THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

Conversation with Fred Gall’s Mom:

Freddy got his first skateboard on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. He won one of those real cheesy boards. Freddy was playing one of those big spin wheel games and he won, but it was one of those games where you could win really big prizes. They had washing machines, TVs, and things like that, but all Freddy wanted was the skateboard. So what were we supposed to do? He wanted the skateboard so we got him the skateboard even though we could have gotten all these expensive prizes. But he took that cheesy skateboard and that’s all he cared about and he did really good with it. So next Christmas, I got him his first real professional skateboard, a Lance Mountain. I can’t remember what kind of wheels or trucks we got him but that doesn’t matter. Freddy loved that Lance Mountain.

“Tracker Trucks called, all the way from California they heard about Freddy, the little guy with the big moves, and they wanted to come see him.”

After that I would take him every weekend to the contests under the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember the fourth time we went there Freddy put his skateboard down and charged the bank. At that time Freddy was just a little kid. He put the board down and rushed right toward the bank and over into the street in the middle of traffic, like a mad man. I almost had a heart attack.

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THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

Okay, so I moved to New York City when I was eighteen having grown up and spent my real formative years in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I started my life in San Francisco, California and spent my first four years in the Los Angeles area. When I was seventeen I managed to graduate high school. I got out a year early and used the year between seventeen and eighteen to plan and fantasize and get the dream together that I could take with me to New York City. By the time I moved to New York I set up some jobs, internships, and some other opportunities. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, maybe I thought I would go to college. Within those few months all my plans and my sort of initial infrastructure I tried to lay out for myself fell through or I quit at basically.

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I was singing that and the Bill Gates looking guy said, “and I think it’s going to be a long long time till you ever play in this venue… get the fuck out!” He was serious and that’s when the tears welled up in my eyes and I lost it.

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Out of all the things I thought I was really going to enjoy I didn’t enjoy them as much as I hoped, which included working at an avant- garde fashion company, working at an art gallery and trying to get an internship at an art magazine. So in one hand I was a bit disillusioned and disappointed that when I was growing up back in Michigan all these opportunities of this sort that New York had to offer seemed so thrilling. I then realized that it wasn’t going to be my New York experience and my experience wasn’t necessarily going to come from these particular opportunities. It was going to come from my attitude and what I can do personally in the city, not what anyone else can do for me.

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So at that point I was still looking for some other job. One day I was reading the Village Voice newspaper and looked through the classified ads, this was before the Internet had really caught on so this was like ‘97 or ‘98, and there was always music jobs – drummers wanted, band members wanted and then occasionally something else that was more your day-to-day job that you could really rely on for the long term. I had grown up playing piano my whole life and felt pretty confident as a piano player. One day I saw an ad that said keyboard player needed for nightly performance at one of New York’s greatest clubs and it was like $1,500 a week and I was blown away. It might not actually have been $1,500, it might have been $500 a week but whatever it was it was more money than I ever even had. So I said I can play keyboard, I can learn any song they want me to learn, this will be great. I would get to play with the house band in a bar, it sounds amazing. For some reason I just seemed like a no brainer. I felt very relaxed about this whole idea and could really picture myself doing it, so I called up the club and there was a very nice woman that answered the phone and I told her I saw the ad and that I would like to come and see about the job. She said okay and that I could come down anytime and meet with the owner. He was going to be there that night if I would you like to come by. I said sure. This was good. This is momentum, this is the right kind of inertia and perhaps this is all meant to be.

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THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.
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