Narrative story for class –
“I don’t like staying put,” says Tyler Rigdon. “I’m an asshole and a perfectionist. It’s a curse.” I met a nomad two weeks ago. He’s so young.
The 21-year-old sips on a pint of Blue Moon at The Silhouette Lounge in Allston, the latest of his go-to bars around the globe. He’s had them in Liverpool, England, and in Flint, Michigan. He’s not here for long, though. He’s moving to New York in January.
“I usually get depressed,” he says. “What if I run out of things to do? It’s an irrational fear.”
Rigdon isn’t like other millennials. He never went to college. “Why waste money and time when I know music is what I want to do?”
He plays guitar, electric piano, sings and writes lyrics. He released a three-song rock & roll and jazz EP in October.
After graduating high school, he moved to Flint, and then to Liverpool, where he lived for six months. He’s staked out a new temporary home in Boston for the past month, but he’ll be gone before you even notice he was here.
“I’m searching, but I’m not sure what for. It’s a drug. Every time I go to a new city I get to create myself over and over again and it’s a high.” He’s never tried heroin, but compares the feeling. “Every time you shoot up, it feels great. Well, once that high runs off I ask myself what’s the next coolest place I can go?”
He’s afraid that he’ll run out of time. His family doesn’t have a history of dying young, but he just feels there is too much to see and experience. He doesn’t want to miss out. “Why is the West coast so much different than the East coast? You don’t know it until you experience it.”
Like a bird heading south for the winter, Rigdon is always looking for his new home. But he doesn’t travel to find warm weather or live in lavish apartments. In fact, he lives somewhat in squalor. In Liverpool, he and 10 others shared a room in a hostel. One night there was a fire, which destroyed some of the rooms. For the next month and a half, his new bed was the hardwood floor in a laundry room. Here in Boston, he’s staying on a friend’s couch whom met at a show in Maryland, Tom Wyatt.
One of the reasons he travels is to influence his music. “Meeting new people gives me inspiration in writing music,” he says. “I have this epiphany about myself when I meet new types of people and I can use it in my lyrics. … It was very crammed in the hostel. A lack of personal space; no privacy. But at the same time it was a very positive experience and I was meeting new people every day.”
He says he doesn’t become good friends with people he meets along the road; he just enjoys talking to them, hearing their stories and taking it all in. Just two weeks ago after an open mic in Cambridge, he struck up a conversation with a 60-year-old guitarist, Zeke, who played lyrics that Rigdon enjoyed. They found they had more than one thing in common: for the past forty-five years, Zeke has been traveling around the country, staying with either friends or in hostels, playing at music venues and taking up various jobs. So, too, has Rigdon. And Zeke is from Ann Arbor, Michigan, one hour south of where Rigdon grew up in Swartz Creek. “He seemed really happy,” said Rigdon. “It gave me this light. It made me feel that all this wandering could definitely pay off at one point.”
Rigdon’s first paid gig was at Flint Local 432 with his first band, the Teaheads. He played two shows a month, each about half an hour long, for two years. They toured parts of the country several times, traveling to Columbus, Memphis, and New York City.
He plays a few shows every week now, making about $100 per week. He has hopes of signing with a record label and either performing or producing albums.
Another music dream of his is to play “Return of the Grievous Angel” with Emmylou Harris, the 70-year-old, 13-time Grammy winner whose plaque sits in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. If Rigdon never signs or gets the opportunity to play with Harris, he’ll continue to pursue his passion. Somewhere, somehow. “I have to do this,” he says. “It’s the only thing I’m good at.”
He tried working as a mechanic for his grandfather, but didn’t understand cars. He had a brief stint as a line cook at Soggy Bottom Bar in Flint, but according to multiple employees and customers, he wasn’t very good at that either. His manager knew his skills could better be applied elsewhere. The dismissal came on mutual terms. And then of course there was the job as an office administrator. That didn’t work out because he dreaded office life. He laughs recalling the experience. “I’m never doing that again.”
The only other thing he could see himself doing for a living is broadcasting baseball. Growing up in Michigan, he used to watch Tigers games with his dad and two younger brothers and idolized Tigers ace pitcher Justin Verlander. Rigdon was a star pitcher in high school, but never good enough to pursue the game professionally. Instead, he chose a dream of seeing his signature on a record label, instead of with a major league baseball team.
“Worst case scenario is I make money working dive bars until I die,” he says. “I want to play music so I can say ‘I’m good at what I do.’”
Rigdon isn’t with the Teaheads anymore. They broke up two years ago because Rigdon wanted to play jazz, while the rest of the band didn’t. He had grown tired of the punk rock style they’d been performing since the band formed in 2012.
He went to Rooftop Recording, the studio in Flint where they recorded their album, and told the owner, David Roof, that he no longer wanted to play with teenagers. His band members were ripping too many solos, doing too many drugs and getting too drunk. For Rigdon, it’s not about the rockstar lifestyle. It’s about the music.
Roof was friends with a handful of middle-aged men, and he recommended them to Rigdon in the hopes of helping him capture that new sound. Rigdon played shows with them in the Flint area, but they never toured. Most of them, like Donn Deniston, a drummer, have a wife and kids. They played live shows and their songs are featured on Rigdon’s latest EP.
He prefers these older musicians to those closer to his age, anyway. “They are seasoned musicians,” he says. “When you have an older guy who knows it’s not about him but it’s about the band, the music is going to sound a lot better.”
It’s a narrative that Rigdon is all too familiar with: move somewhere new, meet people, record songs with them, and add the songs to his EP. It’s why he chose to call his latest EP Tyler Rigdon and The Second Arrangement. He writes the lyrics, directs the music, and tells each musician what to play. He controls the direction of the band, like he’s shaking off a fastball command of his catcher. The EP consists of a variety of people he’s met at his different stops.
Sometimes his musical partners come from the most unlikely of places. In Liverpool, Rigdon met a future band member working as a doorman. They played at Blue Angel nightclub. This was after Rigdon quit his janitor job at a liposuction clinic after finding out his boss sold crack.
Only one member of the Teaheads still remains in Rigdon’s inner circle. It’s the bassist Nick Barber, who is featured on the latest EP. Though Barber is four years younger than Rigdon, the two have a musical connection that is hard to match. Nick plays the exact way Rigdon writes for him. “We know each other perfectly. We just have a sense of what the other is going to play before the other plays it.”
In Rigdon’s world, everyone is a free agent and there are no contracts. “I won’t settle,” he says. Kind of like how he lives his own life, moving from city to city, never staking too much of a claim. His band partners may have gone, and he may not stay in cities long enough to form lasting relationships, but he has the one partner he’ll ever need: his music.
