thinking he was pulling some kind of prank.
My father was an amazing parent and I miss being able to tell him every little piece of news that happens in my life. After a few years in LA, I have so many stories to tell him - especially seeing Ringo get his star on Hollywood Boulevard in person and stopping to see Cirque Du Soleil LOVE in Vegas during my move out west. Most of all, I miss his ear. Aside from my dad’s quick wit and sense of humor, his strongest trait was probably his ability to listen, give advice and make big deals seem less big. His passing away keeps me grounded. It reminds me why I do what I do through the ups and the downs of the music industry with no promise, just the hope of success and/or stability. Luckily, I have an equally amazing mother who is more than 100% supportive of my career despite the difficulty of being 2000 miles apart from each other.
This blog is only a fraction of my memory of my dad. I could go on and on but I’d fill the entire internet. Losing my best friend, my idol, my father was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through in my life. It’s so personal but also universal because everyone loses someone in their life and is left with a huge hole and only tiny memories to fill it. Thanks for reading a few of my tiny memories. -
- My friend Scott has a loud upstairs neighbor too. We decided to battle it out in a chat conversation to see who could think of louder reasons why.
- Scott: i know my neighbor has a 1br like me but she is so f-ing loud it sounds like shes always dropping shit down stairs
- Scott: or moving pans
- Shira: omg samesies with my upstairs neighbor – she has anvil shoes
- Scott: or doing foley work from home
- Scott: or collecting sheet metal
- Shira: Mine is actually power-sanding a wooden deck
- Scott: or creating “thunder” for a school play
- Scott: or hosting a billiards tournament
- Shira: Mine has a cinder block pogo stick
- Shira: Haha I just pictured that
- Scott: hahaha
- Shira: And then pictured her on it
- Scott: mine is doing gravity vs balsa wood experiments
- Scott: mine is watching a WWII documentary in 5.1 surround
- Shira: Mine is pouring concrete mixed with tnt and pop rocks
- Shira: Haha
- Shira: 5.1
- Scott: haha
- Scott: mine is building steel drums
- Scott: in tap shoes
- Scott: mine is shoeing horses
- Scott: and playing croquet in her bedroom
- Shira: Mine is jack hammering with anti aircraft weaponry
- Scott: haha
- Scott: mine is shooting out a star at a carnival booth
- Shira: Mine is blasting for gold while watching top gun in THX
- Scott: mine is building a portion of railroad track from her
- kitchen to the front door
- Shira: Using her cabinetry?
- Scott: mine is juggling cymbals
- Shira: haha
- Shira: Mine has a ship coming into port
- Scott: haha
- Scott: mine is chaining her winter tires indoors
- Shira: Are you trying to think of the loudest shit you can
- Shira: Haha
- Shira: Good one
- Scott: yes
- Shira: Mine is mowing her lawn.
- Scott: inside.
- Shira: Yes.
- Scott: mine is housing a Who rehearsal… which is ok b/c its sorely needed
- Shira: Yeah wow
- Scott: mine is clubbing baby seals…
- Scott: …with adult seals
- Shira: HAHA
- Shira: peeing
- Shira: ’cause I pictured it
- Scott: what would that even sound like?
- Shira: Loud, no question
- Shira: Mine is doing a 3 point turn with a 53′ diesel trailer in her living room
- Shira: That might actually be true
- Shira: Ok must sleep, will email you this as a blog post before I “publish” it
- Shira: Which reminds me of my upstairs neighbor’s printing press.
