I Write the Songs, I Write the Songs, Part 2
On pulling words and music from the air, 1983-1989
My recent Big Birthday Shindig felt like a homecoming. If you’ve not already, please enjoy
’s generous review here. It was a happy birthday indeed.Preparation for that evening prompted these songwriting posts, and, unexpectedly, produced in me some consternation. While assembling old and new stuff for a set, I realized I’d not booked a mostly-all-originals show in at least a decade. No bueno.
In my defense, I’ve hardly been idle. These last years I’ve invested creative energy in my novel Perfectly Broken (and follow-up-in-progress), my one-man show Redheaded Friend (which includes original songs), and beloved, remunerative tribute shows to Bowie, Leonard Cohen, and Johnny Cash. Plus a book about the Man in Black. Also this Substack (thanks again for subscribing).
I enjoy all of the above, but the Shindig evoked the distinctive exhilaration of presenting my own tunes solo, and riding the wave of whatever the audience brings into the room. Those things feed my soul now more than ever.
Deep gratitude to the dear folks who attended, applauded, and thanked me.
More of that going forward.
Since I posted I Write the Songs, I Write the Songs, Part 1, RuPaul’s new memoir The House of Hidden Meanings hit Number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Coincidentally, the earliest surviving recordings of my songwriting are from my time as bassist in Ru’s and my 80s band Wee Wee Pole. That was his first musical endeavor, and, as he recounts in his book, the first time he donned full drag.
While my memories of Wee Wee Pole’s sixteen-month run differ from Ru’s, one fact is incontrovertible: in that time – late ‘82 to early ‘84 – RuPaul, Todd Butler (“Timothy” in Ru’s book), J David Klimchak and I co-created a slew of new wave funk songs. (You can see us perform a few here.) We recorded three – “Tarzan,” “In My Neighborhood,” and “Body Heat” – at Caribeso Studio in Atlanta’s Little Five Points. Before anyone could put those songs out, the band was no more.
(You can read more Wee Wee Pole recollections here and here.)
Down the decades, RuPaul and I have stayed in touch via email. When I digitized the Wee Wee Pole songs, I let him know. This past January, he released them on his label, RuCo. They’re part of his Essentials Volume 3, timed to coincide with his memoir.
So now “Tarzan,” “In My Neighborhood,” and “Body Heat” live on Spotify and YouTube, et al. If you can manage to stream just one of them about a million times, I will make enough money to pay my mortgage for a month. (Not an exaggeration.)
Like Lennon/McCartney, REM, U2, and Radiohead, Wee Wee Pole split writing credit equally among us, regardless of who actually composed the tunes. Most of the lyrics came from me.
I enjoyed writing for RuPaul. He was brave, and relished shocking people, which I admired. While I couldn’t emulate him in performance or dress, I could in song. He emboldened me. We were all big Prince fans, and some of my lyrics –especially “Body Heat”– were pretty naughty. Creating them gave me a punky, transgressive thrill.
You can break it up, you can break it down
Only one message to be found
You can give all your money and all your treasure
For two or three seconds of sexual pleasure
That’s what life’s all about… BODY HEAT!
When Todd’s saintly mother, Betty Butler, heard Ru singing my libidinous lyrics, she evicted us from the steamy front room of the Butler home – our first practice space. She’d breezily accepted so much, bless her, but certain words were a bridge too far.
To my surprise, even as Wee Wee Pole gained popularity, traveling to NYC for triumphant gigs at Danceteria and the Pyramid club, aspects of the experience increasingly stressed me out. The goofiness, the often chaotic gigs, the limitations of being in a band called “Wee Wee Pole.” When I received an invitation in early ‘84 to play bass in Athens icon Vic Varney’s arty band, I jumped at it. My personal life was in shambles, and Wee Wee Pole was getting on my nerves, so I pulled up stakes in Atlanta and moved ninety minutes east to “the Land of R.E.M.” to join Go Van Go.
Athens wasn’t just a new band opportunity. It was a chance for me to live independently, with low overhead. Single for the first time since age fourteen, I was eager to see who I was away from the only life I’d known. The move was one of the best decisions I ever made. As I would write almost four decades later in “Defy Gravity”:
There’s only so many times in a life
When you can defy gravity
When you can break away, fly from the mess you made
Live those questions of being free.
