“I can’t do it anymore! I’ve tried and tried and tried but I just can’t manage it. I feel like killing myself!”
“Don’t be a jackass,” my friend and agent, Larry Taglin told me, his arm around my shoulders giving me a reassuring squeeze. “Steve, pal, did you think you’d go on doing it until your dying day? Everyone has to hang up their hat someday. You’re an older man, you gotta realise it’s all over for you now, just like everyone else has to. ”
We were walking through the hallway of my huge house just outside the town of Nashville, Tennessee, passing the gold and silver discs mounted on the wall, my certificates for awards to songwriting for the Country Music Industry, induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. I had shedloads of trophies like that, lots of the awards were signed by famous names. Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Brad Paisley. I knew all the greats, they were personal friends of mine, and I’d written songs for all of them. I don’t perform myself so much these days, I’m more of a songwriter than singer now, but I like to think I still have the gift to entertain an audience.
“See, I have a theory,” Larry went on, as we walked into my living room and sat down opposite each other on the large armchairs, me sunk in gloom, Larry all smiles and wisdom. “Think about creative people of all kinds: songwriters, music composers, artists, writers. They have one thing in common: a special talent that sets them apart from, the also-rans, the no-hopers that struggle and never get anywhere. I figure that all of them have a certain finite amount of this special creative juice inside them, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. Artists who paint wonderful pictures, songwriters like you who write marvellous melodies, writers who can build a fantastic world of make-believe in their books, poets who can make you cry with their words. How often have you read the latest ‘bestseller’ by a famous author that’s utter crap, because he won’t face the fact that he’s run out of ideas? Writers are the worst, their agents push them for years past their sell-by date, and they end up producing garbage for the money. But with our industry it can’t be done: for music either grabs you or it doesn’t, you can’t fake a musical hit. That’s why so many pop stars often rise up like meteors, then crash and burn within a couple of years because they can’t keep it up. Face it, Steve. You’ve had a twenty-year run. Now it’s over.”
“But that’s terrible,” I answered him, covering my face with my hands. “Songwriting is my life, it’s who I am, writing songs has been my friend through my worst crises, it’s kept me going through the bad times, and it’s rewarded me with lots of money, a wonderful lifestyle and the best social life I could wish for. Larry, I’m a songwriter, it’s who I am, it’s what I do!”
“Not anymore, Steve. You just told me, you’ve lost your talent. Heck, at east you’re man enough to admit it and not to go on fooling yourself. And, hey, what’s it matter? You’ve got enough money for a comfortable retirement and you can find some other hobby to fill your days. Do more of your charity work, or try golf, or fishing – or take that new wife of yours on a vacation, see the world. Relax. Retire. Have fun.”
“Fun?” I shook my head miserably. “This is my fun, Larry.” I picked up my best friend, my thirty-year-old acoustic Martin guitar with its big hole in the soundboard, and fingered the strings. “This is what I love most in the world. Plucking these and coming up with a riff, then a melody, then a chorus, then some words. That’s me. That’s all I ever wanted to do.”
Larry stayed and chatted before leaving me alone to my bottle of whisky and my gloomy loneliness. My wife, Jan, was out somewhere, as she often was these days. The trouble with having a younger wife is that they often want to do things you just ain’t got the energy for, so you just have to let her do it – dance classes, coffee mornings, pottery, bookbinding, Jan does them all.
Larry’s heart-to-heart with me was six months ago, and during that time, nothing changed for me, and I got steadily more miserable as I tried and failed to write a new song. One godawful miserable day I got into reminiscing about when I was in my thirties, had just come to Nashville, and was working as a waiter and barman by day, and sang my songs in the clubs at night.
All those years ago seemed just like yesterday sometimes. I was working myself into the ground, but at first – indeed for over a year – my singer-songwriter career was a joke. And then, after one late-night drinking session, my pal Jodie Ericson took me aside when we were both too drunk to think clearly.
“Steve, lemme tell you something,” Jodie muttered to me after a belch. “Boy, are you gonna hate me for this.”
“What?”
“You’re never gonna be a great songwriter! There, I’ve said it. Don’t get me wrong: you’re a fine guitar and violin player, you know a heck of a lot about musical theory, you write competent, nice cosy songs that are easy on the ear, and you’ve made lots of friends in the business, But you’re just never gonna make it big.”
“You mean because I’m English, not American?”
“Shit no! Being English gives you an interesting edge. At first I really thought that you could have made it.”
“Could have made it?”
He nodded. “Do yourself a favour and go back to England.”
“How the fuck can you tell me that I’m a failure?” I snarled at him, resisting my urge to whack him on the jaw.
He leaned back in the bar stool and gave his best shit-eating smile. “Shut up and listen, you idiot, I’m trying to help you! Just stop and think of the greatest musical talents of the past. Edith Piaf grew up in a brothel, filthy men abused her since she was a kid, and she was perpetually hungry, living in squalor. Ray Charles, for God’s sake, poor little Ray went blind as a boy and learnt to play piano all on his own! Dolly Parton grew up in a dirt poor family in the Appalachian Mountains – they could barely afford to eat! Garth Brooks shovelled shit in a sanitary station.”
“So?”
