With Jake, however, the combination of musical genes passed down by his parents combined in a way that was staggering, almost scary at times. Even before he learned to talk, Jake learned to sing. As a baby boy crawling around the floor in diapers, still drawing milk from his mother's breast, he would stop whatever he was doing when he heard music on the radio, when he heard a voice engaged in song, and he would try to imitate it. Though no words would form, he would imitate the syllables, the changes in tone and pitch. He would hum to himself in his crib, babbling out snatches of song he had heard and memorized. As he grew older, his love of singing, of music intensified. By the time he was four he was playing around with his mother's violin and piano, his father's harmonica and acoustic guitar, learning the rudimentary skills needed to make the sounds he desired with them. He parents encouraged his musical development as best they could. They taught him about scale and harmony and melody. As he learned to read the written word from his early grammar school teachers, he learned to read music from his mother and father.
By the age of ten he was able to play every instrument in the house to some degree but it was the battered old acoustic guitar his father strummed when he wanted to relax or when he was drunk (or, after he and his mother had disappeared into the bedroom for a bit and that funny, herbal smell came drifting out with them) that Jake was most taken with. He would pick at it for hours, imitating songs he heard on the radio, on his parents' record albums and then, by about his fourteenth year, he started making up his own melodies and then penning simple lyrics to go with them.
Jake was never given anything that could be termed "formal" musical training. His parents took care of that on their own. With his voice, however, they recognized early on that he had a gift of song, a gift that cried out for professional honing. He began to see voice teachers at the age of nine. He always thought the singing exercises great fun, taking to them like a duck to water. It was feared that his natural talent for vocalization would diminish or even disappear with the onset of puberty and the changing of his voice. Quite the opposite is what actually happened. As his speaking voice deepened his singing voice grew richer and developed considerable range. It was truly a joy to hear Jake sing a song, any song, and around the house he did so often, but his shyness kept him from sharing his gift with many. He would play his guitar and sing for his parents, his sister, his voice teachers, but he would clam up and refuse during family gatherings when his proud parents would try to cajole him into an impromptu performance. He never joined the band in school though he easily would have been the star player. He never joined a choir or entered a competition of any kind. Nobody outside his family had any idea that young Jake Kingsley was a bourgeoning musical genius.
Until that night at Salinas Bend.
Chapter 1B: The Power of Music
Salinas Bend, in the 1970's, was a 200-acre Heritage City park located in the relatively rural southern section of the city. Situated along the Sacramento River, which formed Heritage's western boundary, its primary purpose was a boat launching facility and family picnic area. That was during the day. During the weekend night hours it served as a favored location for students from three local high schools to hold their keg parties. Hundreds of teenagers between the ages of fifteen and nineteen would descend upon the park after 10:00 PM, parking their cars in the boat trailer lot and setting up kegs that the more business oriented among them would purchase and then charge two dollars per person for an unlimited refill policy, at least until the keg ran out, which typically gave each purchaser an average of eight to ten plastic cups full of cheap beer per keg. Since the site was so isolated from the rest of the city-it was surrounded by dozens of square miles of farmland upon which onions and tomatoes were grown-the partygoers could be as loud and obnoxious as they liked with little risk of the Heritage Police making an appearance. The Heritage PD did, of course, occasionally show up to break things up, but this was more for form's sake than anything else. They actually liked having the majority of the south area's teens gathering in one, known spot in the middle of nowhere instead of breaking up into a dozen or more parties in more populated areas.
As a member of the stoner clique, Jake was a regular attendee of the Salinas Bend keggers during his junior year. Typically he just kind of hung out, sticking close to a few friends, watching the antics of others while he smoked a little weed and got pleasantly buzzed on beer. He was the quiet one, saying little unless he had something important to say, which wasn't often. He had long since learned that his peers were not terribly interested in politics.
On the night in question, Jake was sixteen years old and still a virgin. He had made out with a few girls before, had even done some light petting, but such encounters were very few and very far between. Since getting his driver's license two months before he had been borrowing his parent's 1972 Buick station wagon to get him to the weekly parties on the theory that having his own transportation would improve his success rate with the opposite sex. It was a sound theory that might have held water-even with the wood panel siding on the wagon-if not for the fact that Jake was so painfully shy around girls he rarely got one alone long enough to sustain a conversation. And so, on this evening, like so many others, he was just standing around in a group that consisted mostly of males, sipping beer and maintaining a stronger than average buzz, waiting for some kind soul to pass a joint in his direction, saying little, mostly just watching and dreaming.
And then he heard it. The sound of an acoustic guitar being strummed. His ears perked up and sought out the source of the sound. It was coming from the midst of a group of about twenty people on the other side of the parking lot. A bonfire had been built out of broken up pallets and was blazing away. A male figure was the center of this group's attention. He was sitting on the top of a picnic table holding a guitar, strumming open chords on it. Even over the babble of conversations and the sound of multiple car stereos belting out conflicting tunes, Jake could hear that the guitar was out of tune. He headed in that direction, no one in the group he had been with even noticing his departure.
He knew most of the people gathered around the picnic table. They were a mix of juniors and seniors from his school, about half girls and half guys. In the stoner clique, as with any clique, there are cliques within the clique. This group was the elite among the stoners, the hard-core and coolest, the rulers of the clique as far as such a thing existed. The guitar player was Eric Castro, one of the premier members of the ruling clique, one of the hardest of the hard-core. Castro fancied himself a musician because he owned a guitar and had learned to play a few chords. He and a few of the others in this group were always talking about how they were going to get a band together. The guitar he was playing was little more than a toy, a knock-off of a knock-off of a Fender Grand Concert. The strings were of the cheapest quality commercially available. The finish was scuffed and scratched. Jake thought that if he paid more than $15 for it, he had been ripped off.
And yet, despite the out-of-tune sound, despite the toy-like quality of the instrument, everyone in the group was staring at Castro with rapt attention as he finished strumming the open chords and started to play the opening of Simple Man by Lynard Skynard. His playing was only barely palatable. His fingers moved clumsily over the strings as he picked out the first few bars over and over again, never launching into the heart of the song.