This is the last blog post.  Next week there’s a song and video, but I’m going to do the wrap-up now.

So here are some observations about the experience of being a lifelong non-songwriter who decides to write approximately one song a week for a year or so and a few questions answered in a sideways fashion.

Verdict.  I’m glad I did this.  In two weeks or a month or five years I may look back on it as a horrifying embarrassment, but I don’t think so, since (i) I don’t plan to ever look at any of this stuff again and (ii) if it was really that bad, I have faith that most people are decent enough that they will avoid mentioning it.  As indeed most people have been so far.  (I’d be more embarrassed, I think, if anybody knew how seriously I took this thing.  Or at least how seriously I took it up to a couple of weeks ago when I had my Neil-Armstrong-after-a-five-day-drunk moment:  “I walked on what?”) I know that if I had looked back very far at any point in the project I would have abandoned it.  Whether it was wise to continue is unknowable, but for now I’m calling it a success just because it is finished.  I said early on, in one of my fits of handwringing about whether to continue, that I had a habit of not finishing things once I knew they were finishable, that once I saw that something could be done, it didn’t seem necessary to actually do it.  I went through that same sort of logic when I was drinking.  I would stop for long enough to see that it was possible to stop, at which point I would start again, having, to my mind, proved something. I had proved something, of course:  I’d proved the opposite of what I thought I was proving.

Why Did I Decide To Do This? I used to write novels.  Obsessively.  I kept it a secret from most people, and I kept the extent of it secret from everybody.  The fact is, all I did was write novels (after figuring out in my early twenties that I couldn’t write short stories) for about sixteen or seventeen years.  When I got married and started working at a real job, I wrote early in the morning, late at night, at lunch (when I worked downtown, at lunch time I’d go over to the old Carnegie library, now the History Center, and sit in the lobby of that quiet old building and write in longhand.  I wrote two novels that way.) Many of them were, and are, unfinished.  Several did get finished.  My typical method was to work very hard and be very committed to the novel until it was done or until the end was in sight, be convinced it was the greatest novel ever written, send queries to fifteen agents, get the rejections back, and meanwhile decide the novel was no good and immediately start another one.  Rinse and repeat.  Each novel took one to two years.  I worked on one about a messianic placekicker for six or seven years, maybe longer.  I don’t think I ever finished it, because I finally figured out how it was going to end (it involves Buck Owens), so I didn’t need to finish it.

That’s not a healthy way to live, I determined.  Whether I have any aptitude for that line of work, whether those novels are or were any good, is not even relevant, just as whether these songs are any good is not relevant (more on that below).  The way I went about it was not any good.  This time, failing publicly somehow presented itself as a more attractive option than failing secretly.  That was part of what was behind the compulsion to write a song a week for a year.  The alternative would have been to pretend I wasn’t a guy who’d spend a year in his garage writing songs for a nutcracker doll to sing.  But I am that guy.  So now you know.

What Have I Learned? Other than what I’ve just said, nothing.  Or at least nothing jumps to mind. There are plenty of things I feel like I should have learned, some of which are things that other people are born knowing or learn early in life, but I can’t say that I’ve learned them yet.

But it’s a process, right?  The work is its own reward.  That’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about, the stuff I know but haven’t . . . learned. So that’s something, I guess–knowing things but knowing you haven’t really learned them.

What Will I Do For My Next Trick? I don’t know.  The songwriting began as a stunt and then, I think, I got (sporadically) better at it.  I don’t have any burning ambition to write songs, but then again burning ambitions are something I’m trying to avoid at this age.  The attitude I took toward the songs was, “I need one a week.”  Some weeks, most probably, were nothing to celebrate.  A few have, I believe, commercial potential, and for awhile I thought I would pursue that angle, but now I know I won’t.  I’m pretty sure my songwriting days are over.  This is as far as any of this stuff goes.

