Create a balance between narrative and reflection
It isn’t that I never got wasted, I mean, I was the bass player in the band.
But I just never did it like Kevin Merrymen. Merrymen was the front man for Harper’s Ferry Demolition, or HFD if you were local and knew the scene. I met him at a friend’s party when he was in college and I was newly graduated from music school. Boston is a place where you are always either in school, or just leaving it. For me, I’d grown up there, and then stayed to study guitar and eventually focus on bass.
Of course HFD wasn’t my first band. I had been playing since I was eleven with some talented people over the years. But when I met Merrymen, there was just something different about that guy. We’d just turned over into the new millennium and I had a feeling the world was about to get pretty big. I took meeting him as a sign. He’d been drinking that night, but we all had. Soon Peters got out his guitar and soon everyone was beating on anything that made an interesting sound. Suddenly Merrymen, un-rnic’d, started howling these lyrics overtop of the jam connecting with almost every corner of sound in that room and tying it together. I had never heard anything like it, before or since.
I suspect I wasn’t the only one either. Years later people still talked about that jam and how it had impacted their lives. If you’ve never had that kind of moment with music, you should really go about spending the rest of your life trying to replicate it. But one thing was definite: No one left the room that day without hoping that Kevin Merrymen would front a band.
Six months later Mike Nagel left the Fallovers and we started up Harper’s Ferry Demolition. Before we’d even penned our first song we were already booked at two bars in Jamaica Plain and one in Brookline. We brought in drums and had a five-person band. The music poured out of us. One year we were guaranteeing bars a sellout. But that was also when we started to lose the thread.
First the label came to a show. We had a warning, which might have been just the impetus for imploding that Merrymen needed. But I’ll never forget how my heart broke and my stomach twisted up in knots when he showed up on stage three hours late, puking in his hair, screaming out words over our music that shattered it into shards of unlistenable glass, bleeding out our eardrums. I woke up the next morning devastated.
When I confronted him, I had Nagel and Peters with me. Merrymen was snorting blows with our drummer and two half-naked girls who looked alarmingly young. He didn’t look like he had slept or bathed in days. He was covered in stink.
“Son,” I began, looking him dead on, “My folks are immigrants, my skin is brown, I ain’t got shots in life like you’ve got.”
His unfocused eyes wobbled around trying to land on my face.
I continued, “You are my one shot, man. You gotta aim for me, son. You gotta start up again.”
Merrymen didn’t respond. Two days later he showed up for rehearsal dry as a California riverbed. Two weeks later, he fell off the wagon.
Harper’s Ferry Demolition put out one album that made six “Best of 2000” lists, including one in a weekly publication in Paris, France. Even today, some people in the Boston music scene know exactly what it means when someone says, “Careful you don’t pull a Merrymen.” You better not fall apart, squander your talent, or ruin it for your band.
Because of the short-but-sweet success of HFD, I was able to play for many years in bands around the world. I loved that I have been able to spend so long living that dream. But I never loved music again the way I did when I was playing it with HFD. Over time, playing became more of a job and less of a passion. I realized then that the speech I had given my old friend Merrymen-wherever he is-that night after he threw away the label, had proved decidedly incorrect. Merrymen was never my one shot. I always was. I’m the one that has always had to aim for myself.
Starting up again is exactly what I plan to do with an education in law. I was already the first person to whom I am related by blood to graduate college and enjoy a steady career. Now, I am ready to go even better. Merrymen might have had the music, but I’ve got the gift.
JD MISSION REVIEW
Overall Lesson
Strike a balance between narration and reflection
First Impression
Although I like the easy tone and the sincere start, I think referencing one’s “getting wasted” in the first sentence is a bad idea. I also just do not think that doing so is needed after reading the second sentence. He could start with “Keven Merrymen was …” and achieve the same result. Overall, this essay reads like a decent first draft that could use some serious revision.
Strengths
The narrative here is strong; I want to keep reading to find out what happens to the band. Likewise, the thesis that the applicant’s opportunities for success do not depend on a single person or instance is a powerful idea, strong and universal enough to ground an essay. That said, he spends so much time telling the story of the band’s rise and fall that he misses an opportunity to elaborate on that theme in an effective way early enough in the essay.
Weaknesses
The story about the band is too long. It can be condensed to about two-thirds if not one-half the length and have the same effect. In particular, the parts where the narrator quotes himself are slightly jarring-the way he speaks to his bandmate is strikingly different from how he writes. This could be resolved by just describing his conversation with Merrymen rather than quoting himself.
By shortening the story, the applicant could devote more space to his self-discovery that he is powerful in his own right and more space linking that discovery to his interest in a legal career.
Also, the following paragraph is confusing, because I do not know who showed up with puke in his hair-the label or Merrymen?
First the label came to a show. We had a warning, which might have been just the impetus for imploding that Merrymen needed. But I’ll never forget how my heart broke and my stomach twisted up in knots when he showed up on stage three hours late, puking in his hair, screaming out words over our music that shattered it into shards of unlistenable glass, bleeding out our eardrums …
I eventually figure out that the writer is talking about Merrymen, but the way he has written it is unclear.
Finally, this essay has various misuses of vocabulary that are problematic in ways that Microsoft Word will not recognize. For example, “overtop” is a verb but not a preposition, which is how it has been used here. This illustrates the importance of having others proofread your work-the word “overtop” was not underlined in squiggly red by Microsoft, but that does not mean it was used correctly. Other problems here include that “replicate” is used incorrectly and “started up” should just be “started” or “founded.”
We cannot stress this enough: have someone else-with good grammar skills read your essay!
Final Assessment
The skeleton of a strong personal statement can be found here-a clear, compelling personal narrative, and an extraction of meaning from it that is relevant to a legal career. But as is, the narrative component is given way too much space, while the meaning component is given too little. A better balance must be found between narration and reflection. As is, I finish the essay wondering, “Does he really want to go to law school? Why does he not keep pursuing music?”
