The Last Thing I Think Before I Play a Show is That Jo Jones Threw a Cymbal at Bird

(songwriting as competition)

I’m on my way to kick Pat’s ass.

Pops was pitching for the faculty softball team against the Grad students. Pat was a grad student playing center fielder as a ringer for the faculty. The faculty were in charge, so whatever rule breaking they endorsed, none of the aspiring poets and novelists were going to mention that something was amiss. How are you going to get to the holy grail of being published by questioning a few minor rules infractions? The faculty always had ringers and the faculty always won.

Pat must have been a lifelong jock, big deal on the high school campus, big swings, big misses, big stories, and an even bigger mouth. When the Faculty second baseman booted an easy grounder, Pat lit into him all the way from center field. My father, as competitive as most, still saw the game as a fun day at the diamond, and admonished Pat to either “cool down” or “cool the fuck down.” Almost immediately my five-foot-six father, and six-foot-five Pat started walking toward each other with their fists clenched.

I was in the on-deck circle waiting my turn to hit, seventeen-years-old, and the designated ringer for the Grad Students, most of whom were high, or had barely played softball. Except for the shortstop, one very fast outfielder with a history of having played high school softball, and me, it was a team of mostly very intelligent non-athletes.

A faculty error gave us hope.

Stuart had reached first on the error. Stuart loved softball. When other Grad students just showed up, Stuart showed up early to take batting practice. During the week between games, most of the Grad students spent their time at the Mill Restaurant on All You Can Eat Spaghetti night, drinking, smoking weed, complaining about turning in their poems for workshop, and trying to get laid. Not Stuart. Stuart practiced. And he practiced specifically, since Stuart had assigned himself to the position of 2nd base. He played fungo, he worked on turning the double play, and he rehearsed the first step across his body while moving to his right. Nobody loved softball more than Stuart. 

The first inkling I got that Pops was about to get his block knocked off was when I heard Stuart yell, “come on, guys, it’s just a game!” 

I wasn’t a fighter, but I went through my childhood with an extreme afro (think Linc from Mod Squad). There were always attempts to bully me. So, I learned to fight a little.

When I heard Stuart’s plea and looked up, I saw Pat and Pops rapidly getting closer to each other, and Pops was going to go the way of the Gerbil, former Boston Red Sox Manager and Yankee coach Don Zimmer, when he got clocked by Red Sox Pitcher Pedro Martinez. My old man was going down.

I had a bat in my hand. I headed out to Center Field.

I was past second base when Pat saw me, and his eyes went wide. Pops saw me and his eyes might have gone even wider. If this had a been a film, located in Southie, with an Irish family of sensitive but troubled kids and a dad who had a business that was intertwined with Whitey Bulger, this was the scene where the artistic kid, Brendan, shows up at a “meet” and shoots one of Whitey’s guys, ruining his own life and destroying the secret goals his non-verbal old man had for him that did NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES involve shooting a gangster

Then I felt arms around me, and Stuart was pulling me back toward the benches. And was he saying, “cool down, don’t do something stupid?” No, he was saying “we can win this game, man, don’t fuck it up.” Stuart loved softball and the Grad students never won. All his practice was about to pay off. He wasn’t about to let me screw that up.

In the meantime, Pops and Pat had found common ground in not getting somebody’s brains bashed in and/or seeing somebody’s child be tried as an adult in the state of Iowa and were sharing a joint and talking shit about other writing programs, the ones that didn’t have softball games and cool stuff like that.

I was still angry when I hit a home run down the right field line that drove in the tying and winning runs. It was a “fuck you, Pat” homer.

I understood my debt to Stuart. On that Sunday afternoon, winning the game was more important than anything else on earth.

Most of the stoned students didn’t even know the game had ended, or that we had won. But Stuart greeted me at home plate and slapped me on the head like he’d seen in major league baseball.

That was the only time I ever saw my father smoke. It was the only time I threatened a man with a baseball bat. It was the last time I remember the Grad students winning a game. 

Is songwriting, even at its very most basic level, when the song is being written, a competition, like a softball game?

Hell yes, it is.

And I’m the most competitive songwriter I know. With my peers, with myself, with the entire universe of songwriting.

My music journalist friend Barry just shakes his head when I tell him that I can’t listen to a lyric without analyzing every word, every space. Even in the most “this is just dance music, man” songs. I’m a critical listener of melodies, arrangements, and performances. But I can almost not physically stand a lazy lyric.

I’m hopeless.

But first let’s clarify that the songwriting business and writing songs have almost no relationship with each other.

The business of songwriting is a knockdown, drag out, day in and day out brouhaha.

There’s almost no money, less fame, and few opportunities. 

Everybody wants to have their song heard. 

You’re up against millions of people, some of them more famous, well-connected, wealthy, or more attractive. Some of them are even vicious bastards who will steal your work and pass if off as their own.

To get your song heard you are competing against ALL of them.

