What was life like at the age of 12?

H: When I was 12 life was great. In junior high I was accepted into a program called CAPA Creative and Performing Arts for gifted kids in Rockford Illinois. It was the early 80’s. That was the age of breakdance and freestyle rap battles. My parents bought me a 5 piece drum kit. In the summer I played for hours every day that could. Other kids were getting turntables and dj equipment. It was a great time to be alive. 

MTV was still pretty new at that time as well so i learned a lot about genres of music outside of R&B, Funk and Hip Hop. I started listening to rock, heavy metal, punk, jazz and classical. 

I was beginning to focused on learning about the fine arts. I wanted to become a graphic designer before I knew what it was. Casablanca Records had a huge influence on me. They had Parlament/Funkadelic and Kiss at the same record company. I’d been drawing pictures of album covers since the third grade. 

George Clinton put these comics strips about the characters in the songs inside the album cover. It was the first time I’d seen black characters in a comic strip. It was genius. Listen and read along. It allowed you to get that much closer to the music. You could visualize what was being said. 

Kiss was pure theater. My parents hated it. But what young boy  doesn’t like fire, blood and creepy makeup. 

But along with all that joy was the realization that my parents weren’t happy. There was tension in the house, but I didn’t let it get me down. I had lots of extended family around and I spent lots of time with my family. My parents later divorce when I was in college. I don’t know what took them so long. 

D: The best way I can describe my life at 12 is tentative. I wasn’t on solid ground in a few ways and while I probably didn’t realize it, looking back now it was evident.

I was a bit of a sick kid, having serious surgery at age 6 and then asthma through age 10. So I spent a lot of time inside and that resulted in a few things. I wasn’t a social person and I developed an imagination that sustained me.

As many 12 year olds in New England I was big into sports. In the wintertime I dreamed of being Bobby Orr and Gerry Cheevers. I played street hockey with a few neighborhood kids and we reinacted wins and great plays we saw on channel 38, the Boston network. It would be the year of a Stanley Cup championship which was amazing. I wasn’t a very good ice skater so I became a goalie in Pee Wee hockey. Cheevers was the Bruins goalie then and he had a mask that was marked with stitch marks for all the actual stitches he would have received on his face if he hadn’t worn a mask. The theatrics of that were irresistible to me. So I got a white plastic goalie’s mask and did the same thing.

In the summer, I was Reggie Jackson. Of course, I was a Red Sox fan because of geography and a herd mentally of despair, but in Reggie I found escape. He was brash and confident and everything I wasn’t at that time. He was a badass that stretched the stirrups of his socks so high and tight they were like slingshots. So I would spend thirty minutes on my little league socks before games. It didn’t help my batting average.

I was just getting into music and bands like Canned Heat, Three Dog Night, and Black Sabbath. Girls were not in the picture yet.

It was the year of Nixon, Kent State, Vietnam protests, and an economic recession, all of which I was oblivious to.

It also was the year that the Gremlin, Pinto and Vega were introduced. Which gave us all something to laugh at for the next several years.

Howard and David are two friends talking (and listening).

We're going to see where the conversation take us.