Lance.
In my last months in Austin I knew, briefly and casually, a guy named Lance. Though Lance was several years older than me (or what seemed like “several” at the time; the age difference was probably something like ten years, which is no longer several to me), we were both from north central Texas, both musically and literarily inclined, both fans of old country music, and both kind of grumpy, so it would seem that a friendship should have developed between us. It never did, quite. We knew each other through mutual friends, John and Sabina, and except for one occasion, which I am about to tell you about, saw each other only at John’s and Sabina’s house. Some relationships just never progress to the point that they can survive without a chaperone, I suppose, and that proved to be the case with me and Lance.
When it becomes established that two people play guitar, it becomes obligatory for one or the other person to say, whether he means it or not, “We should get together and play sometime.” Lance played guitar; I played guitar. Either Lance or I made that suggestion, and neither of us meant it, but we were stuck with it. “Can you sing?” I asked him and told him I couldn’t. “Yeah, I can sing,” he said. We made arrangements for him to come with his guitar to my apartment.
Indeed he could sing. As I remember it, he had a big, projecting voice and sang in what I think of as the “formal” or “classical” style of country music. I’m entirely inventing those terms and these distinctions, but I recognize a distinction between the styles of singers like Faron Young, George Jones and Gene Watson, on the one hand, and, well, everybody else, but let’s say Willie Nelson, on the other hand. It’s a distinction based not simply on vocal talents and size of voice (though it would be hard to sing in the formal style unless you had a big, operatic voice) but more on posture, enunciation, tonal control, symmetry of phrasing. The formal style is Shakespearean, Wagnerian; you imagine the singer standing at the lip of the stage in classical pose with one foot forward and one hand outstretched, emoting while the voice pours forth up to the rafters. It’s stately, grand, built for the ages; the singer is Olivier as Prospero. Willie, on the other hand, slouching over there by the drummer somewhere, is Brando.
I should point out something friends and regular readers will probably already have figured out about me: I don’t play well with others, either in the figurative or the literal sense. And the notion of playing music with somebody else has always filled me with dread. I am a reasonably good, reasonably versatile guitarist, but the style I have developed from years of playing alone in dark rooms is idiosyncratic and doesn’t lend itself well to collaboration. It’s an accompanist style, mostly, a style designed to back a singer who never shows up. I grew up schooled in the dichotomy that there were two kinds of guitarists: rhythm players and lead players. John played rhythm, George played lead. That is a simplistic way of characterizing guitar styles—it was then and it is now. Keith Richards and Pete Townsend are “rhythm” players in that they don’t rip into any Eddie-van-Halen-esque solos, but their playing is almost always very much front and center of the song. Richard Thompson, Lindsay Buckingham, Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco and Mark Knopfler are very versatile guitarists who completely erase the line between rhythm and lead—you’d often swear there were two or three guitarists playing when in fact it is just one of those guitarists.
I am not in the category of any of those guitarists as far as skill level goes, but their hybridized styles are what I emulate as best I can. I am capable of strumming away at chords in the traditional “rhythm” player way, but it doesn’t take me long before I get bored, and if I start varying the pattern to keep myself interested, I wind up confusing the other guitarist. And I can play scales all day, but single-note soloing is not my forte and pretty soon bores me or makes me self-conscious. Consequently, any time I’ve gotten together to play with another guitarist, what usually results is a lot of sitting around staring vaguely past each other, playing the first verse of one song or another before self-consciously fading out and musically changing the subject. Almost never do those get-togethers produce actual collaborative music. Rarer still is a song played all the way through. John Lowe and I used to do a pretty impressive rendition of America’s “Sister Golden Hair,” with me on rhythm and him on lead, but I’m not sure we made it past the first eight bars. That’s probably the highlight of my musical collaborations.
But Lance and I gave it a shot. It worked out about how all the others worked out, as I recall. He sang a song, I made an excuse and changed the subject, he sang another song, etc. I don’t remember what songs he sang, but they were country standards done in the high, formal style. Lance’s guitar-playing was traditional rhythm-playing—strummed chords—entirely appropriate to the performance. He sounded good.
When he finally prevailed on me to play something, I did a Guy Clark song that Lyle Lovett had recently recorded called “Step Inside This House.” It’s a very quiet, moving, poetic song with a gentle and simple but somewhat intricate guitar part. I liked it very much and still do.
Unlike a lot of contemporary memoirists apparently, I do not have perfect recall of dialog from conversations that took place ten years ago, so I will admit to generous use of poetic license in rendering Lance’s reaction to my choice of song.
“Hmm,” he said, still looking at my guitar.
“What?”
“Well, you concentrate a lot more on the guitar than I do.”
I didn’t know what that meant.
“I told you I couldn’t sing,” I said.
“I’d never do a song like that one.”
“You don’t like the song,” I said.
“It’s not that. It’s just that it’s . . . well, it’s Guy Clark’s song. Nobody should do it but him. It’s too . . . personal.”
That concept was earth-shattering to me. I’d never heard it put forth before, and as Lance elaborated on it, upon further quizzing by me, I gathered that under his view the whole Lyle Lovett album that song was on—an album of covers of songs written by Lyle’s friends—should never have been done. Emmylou Harris’s career would never have occurred. Any songs that were in the “singer-songwriter” category would never be sung by anybody other than the songwriter.
