What I Did Instead.  This week’s song is one of the songs with commercial intent, a genre I ushered in a few weeks ago with “Slow Learner.”  I wrote it New Year’s Eve and recorded in New Year’s Day.  I worked out a few of the kinks in it over the weekend (i.e., I actually learned the song) but stayed with the New Year’s Day recording so I could say it was recorded New Year’s Day.   It didn’t come out so great because I didn’t know the song very well and also didn’t get the levels set right on the recorder, so it sounds sort of like it was recorded in a leaky submarine.  I tried to fix it by putting a bass track on there (because, you know, if a song sounds bad, sometimes you can fix it by adding another instrument you can’t really play) but that didn’t work, so I took it off and just left the vocal and guitar.  I wish I knew how people kept the pick-scraping sound off of acoustic guitar recordings.  Maybe they just know how not to hit the guitar with the pick.

I like the song.  It’s upbeat, the right length (about three minutes) and pretty versatile, I think—it could go contemporary country, soul, R&B, jazz, folk, maybe even contemporary Christian or inspirational (if that’s a genre), depending on the arrangement. I’d like to hear it with drums (real drums),  bass, piano, maybe even some horns.  Mostly I want to hear a really strong vocalist do it; I hear it mostly as a soul song, something for a strong, inventive vocalist to make something of, but one of those big-voiced country guys like Toby Keith would also do.  So if you know Toby Keith, send him on over.  Or the Reverend Al Green.  Or Gladys Knight and the Pips!  The Pips could really rip on this song.

(Why doesn’t Gladys Knight register on the cultural radar anymore?  She was huge in the seventies, on TV all the time, she and those groovin’ Pips.  I just checked out some youtube clips, and she and those Pips sound really good.  I wonder how you got to be a Pip?  Oh, I see, you start out by being  Gladys Knight’s cousin.)

Back to this song, the lyrics are not really all that special because I was trying to keep them from getting in the way of the song, if that makes any sense.  This could have been a nutcracker song, and the original intent was that it be a nutcracker song; it was going to be a very specific litany of all the rotten, dumb stuff I could have done, and then the not-as-dumb stuff I did instead. Somehow it took a non-nutcracker turn, and I’m happy about that.  Usually the opposite is the case.  I usually start trying to write a song that might appeal to people other than me (that’s my definition of a “commercial” song at this point) and wind up nutcrackering it (or self-sabotaging it; I’m indebted to my friend Barry for that formulation.) That’s how Melissa Etheridge tee-shirts wind up in songs or how a fun Scottish country dance song turns out to be about incest.

Alphabet Tally.  This isn’t the W song I said I had last week.  I didn’t like that one very much anyway.  I might have a K now.  If so, that just leaves U and X.  The others (O, V and Z) I have covered, unless I decide not to do them.

Video.  I have about fifteen solid minutes of Thomas explaining the whole world of Star Wars.  It’s from last summer after our June campout at Enchanted Rock.  At that point he’d seen only one Star Wars movie, but that lore gets passed around among six- and seven-year-old boys so fast and gets so deeply ingrained it may be altering the genetic code of the species, maybe messing with the language gene Noam Chomsky theorized forty or so years ago.  Within our lifetimes it’s possible that kids, or boys anyway, may be born already encoded with all that knowledge.  For the next generation or two anyway, I doubt anybody will be adjudged to have had a greater influence on childhood than George Lucas, not even J.K. Rowling or Nutcracker Buck.

Outlook.  Well, it looks like this thing will get completed.  We’re down to single digits after this week, and pretty much all the songs are accounted for.  I’m starting to put some thought into how the remaining weeks get scheduled.  I hasten to assure you that I haven’t been holding back the good stuff for the end or anything like that—though I have enough songs complete or near-complete to finish out the project, some of them might be stinkers, because I’ve generally tried to go with whatever I liked most (or was most recent) in any given week.  I have only one song recorded ahead, and it’s been recorded-ahead so long that it must mean I don’t really want to use it.  So it’s still a week-to-week operation.  There are a couple of blog topics I want to get to, and probably in the next to last week I’ll try to put together some thoughts on what the whole project was about, what I’ve learned, etc.  Because I do think I’ve learned quite a bit from it.  And I’m quite ready for it to be over.

