Early on in the set I said things like, “This next song was the first record that ever sold as many copies as my father’s biggest hit,” or “I never wanted to be compared to my old man. I wanted to be my own songwriter, but this one is a nod to my father’s style.” Nobody in the audience seemed to know who I was anyway, so I figured I was free to spin tall tales with impunity. I set it all up so that near the last song I could tell a story that went something like this:
“Ladies and gentlemen: This is, as many of you know, a very emotional show for me. I was eight years old the last time I was here. Sitting right over there, just offstage, watching my dad. It was one of those nights, and I knew how he could be when his drinking started. I knew something was going to happen that night. Everyone did. I know some of you are old enough to know what happened, right?”
There was a muted and confused response, but I had their attention. I continued.
“It changed my life. It changed his life and the life of the woman who lost her sight in the incident. It’s painful, but I’ll recount what followed for those who don’t know: My father, of course, was the lead singer of 38 Special”—crowd goes wild—“and that night, the last night he took the stage, ended his career in shame. Someone in the audience, front row, as many of you will remember, had thrown a whisky bottle at my father, who was slur-singing out of tune. Dad picked the bottle up, threw it back as hard as he could, missed the guy who had thrown it at him, but blinded his girlfriend….”
The audience gasped, of course.
“But he’s spent his life being sorry. He’s done wonderful things for those people, and they’ve forgiven him. She has her eyesight back because my dad spent every last penny on that experimental surgery. And she’s here tonight, friends, with my mom. In fact, they’re just offstage together! Hi, Mom! Hi, Lisa!” Applause for Mom. “And my dad: He’s! Here! Tonight!”—thunderous applause—“And I talked him into coming out here. Onstage, for everyone to see! It’s about healing! Dad, wanna come on out?”
On cue, my stepmother then rolled my father out in a wheelchair. Why did it need to be a wheelchair? I don’t know. It just seemed comically sadder, as if something about the tragedy had rendered Papa unable to walk. I’d seen the wheelchair sitting unused backstage when I was cooking up this whole scene prior to the show.
Papa hadn’t been sure if he wanted to be involved in this scheme, but my then-seven-year-old daughter had been very excited about seeing her grandfather onstage. She talked him into it—granddaughters have their granddads around their pinkies, you know.
So Papa was rolled out onstage, with a local crew helping lift him over various cables. Those in the seated section rose to their feet at the sight. My band swears there were tears in the audience. I didn’t see that. I was too busy taking in the beauty of my father’s form as he so artfully and painfully struggled to slowly raise one twisted fist in the air. He milked that. When he’d accomplished the feat of nearly extending his quivering arm, the place went nuts. There was no roof to blow off the motherfucker, it was outside. No, Dean Folds blew the sky off the motherfucker. Our last song—God knows or even cares what it was—was massive. It was my first actual positive response of the summer tour.
As we exited the stage, my tour manager anxiously announced, “Everyone’s stuff is on the bus. There’s press that wants to talk to you about this and I can’t let you talk to them!. Move quickly to the bus. Let’s get the fuck out.” And we took off.
The next day in catering, John made a beeline to me.
“Please tell me that at least that was your real father?”
I nodded yes, sinking into my chair like a scolded child.
John shook his head like a disappointed dad and went to the catering line. It seems that at forty I was still getting paid to throw childish tantrums and mitigate my anxiety onstage. Who else gets to do that?
WAY TO NORMAL
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT TIME THAT we just don’t understand. Depending upon our perceptions and moods, time can feel as if it has accelerated or slowed. Sometimes it can feel as though it stands still. I don’t sit around trying to understand Einstein, but I know he sat around trying to understand time. And if that guy had to dedicate his entire life to time, and died uncertain about the whole thing, then what chance do the rest of us have? But time—or, rather, our sense of time—has an important place in music, and I can speak to that from my experience as a musician.
Any musician will know that our perception of tempo, music’s way of keeping time, can be quite elastic. We musicians practice like hell in private with metronomes, but the moment we get excited at a show, our sense of tempo can go out the window and we’re off to the races! And we usually have no idea how badly we rushed until we hear the recording later. Ugh. It takes a lifetime for musicians to get a handle on this. Because humans are time-dumb.
Our time-challenged nature is what music therapists take advantage of to increase the gait of rehabilitation patients, who, by the end of a session, can routinely walk at a clip not thought possible at the beginning. Using music and tempo, the therapist plays with the patient’s sense of time, which fools the mind and the body into doing something it couldn’t previously do. This method is standard practice, proven and effective. Indeed, our shitty inner clock is no match for the mysterious persuasiveness of music. And this gives us a lot of opportunity to have fun with tempo, expression, and even the content of a song.
I think that manipulation of time, musically and lyrically, is part of what makes songwriting so interesting. Because what four-minute song has ever been about exactly four minutes of someone’s life? Within the structure of a simple four-minute song, you can play with what happens between the beginning and the end and warp the sense of time. A four-minute song might dwell on one special second in our life. And that one second might represent a turning point, something that implies a whole lifetime. Whoa, dude! I know, it may be a fairly pedestrian concept to philosophers and scientists, but it’s worth considering that songwriting, like any time/performance-based art like movies, plays, or symphonies, wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have such gullible inner clocks.
I read somewhere that when teenagers are asked to stand and reel off their life stories in front of an audience, they tend to go on for ages about what seems to them to have been a very long life. But when you ask someone in their forties to step up and recount their life, it’s usually over in a few minutes.
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The metaphoric language around time illustrates how much poetic license we’re willing to take with time on a regular basis: It took forever to get my coffee. The summer was over in a second.
I thought it was pretty damn deep when I wrote this line from “Jackson Cannery”: