I’ve spent the last fifty years or so writing songs, performing them, trying to sell them, all without the slightest financial reward. Well, I overstate – back in the early 1980s, I played many paying gigs with a small group, Toy Boat.
In 1982, Toy Boat had had two extended gigs at a Westside club and many casual weeks at other clubs. When I sat down to fill out my tax return, I discovered that I’d only lost about $1,600 playing music more than 300 nights during the previous year. My bottom line reminded me of the old musician’s joke: Know how to make a million dollars playing music? Answer: start with two million. I seemed to be well on my way. Except for the two million, of course. Possibly my insistence on writing songs like “Yerba Buena” accounted for my failure to chart:
Yerba Buena
There’s a stand of red willows where the little river runs
They glow like window candles, you can see them far away
As you drive down toward San Luis, the place where you begun
Knowin’ anywhere you go, the week has only seven days
And it grows in the willows by the creek
Where the kids all hide and hide and seek and seek
And the water knows the proper words to speak
That’s where it grows
There’s good weeds and bad weeds of many different kinds
You must learn to tell the difference, that’s what most people say
But they’re all good for something if you just pay them your mind
And anywhere the weeds can grow, the week has only seven days
And it grows in the willows by the creek
Where the kids all hide and hide and seek and seek
And the water knows the proper words to speak
That’s where it grows
There’s many are going and few are coming back
They think the good place can be found somewhere far away
From the red willows standing over San Luis
Where the weeks that never end go on for only seven days
And it grows in the river by the creek
Where the kids all hide and hide and seek and seek
And the water knows there are no words to speak
That’s where it grows – that’s where it grows
I got “the week has only seven days” from the owner of a little gas station somewhere on the road to San Luis, where my friends the Ortega family lived. Daisy Ortega was the one who introduced me to yerba buena tea, during one of the long, unhurried afternoons I spent in her home down there. I liked the song then, and I still like it. I think I captured some of the feeling of that old town, that part of Colorado, and some of what we were losing as our small towns emptied out and died.
Somewhere I’d come upon an advertisement for something called The American Song Festival, Inc., promising a hearing and a professional critique of any song sent in with twenty-five smackers. It didn’t occur to me that they might be looking for the next pop hit, and that “Yerba Buena” might not quite fit that bill. I sent it in, with my $25 and who knows what deluded hopes. The recorded critique I eventually received was certainly worth the price of admission, as I recognized even then. It was uttered by an unidentified black man – I guess I was supposed to assume he was some sort of Music Industry Executive – and his game efforts to avoid saying directly what he clearly wanted to say (“Take this piece of crap away from my cringing ears”) remain a masterpiece of doubletalk:
“You have a good song…the melody is good, the lyric is good… but somehow…it just doesn’t really grab me, it doesn’t do what I feel that the song really could do. Aah…what I think you ought to do, maybe, is try to express it differently, try to use…maybe…a different story line, maybe change it just a little bit and, ah, make it stronger. That’s just about the only thing I can say, ah, about it – it’s good, I think you have it almost there, but not, not quite. I think you need to maybe…go over the story again, from the beginning all the way down to the end, and see whether or not you can say the same thing you’re saying, but, ah, say it a little differently – say it in a way that you really mean it, that a person feels the song was written especially for them.”
Or, to summarize, You’d have a good song here, if it were completely different from what it, unfortunately, is.
Well, I wasn’t trying to write pop hits, anyway. I’d been inspired to try my hand at writing and singing song lyrics first by Dylan and the later Beatles, who showed the world that there were no limits to what a song could address or express, then by John Prine, who wrote about the lives of normal, mostly adult people in their everyday vocabulary. And then by the many wonderful songwriters of what’s puke-inducingly become known as “the Great American Songbook.” Everyone from Stephen Foster through Hoagy Carmichael to Cole Porter. Those were the leagues I wanted to play in, leagues of songwriters who wrote songs about real lives in language that cared about precision, inventiveness and surprise and didn’t require advanced degrees to understand. I didn’t want to write another “Wop bop a loo bop a lop bom bom.” Little Richard had taken care of that.
I searched out the stories of how some of my inspirations got their starts. The stories were pretty similar.
The vastly and justly successful Carmichael, dubbed by his biographer “First of the Singer-Songwriters,” began fooling around on the piano in his early teens, learning first by watching his mother play piano in the pit for movies, later by studying the newly popular “hot” records of the day. He was soon playing for hours on any and every piano he encountered – and in the early years of the last century, many homes contained pianos, as did the Indiana University hangout The Book Nook. Hoagy achieved a measure of renown among his high school classmates. He soon got wind of a “hot” band in town, led by an alto sax player, “Batty” DeMarcus.