But it was edifying to approach something from the standpoint of a professional, or at least a craftsman, rather than that of an artist.  I have a greater respect for craft than I did when I was kid.  Back then it was all about inspiration and passion–Whitman’s yawp and the 10,000 words a day Thomas Wolfe just couldn’t contain, just had to pour out for the benefit of posterity.  I don’t regret or disown any of that, but the priest who goes to work Sunday morning and says the exact same thing the priest across town and across the ocean is saying, well, that’s something, too.  Just going through the motions can be ennobling, too.

How Many Songs Were Left Over? A bunch!  I didn’t realize how many until I just started thumbing through the books.  But don’t worry, you’re not missing much.  There aren’t many that would have made the cut at this late stage (and, honestly, you could say that about a whole lot of them that did get used.)  I do consider it a victory that I never had to use “Quirky People.”  I would have liked to use “I Think Your Cat Pissed in My Truck,” but Chevrolet doesn’t make S-10’s anymore, which screwed up the main rhyme in the song.

What Was Left Undone? I wanted to write about Red Headed Stranger, how Willie Nelson created a thing entirely new under the sun by using scraps of stuff littered throughout his own pop cultural history, how that album exemplifies transcending the personal into the public.  I wanted to write about Merle Haggard’s perfect “Sing Me Back Home,” the strange jump backwards in the second verse that makes what would have otherwise been a sentimental prison song instead a work worthy of comparison to Chekhov. I wanted to put down everything I know about music theory, which isn’t that much but which became an early key to the universe for me; I wanted to celebrate the circle of fifths.  I wanted to write about the Rule Against Perpetuities, the only thing in law school I learned and understood better than anybody else but in a way that has no application to the law.  And I owe Fussy the story of how I got to Fayetteville and the refinement of the Tom T. Hall Principle, which I will get to her in some fashion.

What Happened to Week 50? I really don’t know.  I started reading A Wrinkle in Time to the kids last week, and I think maybe Week 50 got sucked into a tesseract.  It’ll show up somewhere, I think.  My next project might be called The Week 50 Project.

Are These Songs Any Good? They were good when they left here.  After that, I can’t say.  But there really aren’t any bad songs, only bad songwriters.

©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.

I made two C’s in my academic career.  The first one was the second semester of my freshman year in a class called “Astronomy in Science Fiction,” taught by Ethan Vishniac.  I remember very few of my undergraduate professors’ names, but I remember Professor Vishniac’s, because it sounded like a character in a science fiction novel [Note:  Just looked him up on Wikipedia.  Man, he came from an estimable family.] I don’t remember anything about the class except that I was lost and terrified throughout.   What possessed me to take a class combining two subjects one of which was over my head [sic] (I’d made a B in Astronomy and hadn’t deserved that) and the other of which I’d always hated, I do not know.

My dislike of science fiction generally and space fiction particularly is matched only by my dislike of submarine fiction, and the dislikes arise from the same visceral distrust of genres where there are no rules.  In both submarine and space stories, you never know where north is. The people just scurry around, in space, underwater, or in the spaceship or submarine itself, and you never know where they’re going or why they are where they particularly are. “Look, another submarine room full of pipes and stuff!  Look, another planet or asteroid or something with some made-up name!  I wonder if they’ll get away from the bad guy!  Yes, another submarine room, another planet!”  That stuff gets boring.  There’s no suspense because the author can always just invent another room in the submarine or head off to another part of the limitless ocean.

I hate hobbit stuff, too, where it doesn’t matter if somebody dies because, hey, here’s some magic!, and he’s alive again.

I made a C in Vishniac’s class and was glad to get it.  I transferred from UT immediately.  Then a bunch of other stuff happened and . . . hey, here’s some magic!, two schools and a semester-off later I wound up graduating from UT with no loss of credits and in four and a half years, as though I’d never left.

A couple of years later, after a year in St. Louis I’m no longer sure happened at all, since there are no witnesses to attest to my presence there, I wound up back at UT for grad school in English.

