EARLY SONGS
The Beatles were, and always have been, my musical anchor, the sound and the style, musically speaking, that I have considered right, somehow. They taught me what makes a good song. Like a good bridge: in many songs you just know that Paul had a good melody and John came up with the bridge, like in We Can Work It Out. Remember the bridge? “Life is so very short that there’s no ti-i-i-i-me…” Most inspiring for my own songwriting: A Day in the Life, where I learned an important lesson. They toss in that “Woke up, fell out of bed…” ditty that was just a throwaway in Paul’s stuff to complement the serious and somber main song. From this I learned that I could use loose bits of music that had no song-home and literally build songs with them. For example, the bridge in California was a bluesy riff that I knew had potential, originally called Salt and Pepper, but just shelved it.
I wrote most of my early music when I was 21 years old, and had just moved to California. I was living in a communally run restaurant in Jackson CA, on highway 49, working for room and board and tips. I was in love with a terrific girl named Judy, but also in love with my freedom, with the fact that I had taken control of my life: left college, gotten deep into songwriting, and left my best friend and my mother in Ann Arbor, now free of two complicated relationships. I lived in the basement of the restaurant, the old headquarters of the Argonaut gold mine. It was a very home-style place, most un-commercial. At night, after we’d served dinner and the customers had left, I would find myself alone at the piano in the main room, and music flowed out of me; I couldn’t stop it. At the time, I didn’t think too much of it, didn’t even think it was all that good. I completed a few songs; others I thought I’d completed; but I also hung onto many stray riffs and bits of music. The rest of my songwriting life has been an exercise in perfecting the completed songs, but also in building songs out of existing material.
California is my breakout song. This is my literal autobiography: it tells the story of needing to leave the east, following my friend Char out west, and finding “a new home on Highway 49”. I guess moving to California was when I decided to grow up, but also to say to myself, hey, you can mope around in your teenage angst or you can decide to enjoy life. Which I did. This song started out at the Argonaut being called “AWOL”, which expressed the breakout spirit, but I never liked the imagery though; it seemed cowardly. In 2010, it hit me: California! That’s where I broke away to. I added the bridge at this time, the music of which was a throw-away ditty that I had called Salt & Pepper, but had no idea what to do with.
Rainy Day Lover is my spiritual autobiography. The song starts in my angst-ridden late teens in Ann Arbor. I started out in those “rainy days and lonely nights” when I “couldn’t say what was on my mind” but finally found my way, in California, of course. But it “took a while to find a home in the rain” … “for a rainy day lover”. And a big part of that was meeting Janet, which the song expresses in “I found LA and there is no rain; I tried to leave and fell in love instead.” This song was conceived in my early alienated late teens in the 1970s in Ann Arbor, and was completed in the 1990s when I had found some kind of peace and stability: a great wife, a career, a family. It was not until I added the bridge, where I declare that “I love LA”, that the song felt right.
One song that I wrote pretty much as it is today is Lonesome I Am Leaving. My music is laced with, at times defined by, a longing for home, and reflections on leaving others. The longing for home is real though completely unexplained: I have never been adrift really, always had a place to call home, grew up in a stable household. A psychologist might interpret it as a search for my father, whom I lost when I was thirteen.
And that psychologist might be right. I met Bruce when I was 17; we made pizzas together at a pizza joint in Ann Arbor. We connected over our love of the Beatles. He had been to Vietnam, and was five years older than me. He became a father figure to me, a relationship that lasted way too long, but finally did change, then was painfully excised from my life. But I owe a lot to Bruce. He is responsible for the dream. This garage, this music room, is the thing that we used to dream of having, back in the old days. We both fancied ourselves as songwriters, though only he, at the beginning, had any material: he’d been in ‘Nam, and had had lots of time to think, and write. He conceived of the music room, which was to be a place where we could talk, play music, craft our songs, bring them into being by recording them, just like Paul did on a home-studio 4-track to make his solo album McCartney. Performing was not as important as creating. Fast forward thirty or forty years, and I am the one with the music room, not him. But I doubt that I would be doing this, at least in this way, if it were not for him. He planted the seed; I made it grow. It was a long and tumultuous friendship, punctuated by much distance between us. But I fought my own demons as I wrote music to, and for and about him. Maybe the sweetest is Waiting for You, which echoes my dependence on this guy. End of the Summer is my honest confession and struggle to realize that maybe it would have been better if the whole thing had never happened, that maybe I’d wasted a huge chunk of my life. Breaking up is hard to do, and though over the years I have broken up with a few women (to my own discredit), breaking up with your best friend, ah… that’s a horse of a different color. That’s The Hardest Thing.
MIDLIFE SONGS
And then, cancer struck. January 1994, our son was 2 1/2 years old, daughter not yet born. Janet saw me through my bout with leukemia. For that and for almost every good thing that has happened to me in the past 30 years, I thank her. Most people with the disease died, at least in those days; I’m one of the lucky ones. But I didn’t, and strangely, never believed that I would, even though my good sense told me that I very well might. Ironically, my part was easy: just lie there, be in pain, and take drugs. Janet had to mind the home, the child, and her work. How Good It Feels tells that story. I end the joyous rock and roller with a minor chord, to honor my comrades who, through no fault of their own, did not survive.
Then, of the hospital, an irony set in: I realized that I wasn’t cured, only in remission, and was only as good as the next blood draw, that any day the cancer could come back. In the next song, I wonder, “How long must I walk upon the wire? How long ’til I fall into the fire.” The answer to this question comes out in the lyrics: “maybe soon, maybe never, but when I’m gone, I’m gone forever.” So, The Rest of My Life might be long or very short indeed.