It's been a couple of days since I turned 52, but today I celebrate my long time best friend, best man, Jason Ries, who turns 52 today. And - well it's sort of golden in that 5/2 is = 52 because, honestly, who gets to enjoy their golden birthday when they're barely learning to walk?
I already digress. Anyway, I was rearranging one of my junk cable drawers today and dusted off the old AIWA PX257 Stereo Cassette Player with Ear Guard technology (TM).
I had to dig through my other junk drawer (in the "basement" as we call our laundry room under the girls' room in this split-level, upward slope house out here in California, where it's rare you find a house with a true basement) to find a couple of AAA batteries in my stash so I could play the thing. But what to play in it? I'll rewind a little.
A week or two ago my brother informed me that Mr. Giombetti of the Exclusive Company ("Say it with me!") had passed away. I took that to be a recent thing, but it was actually November of last year according to MY research (I won't delve any further into my brother's self proclaimed excellence at doing his own research as you can guess where that one's headed). And then I busted out this old cassette case, which I still have, under my bed, with all of my song tapes. Sent him a picture of it. The case had once been his.
Then, on my birthday, my friend Don posted this photo of himself, my good friend and pal from High School in my Illinois days, Joe Blidy, from the winter of 1992 with the slogan "Happy Bill Day!" The photo had me holding, yep, you guessed it, "Say it with me! THE Exclusive Company":
I figured that was a sign that it might be time to reflect.
I opened the case.
See, I was once a fairly prolific singer/songwriter - from my late teens to my late twenties, with dreams of "making it," whatever that means (Ask Kids In The Hall - "But did I make it?"). And as a kid I was also vaguely interested in my family's past - probably because the details of my family's history were elusive or sporadic. So at a young age, around 10, I grabbed a hold of my mom's tape recorder and taped everything, wrote a lot, kept diaries, journals, wrote tons of letters to people, saved all the letters they sent back, etc. I vainly thought my life would be so interesting that surely someone would some day take notice and write a book about me or something. I dated my first band practice (April 4, 1987), and god knows what else -- on the labels of tons and tons of cassettes now at rest in bins, somewhere in the basement. I'm gonna call it that from now on.
Self love borders on narcissism but I'm old enough, I think, to know the difference by now and I'm just grateful to have a trail of evidence rich enough with artifacts along the way where I can pick any point in time and dive a little deeper into what I was thinking about and feeling than my now fading memory will allow.
When I got to about halfway through tape 20, my methodical routine came pretty much to a halt. It was a couple of months after I met Kiera. It was also around the time that I pivoted from being a front guy in a band (where I'd send songs like this in batches and have them pick the best ones that we'd then rehearse), to taking on a project with, back then, an acquaintance of mine that I happened to work in a mail room with in the Transamerica pyramid a couple of years earlier. If you're still reading this, you probably know the rest of that story. But it wasn't until late June that I finally skipped a month of recording at least something. And that month was July, 1996. I'll get to that in a minute. I resumed with a song or two in August and September but the output was already sputtering. I wouldn't finish tape 20 until March of 2000. But I was already finished as a songwriter. At least, a prolific one. As Henry Rollins recently said, he doesn't really write songs or lyrics for songs anymore because the "toothpaste has gone out of the tube."
That seems about right. In my case, there was trauma - though at the time it was not direct trauma - it was trauma through someone I was already falling in love with - and her brother, Ryan, passed away tragically on July 1st, 1996.
Even after all these years have past, I still feel this is not my story to tell publicly, except to say that what happened that day had a profound effect on my life. But I still feel sensitive to the fact that anything I personalize when it comes to what happened - is not intended to co-opt any of the trauma that occurred for Kiera and her family on that day. We'd known each other for only three months, at that point, and I had not spent a lot of time with Ryan or get to know him that well before he died. Even though I've been a part of Kiera's life now for 26 years, and part of her family in marriage for almost 21...you know, it's just not the same.
Since I'm speaking about my songwriting - what happened at that time had a profound effect. Lyrically at least, I felt like I didn't really have anything that important to say compared to the trauma that Kiera and her family were going through. So many of my songs were -- if not obtuse or completely indecipherable with vague imagery -- an anger vent, or protests about things that, after July 1st, 1996, felt awfully trivial. Embarrassing, really. And I had long established myself as a writer who had an aversion to writing love songs. I did know that I was ill equipped to do a good job of that at any rate. It was never my forte, and it always felt forced. And there's no fucking way I could possibly try to express the depth of what was happening in some kind of pop song. To try and do that was out of the question. It was not my place.
So, I was in love, the person I fell in love with was suddenly experiencing deep trauma, and there was also another musical outlet opening up for me to explore and grow into. Beulah was becoming that outlet, and the best way I knew how to express myself in that moment was to wrap myself into the songs of someone else, someone who I felt had a much better gift at songwriting anyway. My playing would start to do the talking.
Those thoughts I've just expressed were swirling in my head today so I went straight to tape 20, rewound it to the beginning and listened all the way through. The first song was a song called Guantanamo Bay, written on my 26th birthday (half my life ago), a song I still play to this day. It's one of about a dozen that I still do, and am finally thinking about recording properly with the aim of putting out on a record of what I consider my very best. There are others, older than this. But I also wanted to hear what the change I went through back then sounded like, because I don't think I've listened to that, or any of the other tapes for that matter, in all of the years since.
After the fall off, the songs I wrote and recorded in the three remaining years it took for me to get to the end of tape 20 got quieter and quieter, with my voice settling into one that had a lot less affect. Truth be told, I was probably influenced by Miles Kurosky (you know, guy I met at the pyramid?) in that regard somewhere along the way, for the moments I had that were few and far between when I actually sang lead on a Beulah song, I would sing them straight, and as pretty as I could. That was under Miles' guidance. He didn't like my "rock voice." I don't like my rock voice either, when I listen to it now. Miles was right. He almost always is. I was probably also influenced by my friend Carlos Forster from the band For Stars (I was their drummer for two gigs, I'll save that story for another time) - whose voice belongs in a permanent echo in the richest of cathedrals.
And, of course, to anyone listening closely, the great Elliott Smith. I hadn't heard of Elliott until a bandmate of mine in my last band before Beulah, called 17 Reasons, told me about him because he said that when he first heard Elliott's self titled record, it reminded him of me. When I bought it and first listened to it, it was already game over for me before I finished listening to the second track, Christian Bros. There was no comparing me to Elliott Smith...
Every now and again when I pick up my guitar, I wonder why I still can't write. It's probably because I just don't want to. I reserve the right to change my mind some day, perhaps when the decade is out. For now, I'm gonna get going on my old batch of dozen. I've already finished one (with a little help from my friends). The name of the song is called California Son, and I wrote it on March 10th, 1996, exactly one month before I met my wife, Kiera, for the very first time.
Anyway - that's it. That's the post.