The music business, including the songwriting business, has descended into a world of contests, reality shows, and talent searches, each more demeaning and insulting than the one that came before. All those competitions exist for one reason, to funnel the money of everyday songwriters and performers into the pockets of people who couldn’t write a single song if their lives depended on it. Or famous judges whose careers had long ago become jukeboxes of playing their hits from the glory days.

Some people I know have won these contests. Most of these people are still scrapping for nickels and dimes.

The legendary mandolin player and musical comedian, Jethro Burns told me that he’d enter any contest where he was guaranteed victory. That’s how I feel about contests. They are demeaning and insulting to writers and performers who work hard to become great at their craft. 

Don’t enter them. They will make you feel less good about yourself. And you’ll send your money to people who have no business judging your work.

You’ll probably enter them anyway. But you can’t say you haven’t been told.

But is the act of songwriting a competition?

I would argue that when done well, it should be.

It’s a different kind of competition, less a battle for success or recognition and more kind that fills your heart and scares you just enough to keep things interesting.

I’m talking about your brain, your heart, and your honest appraisal of your own work.

That’s where the competition really lies.

And now, a jazz tale.

The story has become larger and more terrifying through the years, but it is agreed that when young Charlie Parker, who one day would be known only as Bird, showed up at a jam session that included the veteran drummer Jo Jones and decided to take a few extra measures of a solo, Jones, thinking the boy not ready and clueless, tossed his ride cymbal at Bird’s feet to get his attention. Bird got the message and went away to practice. Without that cymbal, there is probably no Bird.

The idea of a bad, selfish soloist is anathema to jazz players so the story has been expanded to include the cymbal whizzing toward Bird’s head.

When I’m backstage waiting to be introduced, the image of the flying cymbal always comes to mind.

When I’m tired and thinking of skipping practice, or when I’m thinking of being anything but ruthless with myself, I think of that cymbal.

I have a young student, who, with any luck, will surpass everything I’ve done in my career (it’s not a terribly high bar but it’s something). When I asked her what she wanted to be she said she wanted to have a successful Indy band, and a career that was artistically successful. She made a point of telling me that it wouldn’t be about being wealthy, or famous.

My first thought was that she would be taking the rough road. My second thought was that I now had to be a much tougher teacher. Because what she had said to me was that she wanted to be great.

Being great is about being ruthless.

She was just starting to write her own material. And if she was ready, she’d need to be ruthless with those songs.

Because to write their very best a writer must be ruthless with themselves. They must fight for every word, fight against their instinct to be loved, against their own self-satisfaction, against flattery, against fatigue, and their own need for it just to be over when it seems like nothing good is coming out of the effort.

Fortunately, she’s already self-aware and entirely too hard on herself.

But I have a cymbal ready, just in case.

I can’t think of a worse way a writer can feel than the feeling of having finished a song and knowing in their heart that it doesn’t measure up, even when nobody will notice.

Living with that uncomfortable feeling, that acid in the gut, long enough to rip apart that song and put it back together a million times is a key part of writing a great song. It’s what I hate most, the all-encompassing feeling that can be generated by one misplaced word in one song. Until I fix whatever it is, and I don’t always know what I’m really going to fix, I can barely stand being alive. This isn’t an exaggeration.

It’s also what I love the most about songwriting.

In a business that is 98% failure, the only things I’ve ever been certain about have been the songs I’ve finished. And those are the songs that I stayed with through the discomfort.

That’s what it means to be a ruthlessly competitive songwriter.

I learned all of this from watching Pops. He wrote at the very edge of annoyance. There is immense joy and love in his writing, but I don’t think it was ever comfortable for him. He expressed joy and love in his own life, as I hope I do. But he wrote like he was in the fight of his life.

That’s how I try to write. That may seem ridiculous, but he and I always agreed that a person should do their job as well as they can.

We rarely missed a chance to speak, even during the Pandemic lock downs, and we mostly spoke of sports and jazz.

Jo Jones’s cymbal was referenced, Buddy Rich’s life as a consummate drummer and prick (we know where all that anger comes from, don’t we?) was a sad source of wonder. Curt Flood, Willie Mays, Denny McClain, and the oddballs like Thelonious Monk and Bill “Spaceman” Lee were the characters we came back to again and again.

I don’t know what led to us finally discussing that softball game 30 years later, it was likely a riff on the two of us needing to relax about things, but when I told him what Stuart had said, he collapsed into breathless laughter. 

I’d pick up a bat and threaten a man today if only I could hear that laugh again.

I honor him by refusing to go easy on myself. Every day I throw a cymbal my way.

The free advice comes next.

Don’t go easy on yourself and you will write your perfect song.

It won’t matter if anybody else hears it.

You’ll know.

Success is when you don’t hear the cymbal land, when the walk-off home run goes over the fence, when the words say only what you meant them to say, and everybody is alive and laughing, even if only in memory.