I did not get much songwriting done in Athens. Go Van Go was very much Vic’s vehicle for his tunes. His willpower dazzled me. I was fine just honing my bass chops, working my money gig at Kinko’s, and living on the cheap as an unattached nineteen-year-old. I used my ample free time to practice, and, most importantly, to loaf, an underrated concept. On occasion, I would strum a Fender acoustic guitar in solitude, making up riffs, thinking about songwriting.
As I fell in love with more and more songs, however, the urge to create my own percolated steadily. If you stood in the hallway of the antebellum house where I lived, you’d hear my new discoveries Richard Thompson, The Replacements, and Tom Waits blaring from a boombox. You would not hear me trying to mimic them, though. Not yet.
On a September Saturday, The Replacements rode into town to play a typically ramshackle, oppressively loud gig at an Athens venue called Stitchcraft. Their punk ferocity was formidable, but I recall wishing they would just shut up and let leader Paul Westerberg sing his work unaccompanied, like, say, Neil Young in Rust Never Sleeps. In interviews from that time, Paul professed admiration not just for arena rockers like Kiss, but also singer-songwriters like Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot, and Harry Chapin. I thought: I want to hang out with this guy.
A solo troubadour captivating listeners with just a song inspired me more than spellbinding instrumental prowess, or punk ferocity. (This remains true.) I longed to weave words and melody such that I required neither volume, nor technical proficiency, nor even a band to win over an audience.
I would need to wait. Learning bass and guitar had come pretty quick for me, but writing a good song I could confidently perform solo would take much, much longer than I anticipated.
In those days, my cardinal trait was restlessness. Having fallen hard for NYC while on tour with both Wee Wee Pole and Go Van Go, and interested in a girl who lived there, I left Athens and moved to Manhattan on February 1st, 1985. In my first year, I joined and quit a couple of bands. My desire to do my own thing was increasing, but I did not yet have the material or confidence to pull it off, so I sought bass gigs, which would satisfy part of me for a bit. As a bassist, I did not lack confidence.
All the while, I beavered away for untold hours on a Fostex cassette four-track, recording my works-in-progress in an Avenue B tenement. While the results did not thrill me, the process did. I was rich in hope, and driven. In one of the luckiest happenstances of my life, I was part of the last wave of creatives who could enjoy relatively cheap NYC. My work schedule was not onerous. I had time between money gigs.
Music was my constant. My boombox and Walkman blared Bowie’s Heroes and Hunky Dory, Prince’s Dirty Mind, 1999, and Purple Rain, Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates and Girl at Her Volcano, the Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops, U2’s Wide Awake in America, Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love.
At nearby Life Cafe, I befriended an excellent drummer named Drew who was opening a small recording studio. So he could learn the gear, we recorded a handful of my Replacements-inspired tunes, Drew on drums, me on everything else, including vocals drenched in effects. I am forever indebted to him for his patience and encouragement, for many fun hours spent slamming frequencies to tape, often ‘til the sun rose.
Eventually, I found the courage to play hissy, distorted cassettes of my tunes during smoky happy hours at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, where I’d landed a bartending gig. Occasionally, a song would prick up a patron’s ears.
“Who’s this?”they would ask, looking up from a two-dollar cocktail.
“Me,” I’d say.
“I like it! You’re gonna be famous. Another vodka tonic!”
Despite such praise, I would not perform any circa ‘85-‘86 material today. Of dozens, only one tune – “Moment of Weakness” – is committed fully to memory, and has never been digitized. Many cassettes containing “80s evidence” reside now in sealed plastic cases in a closet mere feet from me. Someday I will excavate them and travel back to those fitful, albeit mostly happy, years. But not today.
In autumn of 1986, I landed a great gig: bassist in garage rockers the Fleshtones, a working, touring NYC band. I was twenty-one. I almost didn’t join, telling myself it was time to hunker down and start my own band, do my own songs. But theirs was an offer I couldn’t refuse. Thankfully.
The Fleshtones had been together a decade, had released several albums, and enjoyed an ardent fanbase, especially in Europe. All members were well into their thirties. To this day, they are the greatest live band I’ve ever performed in. See here.
