The Songwriter is No Big Deal (The Kid(s) Part III)
The Songwriter is No Big Deal (The Kid(s) Part III)
This is no small deal, Being in a band is the best thing, Don't disappear
I’m no big deal.
Brandi Carlisle doesn’t bring me on stage to reflect in the glory of my long, amazing career.
The Boss has never jumped on stage with me to noodle around on guitar.
Neil Young won’t be trundling on stage with his amp and guitar for an uninvited jam.
When I was 16 I wondered if someday I’d be invited to join a famous band, maybe the Stones when they finally realized that Ron Wood wasn’t Mick Taylor. I knew I could do what Mick had done.
The call never came.
In fact, the phone rarely rings. There aren’t many emails.
If I wasn’t going to be in the Rolling Stones, I wanted to be JJ Cale, with a little studio somewhere off the beaten path, where I’d make music that would get out into the world, with or without my name attached.
Yeah, that’s two completely incompatible desires.
I have enough ego to want to be the best at what I do and do it where people can see that.
But I’m also a guy who used to lie on his back on the big field outside my high school and look as far as he could into the sky and take some comfort in being just a statistical margin of error.
I’ve struggled with that every time I’ve walked on stage.
I’ve never been able to fully embrace the promotional side of the music business.
I always felt like an idiot.
I just wanted the music to be enough.
Warning- Self Promotion Below
I have an instagram account, you can follow me at the link below.
Fair warning, I don’t post 5-8 times every day.
I don’t have any shows scheduled, or record releases due, so I don’t post much about my own “career.”
I post pictures of our dog, Daisy.
I post information about shows and music from the bands that practice at the Mountain Arts Community Center.
Sometimes I post about other musicians.
What I’ve never been able to do is keep up a constant drone.
I’ve also managed to keep my clothes on, but that’s another essay altogether.
Whatever failures of promotion and of making myself known are my own.
Which is why I astounded myself by losing my mind in an email to a friend a little while ago.
Every frustration came out and I wrote down on paper all the slights, insults, and indignities of the music business. I said the things that nobody says out loud, especially about the other musicians I had known through the years and the utter selfishness that plagues relationships in the business. I didn’t name names. That’s the best thing I can say about the email.
Idiot that I am, I actually sent the email.
I had forgotten that there are no small jobs.
I’m ashamed to say that for one brief moment I had forgotten how happy I am.
I had forgotten how lucky I am.
I had forgotten how loved I am.
To my friend, if she reads this, consider this my public apology.
I know how hard she works, and I never worked that hard at the music business.
And sometimes I forget how incredibly lucky I am.
Every day I get to see and hear music made by the BEST people.
And that’s no small deal.
Welcome to the Show.
“Being in a band is a great thing” - The MetroGnome
In my last Substack, linked below, I wrote about the upcoming concert at the Arts Center where my teaching studio, Signal Mountain Doghouse Studios, is located.
The show was terrific, with a great sized crowd.
The first 5 rows were filled with young fans screaming for the bands.
Screaming.
I have never been on stage when an audience screamed like the days of the Beatles.
The headliner, Peers Under Pressure, just off recording an album, were a band that had ascended to being able to play and hold their own anywhere.
Acoustic Bowie is much more than a School of Rock type project.
It’s a really good band with compelling vocals, cool arrangements, screaming guitar solos and even a guitar duel or two.
The new band, yeah, toast!, led by The Poet, has the songs and their own sound. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
The bands share musicians with the MetroGnome playing drums with all three.
More than just three bands, it’s a musical community.
After the show, long after everybody else had left, Peers Under Pressure (joined by the Philosopher, who is headed to England soon) sat with me in the green room.
Nobody wanted to leave. There was so much to say. There was so much happiness in the room, so much love, that even the shadow of what came next couldn’t intrude.
The next few days, kept busy with trying to finish the new Peers Under Pressure album, didn’t feel like anything was ending.
The ending, inevitably
The leaving came yesterday.
People have come and gone in my life.
For a teacher, every year has some change with students moving on.
I’m terrible at saying goodbye, but I move on quickly.
This time will be different.
The Pandemic was so utterly life changing that this group of young people arrived back in the world, back to the teaching studio, wounded, yet eager.
After the pandemic, everybody had to learn to trust again.
It is a fortunate coincidence that I had decided to put a student band together, but I’ve always been lucky.
Everything fell into place.
It’s rare when everything falls into place.
I’ve learned that you can’t really plan for things like this.
