LITTLE ROCK — Part of the new normal for some of us is maintaining an online presence, which is either an exciting way of connecting with other people or a foolish raising of one’s head above the parapet. (I forget which.)
Anyway, I usually enjoy it, and it allows for some genuinely wonderful and uniquely 21st Century moments. A couple of months ago, I was contacted by a friend—Eddie—who I haven’t seen in more than 20 years. We were in a rock ’n’ roll band together in the 1980s, in Louisiana, where he still lives. And as it turns out he’s still making music. As it turns out, he’s still playing some of the songs that we played back then—including several that I either wrote or helped write.
And his current bandmates—who I take it are somewhat younger than Eddie and myself, and were not playing music in the 1980s—kind of liked some of those old songs. So Eddie tracked me down. He told me what was going on, and he asked me if I had some of our old lyric sheets (Eddie had forgotten some of the words), or tapes of performances and rehearsals, and if I did, if I could send them to him. And, did I have any new songs?
As it turns out, I did—in the 25 years or so since Eddie and I shared a stage, I’ve probably written a thousand or more songs, most of which I’ve discarded or forgotten. It’s something I’ve been doing since I was 14 years old, and something that I’ve had a mild degree of success at—something that I could have at least tried to do professionally. (Back in 1981, a college friend and I won a national songwriting contest that landed us on The Merv Griffin Show. Brenda Lee recorded our song. Kenny Rogers almost did. My friend went to work as a staff writer for a Nashville songwriting combine. I took a job as a sports editor.)
Or maybe not. Our contest-winning song notwithstanding, I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that sounds like a hit—though some of the stuff I wrote in high school when I was figuring out how to play guitar is pretty moony-juney. I don’t generally write romantic love songs—at least not ones I like (there are one or two that are OK)—and I’ve rarely followed the AABA form or any other convention. I tend to write a lot of six minute songs, some of them without a release, chorus or a bridge.
Part of that is no doubt due to the reality that most of these songs were written with no expectation that anyone other than myself and maybe a few close friends would ever hear them. Since I last shared a stage with Eddie, I have publicly performed maybe five times. I retired from performing 15 years ago and though Eddie’s asked me to come down and do a show with him I mean to stay retired.
Part of that is because I’m simply not very good—and that’s not false modesty. I never really was, and over the past 20 years or so my hearing has become noticeably less acute. Were it not for some high quality headphones and a low latency digital audio workstation I couldn’t come close to reproducing the sound in my head.
But the larger part is that I genuinely have no interest in performing—I just like writing songs. Even when I was in bands, I never aspired to being a rock star—I remember thinking that Elton John’s lyricist Bernie Taupin had a good setup; he was essentially in a band without the responsibility of playing in tune every night.
I was never a natural musician, sometimes I got through songs by learning chord progressions by rote and watching my bandmates’ hands. I was a limited vocalist, passable for the songs I sang but incapable of hitting and/or holding all but a few hand-selected notes. (About the time I quit playing in bands, not long after the release of Guitar Town, I interviewed Steve Earle and he told me that the executives at MCA had made him take a humiliating singing test. I could relate—I never would have passed. )
For me, it was never about being onstage—though that could be exhilarating, for me it wasn’t worth the pre-show nerves or the after-show come down. I had a writer’s mentality—I wanted to connect, to communicate, but I didn’t necessarily want to the center of attention. (To paraphase something I once heard Gene Lyons say, I wanted to go into a room alone, do some work and have everyone congratulate.)
Looking back, I realize my songwriting has always been a lesser and included offense in my larger work. When I was in a band with Eddie, I was also a police reporter, and so I tended to write songs about the stuff I covered in my day job. I did a 30-part series following the flow of cocaine from Miami to Shreveport for the newspaper, and I wrote a couple of cocaine songs. I wrote about an alleged hit man I knew. I never thought about it back then, but digging back through my old notebooks it’s obvious that I wrote songs about things I couldn’t write about for the newspaper.
I’ve started writing more in recent years for a couple of reasons. The main one might be that, for the past three years, I’ve been curating a blog—blooddirtangels.com—that pretty much needs constant refreshment. It’s a pretty simple thing for me to record a song and stick it up on the blog—I’ll usually put a couple of tracks up a week. I even put cover songs up from time to time. It’s another way to provide content.
I’m working on a song right now about Boston Corbett, the Union Army sergeant who shot John Wilkes Booth to death 12 days after Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln. I’ve written one about the “boy martyr of the Confederacy,” David O. Dodd.
I tend to write a lot of sportsthemed tunes—there’s one called “Cassius Clay” about watching the Friday night fights with my dad. I wrote one about Urban Shocker, who was one of the best pitchers on the 1927 Yankees. A couple of years ago I wrote a song about a dog who wanted to play baseball. I really like the one about Ray Winder Field and Richie Allen. I just finished a song in the voice of pedophile Jerry Sandusky. (I sent it to a friend of mine who has an abiding interest in the case simply because I thought he might be interested in hearing it. He told me I shouldn’t put it up because people might think I sympathized with Sandusky. Really? Are we that dull and literal-minded? Maybe I’ll put it up today. With a disclaimer.) Anyway, Eddie says they’re going try and work up some of the new songs. He’ll send me a CD. It’s a brave new world. Stay tuned.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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blooddirtandangels.com
Perspective, Pages 72 on 01/13/2013