Venice: The Sound of Suck-sess
My first trip to Venice occurred when I was just a young man; I was in my twenties touring with a rock and roll group called Dr. Midnight and the Muskrats. We played a mutated version of the blues and garage rock with a fervor that careened wildly every night we got to play. We had been touring Europe quite ardently as we had just released an album. We were lean and hungry and mad with visions of stardom. It was a halcyon time for all of us!
Venice has stuck out in my recollection since it was in one of the more shabby hotels in Venice that I first heard our band being played on the radio. Of all places to hear your band on the radio for the first time, standing in a squalid room of one of the more seedy Venice hotel, we all experienced a boisterous rush of euphoria when the opening notes of our song came blaring out of the cheap, hotel radio. We certainly weren’t at a tour-bus level as a band, nor were we at a level were we could be staying at the Hilton, but we were keen, hungry, lean, and excited, and hearing our band, the band we had slavishly devoted our time to pursuing, was an invariable high for all of us.
Venice, the mysterious lagoon of a city, will always remain dear to me. I look back now, after many years that have transpired since that fateful night in Venice, and I realized how truly exhilarating that was; all of the success that followed, the accolades that were bestowed upon us, the widespread adulation, and all the other perks that came to us when we broke into the mainstream, that night, somehow, seems to me in retrospect to be an acme point, something wild, untouchable, and more satisfying, more meaningful than almost all of the other spoils that we basked in as we became more popular, more recognized etc. In Venice, my heart exploded with joy and excitement and that memory stays with me always, pure and unstained.
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