Lance’s view has had a great influence on me since that day; it’s not an overstatement to say that it had a greater effect on the way I think about music than anything else I’ve read, heard or thought up on my own. I’ve probably moved far afield from what Lance originally meant, but I still categorize songs according to whether they are “public” or “private” (I don’t think those were Lance’s terms), whether Lance would sing those songs, whether he would approve of others singing them. I find myself arguing whether a “private” song can be as great as a “public” song. I turn those concepts over in my mind almost constantly in an ongoing discussion with myself and a now mythical Lance.
The first question, of course, is how you can tell the difference. Is it a matter of how much psychic distance there is between the singer and the narrator? For example, is “Step Inside This House” too personal because the narrator of the song is in fact Guy Clark, rather than a character he created? Bob Dylan insists that he, Robert Zimmerman himself, is the “I” in every song he sings. Putting aside the fact that nobody is ever really sure what Bob Dylan is talking about, would Lance approve of somebody else singing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which certainly feels like it’s in the public category? I think he would. I think any song, no matter whether it originally might have fallen into the private category, moves inexorably into the public category as time passes. Shakespeare’s sonnets still read as achingly personal poems, but I don’t think Lance would insist that they belong only to Shakespeare. What about “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”? How do we know Fred Rose isn’t writing about something very painful that happened to him particularly? Maybe we don’t, but it’s moot now, because enough time has passed that any vestige of the personal has worn off and only the song remains. We don’t hear the particular lyrics, the particular pain anymore. The song has moved into the collective consciousness of humanity. It doesn’t mean what it originally meant. Gravestones, once the lichen attaches and the granite discolors, are quite pretty, and cemeteries are peaceful places to sit or wander. . . . You don’t dwell on the head wounds of the bodies buried below you. . . .
What about “Famous Blue Raincoat”? That one sounds damn painful. It’d be hard to make up something that hurts that bad. But when Jennifer Warnes sings it I believe it even more than when Leonard Cohen sings it. Is that because I sense that Leonard Cohen is putting us on a bit, I see the artistry a bit too clearly, or is because I happen to believe Jennifer Warnes when she tells me it’s four in the morning, the end of December?
There are myriad other implications to exploring Lance’s view of who art belongs to, who is entitled to interpret it, etc. Paul Simon caught a lot of flack for Graceland when it first came out because it wasn’t “his”music, though he wrote every song on the album. We’ve heard the same argument for decades now about the white British boys who stole the blues from Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. . . .
I’m probably far afield of what Lance meant. I should also say that it is not only likely but is probable that the real Lance bears no resemblance to the characterization in this essay. You should always mistrust every word you read, because even if the writer is striving as hard as he can for honesty and really concentrating on giving you an accurate portrait of a person (neither of which is something you should assume), language itself is an inferior tool even in a good and honest writer’s hands. I’m not trying to evoke the real Lance, who I never knew. If you’re reading this, Lance, thanks for giving me so much food for thought over the last ten years and still counting. We should get get together and play sometime. I haven’t sung “Step Inside This House” since.
Everybody’s Talking/Good Time Charlie
I didn’t choose these two songs so I could talk about the Lance discussion. I just couldn’t get very interested in any of my own stuff this week and thought I’d do these two songs, because I like the guitar parts I worked out for them, and, as always, I wondered whether Lance would approve.
For some reason I always think of “Everybody’s Talkin’” and “Good Time Charlie” together. I don’t know how or when they got paired in my head. I do think they’re both fine songs—they epitomize for me what I think of (God only knows why) as the ennui and angst of the late-sixties/early-seventies, and that may be why I’ve come to associate them together.
“Everybody’s Talkin” was the theme song of the gloriously bleak movie Midnight Cowboy, of course, and is destined to live on in elevators all over the world as long as Muzak exists. It was written by a guy named Fred Neil (who recorded it first) and sung by Harry Nilsson, two guys who are most famous for that song and are hardly household names.
“Good Time Charlie” was written and first recorded (in 1972) by a Midwestern songwriter-singer named Danny O’Keefe; like Neil, O’Keefe wouldn’t ever be known to the larger world for anything other than that song. (Jillions of people have since covered it. Here’s a good Dwight Yoakum version.)
Both songs are mellow and melodic; both are concerned with staying or going; both are over in a couple of minutes. Both are within Buck’s range (though he chickened out on the jump to the falsetto at the end of “Everybody’s Talking” and wisely demurred from doing the calf-bawled wah-wah-wah second verse of the song.) Both are probably on Lance’s list of unapproved cover songs.
Video. The other thing both songs have in common is they are that weird category of songs I became familiar with through cover versions instead of the more well known original versions. Willie Nelson did “Everybody’s Talking,” and it was several years before I saw the movie and heard the original Nilsson version. “Good Time Charlie” was covered by Waylon Jennings on 1973’s Lonesome, On’ry and Mean. Waylon, along with his many other accomplishments, will be credited someday with pioneering (in The Dukes of Hazzard) the classic Youtube cover song video shot, which I pay homage to this week.