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Long Misty Days

I can remember the first times I ever played an electrified guitar with total clarity — at least regarding some of the key details: it was my brother’s Ventura Acoustic, and it had a pick up stuck in the sound-hole, with a grey cord that was plugged into a Big Muff PI, which was then connected to a little Pignose amp.

We would stuff the Pignose in the closet to max out our own personal volume level, while doing our best to spare other household members. I skwonked around on that setup whenever my brother was not around, until my mom or dad would yell at me to stop making that goddamn racket — closet-setup notwithstanding. The buzzy crushy fuzz of the Big Muff was, true to its name, more or less like sex for me — before any threat of the real thing was even imagined. Sex and the electric guitar arrived at the same time and shared some key attributes: both were more or less forbidden, seemed like a truth that couldn’t be denied, and soon permeated every facet of life.

Despite the fact that I loved messing around with the electricalized-Ventura, and had my brother as a positive example — as he happily played blues licks and learned a few Neil Young tunes — I never seriously considered buying a guitar of my own. It was just out of the question, because whenever I snuck a few minutes of that fuzzzzsshhh in my brother’s room, the session would end, usually pretty quickly, with exasperated shouts from my brother, or from my parents downstairs. My father finally begged me to learn a song, “Just learn how to play Old Black Joe…or…something. Would that be so bad?” But I wasn’t having it. Another complication was that I played guitar left handed. I have no idea why, but it was how the instrument seemed to fit for me. I still play air guitar left-handed — the only instrument I really excel at.

Of course I now recognize that the biggest impediment was in my own mind, and that remains the case to this day. I’ve been playing guitar the right way ‘round for 33 years now, and still think of myself as not really able to do it. I can read a chord chart, if it’s not too fancy, but that’s about it. As for reading music (never)… or playing by ear…well, unless you wanna hear those same blues licks my brother played back in the day, you and me are both outta luck.

But love overcomes obstacles. And back then I had no plan to ever amount to anything, so I bought a ’61 Epiphone Melody Maker with my first salaried-paycheck, and set to what I now know is the impossible task of “learning guitar.”

(Let us now pause for a moment of silence for the loss of that Epiphone, which I assiduously ruined, by changing the tuners and the bridge…and then sold for a sum I cannot repeat without bursting into tears.)

I stole the big muff, bought a tuner and chorus pedal, and borrowed Fred Anderson’s transistor Rickenbacker amp, then set to the business of playing a D chord. All of this well after most of my friends and heroes had played dozens of shows, made singles, elpees, and generally succeeded at the game of music-making. From the very beginning, I conceived of myself as a dilettante, an outlier, a fake…a guy who hung out at the record store and didn’t even really know how to collect records properly. …Forget about making one.

My earliest attempts to join bands as a singer proved disastrous too, as I was unprepared for the vagaries of hearing myself in the din, and also lacked the essential fearlessness to really SING — to push it anywhere near like what I could do in my bedroom with a Judas Priest record, or in a shower or empty parking lot, or even in the company of the rest of the school choir. The few opportunities I had to try singing with a band ended terribly: on one occasion, I spent the next two days hiding in bed — unwilling to speak or be seen by other human beings. It was very nearly the worst experience of my life, up to that point. A holy dream, seemingly crushed forever.

But you love the sound and so you keep going. You turn back to yourself. I bought a four track and recorded horrible bedroom demos. Screeching crazy crunchy nonsense. Guitars only. Chang chang chang. Chong skwwoooooooooojjjj chang a chong…wooooooowooooowahhwahhh woooowwahh wahhhh.

Oh yeah: I bought a wah wah pedal because of course that’s what you really need to get serious.

And I answered ads in the Illinois Entertainer and the Reader and brought my four track to people’s houses in the city who will never be known or remembered, not by me anyway, and played to drum machines and horribly non-musical riffs, in projects that self-destructed through the sheer gravity of incompetence and collective non-direction. Projects that, in Walter Becker’s immortal phrase, “spoke for themselves.”

