In the summer of 1989 I joined a couple of friends in working on staff at a Boy Scout summer camp--Yards Creek Scout Reservation in Blairstown, New Jersey. It was kind of a watershed event in my life, in retrospect--the first time since age eight when I was generally liked and accepted by the entire local population (maybe forty people who'd mostly just met me, but hey).
Of a number of friends I made there, the closest and longest-lasting was easily Andy--at that time, a volatile, wiry, frazzled, magnetic kid with a glib insouciance and a martial-arts fixation. I was introduced to him fairly early (it didn't take long to meet the whole staff, of course) and was rather in awe of him, and by the end of the summer we were spending a good bit of time fervently discussing Deep Things.
I'd been playing guitar since the summer before, which is to say I was pretty terrible, and my friend Marc, whose tent was in the same site as mine, had a guitar at camp with him. I remember one day when Andy had stopped by, and I was playing, and he said, "wow, you're really good." I made a note right then that he was capable of being too easily impressed.
The next summer I returned, largely because it was the only way I knew to see Andy, who lived an hour north of me, in utterly uncharted territory. For several suspect reasons I left camp early in the summer, but this time the precedent had been set for Andy and I to meet outside of camp, and for the next year we stole every weekend we could. Andy had a truck at his disposal, and I could intermittently borrow a car, and one way or another we made do. With his hodgepodge of friends we would play pool, run his parents' errands, and generally drive around and shoot the breeze endlessly. Before long, importantly--in October of 1990--Andy got a guitar.
This quickly put a sharp focus on our visits: we never traveled without guitars, we were never left unwatched for long before we started playing. For a while we'd just alternate, since neither of us had any clue how to work together, though in a vague way I think we were both hoping to try. Over time we began to have a small repertoire of pieces we both knew--Andy, though he began playing by learning Beatles songs and such, did begin to write songs very early (noticeably McCartneyesque ones, for better or for worse), and he was better able than I to communicate to me what he was playing.
Soon we were both writing at a fair clip, and whenever it proved within our ability, we would learn to play and sing along with each other's work. We were both raptly imagining an epic succession of Skyler&Dunn albums in the nearest conceivable future. Most of our friends helpfully listened and told us we were good, maybe a little fascinated themselves with the idea that it all might really work.
In the fall of 1991 I went to college in Indiana. Andy and I spent a pretty good bit of time on the phone--I heard many songs for the first time over the phone--and wrote more letters, especially in the first year or two, than I can easily imagine now (especially considering the contest of mysterious and encoded letters that arose out of nowhere between us). But above all, we mailed tapes back and forth--cheap, mismatched cassettes full of our latest efforts, interspersed with interminable freshman ramblings about nothing. Socializing little that first semester, and blessed with an accidental room to myself, I wrote thirteen songs before Christmas (maybe half of which I still mostly remember, even). One a week. Suddenly I understood how somebody like McCartney was possible. Andy volleyed them gamely back with suggestions and harmonies and loads of his own newest songs and scraps. We recorded over whatever tapes we could scrounge, using the most appallingly jury-rigged substitutes for mic stands (suprisingly difficult things to improvise, and too expensive for us to buy), staying up til all hours. On my precious visits home, we would cram as much rehearsal as we could manage into a couple of days before I was gone again. In between, we'd still play some pool, but just as likely we'd play guitars at friends to be social. One of Andy's friends dubbed us "Skyler and Dunnfunkel," a quip that went over so well he spent the next two days recounting the story of how he had thought of it.
I don't know a tidy way to sum up that time. We both got to be a great deal better, of course; I have come to understand more consciously since then the value of having someone out there in the world who knows what you're working on and wants to hear as soon as you've made progress on it. We developed a laughable, but workable, shorthand for describing music to each other, maybe like the secret languages that grow between twins sometimes. We wrote some genuinely good work. We had some good experiences playing out. Not many, but more than we had bad ones. We found chords we couldn't remotely name and made up our own names for them. We did some inventive stuff, and we sounded pretty good sometimes.
I learned early on, before Andy, that there is one trick to singing and playing at the same time. You don't have to learn it over again for each individual song. Plain to anyone who's done it, but not particularly obvious on the face of it. Anyway it's true. Once you've got the trick you can pretty much apply it on the fly. And there's a similar trick to collaboration: the willingness to place your own work in someone else's hands without knowing the outcome, even the realization that this is what it means to collaborate, must be learned. Andy taught me that. Now it is a tool I have, to be applied to anything cooperative.
A lot of long hard work was done in those first three years, and I suppose I will always wonder what might have come of it if I hadn't been so far from home. As it was things took an unfortunate turn for me: I dried up. Badly. My output ground down to about a song every year. And Andy was taking off, writing more and better than ever, and vigorously playing out in all the venues he could hit. The longer my doldrums dragged on, the harder it was to try and go on with it. I can't say why I dried up; it might have been nothing more than my growing entanglements with my physically present life in Indiana.
In the end we decided, more or less by default and not exactly at any one time, that we weren't working together any more--which by that time was just recognizing a fait accompli.
It took a while to set in, but it was oddly hard to take when I realized what had happened there. It was as hard to deal with as any breakup had been, maybe harder; a greater pile of future plans was let go. It was the sort of thing that left my sense of identity a little loose in its socket for a while.
These days Andy is an established fixture in the local folk circuit, headed upward, and though I've had revivals from time to time, my songwriting has never become any central focus of mine again. We still don't often visit without guitars in hand, though. It's half of what our friendship has been built on.