“Inevitably, there came a night when someone urged the hopped-up high school pianist to the Book Nook upright, to play along with Batty’s alto…. ‘When we finished,’ Carmichael wrote with a mixture of triumph and relief, ‘Batty was calling me dirty names and running his big freckled hands through my uncut hair.’ Only then, he remarks, did it dawn on him that he’d just passed an audition.
“Within only a few years Batty DeMarcus would be the talk of New York, widely in demand as a recording and broadcasting musician…. But now, in this student hangout in Bloomington, Indiana, he’d just put his…seal of approval on Hoagland Howard Carmichael. As if by magic, job offers began finding the young pianist. . . ” (Sudhalter 33-34). Hoagy had found the first of his Chinamen. When Bix Beiderbecke came to town to play gigs Carmichael had arranged for his new band, he found his next.
“This morning in May 1924 [at the Gennett recording studio] belongs to a band calling itself the ‘Wolverine Orchestra of Chicago.’…A young guy down at the university in Bloomington had put this one together, [Beiderbecke] said. Hadn’t written it down: he could neither read nor write music, really. But they’d been playing fraternity house dates he’d booked for them, and he’d worked this thing out on the piano at a campus hangout called the Book Nook” (Sudhalter 70). “This thing” was “Riverboat Shuffle,” Hoagy’s 1st recorded tune, and it found rapid success, later being recorded by Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, perhaps the most popular band in the country.
In 1970, young Chicago mailman and singer-songwriter John Prine underwent a similar trip from recognition by a newly successful musician to a recording contract with a major label. “One Sunday night in 1970, after a couple of beers at the Fifth Peg [Prine] complained about the quality of the open mike performers]….The people sitting with him challenged him to put his money where his mouth was….
“He got the songs out, only to be greeted by silent stares. . . .’And then they started applauding, and it was a really great feeling. It was like I found out all of a sudden that I could communicate.’ . . . The owner of the Fifth Peg came over and asked him if he wanted a job. . . . He was twenty-three years old” (Huffman 40). Prine started getting offers to perform in other clubs, including the Earl of Old Town on Wells Street. . . . Steve Goodman had been playing the Old Town clubs for about a year before Prine got started. Prine had been impressed with an original train song, ‘The City of New Orleans,’ that Goodman sang on The Midnight Special radio show. . . . Prine was backstage at the Earl of Old Town on another night when Goodman walked in. . . . ‘Here comes this guy stormin’ through the door, looks like Edward G. Robinson. . . . And walks up to me and says, “Hi, I’m Steve Goodman! You’re all right!” Like previous to that I wasn’t. He, just like, solidified it, you know? And we became kinda instant friends’ (Huffman 46).
Goodman, as was his nature, became an apostle for Prine. In 1971, wrote Kris Kristofferson, “Steve Goodman (who’d shared the bill with us that week) asked us to go to Old Town to listen to a friend he said we had to hear [Prine]. . . . “He sang about a dozen songs, and had to do a dozen more before it was over. Unlike anything I’d heard before. . . . I don’t know where he comes from, but I’ve got a good idea where he’s going.
“P.S. Thanks to the people at Atlantic for making good things happen fast to someone who deserves it” (Kris Kristofferson, liner notes for Prine’s first album, John Prine).
It was Goodman and Kristofferson who had made this good thing happen fast for Prine. In those days, as in Hoagy’s, there was strong camaraderie among young musicians, and many of those who found success used their newfound power to give their so-far obscure fellows a leg up. That was possible, in the early 70s as in the 20s, because the musicians had briefly gained some real power in the music industry. That power derived from the fact that they were playing in styles – jazz in the 20s, rock and folk-rock in the later 50s and the 60s – that the established music industry didn’t understand at all. For a few brief years, the money men were forced to listen to the musicians, since the money men couldn’t distinguish shit from shinola in the new styles, and the new styles were where the big money was going to be.
By the late 1980 and early 1990s, rock, folk rock and other “revolutionary” styles had been thoroughly absorbed by the corporations in control of the music business, and those little cracks through which such quirky talents as Kristofferson, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and John Prine had slipped were sealed up again, glued shut with pots full of cash and layer upon layer of lawyers. The corporations had put their man in the White House, a genial fellow with long years of practice at speaking for the moral vision of the powerful. People were going around wearing t-shirts that proclaimed “He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins.” You knew when somebody mentioned “the bottom line” that the bottom line was the one with a dollar sign in front of it. It was morning in America.
In 1983, Toy Boat’s six-month contract with The Territory restaurant and lounge was abruptly terminated by order of the owner’s wife – she’d apparently heard some language that offended her delicately pious ears one night when the owner had brought her in to dine.
