I’d learned a lot of blues songs, quite a few famous and obscure standards from the 20s and 30s, some Irish tunes, a few old Burl Ives songs and others from the dread folk music revival years, a few Dylan tunes. (While I’d dug Dylan’s early lp’s, he was leaving me pretty lukewarm as his lyrics expanded. I didn’t stop to analyze what it was I didn’t dig until D.A. Pennebaker’s wonderful Don’t Look Back came out. Pennebaker, in one section of concert footage, cut the last verse and chorus from “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” leaving the song far more powerful than it had been with the predictable moral posturing in that last verse. I eventually learned from this that a song lyric shouldn’t go on too long, and especially should shun stating “the message.” “Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end,” said Igor Stravinsky. “The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play,” said Dizzy Gillespie. Lots of ways to state the same truth.)
I’d been playing and singing this stuff since I was in high school, never getting even slightly serious about doing either right. In Denver, I’d taken a few lessons that gave me the rudiments of a right hand technique, and I’d taken a few more after moving to the Springs with a local picker, Fred Epping. He’d taught me major and minor scales in three positions, and working on them had given me some left hand strength and minimum dexterity. I was beginning to get slightly more serious about my music, but it had never occurred to me to try writing songs.
I’d also been listening to Jacques Brel for years – in fact, it was his work that moved me to learn the very limited French I’d learned. While Brel wrote some of the love songs obligatory for a chanteur (and even these came at their subject from odd, original angles), he also wrote songs that created vivid characters and dramatized whole lifetimes in a few verses. Brel often wrote in the voices of those characters, rather than in his own, allowing for deep irony.
This technique was adopted in the States by Randy Newman – in fact, it became the defining characteristic of his songs. From “Lover’s Prayer” on, Newman frequently satirized the “pinhead’s view” by writing in the pinhead’s voice (“Don’t send me nobody with glasses / Don’t want no one above me / Don’t send me nobody takin’ night classes / Send me somebody to love me”). But even when the pinhead was an egregious, unapologetic racist (“Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a tv show / With some smart-ass New York Jew / The Jew laughed at Lester Maddox / And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox, too”), Newman pled his case so eloquently that it was obvious by the final chorus (“We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks / Don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground /We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks / Keepin’ the niggers down”) that the racism under attack was to be found in all of us, not just in the good old boys of the South. Newman was almost unique among the “politicized” songsters of the 60s and early 70s in being a true moralist – in hating the sin, not the sinner, hating the sin wherever it cropped up, even in himself, and in finding the humanity in the least humane characters he spoke for or about.
He’d early in life absorbed the New Orleans piano style of Professor Longhair, Huey Smith, Mac Rebennack and, most importantly, Fats Domino, and that style formed the basis for many of his songs, not to mention his impeccable rhythm on piano. But he’d also early in life been exposed to the processes of orchestrating and performing movie music, courtesy of his two uncles, Alfred and Lionel, who remained constantly employed producing film scores for decades, and who sometimes brought their nephew into the studios to observe the process. The genius for creating moving melodies and their imaginative orchestration that garnered Oscars for his uncles – and, finally, for him – became another significant aspect of his songwriting career. But even while he was trying to make it solo as a pure “singer-songwriter,” he was writing songs that weren’t for films, but inspired by them (“Cowboy,” was one, prompted by Lonely Are the Brave. I once heard him, at an early concert in a college gym, recount a hilarious screenplay for the utterly fictional film for which “Sail Away” was, he claimed, the theme music.)
Admire Newman’s songs as I immediately did, his musical sophistication daunted me. I couldn’t imagine writing such songs because I knew I didn’t have the chops to play such music. John Prine was another story. I think it was Mike Adams, one of my students who became a friend and songwriting collaborator, who first played John Prine for me – “The Great Compromise” is the first Prine song I remember hearing. That one, and “Sam Stone,” so poignantly expressed the disillusion and pain that Vietnam had caused to those of my generation who, like me, had taken as gospel everything successive administrations had told us about the war there and our reasons for fighting it. Taken it as gospel until we’d seen for ourselves what the realities of it were. The songs weren’t ideologically based or self-righteous, any more than the Vietnam Veterans Against the War I’d been writing about, or the students I was learning from.
