Two Songs

Our lives follow paths that sometimes circle around and drop us back where we thought we’d gotten away from. Our enemies become our guides and the goal we were striving for turns out to be the last thing we would ever want. What we were sure was the absolute truth turns out to be neither true nor false but a road sign pointing in a direction we’ve never gone.

What am I talking about? Oh just the fantastic interconnectedness of everything, the interconnectedness of myriad parts only understandable when we get far enough away from what happened to discern those events in the context of the larger picture.

For example, when I was twenty-three I was living in a commune in Santa Cruz. I had been playing guitar for two years when I purchased my first steel-string guitar. My very first guitar was a nylon-string “classical” guitar I bought in 1970 at a tourist mercado in Guadalajara. I paid eight dollars for that not-very-good-guitar and taught myself to play. The neck was way too thick, the tuning pegs were lousy, and several good guitarists who tried my guitar declared the instrument unplayable.

Nevertheless, it was the guitar I had and I played it for thousands of hours over the next two years of roaming around North America and I eventually got pretty good at making the lopsided thing sound okay. Thus when I graduated to playing my sixty-dollar steel-string guitar, an Epiphone with a slender neck, I turned out to be a solid rhythm guitar player.

Simultaneously with getting my new guitar, I got a new girlfriend. To make a very long and complicated story short, she may have loved me, but she didn’t like me.

Why would I choose to be with someone who didn’t like me? Good question. Having had fifty years to think about it, I know part of the reason. My parents were extremely critical of me as a child and young adult, abusively so, and I got used to such abuse as a normal part of my emotional life. Because my parents were my initial significant others, I unconsciously chose people who disapproved of me for my subsequent significant others.

On a positive note, my disapproving girlfriend introduced me to Bonnie Raitt’s first album and I’ve been a Bonnie Raitt fan ever since. My love of Bonnie Raitt’s singing looms large in the rest of this story.

So there I was in Santa Cruz in 1973 with my new steel-string guitar and my new girlfriend, and I decided to see if I could make some money playing music. There was a fellow in my commune who was an excellent fiddler and mandolin player. He and I worked up ten of my original songs and I called various venues in town featuring live music to see if we could audition to play there.

This was before everyone in America started playing the guitar and the competition was much less fierce than it is today. Thus every café and pub I called invited us to come in and audition, and they all offered us gigs! One of those pubs, Positively Front Street, hired us as their Friday and Saturday night band. Our pay was twenty dollars for the two of us, plus tips, for which we played three fifty-minute sets.

We had that Positively Front Street gig for a year and it provided me with enough money to pay my rent and groceries. My disapproving girlfriend never once came to hear me play because she didn’t like my music, a comic-tragic situation that inspired me to passively aggressively write a song called Loose Woman that was a favorite of the regulars at Positively Front Street.

The lyrics began: I’m hooked up with a loose woman, a loose woman’s all right with me, she don’t like my songs or my jokes or my dreaming, but she gives me all her love for free.

Loose Woman is not one of the two songs referred to in the title of this memoir, though if you like skanky Country Blues, Loose Woman was a pretty good song.

After living with my disapproving Santa Cruz girlfriend for a year, she started sleeping with other guys, we broke up, and I moved to Menlo Park and got a job as a janitor and teacher’s aide in a preschool. Then my disapproving girlfriend said she wanted to get back together with me, and I, not yet having had successful therapy, agreed to get back together with her. She moved to Menlo Park where we lived for six months before we moved to Eugene, Oregon. In Eugene we lived in a tiny garage converted into an apartment and my girlfriend majored in Music at the University of Oregon and I sold my first short story and wrote a couple novels I hoped to sell.

Then one day in that converted garage, my disapproving girlfriend gave me an ultimatum. I either quit playing the guitar and the piano or she would leave me. She said I was using music and performing as a crutch because I was afraid to face the world as my authentic self, whatever that was.