We now faced the Christmas holiday season with no jobs and most of the clubs already booked ahead through December. Not so good. Then we got word of a Chinese joint up in the Northeast part of town looking for a holiday band, went in there and got a verbal contract. Hot dog.
Before our opening night, we got a call from the place, informing us they’d booked a different band instead and our services wouldn’t be required. The new band belonged to a reed player who’d been working around town for years. We all knew her – in fact, we’d recently played at a benefit for her after she’d had all her instruments stolen out of her car. That apparently cut no ice with her, though she knew we’d previously been booked for the gig. As Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley once observed, “If ye’d turn on th’ gas in th’ darkest heart ye’d find it had a good raison for th’ worst things it done, a good varchous raison, like needin’ th’ money or punishin’ th’ wicked or tachin’ people a lesson to be more careful, or protectin’ th’ liberties iv mankind, or needin’ the money.” It was morning in America, and she needed the gig. The fraternity of musicians that had enabled the careers of such as Hoagy and Prine was dissolving. As my friend Frank Herbst observed, it had become a doggy-dog world.
Toy Boat dissolved shortly thereafter, and I, with a young child to be responsible for, got back into teaching full time, with the help of some of my Chinamen at the community college. I left the job of peddling my songs to my former student and now friend Joel Shaw, who tried gamely and in vain for years thereafter to get them into the hands of various singers. He discovered, among other things, that no singer could afford to listen to any unvetted song for fear of being sued for piracy. I’d become thoroughly disgusted with the music business, having lost track of my original impetus to write songs or sing them. Though it would be ludicrous to compare myself with Sidney Bechet, I felt much as he did: “If you start taking what’s pure in a man, and you start putting it on a bill of sale, somehow you can’t help destroying it. In a way, all that business makes it so a man don’t have anything left to give” (Smith 124).
When I got together in the new century with my old Toy Boat partner Dan Todd, I told him I’d be happy to play in any situation that wasn’t a bar and that didn’t involve money. It turned out he’d reached similar conclusions – we’d both noticed that nearly all the musicians we knew who were still playing and still enjoying it had early on found a steady gig in some other field than the music biz. We had a fine time for many years either playing for nothing or donating our gate money to various needy people and enterprises.
And over all those years, we made a whole lot of music in our various houses, playing for no one but each other – jamming. Louis Armstrong described the essence of it: “Now you talking about jam sessions. . . . those were the things, with everyone feeling each other’s note or chord, et cetera. . . and blend with each other instead of trying to cut each other. . . nay, nay, we did not even think of such a mess. We tried to see how good we could make music sound which was an inspiration within itself” [Shapiro and Hentoff 159].
I remember a grey Sunday afternoon in February in the late 80s. A bunch of friends came by my little shotgun house on Chestnut Street, someone supplied a half-gallon bottle of bourbon, and we played all afternoon – Dave Gallupe, a superb guitarist, Bruce Garlington, a unique spirit who’d drummed with Toy Boat briefly, Dan Todd and me. Toward nightfall, the blues set in and I lit into St. Louis Jimmy Odom’s “Goin’ Down Slow.” I’d been trying to learn to play alto sax, with scant success, so I started off on that horn. After I’d sung the first two verses, Dave burst in with an intense 6/8 chorus, I did my lame best with the alto, and Dan played a beautiful, understated harp solo that would have made Big Walter proud, and we all traded around a little more and took it out and my friends went off into the night we’d been defying.
Back when the space program hadn’t been farmed out to South African lunatics and other assorted hustlers, the US sent a rocket out into the universe bearing, among other things, recordings of a bunch of music some committee had decided would best convey something or other about humans. Don’t recall now what all tunes they included. Hate to think. But I liked the idea, and I still do, except I don’t believe any rockets are necessary. I think harmonious sound waves, once they’ve been made, can travel forever. I think they do travel forever around this earth, lifting the nature of humans a little every time they’re received by someone.
Stephen Foster, the first to write truly American songs, songs which spoke immediately to people’s hearts back in the 19th Century, as they still do today, made very little money from all his hits. He died alone in New York City, his estate comprised of the contents of his wallet – 38 cents and a slip of paper on which he’d written, “Dear friends and gentle hearts.” He’d learned what was truly valuable. On the real bottom line, he was a ragtime millionaire.
Works Cited
Huffman, Eddie, John Prine: In Spite of Himself, University of Texas Press, 2016.
Sudhalter, Richard, Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael, Oxford University Press, 2002.
Shapiro, Nat and Hentoff, Nat, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, Rinehart, 1955.