In addition to showing me how a song could speak for people who couldn’t speak for themselves, John Prine showed me, in the words of Alice Walker, that “the singer is the one who sings” – that is, that having a trained voice and pure tone weren’t necessary, that anyone could sing if he believed in what he was singing. I didn’t know enough then to recognize what a remarkable singer Prine was, how brilliantly his rhythm and phrasing captured those of his everyday speech. He sounded so “natural” and rough and unstudied that my only thought was, “I can sound that good.”
Thus inspired, I started trying to write songs.
“The Simple Life” was one of the first attempts, based on conversations with an older student. Over time, he’d told me much of his life story. I have no idea why, except that I was, even in those days of over-educated loquacity, a good listener, and a willing one when it came to the man I named “Ernest Tull” in the lyric I wrote in his voice, a man I admired, a man who taught me a lot about how tough life could be, especially for a man trying to live up to his code:
The Simple Life
My name’s Ernest Tull and I’m from Tennessee
Born in the bad times back around ’33
Times was confusin’ and times it was hard
With tomorrow on the table and dad in the bars
But since them bad old days, things are simpler far
Now I’m livin’ the simple life
Got me a wife and I bought me a rig
She and the bills had a race to get big
3 kids at home and 6 days on the road
Doctors and dentists and K-Mart for clothes
There’s more’n one deisel pullin’ more’n one load
Got ’em livin’ the simple life
It’s a simple life, it’s easy
Buddy, I’m tellin’ you
I’m not makin’ too many choices
Just doin’ what I have to do
Well, the kids they grew up, the wife she broke down
14 times in 2 years in a hospital gown
Sold my old rig, took a home job for keeps
12 hours a day now I’m just truckin’ concrete
In my spare time I’m cookin’ and washin’ the sheets
Just livin’ that simple life
And the taste of my cooking makes cardboard look good
And I know that I’m tryin’ to do more than I should
I keep whiskey at home in case company comes
And I’d get like my daddy or them other old bums
But that woman’s too brave for me ever to run
So I’ll just keep livin’ that simple life
I’m livin’ the simple life, yeah, just livin’ the simple life
Livin’ the simple life, yeah – it’s a simple life. It’s easy.
“The simple life” was a phrase he used more than once to ironically describe his situation, meant to reject any notion of pity or self-pity. As I remember, he was at the college looking to find training for a job less physically demanding than driving a cement truck – he wasn’t getting any younger. I admired the hell out of him, and I can still see his deeply-lined, Buck Owens face and the huge hands he’d keep folded in front of him as he talked.
I recorded a lot of these early songs on little portable tape recorders I’d borrow form the lab, hence the abominable sound quality. When I first began trying to sing my stuff, I affected what I imagined was a “folk” voice, with weirdly distorted vowels. I didn’t know a thing about proper tone production, so any high notes sounded something like the cries of a tormented seagull, and while I did know something about phrasing, my lack of breath control often cancelled out what I knew. None of that bothered me unduly at first, since I had no plans to perform in public.
Nancy and I still lived in a little rented house on Glen Avenue, a two-block cul de sac along Monument Creek. Across the street lived a little old wino, Bill Sampson, with his dog Bing, named, Bill told me, for Bing Crosby. Toward the end of our stay on Glen Avenue, Bill probably fell asleep with his last cigarette in his hand. His house went up in flames with him and Bing in it. I was saddened by those two deaths. I’d enjoyed talking with Bill, especially enjoyed his scurrilous stories about the rich folk who lived in the big houses on the other side of the creek, and I’d enjoyed Bing’s performances when Bill would order him to sing:
Bill and Bing
Billy Sam was a little old man [2]
He built his house where the river ran
Well he’d come to call, about as drunk as an owl [2]
Billy Sam, he did not care at all
Right across the river on the other side
That’s where all the richfolks’ kinfolks got pie-eyed
Billy knew their names and their faults real well
Voted Democratic just to give ’em hell
He had one friend, an old mongrel hound [2]
They both smelled about like a wino dog pound
He’d say, “My name is Bill and that’s my dog Bing” [2]
He’s a good old boy – c’mon, Bing, sing.”
