Bobby Rock

The Bobby Rock Newsletter #91 (1-2-23) - Another Run Around the Sun

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My friends -

Thanks once again for joining me here. It is Saturday, early AM, on the last day of 2022 as I sit down to begin assembly on Newsletter #91. (Although it will be Monday 1-2-23 by the time we push the send button! Monster travel day yesterday.) Let’s dive right into it:

• In This Moment: The last day of the year merged into the first, with a killer end-of-year show thrown into the mix along the way…
  
  
• A Post-Big-Announcement Reflection: I’ve had some great feedback since last week’s impending fatherhood announcement, and here’s a bit of reflection in the aftermath.
  
  
• Let’s get 2023 Jumpin’!: A touch of wisdom and inspiration for the New Year...

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In This Moment: Last Day/First Day ’22/‘23

With a couple of slower touring months ahead of us here, I figured I would take you guys behind the scenes one more time before the break. Here’s how it all played out on the road this weekend, starting early Saturday morning, 12-31-22...

4:00 AM journaling routine, 

with the day’s first meditation session up next

As has often been the case this year, I find myself in another hotel room, on the road with Lita Ford and the gang, looking forward to another show tonight—this one, an unusual New Year's Eve “extravaganza” here in a Cincinnati suburb. I say unusual because it’s taking place at an uncharacteristically small venue for us: a sold-out 200-seater with, as we understand it, classic rock bar charm. But, we are all looking forward to it. This show should remind of us of our roots… of so many of the clubs and bars we’ve all played on New Year’s Eve back in the old days. Fun, fun, fun… and, at least in theory, a refreshing change to have our audience so up-close-and-personal around us.

But first, I anticipate a big training/prep/practice day today, starting with a trip to the hotel weight room, post-haste!

5:30 AM: Light cardio to warm-up, weights, and then some stretching.

A bit later in the afternoon, we headed over to soundcheck. The club was everything we hoped it would be! Charmingly raw and authentic, with a surprisingly killer sound system. Life is good!

Drummer’s perspective

With an 11:00 PM start time, the show was a blast, with a rowdy and raucous energy in the room. Here’s a front shot from during the drum solo… with the “drumming-blind towel trick” in full effect:

As it turned out, my solo started around 11:54 PM. How do I know? Because I was watching the clock like a hawk! I knew we would have to be done with solo and song by midnight for the countdown to the new year. I managed to time things out pretty well, with a 30-second buffer from the time we ended the song, until Lita counted everyone down into the New Year. 

After the set, I was soaking wet, as usual, but had to step shirtless into the cold night air, en route to the tour bus, which was our backstage area for the evening. Immediately, steam started rising thick off my skin! It was trippy. Photos and vids were taken to document this phenomenon:

This is not an "effects" app!

Click HERE to see the "Steam" vid.

It looks like some kind of swamp creature special effects-type shit. But really, it’s just science!

Back at the hotel, at 3:00 AM, I stepped out for an after-show run. There were barely any sidewalks around the joint, so I had to get creative about running safely near these streets on New Year’s Eve. ("Drunk motherfucker alert!”) But it all worked out. Got in a refreshing 6-miler.

Click HERE to see the "Running" vid.

And I’ll tell ya, I suppose I could’ve easily justified skipping the run, having some dinner back at the hotel, then going to bed with a full belly. This was basically already a 24-hour day, plus a celebratory occasion, at that. But that would’ve been the “ordinary” choice... the comfortable move. Instead, I figured that making the “extraordinary” choice of stepping back out into the cold and knocking out those 6 miles on little sleep, would set the tone for 2023 a bit better. And yes, it was tough. It was only 39 degrees, but it was a biting cold. Plus, I'd let myself get a bit dehydrated, and my legs felt like concrete for the first two miles. But as usual, things loosened up, and it turned out to be an invigorating experience. (Again, I’ve never taken a run or workout that I've ever regretted!) And then, after a shower, I went to bed hungry—both literally and figuratively. It was a great day.

And now, on Sunday, 1-1-23, a bunch of us wound up in a cool, private area of the Delta Lounge at a layover in Minneapolis. (You know you travel a lot when…)

Clockwise from behind me: Patrick, Jesse, Jarod, Marten, and Debi. 

Next stop: Fatherhood! 

Which leads us to...

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A Post-Big-Announcement Reflection

Last week, I made my long-awaited special announcement about my impending fatherhood. As mentioned, my girl, Kari, and I are expecting our little man a bit later in January, although he’s so big and active now, we wouldn’t be surprised if he makes an early entrance. 

In the four years we’ve been together, Kari and I have been exceedingly private about our relationship, with no public mentions about it until several months ago after our infamously magical trip to Italy. Nonetheless, we knew a social post about the pregnancy would be inevitable, so I mentioned it last week in this Newsletter, and then we followed up with social posts a day or two later. (But you heard it here first!)

Although I’m not much of a social media person, and I rarely (if ever) read comments on shit I post (which is another conversation), my girl encouraged me to read the growing collection of comments in our respective feeds. I did. And damn, was it ever a beautiful thing to behold! Just… an explosion of positive vibes, well-wishes, and just a glowing, pure-white energy of love that can only be associated with a baby, I suppose. (And special thanks to all of you, by the way, who sent me those beautiful email responses to the actual Newsletter! Much appreciated, always...)

And that's what really occurred to me. Although I never thought I would be a parent in this lifetime and, therefore, never had much interest in the world of baby-dom, there seems to be a universal energy amongst humans regarding the purity of a new “tribe member.” There’s something truly Hopeful (with a capital “H”) about the clean-slate nature of a new human and all that’s possible at the earliest stages of life: before said human gets submerged in the matrix of humanity and all of its fascinating, but essential, ugliness. And yes, I said essential ugliness. Let’s not forget that's part of it. 

