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into
    the crucible of a gig, to see if it sank, floated, or maybe even flew. In junior high school I played in bands with friends, covering popular songs, but at
    some point, maybe after a rival’s friend pulled the plug on us at a battle of the bands, I contemplated playing solo.
    After some time rethinking things and learning more songs written by oth-
    ers in my bedroom, I began to frequent the coffee house at the local university DAV I D BY R N E | 31
    and realized that the folk scene represented there was insular and needed
    refreshing. Well, at least that’s how it looked to me. This was the late sixties, and I was still in high school, but anyone could see and hear that the purism of folk was being blown away by the need of rock, soul, and pop to absorb everything in their path. The folk scene was low energy too, as if the confessional mode and folk’s inherent sincerity was somehow enervating in and of itself.
    That couldn’t be good!
    I decided to perform rock songs by my favorites at the time—the Who,
    Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the Kinks—on acoustic guitar, believing that some of those songs were written with as much integrity as the folkier stuff people in the café more often heard, and that they might therefore find a receptive audience. I seem to recall that it worked; they had somehow never heard these songs! All I’d done was move the songs to a new context. Because I performed them more energetically than the standard folk artist might present
    his own material, people listened, or maybe they were just stunned at the
    audacity of a precocious teenager. I played Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran on ukulele, shifting the context of those songs even further afield. I might have even risked scratching some dirges on a violin I’d inherited. It was an oddball mishmash, but it wasn’t boring.
    I was incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years, so one
    might ask (and people did) what in the world a withdrawn introvert was doing making a spectacle of himself on stage. (I didn’t ask myself such questions at the time.) In retrospect, I guess that like many others, I decided that making my art in public (even if that meant playing people’s songs at that point) was a way of reaching out and communicating when ordinary chitchat was not
    comfortable for me. It seemed not only a way to “speak” in another language, but also a means of entry into conversation—other musicians and even girls
    (!) would talk to someone who had just been on stage.
    Performing must have seemed like my only option. There was also the
    remote possibility that I would briefly be the hero and reap some social and personal rewards in other areas beyond mere communication, though I doubt
    I would have admitted that to myself. Poor Susan Boyle; I can identify. Despite all this, Desperate Dave did not have ambitions to be a professional musician—that seemed wholly unrealistic.
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    Years later I diagnosed myself as having a very mild (I think) form of
    Asperger’s syndrome. Leaping up in public to do something wildly
    expressive and then quickly retreating back into my shell seemed, well, sort of normal to me. Maybe normal is the wrong word, but it worked. A study in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 1994 by Felix Post claimed that 69 percent of the creative individuals he’d studied had mental disorders.1 That’s a lot of nutters! This, of course, plays right into the myth of the fucked-up artist driven by demons, and I would hope very much that the converse of that
    myth isn’t true—that one does not have to be nuts to be creative. Maybe some problem of some sort can at least get the ball in play. But I have come to believe that you can escape your demons and still tap the well.
    When I was at art school in the early seventies, I began to perform with a
    classmate, Mark Kehoe, who played accordion. I dropped the acoustic guitar
    and focused on the ukulele and my hand-me-down violin, which now