Bing’d roll back his lips until his choppers showed [2]
Then he’d howl to make you think you was on Glory Road
Bill was on a pension, he was doin fine
Stinking of wood smoke and Maverick wine
Lived on Spam and Copenhagen from the 7-11
Until one day his house burned down and Bill and Bing, they went to
call on heaven
He said My name is Bill and that’s my dog Bing [2]
He’s an educated dog, ain’t ya boy, c’mon sing
So far, I was sticking pretty close to the good old folk harmonic system John Prine espoused. (Except for the bridge in “The Simple Life,” and I have no idea what I thought I was doing harmonically on that, though I’m quite certain I shouldn’t have done it.) But somewhere along the line I’d started playing in a couple of open tunings (open G and D) and learned a trick of barring all but the 1st string with my left index finger, which produced some very interesting, Newmanesque discords. I developed a progression that sounded good to me and it became a song in search of a lyric. By this time, I was playing 3 or 4 hours a day and getting to where I could actually pick some.
Nancy and I had a friend up in Denver, Norm Powers, a unique character who taught junior high and probably saved the sanity of a thousand students over the years he taught. Norm had grown up in Nederland and then Evergreen, two small towns up in the Rockies west of Denver, in a family full of strange and fearsome characters, including one certifiably crazy aunt and a mother I thought of as the Angel of Death. The aunt was living in a northern suburb of Denver when Norm took us to meet her, and I spent some astonishing hours listening to his aunt’s visions there in the overheated living room. I had my lyric:
Rhodie
Rhodie was born the middle of 5
or 8 children, if you counted the dead
The last one took Mama away on a trip
to a terrible, fiery place, so Papa said
but that was long ago –
they all say so
Those Nederland winters, they’re cold
and they’re longer than any 6 people in 2 rooms can bear
But Papa was strong, and he held out so long
that Papa and Sissy and Rhodie was all that was left there
Sissy and Papa was friends
Sissy took care
I’ve seen the fire that burns up the universe
I have felt it burn
When a bird calls in his slow-turnin fall
I feel the world turn
She’s a crazy old lady, she’s been certified
by the State to be out of her mind
She used to take her pistol, shoot at the buses
For fear that the driver was the Devil, drivin Grey Line
I’ve seen an elkhorn grow into a flower
sit in my sister’s vase
I’ve seen the Devil in his terrible power
in my sister’s face
She’s never been real, to anyone livin’
in any place real like a city or town
Now she’s out on her own with a tolerant cousin
Watchin’ tv in an old satin gown
The game show winners smile
without a sound
I see a ship, way out on the ocean
where I’ve never been
Passengers laughin’ and dancin’,
They don’t hear the wind
Typhoon, she circles and drops –
The ship is goin down
We’re under the ocean top, swirlin’,
I don’t hear a sound –
I don’t hear a sound
I continued in this highly commercial vein with a song about a sorely distressed fellow I’d observed one night up in the middle of Denver, where I was sitting in my car across from a liquor store for reasons I no longer remember. Nor do I remember why I named him “Zimmerman.” I wasn’t consciously thinking of Dylan’s birth name, though the lyric I wrote certainly contains some echoes of Dylan:
Zimmerman’s Syndrome
The doctors, they got a name for it, they can diagnose it for sure
It’s one of those things that’s just goin’ round, and there isn’t any cure
Here comes one of the victims now, old fella name of Zimmerman
One step forward, one step back, like a toy made in Japan
It takes him forever just to make the trip from one streetlight to the next
How’s he gonna get to the liquor store on the corner where the light collects?
How will he pay for his pint of Tokay when his hands have a life of their own,
Flappin around like a fish on the land – and how’ll he ever get home?
But he makes it, he gets there and he pays for his wine
Then it’s back out the doorway to a night full of moonshine
And then it’s back to his rented room, it’s a warm little place to hide
From the eyes that look on with pity and scorn at a man with a storm inside
Wrapped up in an overcoat, he’s shakin’ and he’s jerkin’
Tryin to make the corner in a body that ain’t workin’
But he makes it work & he gets back home and climbs the well-worn steps
One step up and one step down, like tryin to get out of debt
But the debt’s eternal and it’s never paid if you’ve got what Zimmerman’s got
How’s he gonna get his lips to the glass to take his well-earned shot?