But I was still thrilled to hear the woooooh wahhh wahh wahh of my own doodlings on the four track. I would drive down to see a show in Champaign and bring the cassette of my latest ploppings and play them — as many seconds as I / my-victim could bear — the poor imprisoned suckers in my Chevy Citation. I once played a symphony of woooohs and wahhhs to Paul Chastain and Paul Rock at their apartment in Evanston, and they were nice, but shame dawned on me driving home, and I’ve never even said hi to Paul Chastain since. (Despite the fact that he is one of the nicest guys in the world.)

Somewhere along the line I married, and then it was Anna, not my parents, putting up with the wooh wahh changa changa. God bless her she still does. Though the wah wah rarely makes it out of the closet.

…Then I finally met some people who knew how it was done. Paul Nini drifted into my life via mutual friend Bob Robinson. Paul had pieces of paper with words and chords on them, perfectly legible handwriting, and the chords were all the ones I could play! C’s G’s F’s Am’s D’s Em’s… so we settled in and start making some noise. We drafted some hapless drummers, gave the band a name and started making some stuff. I learned how to do what Paul does with the chords and the lyrics, and some songs finally got done. I still write ’em that way.

Somewhere in the middle of this just-barely-competent phase, my father became seriously ill with a recurring cancer, and died. I therefore underwent the very first spasm of having something big and important to write about. I also discovered the joy of having an excuse to get roaring drunk and EMOTE. Some terribly embarrassing episodes resulted. More days in bed — afraid to show my face.

American Music Club showed up at this time. A band I still regard as a kind of musical miracle. At the height of their powers, a gigantic, not-the-least-bit-like-anybody-else force of ecstasy and freedom, anchored in alienation and pain. Perfection.

Fred and I saw them play at a record shop under the Metro and all of a sudden nothing else mattered (not to me anyway). Eitzel was playing songs from “Engine,” an album chock full of tunes about death and dissolution in his own family. They played two shows in a fortnight’s time, one prior to my own dad’s hospitalization, another a few days after his death. I was overwhelmed, and basically gave myself up for adoption by the band. …Then I threw my musical self onto Eitzel island.

As Vudi would later say to me: “You were one of many who foundered on that rock.”

They stayed at our house and played beautiful music. Eitzel sat at our dining room table and played “Miracle on Eighth Street,” from his notebook. Vudi and Danny played Marty Robbins and Doc Watson. I consumed enough beer, then sucked the life out of everyone, by tossing out one of my new tunes.

Fearlessly, we warmed them up. Paul and I, later, me and Mike Ritt and Alan Spindle. I visited them when work took me to San Francisco, saw them record and mix the live cuts from Hotel Utah that made it onto “United Kingdom.” I slept on Vudi’s futon, Eitzel’s floor — and generally made a nuisance of myself. They were kind as ever. Unfalteringly generous. Radiantly human and compassionate. Anna and I went to SF, ate at Brandy Ho’s with Eitzel. We still eat there, before we do anything else, whenever we’re in SF. It’s as close to a religious practice as I get.

Somewhere in all of this, I made a pilgrimage to record with Tom Mallon. This was after Tom had departed the group — but while he was still operating his studio. We talked about AMC a little bit, Thin White Rope (whom Tom had just recorded), Chris Isaak — at the time, Tom’s biggest-ever client. Tom talked about his friend Chuck Prophet too. Suggested I check him out.

That’s where this song actually starts. And as much as it’s a song about Tom, it’s also about…well, ok…mostly about: me.

Because Tom did this great thing that nobody had ever done with me before — or at least nobody had done it successfully — which was to treat me like the adult I should have been already. No whining, none of this “I can’t play so you’ll have to help me…” bullshit. Tune your fucking guitar. Hang on (grabs guitar) …let’s tune that up a half step, you can’t hit that note. Just sing. Sing that part again. Play this part again. Hang on. I’m gonna put a little piano here. Wait, let me get my drums mic’d up…”

And as this song tries to say, all of a sudden I heard something that sounded…well…real. It was the first sign since playing my brothers guitar upside-down in his closet, that all of this idiotic faith might some day be rewarded. No kidding, it even sounded a little bit like AMC.

Huh. I wonder how THAT happened??

~

Many years go by — (that’s what the phaser is all about on this track, FYI) and I’m talking to Chuck Prophet in (I think) Evanston IL. I’d played the AMC card with him from the first, and Chuck’s elephant memory is making a connection. Tom, our old pal, is really sick, he tells me. “Really bad, not looking good” is all he’ll say. And soon it’s on FB — Tom has a brain tumor…he doesn’t have long to live.

Tom’s wife Nancie is an amazing person, and she decides to do what my mom did for my step-dad at his 90th birthday party… She decides to throw the party before Tom is gone. And so, an entire generation of musicians comes out to play a show — a celebration of Tom’s musical life, and Tom’s young kids get a chance to see this whole side of him they have never known. It’s an act of generosity and courage on an absolutely Olympian scale.

So hell yeah, I’m going.

I’ve been in touch with Tom a little bit on FB. One day he made my year by writing “nice song Steve” under a tune I’d shared. As Chuck put it: “Tom is always someone you wanted to please behind that glass.” Studio glass or laptop, so very true.

I flew out and went to the rehearsals for the Toiling Midgets/AMC redux part of the show, in a rental & rehearsal space, I’m gonna say somewhere in old Bayview. Anyway, I grabbed a six pack of Sierra Nevada and dove into them zealously. Tom was happily surprised when I arrived, and I was hugely relieved about that. He fixed my gaze from the drum kit, while they were getting levels, locked my eye and said: “I remember seeing you standing right there, just like that…25 years ago, at that show in Newport…”

Oh man…that show. The show that made me think Eitzel wrote Crabwalk “nobody has any pity for the life…of the party” about me (at least partly). That bit about the hubcap rolling across the bar… c’est moi, I thought. And this bit:

“He’s just trying to breathe some new life into the jukebox
But it doesn’t take his crap. it just keeps on staring back
And the quarters that he pours down its throat
Well they’re just starting to get his goat…”

Ha! Of course when I asked, Eitzel said no…

And so we we’re flying high at the rehearsal and Danny showed up and then they started playing AMC tunes, stuff from Engine and California and I know the harmonies and so I’m singing ’em loud and go whole hog into the party atmosphere and try it up there on the rehearsal-room stage and that was the high point of the whole deal for me. Singing with Tom playing there and Nancy singing too, pretty much nailing the harmonies, and Danny crushing out the chords on his Les Paul Junior. I felt love oozing up from the floorboards, and time disappeared completely.

I went home that night to my hotel room and wrote in my facebook status: “People you love, you love.” And when I woke up, Tom had once again given one of his rare nods. I knew he knew what I meant, and it made me happy he did.

It was odd, and oh so powerful, to feel 25 years evaporate completely. But that’s what love does.

Ahhhhh, but of course, I can never leave well enough alone. And so yeah, check it out, it’s in the song. The next night, night of the big show, you know how it is: great rehearsal…Like I say, it’s in the song.

~

And it’s a long history and tradition for me: throwing myself athwart the band. Loving the loved-thing a bit too much.

In that regard, this is a perfectly perverse work of art, as this song is recorded with Chuck Prophet’s guys…who have been, for me, the next great object of love and devotion, since AMC. Upon whom I have also cast myself, athwart.

And I have loved on them elsewhere, but in the true spirit of this tune, and in my stubborn refusal to veer from the path of throwing myself bodily at the people I love, I will love on them again here.

Taking some tunes to SF and working with the guys I’d been literally LOL’ing with joy while watching them play for a couple years — I doubt I’ll ever have quite that much serious fun again. And if I die after too many Wild Turkeys some night, I will die happy about the music thing. And this song and a couple others from those sessions are in that personal firmament one creates — one as ego-mad as me anyway — to keep going. To keep going and try to write something next time out that’s bigger and better. To carry you from your brother’s closet…to real bands with really talented people (thanks Paul, Mike, Rob, Kevin)…all the way to a gig with your best musical fiends and heroes for 30 years (thanks Jans).

And so for everyone who has ever told me to shut up and tune my guitar, or at least thought it: for Kevin T White, James Deprato, Adam Rossi, Vicente Rodriguez; for Mike and Kevin and Rob; for Nick and Steve and Jeff and Todd; for my brother Dan…and finally for Tom Mallon…

And any of you who have read this far — well, here ya go:

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