So what did I do? I did what any self-sabotaging person would do. I sold my guitar, stopped playing the piano, and spent my time writing and playing basketball and feeling raw and depressed. Six months later, thank goodness, my disapproving girlfriend dumped me for someone else and I moved to Ashland, Oregon and got a job as a landscaper.

I liked being a landscaper. I dug lots of ditches, built rock walls, planted trees and shrubs, cleared brush, and made pretty good money. I didn’t write much and never played the guitar or the piano. Nor was I in a relationship. I was just going on being as the Buddhists like to say.

Then out of the blue I got a phone call from my old friend Dan Nadaner. He was living in New Jersey with his wife and making short films as part of his fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He had written lyrics for a song about stripes in paintings for a little movie to be shown to school kids. He remembered my guitar playing and singing and wondered if I’d sing his lyrics to a simple folksy melody for the soundtrack to his short film Stripes.

I said I would. This necessitated my borrowing a guitar from a friend, a little Yamaha. I recorded Dan’s song on a cassette tape recorder and he used that recording for his movie. Hallelujah! All of a sudden I was playing guitar again and new songs came pouring out of me.

A year later found me with that same borrowed guitar (I ended up buying it for fifty bucks), living alone in a funky house in a dangerous part of Seattle feeling as lonely and frightened as I’ve ever felt. I was perilously low on money and planning to go back to southern Oregon to resume my life as a landscaper. Then one night I picked up my guitar and out came a fully formed new song, music and lyrics, a tune called Hey Baby. And as I sang that song I heard Bonnie Raitt singing the words as only she can sing, and the thought of Bonnie singing Hey Baby lifted my spirits and made me truly happy for the first time in a very long time.

I tried and tried for several years to get a recording of Hey Baby to Bonnie Raitt with no success.

Shortly after writing Hey Baby, I sold my first novel to a big publisher, a movie sale followed, my financial situation improved dramatically, and along with continued writing success I started performing my stories and songs in cafés and theatres where Hey Baby never failed to be a crowd pleaser.

After one of my shows a woman approached me and said, “God! Hey Baby is so good. Jesus. That’s gonna be a huge hit one day. So big they’ll play cheesy instrumental versions of it in grocery stores all over the world. You know what I’m saying? That big!”

Fast-forward a few years. I was married and my writing career was virtually kaput. Yes, I married someone who loved me but didn’t like me, and our marriage would eventually end after multiple separations.

However, two really good things came of that marriage. One good thing was that in trying to save our marriage I got into therapy that set me on the path of not hooking up with disapproving partners. The other good thing was that my wife introduced me to a song written and performed by Rickie Lee Jones called Night Train that was, and still is, one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. I listened to that song hundreds of times and felt her words and music planting a fantastic ineffable something in me.

One night, having listened to Rickie’s Night Train for the umpteenth time, I sat down in a trance state and wrote for several hours before stopping to read what I’d written – the beginning of a novel inspired by the lyrics of Rickie’s song merging with the story of a down-and-out songwriter driving a stolen Cadillac who picks up a beautiful young woman fleeing with a baby in her arms, and the ensuing phantasmagorian adventures they have together.

That novel was Night Train and was published in 1986 by Mercury House.

The young woman in the novel, Lily, doesn’t trust the down-and-out songwriter, Charlie, until she finds out he is the composer of her favorite song. Hey Baby. Here is that moment from the novel.

Her eyes widen. She doesn’t say anything for a minute. She frowns and says, “Wait a minute. You wrote Hey Baby? That’s like a classic. You should be rich forever off that. I mean, you hear that in grocery stores. I heard it over in Italy, the only time I went anywhere.” She shivers and glares at me. “Hey Baby? Come on, man. I been to town. I’m thirty-two, remember. I can sing. That’s a great song!”

“Well, I did,” I say softly, not sure whether to believe it myself. It seems absurd. It seems like some drug-induced memory. Except I remember writing it. I remember how it crawled out of me when I was dying, and how when I sang it just right, and my voice held up on the high notes, it made my body tingle. It made me feel useful to the world.

fin

Hey Baby from Todd’s album Dream of You