When everything you thought you knew was a lie.

An excerpt from my upcoming Substack book on my recent journey into the heart of darkness and back.

Because of the unusual circumstances of my early years, I’m perpetually aware of what lies beneath the veneer of propriety and civility in the world. There’s a price to be paid for this, and it’s everywhere, every day. When I watch a movie, for instance, the illusion of real life is rarely there. Instead of characters engaged in dramatic dialogue, I see actors reciting lines they memorized in a trailer somewhere on a studio lot. I am aware of the sets, props, lighting, sound, and veritable army of IATSE union workers just out of the frame of the shot. When I go to a concert, I hear the compression on the vocals and comb filtering as I move through the venue.

The veneer of decorum cloaking most human endeavors has been transparent to me since I was very young. Without the illusion of truth, commitment, security, or some higher power to set everything right, a void forms where they should be in the middle of your soul. It becomes a heart of darkness. That’s the price of awareness that most days I wish I did not have.

Filling that void becomes your life’s work. I’ve attempted to fill it with adventure, danger, and things that are dauntingly difficult. I’ve attempted to fill it with music, writing, physics, math, motorcycles, and bicycles. I’ve attempted to fill it by tilting at windmills. The thing that worked the best were my children. When I’m with them, the heart of darkness seems very distant. They are the one pure and true joy in my life.

Besides children, high effort, and adventure, I attempted to fill the void mostly with good things, but not always. Drugs and alcohol, fortunately, were never attractive to me. Instead of those, I sometimes attempted to fill my void with broken souls. Kindred spirits. But years of bitter experience taught me that people may be, in fact, the worst for this. The one constant among most adult human beings, even the ones that are completely put together, is their nearly endless capacity to disappoint you over even the easy stuff.

So, despite a large body of work, the heart of darkness remains the one constant thing in my life. It’s always down there, throbbing softly deep down like a second heartbeat. The only good thing it does is make clear to me who I am. I never have any trouble understanding what I see when I look in the mirror. It’s not always great, but I know what it is.

Though people are often disappointing, often is not the same as always. I have had some of the greatest friends imaginable. Friends who lit up darkness like Fourth of July fireworks. One of those friends in particular has been on my mind a lot during my recent journey.

My children are all into music. When I perform at my steady gig twice a month, they are usually with me on stage for a few songs. We play music in our home every night, and they all take lessons. There is one song in particular that they’ve all been after me to perform at a show, Dying to Live, by the Edgar Winter Group. It will happen, but only when the time is right. This song is special.

Many years ago, I owned a musical production company. Over the lifetime of this business, about a decade, I accumulated around 500 production credits, many with well-known, award-winning artists spanning genres from rock to jazz to classical to dance. It was great fun. There is nothing wrong with hanging out with Benny Green, Chris Brubeck, or Leo Kottke after a show you produced for them, or having Eileen Ivers ask you to take a bow at a sold-out St. Patrick’s Day event at the Olympics Festival, or having Moses Pendelton ask if you wanted to fly to Italy to work on a show.

One of the great things about professional audio were connections that I made with others. I remember having a dozen of the best live mix engineers in the world in my living room one night in the late 1990’s. A musician friend of mine from back east called during the party, and when I told him what was up, he asked me to ask if anyone at the party had ever heard of the engineer that used to tour with them back in the 80’s when they opened for Head East. I told him that I’d hand the phone to a guy who would know, since it was him.

To me, that’s always been a lodestone: the opportunity to create special and unforgettable moments. Even if they won’t completely fill the void, they distract from it. I’ve had more than my fair share of such moments.

As part of my audio empire, I had a recording studio in my home for a few years. One day in the early 2000’s, I got a call from a producer down in LA who wanted to book some studio time up here in Idaho for an artist he was working with. This particular artist had some Idaho connections and was bringing in local talent to assist him.

Local talent for tracking anything above a B-level artist was hardly ever a good thing. Musicians from small Intermountain West towns are hardly ever up to working efficiently in a studio environment. But as long as the checks cashed, it was the artist’s money. Bring in whoever the hell you want. The meter’s running.

The first day of the session, a vintage VW Beetle, complete with a rack and surfboard on top, rolled into my lane. You can, it turns out, take the artist out of LA, but you can’t take LA out of the artist. A van full of instruments from a nearby backline company came next, and then a nondescript mid-sized sedan arrived with a massive electronic stage keyboard that must have weighed 80 lbs. in the back seat.

I watched the driver of the car struggle to get the keyboard out and hoist it up onto his back to carry it into the studio. After the keyboard was setup, the driver/roadie announced to the rest of us that he’d go fetch “Rock and Roll Steve” so that the session could start.

I had no idea who Rock and Roll Steve happened to be. I just assumed that everyone in the studio was a local music store teacher that had been hired for the session. But Rock and Roll Steve made a completely magnificent rock star entrance. I didn’t know who he was, but he sure didn’t make his living giving piano lessons at the music store down on Podunk Street.

The session went about the way that I thought that it would. As a recording engineer, it wasn’t my job to judge anything (unless asked, which this producer did not), just to help them achieve the sound that they were looking for. As the session wrapped for the day, Rock and Roll Steve asked if it would be OK if he stayed a few extra minutes to work out a part by himself.

RRS looked vaguely familiar to me. I was sure that I’d seen him somewhere before, but I could not put my finger on where. As I went to fetch some cold beverages, his roadie chatted me up about the session. “Man, Steve’s still got it—he sounds just like his Autograph days.”

Then it hit me—that is Steve Isham, keyboard player of Autograph, best known for the 80’s anthem Turn Up the Radio. I went to my record collection and got out my vinyl copy of the album, Sign in Please, to verify from the group photo on the back cover that it was indeed Steve Isham sitting a few feet away drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

I wore out the dashboard in my 1984 Toyota truck, beating time to Turn Up the Radio back in the day. It’s an awesome song. And the keyboard player was sitting a few feet away from me. That’s as cool as it gets.

