Slapping my way through a wedding-band gig, 1989
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I made a pact with myself upon returning to UNC–G to not take another paycheck playing music that wasn’t my own. I had witnessed far too many middle-aged musicians who still carried their “originals” in their back pocket, harboring false hope that their own songs could ever see the light of day. Sticking around too long in cover-band world was a slippery slope, so I decided to take a considerable pay cut to wait tables at lunchtime instead, leaving my evenings open for starting my own band with original songs.
This was a leaner lifestyle. Gone were the days of eating out and buying new LPs, but working a day job seemed more dignified. Music could retain its sanctity for me this way, as I would never take money to play a note I didn’t want to. Cover-band work had been a good run, but I gave a bag full of cheesy show shirts, ties, and various sparkled suits to Goodwill, and I never looked back.
MY SEMESTER OVERSEAS
RETURNING TO UNC–G, NOW WAITING tables, I was starting to focus on a broader plan. I would get a band started while finishing up my degree in English Lit, seal a record deal, tour and record—the end. Something like that.
But my studies at UNC–G were interrupted by an opportunity that came via my childhood friend Anna Goodman, who was now attending Duke and playing French horn in the wind ensemble. You may recall my mention of a little girl named Anna who had inspired me to play piano back in second grade? That’s the same Anna. Duke University needed a percussionist for their semester in Vienna, so instead of spending my birthday blowing out candles in Greensboro with my family, as I’d expected, I found myself with a roomful of strangers playing a student concert in Budapest, Hungary.
During my surprise semester overseas, I lived with a host family, studied German, and toured Eastern Europe (before the fall of the Berlin Wall) with the wind ensemble. I spent that wonderful semester walking the streets of old Vienna each day, passing the homes of Mozart, Beethoven, Schoenberg, and so many others, with my headphones playing XTC and Peter Gabriel. I regularly attended the opera, braving clouds of BO with cheap standing-place tickets, and on weekends hopped on the school tour bus to perform in cities around Eastern Europe. Bitten by the touring bug, I now wanted to travel more. I liked being surprised by what the next day might bring.
Fuck it, I thought. In a few days, when this semester is over, I’ll just go live in London and make my mark there! I had an electric bass, a backpack with a couple changes of clothes, and about five hundred dollars in cash. I didn’t know a soul in England. What the hell? Who needs a plan?
Here’s a line from my song “Phone in a Pool.” It kind of felt like a throwaway line at the time, but it now strikes a profound chord for me:
What’s been good for the music hasn’t always been so good for the life.
It’s one thing to take risks playing music, where unpredictability is often rewarded, and another to take them in everyday life, where consequences are real. People often ask me if it’s scary to make up a song onstage, dictating parts, on the fly, to a full orchestra. Well, no. It doesn’t occur to me to worry about that. I have a jazz musician’s view of mistakes. If you play a wrong note, you can always make the same mistake again on purpose and make it sound right. Insistence on the mistake can be quite musical. Indeed, “once is a mistake, twice is jazz,” a quote often attributed to Miles Davis.
In life, however, this improvisational outlook, repeating mistakes to make them seem intentional, doesn’t work quite as well. Being hit by a car, for instance, or getting married and divorced, are mistakes that don’t improve with repetition. The fearlessness and cavalier outlook that allows me to just go for it in my music has caused me no small amount of grief in my life. I’ve had, perhaps, a few too many cheap lessons.
And so, at the end of my Viennese semester, I hopped from train to ferry for London, England—home to the music that had gotten me through high school and all my shitty jobs. British rock made sense to me, and so I figured it must come from a place that made sense. Anna thought it’d be fun to see London, so she joined me for a couple of days.
It was midnight when our ferry pulled up at Dover. I’d always wanted to see the white cliffs, even if it had to be in the dark under artificial light. Exiting the Victoria Station at around 3 A.M., we chose the first cheap hotel we could find. Over the next two days we spontaneously became a romantic couple, as young adults are wont to do when in close proximity for a few days. She flew back home before Christmas and I continued my London adventure, and though it was never discussed, I’m sure we both knew we’d be married within the year. It seemed right, even obvious, arranged somehow. We’d been best friends nearly our whole lives, and everyone who knew us both since grade school seemed to think we’d end up married. I could never tell any girl I’d dated (all two of them) everything I felt, but I’d always been able to do that with Anna. Being married in your early twenties was the Southern thing to do, something that assured everyone, including parents, that you could “be somebody.”
But first I had to get to the business of making it big in London. I didn’t even have a ticket back home. And why would I need one? After all, I was going to ace some auditions, join a great English band, write some hits, and live happily ever after. Then maybe Anna could return and get a job and we’d live happily ever after together? Who knows. I obviously hadn’t thought this through.
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That night’s cheap hotel became my home for my entire time in London, and my entire time ended up being a few weeks. Resources were dwindling by the hour, but I made the acquaintance of a certain John Bartlett. He was the manager of the cheap hotel, and I remember his name because of John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Mr. Bartlett could see I was struggling to make ends meet, and he admired the fearless audacity of my mission to conquer the U.K. with just a bass and some pocket change. He was kind enough to let me work for my room. Mostly, I just had to wrap the little breakfast trays in plastic wrap before the sun came up and plop them on the floor outside all the rooms. It turned out there were far more rooms than I knew. What looked like a row of multiple hotels was actually one massive shitty hotel with a number of façades with different names. Maybe that was some tax-dodging scheme? Each morning I delivered old bread, sour milk, and a thimble of orange juice in a hallway the length of a city block.
One night after a day of tube trains and auditions, as I lay in my sunken ditch of a stained mattress, wondering when the poor old plaster ceiling might finally surrender and fatally wound an unsuspecting sleeping musician, John Bartlett knocked at my door. Choking back tears, his nose even redder than usual, he explained that something had happened. He couldn’t say what, but he would have to leave in the morning, never to return. The drama! The new manager, he said, was not a nice man at all and I should leave soon. He offered to give me a few thousand pounds of cash so I could survive. This was tempting, because my bass amp had just literally gone up in smoke. It turns out that a hair-dryer converter is not sufficient to step up the voltage for a power amp. I had also yet to find a paying gig.