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.
