THE SOUND OF
Music
IT ALL BEGAN WITH A BEATLES PERFORMANCE on The Ed Sullivan
Show, when David Carpenter was nine years old and developed a fascination
with music. His passion grew during a ride in the backseat of his parents’ 1955
Chevy Bel Air, listening to country music radio. For the next nine months, David
pleaded for a guitar. His wish was granted when he received a red sunburst
F-holed Framus acoustic. “The first night I had it, I didn’t know what to do with
my left hand, so I just strummed the strings with my right hand. I imagined
the high strings were horns and the low strings were timpanis. I didn’t know it
then, but this would help me 30 years later.”
Lessons soon followed. After getting more than his fill of “Twinkle, Twinkle,
Little Star,” David decided to learn by ear. “On the radio, they were playing ‘The
Last Time’ by The Rolling Stones, and ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your
Hand’ by The Beatles. I was hea ring ‘Louie, Louie,’ ‘House of the Rising Sun,’
and many others. The bands were loud, they had hair, and they were screaming. This was much more exciting than what I was learning.” Back then, there
were no YouTube tutorials on how to play songs, so David set out to watch local
bands play live sets. At the age of 10, he and his father would drive to shows. He
watched the guitarists in awe.
Joining neighborhood kids Scott Carter, David Hadden, and Dennis Nesbit,
David became the bass player for The Recto Dynamics. Although he had a guitar, he played the lower four strings, as a bass player would. “Scotty lived right
behind me and would climb the fence to come over to my house. Dennis lived
next to him, and David lived across the street from them, on the street over
from me. It was only natural that we gravitated. We played for family and parties, as long as we were home by nine! There was another band of older teenagers up their street that played ‘Wipe Out’ and a lot of Ventures tunes. We
tried to be like them, but they had cars, really loud amps, better guitars and
girls. We just couldn’t pull it off!” He learned a lot during this time, however.
Then he began songwriting. In fact, it was one of his songs that broke up
The Recto Dynamics. “Dennis, the singer, didn’t like the second verse and said
it was stupid. Scotty, the drummer, defended me, so Dennis walked out and
that was the end of that. Dennis was right.” As he grew older, David’s songwriting skills improved. Listening to classics such as Simon and Garfunkel and
The Mamas and The Papas, lyrics became poetry to David’s ears. “Words were
starting to become art to me.” Reading the likes of Robert Frost in school, David’s writing skills improved even further as he began writing poetry.
SHEMAGAZINE.COM FEBUARY 2016
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