Elvis.  For the past few days I’ve been trying to calculate when I will have outlived Elvis, and I keep screwing up the math.  I think I finally got it right:  One week from today, January 12, I will have outlived the King.  I’ve been listening to quite a bit of Elvis lately.  He turns 75 this Friday, the same day as my tenth wedding anniversary.  Here’s something from the 1968 “Comeback Special” that demonstrates why he was the King.

©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.

I’m considering myself on windshield-time blog duty this week, so only two things:

1.  I think I ruined this song with the last line.  Up til then it was a funny or fun song, and the last line makes it a joke song.  It took me awhile to decide that, and it was too late to change everything by the time I came to that conclusion.  That’s what I get for doing these things too fast.  (But it’s not like you can understand the lyrics anyway.)

2.  I can’t stop watching this video of Dolly Parton doing “Coat of Many Colors.”

Most people probably know the outlines of Dolly’s career:  born in a one-room shack in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, one of twelve children; first big exposure was on The Porter Wagoner Show as the replacement for Norma Jean; writer and singer of a string of hits in the seventies (“Coat of Many Colors,” “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You”); international pop and Hollywood mega-stardom in the eighties; return to bluegrass and spiritual music in her most recent years.  If she’s not the most gorgeous woman with the most gorgeous voice in American history, she’s certainly the most charming human being to ever walk the planet.   Nobody doesn’t love her.

I remember watching The Porter Wagoner Show when I was very young (Dolly joined it the year I was born and stayed with it for about seven years), and of course I grew up as Dolly was becoming one of the more major lesser Elvises as far as cultural impact goes (in fact, Elvis wanted to record “I Will Always Love You,” but Colonel Tom Parker wanted Dolly to give up half the publishing rights; she refused and is still laughing about that, I bet.)

But I don’t think I ever heard her on her own like this, and I know I’ve never seen her play guitar like that.

That video (the pop-up stuff and the announcer are annoying, I know) is from the British institution Top of the Pops in 1979.  Dolly is the queen of country music by then, and just around the corner is the pop crossover success she’ll  have with Kenny Rogers (among others) and the string of movies she’ll make in the early eighties and into the nineties, Nine to Five, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Steel Magnolias.  And there she is singing a song that could be among the worst songs in history if it weren’t one of the greatest in country music—that is, the song is a perfect litmus test for determining how you feel about country music:  Do you hear truth or do you hear sentimentality in that song?

I don’t know how I’d have answered that question before seeing this clip, and for me the tell isn’t in Dolly’s performance.  Great singers can fake the feeling and make you believe the song; that’s their job.  No, it’s the way she’s playing that guitar.  That style of playing, bass notes forming the melody, index finger scratching the treble strings in a syncopated strum, is pure Mother Maybelle Carter.  It’s a style dignified in its austerity and somehow beautiful in its un-prettiness and near-clumsiness (those dizzy, wandering bass notes trying to find a place to settle before the next beat or the next one), the style of people who learned how to make do, whether with cheap instruments, dead guitar strings, minimal talent or minimal everything.  It’s the most influential style of guitar-playing in country and folk music, but it is strange to hear it today in its pure form outside of those olde-tyme 78s from the 1927 Bristol sessions.  From this clip it’s clear that that style comes as naturally to Dolly Parton as the sung notes come to her angelic voice.  It’s clear that she’s not thinking about it as a style at all.  To somebody born in a one-room cabin among eleven siblings in the Smoky Mountains of the 1940’s, it’s just the way you play guitar.

©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.

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©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.

I could see this one being covered by Brooks and Dung.

