So, this week I had cause to confront again an issue that contributed to one of the things that may have defined (in part) 2007 for me. Among other things, 2007 was The Year Chuck Had Long Hair.
There was a time when I really, really wanted to have cool rock and roll hair. While I was in college, and having discovered "college" music, I wanted to look radical, with hair like Robert Smith from the Cure, but I was hampered by two things: one, my existing hair was not long enough to do anything too radical with, and two, I was living in Springfield and/or Quincy, Illinois, which were not particularly progressive when it came to hairstyles. And, the wide varieties of chemicals you can find today in any department store were not widely available. I remember going into the hair salon in the local Venture with a magazine picture of Sigue Sigue Sputnik as an example of what I was looking for, and realizing that hair of that nature was far outside the parameters of the poor woman working there. I had imagined that hair stylists were frustrated artists, who would be grateful for the opportunity to create something noteworthy, but in Springfield in 1985, that was not the case.
So, I stuck with my relatively conservative hair style for many years, but in August of 2006 I had an experience that brought the issue back to my conscious consideration. I'm in this band, the Xylenes. It was formed earlier in 2006 with some friends from work who had not played before, but notwithstanding that, our bass player's husband asked/allowed us to play at his birthday party, which was held at a local bowling alley. The spectacle was captured in photographs, some of which are reproduced here. Now, the show went pretty well, but I was a little bit mortified later when I saw these pictures. Aside from the fashion lapse of the Beer Nuts t-shirt and expansive shorts, I was really disillusioned with how I looked in these pictures.
See, being a rock musician has for many years been a part of my identity, of how I think of myself. But looking at these pictures, I thought, this guy doesn't look very rock. It had been a few years since I'd been in a band, and I'll admit it, I ballooned a little bit during that time. That, coupled with my clean-shaven, short-haired look added up to something that just was not cool. Looking at these pictures, I vowed to do something to improve my image. I adopted a motto: "Better to be a lawyer who looks like a musician, than a musician who looks like a lawyer."
Now, for someone with my lifestyle and lack of willpower, the most obvious route---start working out and eat less junk food---was not realistic; I've tried that on multiple occasions with the best of intentions but so far it hasn't stuck. (Although, I live in hope.) But one thing I could do was grow out my hair. So for over a year I didn't get it cut (barring a single "shaping" incident in the spring.) And I grew a beard.
And I suppose it worked, to an extent. I don't know; judge for yourself. I look less like an accountant in these pictures than I did before, certainly. (Not that there's anything wrong with accountants, but . . . you know what I mean.) But in these I'm freshly groomed, and I fear that the more usual effect was more like the picture below. In other words, most of the time---when I saw myself in mirrors or windows---I just looked like a scruffy bum. And when the cats walked across my pillow in their nightly perambulations, they would step on my hair and it would pull painfully.
My personal preference would be for the ultra-low maintenance haircut, i.e., the clipper buzz. For a while in the 90s I went with that look:
. . . but my wife has issued one of her rare ultimatums on the subject, so for now this one is out.
After months of trying to come to terms with the long hair, always hoping that it would eventually grow out to the point where it would suddenly look good and be easy to deal with, I must admit I gave up and got it cut. I told the barber I wanted it cut short but I don't think he believed me; he advocated a mid-length style, but that didn't really look much better (IMO). Finally I got it cut again and it's now medium-short (but still long enough to preserve domestic tranquility).
So anyway, this week we had band practice and one of the band members took some pictures to put on our MySpace page, including the one below. By unhappy coincidence, I was wearing the same Beer Nuts t-shirt as at the bowling alley show. It makes for a sad juxtaposition. I guess I'm going to have to come to terms with my general pudgy, middle-aged, short-haired un-cool-ness.
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