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| A BOND HEALED BY ROCK-AND-ROLL By Joe Volz Special to The Washington Post Monday, July 1, 2002; Page C10 [The following piece was written for the Washingon Post by Joe Volz, father of Flaw front man Chris Volz. We are grateful to him for sharing it with us and allowing us to post it here for you to read.] Within a decade, sunny years in the 1970s turned into a family tragedy. My despondent wife, Helga, killed herself, and my son, Chris, plunged into years of drinking and drugging, dropping out of high school and spending almost two years in rehab programs. Despair was our most frequent visitor before I moved from Bowie to the District and Chris moved to Louisville. How things have changed. Hope is alive again. Oh, there is nothing we can do to bring Helga back. But Chris, 28, is now a budding rock singer and lyricist whose band, Flaw, has sold 150,000 copies of its album on the Universal label, "Through the Eyes." The group has just returned from a three-week European tour; on Saturday it will be performing at Nissan Pavilion as part of Ozzy Osbourne's Ozzfest. I take no credit for Chris's climb out of despair. In fact, I owe him an apology. I suspect I am not alone among those of my generation who were born in the Depression and grew up in the years just after World War II disdaining rock. I had no patience with Bo Diddley and Little Richard and Bill Haley. They were blue-collar wretches who appealed to the humble rabble, not to real music lovers like me. I was not sympathetic when Chris began his hard-rock career a decade ago. All that music manufactured in a Bowie garage was, in my eyes, a crashing bore. Chris doesn't insist, though, that I like his music. He is not looking for a convert. He once told me that either he was going to end up being a clerk at 7-Eleven for the rest of his life or he would make it in music. There was no in-between. He struggled in jobs at a gas station and a sporting goods store. He worked briefly at restaurants in Ocean City and Charlottesville, but wherever he went, he soon got bored and belligerent. Yet the music was always there. His mom had a fine singing voice. She loved classical music and sang in a choir in Crofton. Chris picked up his first musical instrument, a recorder, while a grade school student at the Key School in Annapolis. The one course he loved in his year at Bowie High was guitar. Six years ago, he answered an ad for a singer in Louisville. The band caught on and produced its own album, "American Arrogance," managing to sell 1,000 copies. That won the attention of Universal executives. If these kids could, with minimal recording or marketing skills, do so well, what would happen if one of the world's largest music companies put a lot of money into the project? I must confess, again, that I knew little about his music, except that it seemed to be a constant screech of angry songs about abandonment and disappointment with a bare minimum of optimism. Looking back, I realize I was a musical snob. If only I had taken time to read the lyrics, I would have discovered some insights into not only Chris's life but the lives of a million other Generation Xers out there. Chris has been writing his autobiography in his lyrics. And he has, literally, struck a chord. One song, "Whole," remembers Helga. It rips me apart to hear him sing it: "Then you came right in tearing out my soul / How could all this loss be your only goal / I am left standing here desperate in the cold." The interviewers at the rock stations repeatedly ask Chris about how Helga's suicide has affected him. It's the infamous question of sound-bite broadcasting: "How does it feel?" Chris tells me his stomach is tied into knots after a day of those interviews. But he realizes that horrible event has helped shape his music for the better. We have been through some tough times, Chris and I. There were times we were hardly talking as he did things I disliked, and he insisted that I was too rigid, too demanding. That I wanted him to be like I am. The competition with Dad was too overwhelming. Now we are closer than ever. The music has brought us together. Not that I expect Chris will play my music anytime soon, or that I will tune out WGMS for large doses of DC-101. I am so proud of what he has become. He did it his way, not mine. © 2002 The Washington Post Company |