You can’t plan for every little action to cascade into a river of actions that carry everybody along to something more beautiful and meaningful.
But sometimes, if you’re lucky like me, the world is filled with an amazing symmetry.
And when you step back and step away, like I’ve been forced to do this week, you can finally see all the connections, like flying high above the countryside and seeing the patterns that tie the world together.
The connections made over this last 18 months can be seen from outer space.
There will be reunion shows in December.
Summer will come, friends will reunite, bands will spend their days rehearsing and not rehearsing, hanging out in restaurants, and dreading the end of THAT summer.
Nothing has really ended.
But right now, all there is to do is look down on the world and see the community and way that these kids tied themselves and all who know them together.
Together means a lot right now.
And remember what the MetroGnome says: “It’s great to be in a band.”
It really is.
More about kids.
I watched a British show called “Heartstopper.”
It takes place in England and it’s about love and adolescence during the wonderfully horrible teen years. It’s filled with the kind of admirable young people we all hope our children are when we aren’t around.
The heroes are gay, straight, confused, brave, adventurous, beautiful, plain, and infinitely relatable. And the whole thing is made somehow more poignant by anime style animation touchs that makes every scene more emotional, and just MORE.
Side note- the music supervisor is a genius.
The show, like the blockbuster British show “Skins,” which propelled an entire generation of great actors like Nicholas Hoult, Dev Patel, and Jack O’Connell to stardom, is brutally and refreshingly honest.
British shows never skip the scary stuff. And they also know that during that part of our lives, it’s all scary.
The writers also understand that it’s the scary stuff that makes it feel wonderful.
The writers of those shows understand that most adults do NOT know shit.
Most adults travel through the world of teens as if they were invisible.
In Heartstoppers, one adult SEES.
He says, “don’t let anyone make you disappear.”
It doesn’t matter who he says it to or why.
It’s the right thing to say to anybody.
That line hit me hard.
I live in Tennessee, a state governed by theocrats determined to make anybody who doesn’t fit their vision of a white, Christian, and Hetrosexual world, disappear.
They are passing laws that will actually hurt people, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.
People are leaving Tennessee so their children don’t have to grow up in a place that legally hates them for who they are.
I have friends and family members who have been effectively made outlaws.
Being a woman of child-bearing age and few means in Tennessee could be a death sentence.
I’ve lived in Tennessee 30 plus years, and I love it here. We have great neighbors and a place we’ve worked hard to make our own.
I get along with people who are nothing like me. In fact, I have friends who are nothing like me.
I love the Mountain Arts Center where I teach and everybody who walks through the Doghouse Studios door.
I’m 63 and I don’t want to go somewhere else.
I don’t want to run.
I’m determined to stay and fight the theocrats.
There are too many people I love living here with me.
I know too many teens who are in danger.
I want to say to all of them, “don’t let anybody make you disappear.”
They shouldn’t have to do the work.
I should be doing it.
So, we start with bands. We start by giving everybody a place where they can be loud and alive.
We invite people to watch and listen.
We hope that hardened hearts, made stone by fear and insecurity, harbor a crack or two where the music can flow in and start the long process of breaking things apart.
How can you resist these kids?
I don’t think anybody can.
I know it isn’t much, but it’s something.
Gemwood to Nathan and Jason, our sons In the shoppes they're showing "gemwood": the buffed-up flakes of dye-fed pines---- bright concentrics or bull's-eyes, wide-eyed on the rack of this newest "joint effort of man and nature." But then those life-lines circling each target chip of "gemwood" look less like eyes, yours or mine, when we have watched a while. They are more like the whorls at the tips of our fingers which no one can copy. Even on the photocopy Jason made of his upraised hands, palms down to the machine, they do not appear, His hands at five-years-old---- why did we want to copy rthem, and why does the grey yet clear print make me sad? That summer, the Mad River followed us through Vemont----a lusher state than our own. A thunderous matinee of late snows, and then the peak at Camel's Hump was bleached. As a yellow pear is to the sky---- that was out feeling. We had with us a rat from the lab----no, a pet we'd named, a pure friend who changed our minds. When it rained near the whole of the summer, in that cabin Nathan made her a social creature. She was all our diversion, and brave That's why, when she died in the heat of our car one accidental day we didn't intend, it hurt her master first and most, being his first loss like that, and the rest of our family felt badly, even to tears for a heart that small. We buried her by the road in the Adirondack Mountains, and kept our way to Iowa. Now it seems to me the heart must enlarge to hold the losses we have ahead of us. I hold to a certain sadness the way others search for joy, though I like joy. Home, sunlight cleared the air all the green's of consequence. Still when it ends we won't remember that it ended. If parents must receive the sobbing, that is nothing when put next to the last crucial fact of who is doing the crying. -Marvin Bell 1977 from "Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See" National Book Award Finalist in Poetry 1978
I found this note in the car my father used to drive. He’s been gone almost three years. Yet, here he is again, as one of the many notes he made for himself.