This is not one of the new breed of ”songs with commercial intent” heralded in the last post.  This one’s just a regular dumb nutcracker song I’ve had hanging around awhile, one of the several I’ve had stacked up on my “bridge repair needed” shelf.  Songs like this one need bridges if their existences are to be justified, and every bridge I try to write winds up sounding like either the bridge from  “Jesse’s Girl” or the one from “Two Tickets to Paradise.”  Those songs typify “bridge” to me, for some reason.  I may have already said that.  I probably started repeating myself in Week 2 and just don’t remember it.  Anyway, this bridge is no great shakes and doesn’t really make that much sense—it’s obvious that it’s just there for the rhyme—but I’m tired of the song being on the shelf.  We’re on the home-stretch; it’s time to start clearing the shelves.

Video.  That’s Eleanor with the painted face.  Eleanor and Rona are buddies.  They put on the Jingle Cats CD (Christmas songs meowed by cats) and dance to it for hours here at the house.  That’s almost as bad as the Renaissance Faire.  “We Three Kings of Orient Are” performed by cats is particularly excruciating.

Up Series.  Today’s the day I’ve set aside to push for finishing the opera, so no tome-length essay today.  I’ll start clearing a few shelves in that regard, too—stuff I’ve been meaning to mention and/or link for, in some cases, several weeks, but have had no segue to get to.  I’ll start with the Up Series.

Here’s what it is:  in 1964, a British television production company made a half-hour film about fourteen seven-year-old British schoolchildren, called Seven Up, with the plan of revisiting those same children every seven years to chart how their lives had changed.  The notion was based on the Jesuit maxim that if you “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man,” or something like that.  The first film was directed by Paul Almond; every subsequent one has been made by Michael Apted (director, strangely enough, of one of my favorite movies, Coal Miner’s Daughter.)  Janet and I have been watching them over the last couple of months—we’ve seen all but the most recent one, 49 Up—and they are, very quietly, spell-binding.

I’ve been holding off on talking about the series because I’m trying to formulate some thoughts about what makes the series so . . . noble (to use  Roger Ebert’s characterization of the works.)  I’ve been wanting to use the series as a springboard to advance my argument that one of the things that comes with growing older is a deeper appreciation of process over product, which is one of the things I think I am learning from doing this project.  Back when I was trying to write books, I would hear talk of how impressive it was just to finish a book.  I never bought that, and I doubted the people who offered that conciliatory note bought it either.  The point wasn’t to finish it; the point was to make it good, to publish it, to gain riches and recognition, etc.

Now, though, I’m less impressed by the particular product anybody produces, usually, than I am admiring of the effort and the belief that goes into the making of it.  I’ve read plenty of books and listened to plenty of songs.  It’s unlikely that there will be that many that come along that really, in and of themselves, change my world view the way a book or song or movie or even a football game could change my worldview when I was in my teens and twenties.  So what is so admirable and noble about the Up Series is that somebody envisioned it and dedicated himself to seeing it through.  It’s unlikely that there are going to be any huge secrets of life revealed in that last episode, if there is a last episode or if it’s known at the time that it’s made that it is the last episode.  What will exist is the series and the lives, then ended, that went into the making of it.

The series itself follows those fourteen children into their 14th, 21st, 28th, 35th, 42nd and 49th years; 56 Up is due out in 2012.  (The subsequent installments are more in the two-hour range, sometimes longer.)   The series was born out of a naturalistic and pessimistic world view; its original premise was that class determines all.  The children were selected from a variety of upper-class and working class backgrounds on the theory that there would be little improvement in the lots of the working class kids (the ones from Liverpool, from London’s East End,  and the two kids plucked from an orphanage) and that the upper class kids would retain the world by the balls.

That view is only partly borne out.  All of the children are asked at seven what they think they will wind up doing.  The three poshest of the upper class boys predict that they will attend a certain boarding school, matriculate to Oxford, and go into careers in law.  With a minor variation on the part of one of the boys (who didn’t get into Oxford and wound up in journalism), that’s what happened.  But the scrappiest of the lower class boys, Tony, worked as a jockey and stablehand, learned “the Knowledge” (the famously difficult test London cabdrivers have to pass to demonstrate an intimate familiarity with the streets of the city), takes small acting roles, and wound up owning three houses on a cabdriver’s earnings, including a holiday house in Spain.  One of the most promising boys is living in a squat at 21, is homeless at 28, and at 35 has migrated to the ends of the earth, the Shetland Islands far off the north coast of Scotland, clearly losing his mind.  A farm boy who at 14 had been no further than Manchester, and there only once, winds up a nuclear physicist at the University of Wisconsin.  All but one of the women (there are only four; Apted admits that the series got off to a bad start by not balancing the gender scales) go through divorces and wind up single mothers.