He leaned forward speaking forcefully, and I noticed his gold front tooth flashing in the light. “The moral is, you’ve had a nice, easy comfortable life and because of that you’ve kinda missed the grit and grind of living hard. If you want to write great songs, first of all you have to suffer. To make songs people really feel, that tug on your heartstrings you’ve got to know what it’s like to feel misery, pain and hell on earth, and Steve, you can’t write great songs because you’ve never suffered! My advice to you? Get married to a real mean bitch, then get a horrible messy divorce so you miss her like crazy and go mad with jealousy. Lose all your money and live on the streets going hungry. Learn what it’s like to have folks spit at you while you’re busking at the side of the road, and guys are stealing your pennies! Suffer! That’s the only way you’ll get there.”
We parted company and I thought hard about what he said.
After that day I got to drinking more, and I found I was a real nasty drunk, I got into fights and fell out with lots of my friends. I lost my waiter’s job, was thrown out of my apartment cos I couldn’t pay the rent, and while I was living on the street I got mugged for the bit of small change I had. And one day I woke up and found someone had stolen everything I owned except my guitar, that, while I had been asleep they hadn’t been able to pry from my fingers.
That’s when I sat in the gutter and it started to rain. As the raindrops dripped down my neck, I plucked at some new, messy never-messed-around-with chords I’d not tried before, fooled around quite a bit without even thinking.
And then it happened!
I found a riff!
A fucking fantastic riff like I’d never made before. A riff that set my heart a-beating.
Then I found a melody, then I snuck into a chorus and finally came the words, all pouring out from me as if they came from somewhere outside myself, I guess from God or something, or anyhow, that’s how it felt.
Next day I found I still had a few friends in the music business, and I played Living, Loving, Dying to Hank Willowtree at Arbor Stewart Records, out in East Nashville. I still remember the bored smile of irritation freeze on his face when he heard my opening bars and started to sing. I noticed the way his face turned to ice and he knew, just as I knew, that this was going to be one of the biggest hits in the world.
And you know something?
It was.
From then on my musical tap was open for me and the music flowed relentlessly, earning me the kind of career I never thought I could possibly have expected.
“Steve Honey, I’m home!”
I snapped out of my reverie from twenty years ago, and came slap-bang down to earth when I heard Jan’s voice in the hall. With her was Cosma Lannigan, some new hotshot friend of hers, and Cosmo was rabbiting on about his business which was crypto currency.
“You gotta invest in this, Steve, you’ve just got to!” he went on as he nearly shook my hand off of my wrist. “If you sell everything you’ve got, take mortgages out on the house, grab every cent you’ve got in the world and borrow more, you can invest in this new crypto currency and in no time you’ll be ten times as rich. Forget Bitcoin and all the others. Believe me, Steve, Cryptospice is going to be the Daddy of them all.”
“I don’t need the risk,” I told him. “I’ve got all the money I need. Royalties coming in, my back catalogue.” Then I thought of how with no new songs, money might get tight eventually.
“Hey, but Steve, you’re known to be a generous guy, and I’ve heard about all those charities you support – homeless people, the hospitals, the food bank. Say you were able to even just quadruple your money, you could still keep your lifestyle, and give away all the rest. Think of all the good you could do.”
The nuts and bolts of money bores me, and as the little guy prattled on, I could see he really believed in it. Why not take a chance, I thought? Crypto was the new thing, wasn’t it? I’d heard that people were making millions without doing any work.
“Sure, let’s do it,” I told them. “Tell me what to do and I’ll sign whatever you want.”
Okay, I hear you telling me. I was an idiot. And, you’ve probably guessed it. Cosmo-fucking-Lannigan not only swindled me out of everything I’d got, but he ran off with Jan, leaving me with no wife, no money, no home, no nothing.
Luckily my friend Val Parsons at the charity for homeless people I’ve been involved with for years, managed to get me a caravan on the trailer park outside town, so that now I had a home of sorts and at least I wasn’t on the streets.
Is this what it comes down to, after sixty-three years on earth? was the gloomy thought that sprang to mind as I waited on the sidewalk while the trailer park people winched my dirty second-hand old caravan onto its space, and I waited, sitting on my suitcase, my trusty old guitar in my hand.
And you know something? My fingers kinda flew across the strings.
And all at once I had a riff! Then I had a melody! Then came the words.
I’d got a new song!
Finally I was back.
Val came across, reaching his hand down to pull me to my feet, his face sad and grave.
“Hey, Steve, I came across to share a bottle of rye with you, to try and cheer you up, expecting you to be damn near suicidal after all that’s happened.” His huge unexpected grin lit up his craggy face. “Yet you’ve got a smile that’s wider than a five-bar gate! What happened?”
“Do you know something, Val?”
I wallowed in that old familiar thrill that I thought I’d never know again, felt a burst of joy in my heart that was better than sex, better than money, better than breathing. That burst of excitement that never ever fades when you give birth to a song that you know isn’t just good, it’s a piece of sheer magic.
“I’ve never been happier in my life!”
(image courtesy of Santiago Gonzalez, from Pixabay)
And why not listen to the wonderful Melanie with her sensational song from 1971
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r44Ach4mXE4