What does he think & what does he feel when the window turns to grey
Sittin’ in the dawn with the nightlight on with a glass of spilled Tokay?
He made it, he’s still there on that threadbare divan
Alive in the wreckage they call Zimmerman
The doctors, they’ve got a name for it, they can diagnose it for sure
It’s one of those things that’s just goin’ round – and round, and round, and round
He made it, he’s still there on that threadbare divan
Alive in the wreckage they call… Zimmerman
The characters I was choosing to write about resembled many of my students. Their challenges were many, their resources few. Their lives were hard. I don’t know what drew me to admire these “losers.” Maybe I’d picked up Nelson Algren’s attitude, as Kurt Vonnegut described it: “he would be satisfied were we to agree with him that persons unlucky and poor and not very bright are to be respected for surviving, although they often have no choice but to do so in ways unattractive and blameworthy to those who are a lot better off” (Never Come Morning. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1987, p. xx). I don’t know why, but I’d always been drawn to the side of the underdog, and repelled by the “winners” in the capitalist system. Something in the character James Cagney played in The Roaring Twenties, which I watched one night with a bottle of scotch, struck me as a perfect example of the Capitalist Winner:
Cagney
Cagney, just keep on your thinkin’, you plans to control
Keep hunchin’ your shoulders like a man stuck all night in the cold
There’ll be plenty to help you seal up all the cracks
There’ll be plenty of hammers and plenty of tacks
Plenty won’t notice they’re building a cell
There’ll be plenty of company down in your cold Cagney hell
The structure you’re building, it looks like a castle to you
But the concrete & steel will conceal you before you get through
And the die in the carpets will all run together
Rusty as blood on a dead eagle’s feather
And the wine that you stole will turn into black rust
And the stone’s that you stole for your castle will fall to black dust
Cagney, you bought all the servants and thugs you could buy
The rest of us smile at their orders and grow old and die
And it looks like you’re winnin’, it looks like we’re losin’
It looks like we’ve chosen to let you do the choosin’
And it looks like we’ll all watch your show end alone
Until we’re all together again under your fallen stones
Cagney, just keep on your thinkin’, your plans to control
Yeah, you just keep on thinkin’, Cagney – that’s what you’re good at.
I lived, back in the late 60s and early 70s, in a state of perpetual rage – rage against the war in Vietnam, against successive lying governments, against an economic system that placed profit ahead of any other values, against the impenetrable blindness and complacency of The Silent Majority. I easily identified with the outlaw heroes of current films – hence the allusion to the Sundance Kid’s sarcastic line to Butch Cassidy. But my experiences with the Craig Barnes, George McGovern and anti-war campaigns had left me in a state close to despair, not to mention close to crazy. When I heard the radio promo for a film called Two Thousand Maniacs (“You’ll never forget…two thousand maniacs”), I was inspired to write a belated title song for it:
Love Theme from 2,000 Maniacs
I saw a man, he looked like a dwarf
He graduated from Holy Cross
Had a little microphone stitched in his ear
With the other end connected to Albert Speer
And they say – we gotta get back to the land
He was talkin’ to a midget and he looked a little nervous
The midget’s hump was frontal, he’d been wounded in the service
That’s the day the day-old bread was gettin’ bought and sold
But the day-old tangerines was blue with that old week-old mold’
And they say – we gotta get back to the land
Bloop, down go the apples
There’s alligators all in the pears
Well, the tire went up – tire went down
God damn, we don’t have a spare
Political honey with your pantsuit eyes
You got a book that’s full of whats & not one page of whys
I can tell it by your look, I’m gonna see what’s in that book
You know that book is true, I can tell it by your look –
And they say – and we gotta get back to the land
Lend me a hand – we gotta get back to the land
Looking back on these early efforts, I can see that I mastered the art of writing completely unsaleable songs right off the bat. But I wasn’t even thinking along commercial lines, then (or ever, really). I just wanted to amuse my colleagues at the college and my new friends at the Tillerman Teahouse.
