I Write the Songs, I Write the Songs, Part 1
On pulling words and music from the air, 1970–1982
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My first songwriting memory dates from when I was five years old. Although the echo of the tune still resonates within me, I couldn’t reproduce it for you. I do recall crying while I created it, from joy, or perhaps amazement that I could pull a melody and words from an unseen place.
The circumstances were unusual, and never to be repeated. I was in the backseat of my father’s rental car, leaning against my sleeping six-year-old brother, Britt. As I whisper-sang the words, tears trickled onto the scuffed lenses of my tortoise-shell glasses, refracting the glow of the Anaheim streetlights passing overhead. Although surrounded by others, I decided to keep this experience to myself.
Britt and I had spent the day with our father and stepmother at Disneyland, exhilarated out of our minds, gobbling junk food, baking in the California sun. Dad had flown us all from Atlanta. It was my brother’s and my first plane ride. This would be the only trip we would ever take with our father. Within two years, he would be dead at thirty. (Here’s a song I wrote about him in 1999.)
A few weeks before he died, my folkie father had given me an acoustic guitar for my seventh birthday. I wouldn’t possess the discipline to learn an instrument, however, until I held an electric bass in the summer of ‘79. I’d noticed the way some girls watched a cover band at a party, and I desired that kind of attention. At fourteen, I became a committed pupil of Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Rush, Kiss, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, learning to play bass by ear via their LPs, aided and abetted by my best friend Todd, who’d been taking guitar lessons since we were twelve. We invested many hours in preparation for rock stardom.
Soon after picking up that bass, I stumbled on a poem in the St. Pius X Catholic High School literary magazine. The title escapes me. It was about playing solitaire while drinking gin. (“The king of hearts is my best friend / Along with a bottle of gin” is the only line I recall.) Even though – or maybe because – alcoholism had played a significant role in my father’s death, this poem about drinking alone over a deck of cards, the rhythmic sentences, captivated me. I sat on our screened-in bungalow porch and threaded the stanzas to a dark melody I plunked from my plywood starter bass.
As with my first song, I shared this work with no one – not even the kid who penned the words, who I would never meet. It exists only in the recesses of my mind, and barely there. I didn’t cry this time, but I did connect to that unseen place again, which satisfied and intrigued me. The notion of documenting the song on my Panasonic tape recorder did not occur to me. We rarely did that in those days. Thankfully.
About a year later I was bassist in cover band Iqee Phudj (pronounced “Icky Fudge”). Our repertoire featured Rush, Def Leppard, Krokus, Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd numbers. I’m almost positive we were awful. Again: this was in the days before compulsive chronicling, and thank God for that.
Regardless, the varied songs were instructive. I began to ascertain the mechanics of it all, the machinery of intro, verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, double chorus, end. How certain chords and progressions evoked certain moods, and how, combined with euphonious (or not) words and rhyme schemes, and melodic hooks (the hardest part), a song could act as incantation, and change the collective mood of a room. A well-wrought tune could inspire love, lust, laughter, wonder, hope, hatred, action. If that’s not magic, what is?
Like me, the Iqee Phudj drummer was a fan of satire. He and I co-wrote a parody “prog rock” song, with shifting time signatures, intentionally pretentious lyrics, and no chorus, just a series of “movements.” We laughed at our genius work ‘til we cried. I secretly thrilled that we actually accomplished it. Before we could motivate Iqee Phudj to learn it, however, the band mercifully broke up. Why? Who knows. Later, they would burn me in effigy at a keg party for “going new wave.”
In 1980, Todd taught me some chords on a cheap acoustic guitar I’d purchased. I learned fast, and played every day. I am so thankful the internet did not yet exist, that video games still cost a quarter at the arcade, and that we didn’t have cable. My time was well-filled with bass and guitar, my red Schwinn ten-speed, the radio, and seeing as much of my beautiful first love Paula as her parents would allow.
My teenage muse emboldened me. Paula inspired my first love song, which I played for her, troubadour-style, in her family’s living room. A first for both of us. The title escapes me, but it was probably “Paula’s Song.” I was trying to sound like James Taylor, clumsily fingerpicking that acoustic. She listened rapt and wide-eyed. The only lines I recall are, I think: “I long to love you more each day / To take your worries and kiss ‘em away / And I want to be your best friend, too.” If memory serves, I lifted some chord sequences from Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide.” Paula was overwhelmed.
Taking someone’s breath away with a song is something you never forget. Remarkably, I don’t think either of us taped it. Nor did I play it for anyone else. It was just for Paula, in that moment.
During this hormonal time, Britt and I became adversaries. To my great relief and gratitude, my brother and I would ultimately mend our relationship and grow closer than ever, but in those days, I was the recipient of a lot of vocal and physical rage. Although bigger than my sibling, I never bested him in often-brutal physical fights.
Out of frustration, I wrote a song called “Brother Blues.” It was as much an exercise in the 12-bar blues form as it was an outlet for my own rage. The only line I recall is “He acts just like a little kid.” I never intended for Britt to see or hear “Brother Blues.”
Fate had other plans. During a fragile detente, Britt and some of his friends – fellow troubled, hard partying kids – crowded into my little room, a former sleeping porch. I’d gotten good on the bass, and Britt took pride in that. He asked me to play for his pals. As I leaned into Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” I grinned at their appreciative hooting and hollering. When the notes faded to a buzz in my amplifier, one of the boys picked up the spiral-bound paper on which I’d written “Brother Blues." I almost snatched it from him, but something held me back. He scanned the angry lyrics, eyebrows raised, and handed the paper to my brother. As Britt read them, a heavy silence fell. My heart leapt into my throat.