Somehow, it’s now a note he left to me.
He knew that life was full of unbound joy and deep despair, exuberant hellos and sad goodbyes.
He hated goodbyes even more than I do.
So he wrote down the little things that reminded him of how lucky he was to be alive.
“Life is sweet”
“Don’t hate nobody”
He would have written down “It’s great to be in a band.”
He would have written down, “don’t let anybody make you disappear.”
To the kids leaving for the great amazing world outside this little town… The Kid, The MetroGnome, The Mechanic, and The Philosopher, each of you should know: I’m with you, pal.
Love Somebody,
N
Hello Nathan Bell, I really like your writing style of separate sentences, (very much) with or without the content. And the content, it is really a killer article, and can touch deeply. (I'll separate a few sentences, to see how it goes here.)
You say “I have friends that are nothing like you”.
I am nothing like you, but have you beat in age by enough.
Most Americans are not rooted (to any land or location). America is about mobility and pulling up stakes. IMO.
Yeah, our only offered heritage is, you kids got’ta do some mighty work. What a set-up.
I’ll tell you about our differences. I am not a musician! But I'll tell you my story anyway. I am an amateur with the classics. I am all self-taught. I am not in the band.
In fact, I know NOBODY that plays a flute, my instrument, (nor a violin, which could be good too). I have NEVER played with another person. (So, I couldn't do it.) Well, I tried a couple of times to record one track of a duet, and then add in the second track. I never end at the same time. (Really a metronome is confusing as hell for me, once I fall out of the beat, I can never recover. Then it is just background noise.)
(Who knows what novelty the future might bring?) I'll be open to it, but I really don't enjoy the bands in the clubs. I go only twice a year, if someone coaxes me.
So, my method is the sensory experience with the music: through the ear, the harmonics of the scale or sequence being played, the fingering of the notes and melody."
I only and exclusively work on the fingering, the faster the better.
I only play pieces straight through, and never concentrate on the "difficult passages". (Usually three times, then move on.)
I have never memorized anything, not even Mary had a little lamb, her fleece was white as snow.
I collect free sheet music, lately from flutetunes.com, they have 500 composers and 5,000 selections. But I have tons of books also. I print them all, and photocopy books when a piece has multiple pages.
I have a 6 page board I use at home and a four page board I use on the road.
I rotate through about 600 selections, usually playing 50 in a 2-hour session. Then I get tired of standing. My goal is to read music, but only on the level of the fingering.
The written timing and embellishments have to come later. For instance, I hate trills, they are so dated.
I do get a melody out of it, but it is my melody. I can realize all the intervals, but only as they are written. I invent NOTHING. I am just a copy-cat.
I love to play "power-flute", I blast it. I guess that is because I have no subtle embouchure. Well, my tone is getting better. I call my flute very "bright", but it is me that is so squeaky.
This summer I broke free and it has really helped me. First I played in an open mike club, but they only allow you 10 minutes. I didn't obey, and played 30 minutes before they ran me off.
(Have you read about the Samurai, that if they pull their sword out of the scabbard, they have to cut someone, in order to respect their sword.) Me too, if I take the flute out of the case, I have to play at least an hour.
Then I arranged lunch times in three restaurants. They had to be restaurants with gardens, I couldn't play inside. But I played too long, and burned them out. (I play for me, not for you.)
Then I started going to the public park, set up my table and have at it. There is a fish pond with Koi, and a pavilion built on top of it. It has a cement floor and ceiling and the acoustics are really good. The sound really carries and people are just passing by, so no one gets over-dosed.
I also have another fantastic venue. It is an art museum where they allow me to play at any time. The hall is 8 meters wide and 7 meters high, but 45 meters long. The sound is like a cathedral, I am so thrilled.
I will play anywhere now, without is hint of stage freight. It just does not occur in my body. That is because I am only "DOING" me. I am not doing any authoritative professional.
I guess it depends on what your goal is?
.
❤️