As I often say around here, if mind/body/spirit evolution is the name of the game, we must agree to enter a shitshow of chaos here on earth because, just like our most prized jewels (diamonds and pearls), our true beauty and magnificence can only be called forth via the highly-pressurized resistance by which they/we are subjected. And this, I am now imagining, must be part of what makes parenting so challenging. We don't want our kids to suffer or struggle… but we do want them to evolve and thrive. And yet, a human cannot fully evolve and thrive unless they endure a fair amount of struggle and suffering. (It's that ol' Hero's Journey thing...) Fuuuuuuck!

Of course, I can only speculate and hypothesize at this point. But I’ll tell you this. I—that is, we—will figure it out the best we can. I got lucky having two exceptional parents. And I not only have the benefit of their influence on the kind of parent I might be, but I also have nearly forty years of life experience on them when they began their parenting journey with my sister at age 20! And I also have an incredible partner with whom to figure this shit out. Our little guy is pretty lucky, it should seem. 

To my non-parent Newsletter readers, don’t worry: I promise not to wear you guys out with all of this talk about parenting and babies in every issue moving forward. At the same time, I can already see how the worldview by which we evaluate… well, almost everything, is affected by the “parent filter.” And I can already see this clearly, even before this little fucker is here! It’s remarkable. 

More on this as we go...

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Wisdom and Inspiration for the New Year

I just checked out our “New Year's” Newsletter from last year to see what we covered. It’s actually pretty good. If you’re looking for a few timeless tidbits on New Year’s resolutions, it’s a decent jumping-off point. Scope it HERE.

For this year, I wanted to lay one key nugget on you that I’ve been thinking a lot about leading up to 2023. (I'll paraphrase the central concept below, but I believe I heard it first from author/coach Brian Cane in his book, One Percent Better, although I believe he attributed it to someone else, FYI.)

Seems to me that New Year’s Resolutions are often based around revisiting things that have been important to us in the past, but that we have not quite yet been able to master. Of course, we all likely have more than one such thing that falls into this category, including that “big one” that we’ve never been able to quite get our arms around.

Think of that one for a second. If it’s been lingering around through multiple years, you might be thinking that you simply don’t have the ability to do it, or at least sustain it. But consider this.

Maybe it’s less about your inherent ability to do it, and more about the ineffective strategy by which you’ve attempted to do it in the past. There’s a big difference there.

A quick illustration:

Some years back when I had a full teaching practice, I met with a student who came to me for one primary reason: he wanted lighting-fast hands. However, although he had labored for hours and hours over a number of years, he said he was terminally stuck at a certain plateau. 

“I just don’t appear to have the ability to play this really fast solo stuff,” he assured me during our first lesson together. “My hands feel like stone."

“Well, let’s look under the hood and see what’s going on,” I said.

I set him up in front of a practice pad and had him play a few basic sticking patterns at a few different speeds. Within sixty seconds, I knew his issue was not about inherent ability, but rather, strategy (or approach).

A big part of playing super fast is in the strategy and practice of utilizing the physics of the stick’s momentum, via the relaxed but highly-calibrated inertia generated by the wrists and fingers. In other words, you want the sticks to do most of the work and, as counter-intuitive as this might sound, this can’t happen with much efficiency if you’re trying to muscle them into moving faster. And that’s exactly what this kid was trying to do. Hell, even his upper arms and shoulders were tightening-up as he tried to increase speed on a single-stroke roll. 

“Bro, you’re working way too hard right now,” I told him. “And you’re choking the blood out of those sticks! Let’s 'Bruce Lee' this motherfucker and get some relaxed intensity going on here.”

And then I showed him some simple exercises where he could get more bang for the buck out of his strokes and actually reach higher speeds with less effort. Literally, minutes later, he was already starting to play more relaxed and fluidly, and we could already glimpse an increase in speed, thus proving that it wasn’t an issue of inherent ability to play fast. He was just employing more of a “smash ‘em, bash ‘em” approach, which is better served when playing hard-hitting rock grooves, but not for super-fast chopsy stuff. 

In the months ahead that we worked together, he made tremendous progress in technique and ability. Truth is, this could not have happened had he not had a fundamental paradigm shift in his approach (strategy). And such is the case for so many other things.

If, for example, you’ve struggled to maintain an exercise program, see what kind of training strategy you’ve always defaulted to. For many people, this has meant a return to the gym because, well, that’s where you go if you want to work out. But not everyone thrives in that environment. Perhaps your strategy would be shorter sessions, more often, from some kind of home workout situation.

Or what about that book you’ve been wanting to write, and all of those New Years' resolutions that this year would finally be the year? What has your strategy been to write it? To sit down several times a week for these two-or-three hour writing sessions? (Good luck with that!) How about 15 minutes a day, five days a week to start? This strategy of shorter sessions is easier to manage out of the gate. And it’s way easier to expand on an existing habit (15 mins a day) than it is to start a new habit that will require a herculean effort to perform with any consistency (marathon writing sessions).

Journal Exercise

Okay, if you’re so inclined to make the most out of this contemplation, here’s the simple ask: For any resolution that has haunted you through the years, ask yourself this: 

What is an entirely different strategy I could implement to
break through this point of resistance that keeps popping up?

Come up with a bunch of them, brainstorming-style, and see which one jumps out at you as most actionable and, quite possibly, most different from what you’ve been doing. (Sometimes we have to go 180 degrees from our norm to get the result!)

Your solution awaits…

Happy New Year!

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Thanks again, everybody. Connect next week!

Until then,

BR

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