The guys were eager to show me the ropes of the rock n’ roll life. For about a year, I was deliriously happy. We toured domestically on what was then called “the college circuit.” I’ll never forget our trips to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Martinique, Hawaii. We rocked both the big cities and the provinces, traveling in a converted bread truck. My first gig in a foreign country was the Fleshtones opening for James Brown on March 12th, 1987 at Le Zenith arena in Paris. Such a thrill, even though Mr. Brown refused to meet with us. His road manager said he was “having problems with his teeth.” His bass player and I hit it off, though. The guy was on loan from KC & the Sunshine Band.
One of our most memorable dates was a shared a bill with Jonathan Richman at Duke University. We blazed through our usual set, after which Jonathan got onstage and slayed with just his songs, guitar playing, and stage patter. I took notice.
I thought the Fleshtones would offer an opportunity to write or co-write more songs, but that was not to be. A handful of times we performed “Can’t Do Without You,” a Stones-y rocker I created, but we never committed it to tape. “Moment of Weakness” ended up on a compilation LP of Fleshtones members’ side projects called Time Bomb: The Big Bang Theory. The liner notes described my tune as “Simon & Garfunkel meets Blue Oyster Cult.”
The Fleshtones had a lot of side projects. I played bass and sang in guitarist Keith Streng’s Full Time Men, which included guests like REM’s Peter Buck. I co-wrote a Full Time Men song with Keith entitled “Wrecking Ball.” (I wrote the lyrics and most of the music.) Just last year, Yep Roc Records re-released it digitally. You can hear “Wrecking Ball” here. (I’m on bass and piano.)
By early 1988, the blush was off the rose with the Fleshtones. My days as their bassist were numbered. Still, during a sound check, I came up with a monster fuzz bass riff they loved. We turned it into an instrumental called “Candy Ass,” and played it on the road. Imagine my surprise when, after I quit in summer of ’88, they recorded it for their next album Powerstance, with a few parts added, and no credit given to me.
On May 6th, 1989, writer/rocker Holly George and I got hitched. You can read our recently-published recollections here. We’d fallen for each other when her band Das Furlines opened for the Fleshtones at the Jag in East Hampton, LI.
I’d moved into Holly’s St. Mark’s Place tenement apartment soon after we’d gotten together. Her extensive LP collection stunned me. Hundreds packed into milk crates against a crumbling brick wall, so many artists I’d heard about but not yet heard: Alex Chilton, Nick Drake, Gram Parsons, The Long Ryders, and my absolute favorite, Big Star. Studying those LPs while Holly was at her day job would be crucial to my creative development. She and I pledged to support each other’s long shot ambitions: she wanted to write biographies, and I wanted to be a good songwriter, and front my own band.
After I quit the Fleshtones, I invested more time and energy than ever writing songs and recording them on the four-track. Lotta cheesy love ballads among the pop-rockers. I eventually churned out enough for a set. I knew then, as I know now, the only way to know if the stuff really works is to play it in front of strangers. I learned early: one person can lie, but a group of people – especially strangers – cannot lie.
Sometime in late ‘89, I was ready to find out if my stuff was any good. I booked my first solo acoustic gig in the tiny back room of King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut. It was a disaster.
Although I’d performed in front of thousands as a bassist, I’d never been so nervous as when I was strapping on an acoustic guitar to share my own songs with maybe thirty strangers. Very few in the cigarette smoke haze paid me much attention, except to pity me. The songs did not connect, not even a little bit.
Adrenalized behind reason, I yelled as much as sang. Strumming furiously, I broke not just one, but two strings. With trembling hands, I attempted to re-string, and then tune, my guitar. This seemed to take hours. Meanwhile, the shirtless host of the evening, Gerard, aka Mr. Fashion, jumped onstage to cover for me, babbling on about how I used to be in the Fleshtones.
After I hurried through my last song, I hustled back to St. Mark’s Place and wept. Holly insisted it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I begged her not to lie to me. I recall this as one of our first big fights.
All things considered, I do not regret that excruciating failure. If I could counsel twenty-four-year-old me, I would advise him to hang in there. Would I tell him it would be about seven years ‘til he played a solo acoustic show he would be proud of? I can’t say. Perhaps I would just inform him the road to that accomplishment would be very interesting.
Next installment: My 90s band High Pockets, Electric Lady Studio, Buddy: the Buddy Holly Story, Rosanne Cash, fatherhood, raves for my debut CD
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