Is she a 1-hit wonder? Just ask her students

On an aimless stroll around the office Monday, I noticed stacks of CDs on the desk of Times music writer Randy Lewis. We’re talking hundreds of CDs, virtually none of them by artists I’d heard of. I made a mental note to talk to Randy about his housekeeping habits.

But what hit me later was that each CD, however obscure it now may seem to me, represented a moment when the artists thought they were on their way.

And then, it had vanished. They’d gone from having a record deal and a CD to invisibility.

As a longtime stargazer, I wondered what that must have felt like -- to have thought that if only for 15 minutes of fame, or 15 seconds, anything was possible.

Ladies and gentlemen, say hi to D.D. Wood, an Honors English teacher at Millikan High School in Long Beach but also a music star who could have been.

And, for a while, was.

In a way.

Wood grew up in a musical household and learned early on that she could sing and write music and play the guitar. By the early 1980s, at 19, she was the singer in a band named Gypsy Trash. Her brother and a man she’d later marry were also musicians -- with each, at different times, fronting for the well-known Long Beach/Orange County band T.S.O.L.

“Music was something that I knew how to do,” she says, “something that came easy to me. As a writer, when I started putting words to music and saw how the emotions could move people, I knew I wanted to be involved in it.”

Lots of young people dream those dreams in their bedrooms, where the fantasies usually die. Wood made it happen. Or, as sometimes happens, fate intervened.

By the late 1980s, in her early 20s and the mother of a young girl, she quit the band. Not long after, she had a son.

Sounds like the likely end of a musical career, but it wasn’t. A longtime friend and fellow musician said she had too much talent to quit. He brought his keyboard to her house and they recorded a few songs Wood had written. He then introduced her to the producer of a fledgling company named Hollywood Records.

And like something out of a strange dream, the producer offered Wood a deal. A few months later, she signed for $150,000 and recorded “Tuesdays Are Forever.”

When she got the record deal, she was a substitute teacher in Long Beach.

In an instant, life changed. “I was in my 20s and really giddy with happiness,” she says, recalling the rush of events as if they had happened on one wild night: “Having a blast, doing the whole rock ‘n’ roll thing, running with the band, cruising Sunset Boulevard, going to the Frolic Room between takes for a drink, meeting Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. . . . People think you’re up and coming, and you’re kind of in a different position. People start treating you differently. It’s hard not to get heady, even if on a small scale. They say, ‘Hey, that’s D.D. Wood.’ ”

Unlike lots of others in the music business, Wood had her head on straight. She remembers telling herself that although she had a record deal, she knew the business could be rough and undependable. She’d seen her brother and husband’s band attain local success but not yet crack the upper echelons of the industry.

She spent parts of 1991 and ’92 in the same haunts at Capitol Records that Frank Sinatra and the Beatles once trod.

Before the CD was released in 1993, the record label sent Wood on a cross-country promotional trip. She did interviews and some performances. The next step would be a tour to support the record.

It never happened. Uncertain, she says, of how to categorize her music -- too edgy for country but not edgy enough for alternative rock -- the label took a well-traveled path: It dropped her.

Just like that, it was over. No tour, no follow-up record, no fame. Talk of opening for James Taylor fizzled.

And this is where the story describes her dissolution and table-pounding anger that persists to this day, right?

Not that juicy. Even during her Gypsy Trash days in the 1980s, she’d been pursuing her education. She ended up with a master’s in education from Cal State Long Beach, and even while her music career seemed red-hot, teaching was not far from her heart.

“I love teaching,” she says. “It’s the core of who I am.”

If she lies awake nights wondering what might have been, she doesn’t own up to it. And because she laughs gaily while talking about her brush with fame, she makes you believe it.

The regrets center mostly around her ambivalence over whether she really wanted a music career that would have taken her away from her husband and children, she says. She wonders if she didn’t “sabotage” her career while trying to keep her marriage together (which ended four years ago).

So, bittersweet memories? Yes.

A little melancholy from time to time? Yes.

But settling for a teaching career? No way.

“When you’re in front of a classroom, it’s no different than performing onstage,” she says. “You’re still giving your all, your energy, your life’s experiences, telling your stories.”

Because her students are in the school’s music and arts program, she brings her guitar to class, discusses lyrics and shows them how a singing voice can translate words into feelings.

And the girl still sings. Gypsy Trash still exists, and the band plays the club scene in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Her Millikan students know of her musical past. They come to her shows, and the punk rock kids are even more impressed because Wood still knows all the punkers from the old days.

But during the week, she’s the teacher again. That’s plenty good enough.

“I still leave school every day with that feeling of accomplishment and that I’ve touched someone,” she says.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.