Music that inspires: Rocketboy saves the day!

Last Thurs­day i went to The Way­post in N. Port­land to sup­port my friends who were giv­ing a poetry read­ing there.  That was, of course, great!  The rea­son for this post though is not to hype my friends, or their lit­er­ary jour­nals, or their recently pub­lished chap­books, but to tell you about Road Race.  I’d never heard of Road Race prior to that night, but i will sooner for­get my PIN # than for­get this guy’s per­for­mance that night.

And by “guy” of course, i mean 9 year old autis­tic kid with a key­board and a mic.  He’s been record­ing music since he was 2 years old!  And has amassed THOUSANDS of albums worth of mate­r­ial, includ­ing hand-drawn cover art.

This kid had been hang­ing around the café all night dur­ing the read­ings, run­ning to and from the bath­room roughly 13 times (alty­hough i assure the reader, i was not keep­ing track!).  Neat, i thought, that a par­ent would expose their kid to this degree of cul­ture.  Even though some of the read­ings danced through the realm of “adult themes”, explor­ing in depth the nature of butt holes, and so forth.  Then at some point, he gets up in front of every­one and i real­ize that this is the musi­cal per­for­mance for the evening.

He tweaks some but­tons on his syn­the­sizer.  Gra­ciously thanks the audi­ence for their pres­ence, like a polite stage per­former.  And then begins tap­ping out a bass line.  Sim­ple.  But with a crafted tone.  Then the beat kicks in.  From then on the audi­ence and myself were rapt.  Thump­ing new wave and techno with dri­ving bass and rep­e­ti­tious melodies.  The kid could’ve backed New Order, or The Cure.  Or so i thought, until he started singing.  Beau­ti­fully opti­mistic and empow­er­ing lyrics of goods tri­umph over evil-doers.  I mean, what else is a 9 year old going to write about?

Not that i have ANY right to share this mate­r­ial with you all but here is a Road Race track off of a sam­pler CD (yes, he’s on a record label, North Pole Records in PDX) as well as a hor­ri­ble qual­ity video that i shot using my dig­i­tal camera.

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