The degree requirements allowed you to take some classes outside of English and even one or two undergraduate classes.  My friend Ailise, an American Studies grad student with a yen for cowboy kitsch, talked me into taking an undergraduate class about the American West.

It wasn’t the stupidest class I’ve ever taken—the stupidest one I ever took was (redundancy alert) “Law and Fiction,” and I still have dreams about missing the final for that one—but it was pretty bad.  The professor had one thesis, which he reiterated about a thousand times an hour.  The thesis went something like this:  ”Hey, you know those cowboy movies?  It wasn’t really like that.”  So we’d watch a movie and he’d tell us why “it wasn’t really like that.”  He’d tell us something he thought we thought and tell us we were wrong, because it wasn’t really like that. (For instance, most singing cowboys on the open range didn’t have invisible orchestras following them around.  “It wasn’t really like that.”)  Vishniac’s class had the same sort of thesis: Time travel isn’t really possible![1] And a few years later in Arkansas I met Kevin Phelan who told me about his high school physics teacher who was obsessed with impressing upon his students that everything has torque.  That class, according to Kevin, consisted of the teacher referencing some object and pointing out that it had torque.  ”That desk has torque.  Your clothes, torque in them. There’s torque in stoves.  Marbles?  Full of torque.  All kids’ games have torque. . . .”  The final exam was a single question:  ”Name some things with torque.”

I made a C in the American West class.  I made A’s in every graduate level class I took (except that one of my fiction workshop teachers gave me a B, which I’m kind of proud of, because nobody gets a B in a graduate fiction writing workshop).  But I made a C in an undergraduate class about stuff that happened in my own backyard.

Charles Goodnight.  Charles Goodnight is the more famous member of the partnership he had with Oliver Loving.  Frank Dobie said Goodnight “more nearly approached greatness than any other cowman in history.”  (Think about that next time you’re discouraged in your quest to become the greatest Mexican hockey player.)  But Goodnight had the advantage of outliving his partner by 62 years; Loving died of gangrene from an infected arrow wound in 1867, while Goodnight lived to the age of 93, dying in the Panhandle in 1929.

My dad sent me the J. Evetts Haley biography of Goodnight last week, which is what inspired me to write this song, though I haven’t started reading the book yet.  Coincidentally, Saturday afternoon I turned on the TV to distract the kids from the apparent ceaseless misery and horror of their lives and tuned into one of the PBS minor league stations we now get since we moved up to the HDTV.  On offer was an episode of Ray Miller’s eighties program (redundancy alert) Texas:  Our Texas, a study in cowboy polyester that deserves its own write-up, and the subject was Goodnight and Loving.  It was the first time I’ve ever heard the trail referred to as the “Goodnight-Loving” Trail as opposed to the other way around.  So Goodnight’s longevity and the fame proportional thereto are still paying dividends.

I grew up in a little town named after Loving, or at least after one of his descendants.  Loving died in New Mexico but was buried, thanks to his friend Goodnight, in Weatherford in Parker County (the lead characters and many of the events in Lonesome Dove were based on or at least inspired by Goodnight and Loving and their exploits.  You probably already knew that.) Parker County is a couple of counties east of Young County, but some of Oliver Loving’s clan made their way to Young County before the end of the 19^th century.  I rode the schoolbus with Loving’s great-great granddaughter (or close enough), Laura Loving, a name so pretty it sounds made up.