Although series takes on a more personal than political tone as it progresses, Apted, who is the interviewer as well as the director, occasionally tries to press the participants back into the mold that was envisioned at the beginning of the series; he seeks to make the participants from working class backgrounds confess how miserable their lives are.  He gets striking pushback, especially from Jackie in 42 Up, who essentially accuses Apted of showing up every seven years for a couple of days and presenting his findings as her life.  That is not my life, she tells him.  I am not unhappy, Michael! she tells him.   She is 42 years old, divorced with three young boys to raise, living in dreary public housing in Scotland, confronting various serious health issues, being invaded every seven years by British television, but she refuses to let any of that or Apted define her happiness.  And Apted very decently lets her get the last word on that.

©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.

 This is pretty much the last of the ones in the vault, and it goes way back to January.  There are a few others, but even if I still liked the songs, and mostly I don’t, they’d need to be re-recorded anyway.  I’ve been hesitant to use this one, because it kind of creeps me out.  I decided to use it because I thought it might creep you out, too. 

Autobiographical Writing.  The other reason I’m using it is because it’s a good jumping-off point to talk about what it means to say, or to ask whether, something is autobiographical.  That topic and this song go well together, if for no other reason than to make clear that I’m not planning to trade in the family for a spot under the Waugh/Allen Parkway overpass. 

If I start that discussion, though, I’m in danger of going off on another 3,000 word screed of pomposity like last week’s country music thing, which I got only partly right, and partly right is worse than wrong in some cases.  I’ll probably revisit that topic later and try to refine my arguments better. 

As for the autobiographical question, as I said in that post of a couple of weeks ago, all writing can’t help but be autobiographical, but it doesn’t mean that the writing recounts things that literally occurred.  There are writers, of course, who use real events from their lives as a basis for their fiction or purported non-fiction (i.e., the whole phony genre called “memoir,” which I could rant about for 3,000 words easily.)  That’s irrelevant.  The fact that Hemingway has very much in common, surface-biography-wise, with the heroes of his fiction is no more or less revealing about Hemingway personally or his work than Anne Rice’s life is revealed or not revealed by writing about vampires.  You don’t really know more about Hemingway by reading his fiction (or nonfiction) than you know about Anne Rice from reading hers, nor do you know any less about Anne Rice than you know about Hemingway.  The writer can’t hide his or her preoccupations or influences nor can he or she hide behind them.  And most writers have a hard time separating facts from whatever the opposite of a fact is.

And what the writer is mostly revealing is what he or she has read or listened to up to that point—i.e., “autobiography,” at least the sort that strives for some kind of literary or other artistic merit, is really the story of the writer’s literary, musical or artistic influences, not what the writer did on February 16, 1993.  The surface details, the story, the plot, are chosen for any number of reasons, but the least of them is that “it really happened so it must be true.” 

Anyway, why would anybody care what really happened?  The brilliant songwriter Todd Snider, who is exempt from my diatribes against protest songs because his protest songs are funny and sad at the same time, said (I’m paraphrasing), “I’m not telling you this shit because I’m trying to ram my politics down your throat.  I’m telling you this shit because it rhymes.”  

So when you’re reading Hemingway you’re really reading Hemingway reading Jack London and Stephen Crane and Ivan Turgenev and filtering that reading through the memory of fishing with his father in Michigan, plus a bunch of other stuff.  When you’re listening to “Ray” you’re listening to me remembering listening to Leonard Cohen and seeing an empty park bench one gloomy day on the footpath along Heights Boulevard, plus a bunch of other stuff.  (The reason this song sounds like it does is semi-intentional.  I was going for the same sound I remembered from when I first listened to Leonard Cohen, which was when my friend Katherine Hester loaned me the “Best of Leonard Cohen” LP.  My record player wasn’t the best in the world.  What I keep forgetting is that by the time the song is recorded, put on a CD, imported in iTunes, then imported from there into the video, then uploaded to  youtube, the audio has been compressed so many times that it already will sound like the old Victrola anyway, so there’s really no need to go for that effect on the front end.) 

