Cullen

I don’t know what it is about Lost Nation, Iowa, but three of the greatest people I have ever met (as well as the biggest nuisance I have encountered since high school) are all from that same little town. Eric, Cullen and Phil grew up together as best friends who all loved The Red Hot Chili Peppers so much that they each learned a separate instrument so they could form a band. Despite their closeness, they are all very different and distinct individuals, and somehow I ended up hanging out with each separately during three different times in my life.

Once, when Phil had gone away to an instrument repair college in Minnesota, we decided to try having me replace him as the drummer for Soothing Syrup. I took a quazi-kit made up of a floor tom, snare and hi-hats into Cullen’s dorm room and struggled through a miserable experience trying to mesh with Eric and Cullen. It didn’t work at all. Years later, when Damon and I were seeking a bass player for our new project, Cullen tried to play with us with equally disastrous results.

While our musical tastes and abilities were incompatible, Cullen introduced me to some surprisingly fun recreational activities, such as perusing car dealerships after hours, extreme snow surfing in his Caprice, breaking into the art building, constantly taking random photographs and spying on people. But the single most important thing I learned from Cullen was the concept of tone.

One day I went with him to a showing of student and staff artwork at our University. Looking at a painting, Cullen exclaimed, “How did she make that red?” This caught me off-guard. What did he mean, “make red.” Don’t you just buy red at the paint store, dip a brush on it and apply it to the canvas? Then I looked at the red, and began comparing it to every red in the exhibit, and found every red to be different. I also contemplated how one would make that red; mentally visualizing the color wheel and trying to dissect what colors could have been combined. I considered how that red was being influenced by its surroundings, and vice-versa.

Tone: what a concept! From that day on, I began considering the tone in all things; visually, audibly and orally. When I worked at a recording studio a few years later, my sense of audible tones became highly developed. I tried to learn the tone of every component of a sound, even hearing the influence of different microphone cables.

As far as I can tell, there are four kinds of people: those who idly let life pass them by, those who wonder what it’s all about, those who try to make something of it and those who are aware of tone. Admittedly, that’s an egregious oversimplification that actually only echoes my own progression through life, but that’s possibly all I’ve learned thus far....

Thank you, Cullen, for giving me the world.