(With apologies to those for whom this will hold no reference.)

BD gone…

Though he eventually went WAY off the deep end, I will choose to remember the intense, whipsmart, charismatic, wryly funny guy whose sheer energy held us all together during the long years awaiting Jack’s decision to free us all from the stale marketing and thinking that, though it had once built a true DC area institution, was slowly choking the life out of the place on a gullet stuffed with dayglo posters screaming discounts and sales like the always ‘going out of business’ carpet store at the other end of Broad Street.

I recall that it was Bruce’s fierce vision of what we could make out of a liberated Giant Music that held together a loyal band of very talented people who would’ve otherwise given up after one of Jack’s condescending tirades about our inability to properly display the plastic ocarinas and two-dollar ‘jaw’ harps (FUCK the battery display! shouted an enraged Ned Christiansen…). I remember sitting with BD and Ned at the Boar’s Head plotting the overthrow of the regime and how we could yank Giant Music back into a place of significance in the DC and mid-Atlantic music market. Was a lot of it fantasy? Maybe.

However…

That we ultimately fucked up the opportunity we held in our hands and squandered the brilliant beginning we had made, nothing will change the fact that Bruce led the way in building a new buzz around the old Giant Music. It was BD who brought in Pete and Tommy, and Evan Johns, and Brad Smiley to demo our guitars and amps on the weekends to generate real interest in Giant as a possible musician’s place and a center of cultivation and appreciation for the Washington music scene. Bruce greenlighted delving into professional sound and stage gear which allowed us to make some of the biggest sales GM had ever known and to re-attract business from professional musicians who had come to see us as irrelevant. The whole thing fell apart, for sure, as Bruce succumbed to the obsession of Northern Virginia’s Lilliputian version of artificially-fueled life in the fastlane. But let’s all recall that many nostrils sucked up the possibilities. And let’s also remember that Bruce was hardly alone as a young entrepreneur who got caught up and wiped out in the 1980s–it was almost a rite of passage for the up and coming go-getter set…

It is with some small pain that I recall the day that Tim Cornish and I (and Mike Deely maybe?) went on assignment (at the direction of Mike Head who allowed us to drive his supercar for the deed) to officially punch Bruce’s card as an employee of Giant Music. Thoroughly smoked and powdered as we made the drive to Richmond, the journey quietly took on the surreal tilt and coloration of Captain Willard’s final push up the Nung River with ‘Chef’ Hicks (and Lance) at his side to confront Col. Kurtz in his rogue outpost in a Cambodian cave. I didn’t hack him up with a machete, but that was the day I fired my own mentor.

It was just 7 years earlier when I had entered Giant Music in Falls Church for the first time–not as a customer or gearporn gawker as had been my habit–but as a (trembling) jobseeker. I was only 18 (without appreciable actual musical talent and with only a GED, some wandering experience as rock-band singer and wannabe sound tech as my career grounding) and terrified to know that I had a child on the way for whom I would have to provide. I was desperate to find a job and could only think of one thing I might be able to do that might be close to capable of providing for my tiny family aborning.

I can only imagine what I looked like to Bruce as I made my outlandish case for being hired as an instrument salesman. He didn’t give me that job, but he did send me out to Fairfax to work with Dave ‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson and Bob ‘Soft White Underbelly’ Ballard and the rest of the Picket Road crew with the promise that if I showed myself capable, he’d move me to the big show at Falls Church, which was for me (since I, as a totally strastruck 15-16-17-and-18-year-old, had bought all my suburban-teen-rockband-gear from the blisteringly cool, clog-and-white-capezio-wearing, haughty Falls Church rock-gods: Ted Ibach, Michael Barry, and Chuck Peters, among others…) like being told I would get a chance to play opener for Pink Floyd at the Baltimore Civic Center. And Bruce was true to his word: within a year I was working alongside my heroes in the glass rooms of the instrument section at the West Broad Street store.

For a guy facing down the barrel of marriage and fatherhood at 18, Bruce provided what felt like (and in many ways genuinely was) salvation and the hope of redemption. That it only partly worked out that way (and mostly didn’t) was all my fault and not at all Bruce’s. Indeed, in many ways, as an aloof and recreational user (at that point anyway) who had much greater control and capability to remain apparently functional, I was among BD’s not so small number of enablers (as I’m sure Doreen can attest…) and occasional suppliers.

So as I stood there alongside Tim (after we’d dramatically made am arrogant and ostentatious big show of taking detailed inventory of all the goods in the Richmond store–telling Bruce to take to the door out and leave the keys (all the keys) behind, BD did not exactly name me the ‘errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill’ that I had begun to feel myself to be, but he was keenly aware of the Kurtz-Willard vibe that was spinning in my head. And while it was absolutely necessary to push BD out that door, he had a right to let me know that he recognized me in my role as an ungrateful prick.