 Why those connections occur is mysterious and is probably why anybody gets up at all in the morning:  What might happen today that might make yesterday make sense?  Mostly I’m telling you this shit because it rhymes.

Announcement.  Speaking of 3,000 word essays, that’s what this one was on Friday when I first drafted it.  I was set to announce that nutcracker scholars had determined that a nutcracker year is actually half as long as a human year, which would mean that the project would be fully complete next week.  That research is underway and the announcement might yet be made, but Saturday I bought a bass.  So the project will continue until further notice.  Further notice is below.

How Long This Stuff Takes.  People have asked me how long it takes to do this stuff.  I tell them it’s taken the same amount of time it’s taken me to do everything else:  a little over 42 years so far.  Then they call me a smartass.  I tell them they don’t understand, that they need to see it written down, and then they’ll see how witty I’ve just been.  They say “Yeah, whatever” and tell me good luck finding somebody else to be my kid’s cubmaster.

My point is that if I weren’t doing this I’d be doing something like this, so it might as well be this.  I don’t know how long it takes because I’m always kind of working on it.  Somebody really did marvel, in a way that showed he was kind of repulsed, at how much time somebody would spend on something so demonstrably unlucrative.  It came to be revealed later in the conversation that this person had watched the entire British Open on TV.  A whole golf tournament!  That’s like watching a whole cricket match!  The time I have spent on all of the 25 entries posted so far still does not equal watching the whole British Open, or all 619 episodes of The Wire, or the past eleven seasons of Dancing With America’s Funniest Most Wanted or whatever people are watching on their TVs and telling me about on my computer night after night.

Further Notice.  But I am going to take a break at the halfway point.  Next week will be on time (though I got nothing ready right now), and then I plan to take a month or so off.  I’ll commit to a resumption date next week.  I am out of recorded songs, and I have a bunch of stuff that’s half-completed or seven-eighths-completed (the 3,000 words was a catalog of “Songs That Were Not Played.”  There were 42 on the list, coincidentally, most of them unfinished, none of them recorded.)  I have no video left.  In case you hadn’t noticed.  So it’s time to refill the tank a bit. 

It’s been tough to do much recording this summer because the kids have been out of school, so somebody’s always opening the garage door right in the middle of some soulful riff, and because it’s so hot out here without the AC on.  I also want to see if I can figure out my equipment a bit better.  I plan to get an electric guitar too, maybe some better or additional recording equipment.  All of the stuff so far has been done with cheap equipment under hurried conditions (a 10W practice amp is just not cutting it.  I have a big amp, but it’s in Spencer’s storage unit in Graham and has been for about ten years.  And it hadn’t been played for over ten years before that.  No idea what it would sound like now.)   Before this is all over I’d like to do at least one or two songs that have better production values and not have to settle for the first or second take on everything.  There’s all kinds of recording tricks I don’t know, like using patches and loops and editing software so that if you mess up three minutes into a song you have to fix only that part and not do the whole thing over again.  Not to mention mixing and other sound design software and tricks.

 I don’t think I’ll figure those out and am not even sure my machine can do them all, but I’d at least like to learn how to re-use a track, because on a lot of these songs a simple snare beat would be nice, and it would be nice to use the same track for various songs without having to re-record it.  I’m also going to buy a snare drum.  I forgot to tell you that.

Todd Snider.  Todd Snider’s one of my favorite songwriters and certainly my favorite of songwriters in my generation.  His songs are artless and effortless; they sound like they just sort of happen all on their own.  Anybody who has had an old friend who became a whore can identify with this one, which is one of his more touching ones.  (You gotta put up with him tuning his guitar for a minute or so, just like in real life.)

©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.