When I sat back down next to the large rack of ADAT machines, Steve looked up and spoke: “I take it that some of what got laid down today did not meet your approval?” I was embarrassed that it showed, but he was right—the talent just wasn’t cutting it. Noticing the rack of guitars belonging to me, he suggested that I pull one out and jam for a bit.

This might have been one of the most magical moments of my life. I’m still blown away by how Steve, who could not read a note of music, was able to improvise harmonic and melodic content on the fly. You play like Steve did that night because you feel it in your soul and have a direct connection to your instrument. There’s no veneer over anything in moments like these; it’s an unobstructed view into a soul. Being able to express such emotion so purely and directly is every musician’s dream. Steve put on a clinic.

Later that evening, after many PBR’s, some Maker’s Mark, and lots of jamming, Steve asked me to listen while he played a song—his favorite. That was the first time I ever heard Dying to Live. Just Steve, a piano, and a song that came straight from the heart. I have heard that song hundreds of times in the quarter century from that long ago night, and no matter the circumstances, I always see Steve sitting in my studio playing and singing for a full 4 minutes and 3 seconds until the stings and keys fade at the end.

Steve was originally from Southeast Idaho and had returned to live with his aging parents. We became friends that night. In the years that followed, Steve used to come up many evenings and entertain my oldest son, who was two at the time, with kid songs he’d play on the piano. When JR wasn’t around, we hit our favorite pub. The guy had great stories. It was an awesome time.

Steve, unfortunately, is no longer with us. I wrote a memorial piece about him last year. He was a dear friend. I miss him every day.

Steve was a good soul. But he had a drinking problem, and as the years passed, his problems with alcohol became much worse. Because of his drinking and the general arc of his rock and roll lifestyle, Steve never got along with his Mormon parents, who disapproved of basically everything that he’d ever done. After a few years of living with them in Pocatello, he was asked by them to leave. Lacking anywhere else to stay around here, he went back to LA, hoping to find work in what turned out to be the final years of his life.

The last time that I saw Steve was in spring 2007, when I met him at a coffee shop in Burbank. He’d been camping in his Toyota sedan, among the last of his possessions, in the parking lot of the strip mall where the coffee shop was located. It was obvious from the look that we got from the manager on duty that Steve had worn out his welcome there as well. But we were seated, and I had my last long talk with Steve face-to-face over a hot meal—the first that he’d had in a while.

When we were done there, I drove Steve to a nearby motel, paid for a room for a few days, and gave him a few hundred bucks in cash. As I was walking away, I turned one last time to see a completely beaten-down human being walking toward his motel room, clutching packets of crackers he’d taken from the restaurant. I wish that I had never turned around. It’s something that even many years won’t allow me to unsee.

A few months later, on December 9, 2008, Steve died of cancer.

Steve’s funeral was here in Pocatello a few weeks later at a Mormon church on the west side of town. There were perhaps 20 people there. It rained all that day. I best remember the rivulets of water running across the grass around the grave and into the hole in the ground where they lowered his casket that afternoon. I can’t unsee that either.

A few days after Steve’s funeral, I left to go for a multiday dirt bike ride in the Mojave Desert. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, I have always loved the desert at night. And on that particular trip, I got a chance to embrace the experience for all that it’s worth.

There were three of us on this adventure. And after a short winter’s day of hucking up and down sand washes in unusually cold weather, even for winter, in the Mojave, we found ourselves still fifty miles from the edge of the desert in gathering darkness, all of us experiencing electrical problems due to a long, cold, deep-water river crossing we’d just made. Cold and wet, with one working headlight between three bikes, we set out to cross the empty basin and range between us and our destination.

I have always liked riding dirt bikes in the desert at night. There’s a bubble of light that moves with you and dances just above the earth. It’s your entire universe in those moments. Above the stars gleam. And if the moon is anywhere near full, you can dispense with a headlight. Those moments are as close as I’ve ever come to every child’s dream of swooping and flying above the earth on a magic carpet. When I’m there, I’m free.

On that particular night, as I rode through the moonlit desert, barely connected to a tenuous carpet of sand that I could not see, I wondered if there was enough magic in the world that I might bump into Steve’s spirit, recently unbound from the sorrows and burdens of his final years on earth, somewhere out there in the night. I would have liked one more chance to say goodbye.

As things stand now, I reckon that I may get the chance again soon enough.

All of that is what I process when I sing Dying to Live. It’s much more than notes and lyrics to me. It’s a connection that I miss every single day. And when I sing the song in front of my kids, they understand that it’s special. It comes straight from the heart.

I spent most of last year separated from my children. It was the darkest period of my life. I will never be able to forget the intense loneliness of coming home to an empty home that had not been without the sound of children for decades. I didn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time at night for almost a year. After a prolonged battle, I got my kids back. And I’ve made a point of playing music with them as much as we can. I don’t think that I have enough time left to make up for the time I lost with them.

My youngest son, MJ, is eight. He’s a wonderful kid: smart, kind, and full of compassion for others. I’m very proud to be his father. He asked me to sing Dying to Live a few nights ago and wants to know when I’m going to work it into my performance rotation. When I explained to him that the song wasn’t just any song to me, he wanted to know why. So I told him the story. And at the end, when he understood, his eyes filled with tears.

Knowing that I have raised a kid with enough empathy to feel sorrow for his father’s long-lost friend, a person across a great gulf of time and distance removed from his reality, was one of the biggest mileposts leading out of my heart of darkness. I knew at that moment that things were going to be OK.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com