So it was that a decade after I last spoke to him at the door of the Richmond store, I had what I thought was going to be a chance to reminisce and maybe heal some old wounds and maybe even find out that Bruce had finally realized some of that early grand potential after augering in for a spectacular failure in his 30s. In that weirdly unexpected but thoroughly predictable way that old friends make contact after years of estrangement, Bruce called me one afternoon and invited me to lunch in Tyson’s Corner. Instead of my envisioned warming afternoon of healing, Bruce was reticent to do much reminiscing and even more reluctant to do the so-what-have-you-been-up-to. Rather, BD launched into a barely concealed and very awkward sales come-on having to do with a multi-level marketing opportunity involving home-water-filtration-system products…or something. After providing excuses which he seemed relieved to accept without much pushback, we parted making obviously false commitments to get together again soon. I think he was more embarrassed than I was by that afternoon spent in a dimly lit Tyson’s area shopping center café painfully calling glaring attention to our lost friendship by not speaking a word of it. (So it was up to me upon my slumped return to my home to desperately whisper the closing line…The Horror…The Horror…)

Bruce Lauzon. I had been only 21 when Bruce promoted me to manager of instrument sales—an opportunity I quickly went to work skillfully engineering into a major clusterfuck. But while Bruce quietly brought in Howie Teitler to replace my general laziness and patent incompetence with at least a modicum of ‘want-to’ and ‘know-how’, he continued to play the role of a generous mentor. He routinely invited me to sit with him and Linda in their Falls Church living room drinking chablis (which I wouldna known from Boones Farm Apple) and listening to a world of music well beyond my usual catalogue that ran the full gamut from Led Zeppelin to Rolling Stones. BD helped me develop a lifelong appreciation and hunger for a rich and eclectic diversity of music. (Which is not to in any way reduce the influence that folks like Curt Golden, Ned Christiansen Sonny Boy, Tim Cornish, and others had on broadening my theretofore narrow bandwidth of musical exposure…).

When Bruce found out I was slowly putting together a hi-fi system, knowing of my love for vintage stereo equipment he gave me his old but still mint Altec home-version Voice of the Theater speakers—which (much to Marta’s daily annoyance) still grace my living room as converted subwoofers. BD sold me my first real car (at Manhattan Auto’s cost).

We might choose to recall the desperate, fading wunderkind who snuck away every time the phone rang leaving some unfortunate subordinate to lie and make excuses to creditors; the cratering fuckup who paid off personal debts by letting his ‘friends’ pack up equipment off the showroom floor and cart it away. But so many of us played a role in that spiral from let’s-dare-to-become-amazing to let’s-see-how-long-we-can-keep-the-empty-buzz-going. I know that many of you kept your heads together, but many of us did not. And few of us paid as much as Bruce did for the hubristic, petty strutting we all indulged in. There but for the grace…

HOWEVER…

For my part, I would change nothing. It was GLORIOUS to have worked among you. I picture Bruce wildly imploring us to finish smashing the old glass walls to transform the space of the Broad Street store in one lavishly crazy night of creative destruction. Bruce charming us all into going along with his Pan dance into the unknown. Bruce intervening with Jack to forget about some stupid infraction one of us had perpetrated. Bruce leading an early wave of twenty-something slackers to dream of creating a new kind of retail business, using his vision and charisma to make RETAIL seem like a worthy theater of expression. It is no exaggeration to say that his was the sort of impulse and vision that led to transformational business phenomena like Apple and Nike. He had hold of the zeitgeist of the 80s for sure. But like so many others, he was also seized by the era’s dark doppelgängers: ambition was shadowed by avarice; focused intensity was shadowed by obsessive compulsion; daring fearlessness stood on the stage while its dark cousin, brazen recklessness, capered beneath the footlights. Joyful celebration of life shadowed by empty hedonism. Self-confidence shadowed by egomania; opportunity shadowed by exploitation. It is an opera of that time.

But, see. I cannot help but love everyone I met and worked with there at Giant Music. The place and people shaped my world and left an indelible mark on who I am—for better or worse. All the wayward twenty-somethings; the tasteful connoisseurs; the posing charlatans; the outlaws, bandits, and spacecases; the fatally flirtatious, scintillatingly sensual  and wantonly wayward women of our West Falls Church coven; the cranks and crackpots; the hapless schemers, the dirtballs and dreamers, the stoners, the mystics; the fast-track go-getters, the slack-track clockwatchers; the rogues and the mensches; the unacknowledged musical savants, the flash-in-the-pan sixstring gunslingers, the crusty veterans of the music scene with their precious gems of rarely revealed wisdom. From 30 years on, I cherish it: The whole daily circus of outrageously beautiful kids indulging a gloriously misspent youth.

With warm and forgiving memory of Bruce Lauzon, and deep and abiding affection for all of Giant Music’s gloriously dysfunction family in the coming year. Truly.