All of that is to say that I don’t have any deep affinity with or connection to Goodnight (or Loving, beyond his name on my hometown) and don’t know why Dobie would have thought the man came nearer to greatness than any other cowman.  Maybe I’ll know when I read the book. They weren’t household names the way Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston were.  Goodnight’s and Loving’s pioneering of the cattle-drive was impressive—what fool would have thought you could make a herd of cattle travel a couple of thousand miles through all sorts of irritating weather to be slaughtered?—but I don’t know that the cattle-drives had any long-lasting influence on the development of the country other than help create the myth of the cowboy (which is something, of course, but I don’t think that was what Goodnight and Loving were aiming to do; they just wanted to make money.)  If he hadn’t driven those cattle to Chicago, people would have just eaten something else.  The cattle-drive era was only about twenty years; pretty soon the railroads made the cattle-drive obsolete, and I don’t think there was any connection between the cattle-drive and the opening up of new markets—the railroad was coming anyway.

Goodnight today would be (and probably is) regarded as a robber baron, imperialist and genocidal maniac, but of course if he were alive today he wouldn’t be doing those things, or at least he’d do them in a different genre, in a way that would be celebrated today and derided by the pod people of the future.  I don’t know who he’d be—probably a real estate developer.  (I’d probably be trying to get his legal work.)  He has to be judged by the standards of the time he lived in, and I wasn’t there.  He invented the chuckwagon.  He might have a claim to paving the way for America’s lasting contribution to world cuisine, which is taking other people’s cuisines and putting them on a stick.[2]

The Last Buffalo.  The song is based on a purportedly true but unverifiable Goodnight story.  The story is that a group of Indians came down from a reservation in Oklahoma asking for a buffalo from Goodnight’s personal herd.  This was long after the Indian wars were over.  He gave them one, thinking they would take it back to the reservation.  Instead they chased and killed it with lances there onsite.  It’s a powerful story that can be interpreted in a lot of ways, most of them arising from “imperialist nostalgia” (in Professor Alex Hunt’s memorable phrase.)

I heard the story first and second from John Graves.  In Goodbye to a River, Graves recounts the story factually, or at least surmisingly.  Later he wrote a short story based on it, called “The Last Running.”

I’ve relied heavily on the Graves elaboration on the story (that’s nothing; I’ve relied on John Graves for big chunks of my life), which I try to acknowledge in the title and with the character’s names (he has Tom Bird and Iron Shirt; I have Tom Preston, which is my son’s and grandpa’s name, and Iron Bird).  It was Graves who removed Goodnight as a character but retained him as an offstage presence (as the donor of the buffalo) and who also invented the past relationship between the cattleman and the Indian foe.  I took all that and added a grandson and a blizzard.

As for the quality of the song, well, if this is the sort of song you like, you’ll like this song.  I am somewhat saddened that I didn’t make it all the way through this project without doing a song in a minor key.  I have a prejudice against minor keys because most of the time it’s a cheat.  ”You can tell I’m sad and serious because I’m singing in a minor key.”  But if you’re going to do one of those new-agey Native American mysticism type of songs, it needs to be in a minor key, preferably with a rain stick and some spooky flutes.

Only a couple of songs in this project have been heard by anybody else before being posted here, and this is one of them.  I had it on CD when I took Thomas to Tae Kwan Do on Thursday, seeing how it sounded on car speakers, and was pleased that he sat transfixed through the whole thing.  At the end I asked him if he liked it.  I thought maybe he’d comment on his name being in the song.  It took him a minute to say anything, and then all he said was, “Why was his blanket moldy?”

That’s How I Got To Fayetteville.  Sorry, I lied last week.  This song came up suddenly, and then I spent too long getting that scroll thing to work on the video and didn’t have time to shift gears to the Fayetteville piece.  It wouldn’t have fit here anyway.  I’m getting concerned that I won’t cover several things I’ve been advertising for a long time.  I’m also just about ready to concede at least three letters of the alphabet.  I have an O and K song but will likely not use the K.  I don’t have an X or U song.  I do hope to write the Fayetteville piece and to continue working out the Tom T. Hall Relativity Principle, which is still evolving nicely.  We now know, for instance, that Tom T. Hall has torque.

[1] Bullshit.

[2] Steve Runner’s joke.

©2012 The Nutcracker Buck Sessions. All Rights Reserved.

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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.

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