My life has been different from a lot of guys in that I tend to despise spectator sports and Car & Driver Magazine. I don’t have a “man cave” and I don’t know if I can still use a ratcheting box wrench or a feeler gauge, and I don’t have any interesting scars. Instead I read books a lot, find myself at art shows, attempt to hold heady philosophical conversations – and I have this really picky aesthetic sense of art and the world around me, and I was only recently challenged to look back and determine who my influences were during my “artistic formative years,” which I believe happen to most of us between ages 11 and 19.
It may come as a surprise to most of you, but with only a few exceptions, everything for me somehow led back to Bob Dey.
For example, in the field of LITERATURE, I remember as a sixth or seventh grader, I had seen Bob reading a certain book series – so when I returned to school that following week, I found the same series in the school library and a whole new world of literature was opened to me. Later, I discovered Bob was reading a certain Robert Pirsig book, and likewise I found and read that book, which has influenced me to this day. And because of this reading, I found myself distancing myself from the crowd of surfer and swim team friends that I had in High School, and more sitting with the AP crowd and discussing the movies and books and artists that we had seen. In my adult life, I’ve been in a book club for years – and I currently read several books a month, and I can’t help but think that Bob was a chief influence on this aspect in my life and seeing out great, life-affirming literature.
Another example, in the field of MUSIC, I remember visiting Bob’s room and seeing him play his bass guitar with this huge performance amp. With the smell of sandalwood in the air, I would look through Bob’s stack of exotic albums and observed all the intriguing music posters on his walls. None of the bands I saw there represented the ones being played on AM radio, and this intrigued me. I started buying mostly albums from bands I had never heard of, in an attempt to emulate Bob whom, by this time, I of course idolized. To this day, I have the same mindset about music – taking the road less travelled when it comes to supporting unique and independent artists, and this way of thinking has never led me wrong. I again have Bob Dey to thank for this.
Bob helped me to realize that listening wasn’t enough – that everyone needed to have a musical outlet too – and write their own original songs, as he did on the guitar and piano. Seeing Bob with a guitar influenced me to buying my own secondhand guitar at age 14 – and then learning to play it – and then buying my first electric guitar and amp as well. Again, Bob was an influencer for me with this.
In the field of STORYTELLING, most of the Dey-Wade clan will remember Bob’s clever aptitude with spinning a yarn – and specifically with “The Legend of Lagunita” – and his suite of “Ornos” Stories. These stories, which Bob would relate, often at night, and often with a flashlight beam pointed straight up his face with a strange twisted scowl, would often unfold in a semi-disturbing almost H.P. Lovecraftian way – usually with a disturbing vocal presentation – only to resolve themselves in some suddenly deflated, filled-with-hot-air plot resolution. It was Bob the trickster at play here, basically saying “Don’t be such Scaredy Cats, guys! Sheesh!” And, to this day, I find myself still gripped with poets and storytellers such as Spaulding Gray, Mike Birbiglia, and The Moth Podcast, for example, and when I look back, I think that again, Bob Dey served as inspiration for me to seek out artists like that.
In the area of SENSE OF HUMOR, I remember BOB THE TRICKSTER leading me through culverts and into twisting and turning dark sewer pipes where he would eventually stick roman candles up through holes in the manhole covers in the center of Whittier Blvd while I would admire the genius of his awesome handywork, peeking out from a nearby drainage gutter, as cars honked and swerved around the plumages of fireworks. And although this influenced me, it led to my own failed ensemble of performance artist trickery back in San Diego
Bob found humor in the simple, by the way. Like the Anza Borrego camping trip where he asked me “How long can you stand it, Paul?” while he wrapped rubber bands one at a time on my nose, and then earlobes, and then tips of my ears until, whimpering, I could bear it no further. I also remember the time he shoved a M-80 firecracker into the fleshy center of an overripe peach and told me to go over and stand on the lawn while he lit the fuse and threw it, with a baseball fieldsman’s precision, far over my head.
“Look up, Paul,” he said. “It’s going to look really neat,” he said, smiling, before the explosion and the masses of pulp rained down on my head.
In the field of PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE, Bob had his own interests and goals. It wasn’t necessarily a college degree or a slick job that he was after, but instead I remember going with him to the arcade to see him attempt to try to top his own pinball records, which invariably displayed at the top of most of the machines at the Friendly Hills Lanes Bowling Center
I’m sorry, Bob, that I wasted so many of your quarters.
Another example of Bob’s influence on me was in the field of ART. I remember Bob teaching me how to draw with Pastels on a camping trip – to sketch first with charcoal on good paper, then pick coordinating colors, apply the colors, and then carefully smudge the pastel applications with my thumb. His technique inspired me, and I remember returning home and asking for a set of pastels so that I could yet again emulate Bob. At home though, left to my own devices with the pastels, nothing seemed to work the same way. My dragons looked like mangy listless lizards . . . and my castles looked foreclosed. Without Bob’s gentle guidance, I was adrift. I later took oil-painting lessons, but I never could fully recreate the magic I felt about art as those days that I sat with Bob under the pines at the picnic table in our campsite with his charcoal and pastels . . . and good drawing paper.
In the field of PHILOSOPHY, I remember following Bob into the sagebrush for quite a ways across the Anza Borrego desert, our shoes crunching through the gravelly sand. The air was still cool in the morning . . . and I saw him sit on the ground and fold his legs and relax his arms and shut his eyes, quietly breathing. I had not been exposed to any forms of philosophy outside our Church, and so the idea of meditation intrigued me. I sat for a while, and tried to do the same – and I found it was very difficult to quiet my mind. The epiphany for me was that I wasn’t necessarily in control of my own mind and the thoughts that entered into it. Bob saw the value in this. Something about watching Bob go through the process of exploring other philosophies inspired me to do the same. I started reading books on world religions, and what I saw there made me realize that I wasn’t necessarily right and everybody else was wrong. That maybe I didn’t know what the right path was, but the important thing was to be a SEEKER. Bob seemed to me, during those years, to be a SEEKER. I and believe that is how I became a SEEKER too. I appreciate Bob Dey for inspiring in this area of my life a well.
Coming from my own family with a fair amount of drama – I saw Bob as a sort of DIPLOMACIST. Maybe I was seeing another side of Bob than other people saw, but the Bob that I observed at family gatherings wanted people to get along. Bob loved to smile. Not a shy, closed-mouth smile – but a full-face broad, toothy smile that was instantly charming and mesmerizing to me. He’d walk up, and say something sweet and gentle, and put his arm around my shoulder, and give my neck and shoulder a squeeze. And just stand there next to me, with the physical contact, like we were best buds, smiling out onto the world – as if we were posing for a photo when there was no camera present.
The Bob that I observed wanted to make people feel good – and wanted us all to get along peacefully. Bob calmed me. Bob inspired me in this way.
Many of you will remember BOB THE OUTDOORSMAN. I remember seeing him in his flannel shirts, adept a pitching a tent, and tending a fire, and all things related to camping. I remember looking at his strong arms, with the veins running along them and, being a pudgy athletically-challenged pre-teen, I remember thinking how strong he must be. I remember Bob was so inspired by the majesty of the Sierras. At the end of a weeklong camping trip along Bishop Creek in about 1973, while our parents were packing up the gear back at the campsites, we walked down and carved our names with penknives on an Aspen tree near the rushing creek. I asked Bob when we could go camping again. He said “next summer, for sure” – and I remember being crestfallen to think that I would have to wait a whole year to go camping with Bob again.
For, to me, one year seemed an eternity to be away from Bob Dey.
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