It’s a widely accepted truth that what is commonly referred to as the “Blues” was created somewhere around the 1860’s. Now there are numerous deviations of the “Blues” and an equal number of components that go into what we all know as the “Blues”; the rhythm, the chord progression, the ‘call and response’. The list is almost endless.

     However, what is not an endless list are the reasons people sing or get the “Blues”. Everyone has their own list and I suspect that for most this list grows and changes as we age and try to get through this thing we call life. But, from where my life has been, my list of why I got the “Blues” is comprised of one singular item: women. Now, I use the word ‘women’ and not love because all too often, for me anyway, love was somewhere down a path I hadn’t cleared yet. I was still at the “trying to understand women” phase which is in emotional terms, light years away from love. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure how they felt about me while I was figuring out how I felt about them. Enter… the teenage broken heart.

     And for boys of a certain age (read: all ages), at least the boys I know, we need space to process such a big topic as a broken heart. We need air. We need sky. We need clear nights with bright stars and a full moon and the hope that the night never ends as there really is no plan for tomorrow. Because you can’t mend a broken heart in a closet, or a bedroom, or laying under a ceiling fan with the phone cord stretched to the point the phone may rip off the wall. No. Broken heart surgery needs massive emptiness. Emptiness so grand that people take photos of it on vacation and laugh in embarrassment when they try to explain how big this space was. There is no formula for how much space boys will need, but we’ll know it when we see it.

     Can you mend a broken heart in say, Texas? Well, Texas is big. Got lots of empty. Lots of sky. Hell, what some consider to be the state song even begins with, “The stars at night are big and bright…” So Texas seems like a perfect place to start repairing such a vital organ. And one thing Texas is not lacking in is women. There are PLENTY of women that can break a boy’s heart in Texas.

     But where exactly to go in Texas? Where could a young man who was covered in grief, afflicted with love, and sinking into despair yell at the heavens and hide until the sun rose on a new day. A day that he foolishly thought would assuredly grant him the answers the night withheld. Well, in the Houston part of Texas, that place was the Westview Rice Towers.

     The Westview Rice Towers were massive concrete, steel, and mortar towers planted at what at that time was the end of the world. Once I-10 took you past the Rice Towers, well, your next stop was pretty much San Antonio. Soaring past one hundred feet into the sky these two monoliths were the first thing you saw coming into town and kept their prominence in your rear view mirror for miles on the way out. But the best part about the Rice Towers, more often than not: they were left unguarded. And if you were really, really lucky (read: really stupid) the ladders were left down and doors unlocked. And for those brave few, well, those brave few got even closer to Heaven and had an unrivaled view of Texas as it curved around the Earth.

     And here is where I went to repair my broken heart, more often than I want to remember. Long after the sun had set and with the moon perched high above I set off for the solace of the silos. Robert Plant knew how I felt. David Coverdale understood. The odd contribution of Simon Le Bon made my brief journey easier to accept. Even though I told myself I was going for answers, what I really was headed to the silos for was sympathy. To be alone with feelings that didn’t fit indoors. To air my grievances with life in a public space that was closed to the public. I wanted to scream in silence. And you can scream pretty loud at over a hundred feet in the air without risking being heard. But just in case someone might be interested in my woes, I would park my car just outside the fence, open the hatch, and let a wall of sound scream out and ricochet those perfectly painful soundwaves off the towers while I snuck inside.

     Soon, Bach, AC/DC, Frank Sinatra, and many, many more became the perfect audio distraction from this lovesick teenager dangling his legs a dozen stories above the earth. But as many times as I ran to the towers, my heart was never healed. I never left there any wiser than when I arrived. If the goal was absolution gained from some celestial confession, or some unique insight into the female brain, I failed many, many times. Then again, that’s not what the towers were for, really. What I only understood years later about the “Blues” was that there never is a solution. The “Blues” isn’t a map, it’s a guide, and I wasn’t going to find a magical sewing kit for the pieces of my heart at the Rice Towers. There was no advice from the stars on what to do next or where to go. No, what took me years to understand is that those numerous hours spent staring in the vast emptiness of the night sky is that it’s more important to feel your broken heart. To suffer alongside it. To understand why it’s broken is a distant second to realizing that you cared enough to have it broken in the first place. In short, it was better to have a broken heart than to go through life using it to only pump blood.

     Sadly though, the towers were destroyed. They and all the land around it were cleared to make way for a church. Which is kinda ironic because in hindsight that’s what I was going there for anyway.