“Is it about Britt?” the friend asked. It wasn’t really a question.
After a few seconds, in a shaky voice, I said, “It’s about him when I’m mad at him.”
I watched my brother’s eyes as he dropped the paper to the floor. I took no pleasure in humiliating him. My heart sank as I realized my longing for the easy rapport we’d shared as small children would never be satisfied. Not now, not ever. I was sorry, but my own wounds held power over me. I did not apologize.
“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Britt said to his friends, and off they went.
A couple weeks later, after he’d left me on the floor following a fistfight, he said, “Why don’t you write another song about me?” and stomped out the door.
Years later, when we entered our twenties and began building our lives as young men, he came to visit me in my first East Village winter. 1985. As snow fell outside the bay window of the Milon Indian restaurant on 1st Avenue, he tearfully and unequivocally apologized for all that rage and violence. I forgave him, and we moved on, stronger.
Let’s back up to ‘81, my sixteenth year. After Iqee Phudj, I bought an Ibanez electric guitar from earnings made working construction for Paula’s father. I joined my friend Jimmy’s cover band Little Dreamer, which featured a fifteen-year-old wunderkind vocalist named Bonnie. In this quintet, I would play my first paying gigs – a handful of parties for gas money. I recently wrote about Bonnie here as someone I can’t track down via the internet.
Little Dreamer specialized in Heart, Pat Benatar, Quarterflash, Jefferson Starship, and Led Zeppelin songs. Bonnie could sing the shit out of all of it. I’m pretty sure she’s one of the best – if not the best – singers I’ve ever shared a stage with. But of course no photos, videos, or audio recordings of Little Dreamer exist.
As I wrote in that post: The first time I heard one of my own songs played and sung in a room (by a band) was at a Little Dreamer rehearsal. Everybody loved “No Good Kid,” a Pat Benatar-inspired new wave rocker, words and music by yours truly. Bonnie slayed the vocal. “No Good Kid” would be Little Dreamer’s only non-cover. It exists now solely in my head, in Bonnie’s clarion voice.
Some lyrics: “Screwed-up hair and blood red eyes / And a face only mama could love / You’re talkin’ your junk and you’re tellin’ your lies / You don’t know when push comes to shove… YOU’RE A NO GOOD KID!!”
After I amicably quit Little Dreamer, ostensibly to “focus on my schoolwork,” they replaced me with another lanky rhythm guitarist. To my pleasant surprise, they kept “No Good Kid” in their set. When I attended a gig at a downtown Atlanta club, Bonnie introduced me from the stage as the song’s writer. “No Good Kid” brought the house down, and people slapped my back and looked at me in a way no one had ever looked at me before.
I was a songwriter.
Within months I formed The Latest with my friend Teddy and an excellent drummer named Harry. I was seventeen, they were eighteen. This power trio was my first all-original band. Teddy had quit high school at sixteen, and worked a job and still lived at home with his dad and two sisters. Like me, he’d endured the early trauma of a parent’s unexpected death – his mom, of an aneurysm, a few years before we met. We bonded on that, though we rarely spoke of it. A portrait of his beautiful, young mother greeted me whenever I walked into his sad family home.
Teddy was angry, ballsy, and extremely funny. He’d written a handful of punky songs on a Rickenbacker 360 that I thought were great. Unlike me, he’d never played in a band of any kind before, but, suited up in a vintage three-button hand-me-down and bowling shoes, he was ready. He introduced me to The Jam, Elvis Costello, XTC, Split Enz, and The Who, and madly drove us through Atlanta to see midnight movies like Quadrophenia and The Kids Are Alright.
The summer of ‘82 was the summer of The Latest. Teddy inspired my songwriting, and he enthusiastically encouraged me to become a singing bass player, like Sting or XTC’s Colin Moulding. He preferred my voice over his, which was kind of a yelp. His faith was invaluable, as I’d broken up with Paula, my champion, and my new girlfriend, Samantha, was compulsively critical. There hangs a tale.
Regardless, in The Latest, I blossomed. I woodshedded with renewed energy, working on my bass chops and churning out song after song, inspired by the LPs Teddy played for me. I crafted angsty, tuneful new wavers with titles like “You Don’t Know,” “Through to You,” and “I’m Too Scared for Suicide.” I also sang most of Teddy’s songs, at his behest. I only refused to sing one: “Not For Me,"an intense number he wrote about his mother. It was my turn to encourage someone to step up to the microphone and scream, which Teddy did.
With The Latest, I would sing my own songs in front of strangers and get paid for the first time. Teddy hustled up some good gigs at hip new wave clubs, and we recorded seven songs in an 8-track studio.
(Sadly, Teddy would eventually lose the only known copy of that demo tape. No other audio, and no video or photos of The Latest exist. It’s all memory.)
As autumn of ‘82 approached, The Latest was on a promising trajectory. We were garnering fans and feeling our oats until gifted-but-peevish drummer Harry quit to enroll in the University of Georgia. Teddy and I had a hard time replacing him.
Just as The Latest lost momentum, my old friend Todd called to tell me he’d met a guy named RuPaul who wanted to start a band. Was I interested in bringing my bass over to jam with them?
I was.
Next week: RuPaul, Wee Wee Pole, Athens, NYC, The Fleshtones, Full Time Men, Rosanne Cash
Love this, and the pics are amazing!
diggin' the reminiscin' - but, yer still a no-good kid. ; ]