Here are my notes on, Composed, By: Rosanne Cash (Amazon):
Because my peripheral vision is more acute than my direct powers of observation, and my love of an A-minor chord is more charged and refined than my understanding of my own psyche, I have often attempted to explain my experiences to myself through songs: by writing them, singing them, listening to them, deconstructing them, and letting them fill me like food and water. I have charted my life through not only the songs I’ve composed, but the songs I’ve discovered, the songs that have been given to me, the songs that are a part of my legacy and ancestry.
Documenting one’s life in the midst of living it is a strange pursuit. I have always wanted to live as a beginner, and writing a memoir in some ways defies that notion, but I consider this book as a first installment in an ongoing story. I don’t know why some memories have persisted while others have faded, but I trust tenacity, so those are the memories I have written about. This is not a chronological fact-check of my life, and I am sure my sisters or my husband or my children remember some of these events very differently. I have abandoned my reliance on the external facts to support an individual truth, and everyone is entitled to his or her own.
I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on May 24, 1955, a month before my dad’s first single, “Cry, Cry, Cry,” was released on Sun Records. My mother had only two dresses that fit her in late pregnancy, she told me, and in her final month, during the most summerlike of the sultry late spring days in East Memphis, she would sit on the steps of the front porch and eat an entire washbasin of cherry tomatoes.
My parents bought Johnny Carson’s house on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino. My most vivid memory of the three years we lived there was of the day a film crew showed up in our living room to tape a show called Here’s Hollywood. My mother was extremely nervous, and we children were made to dress up in poufy dresses, white ankle socks, and black patent leather shoes, with our hair pulled tightly back into bows. We had to sit absolutely still and silent on the sofa next to my parents while the camera was trained on us and the interviewer spoke to them.
She didn’t take my intense need to learn about language seriously, and I was desperate for someone who understood my hunger. My dad would have understood, but he was gone much of the time, and during his recent visits home he had become strange, dark, and intensely distracted. Although I’m not sure why, I didn’t go to kindergarten; bored senseless, I began to create imaginary friends, all of whom were adults. Much later in life, a genial psychiatrist to whom I had confided this fact pointed out how unusual it was for a child to have adult imaginary friends, but it still seems perfectly natural to me. I felt safe with them, and they taught me a great deal.
Every couple of weeks someone—the previously mentioned folk singers, as well as addicts, preachers, or the occasional sex kitten—would drive up the long road to the house, usually late at night, usually drunk, looking for Johnny Cash. “He’s not here!” my mother would shout, slamming the door on them. We liked driving people away. We had a series of live-in house-keepers, one of whom quit the second day on the job because dinner had to be served at nine p.m. the night before due to unexpected guests.
At five foot four and ninety-eight pounds, my mother was a small, nervous slip of a woman who lived on Winston cigarettes and coffee. She was deeply distracted by worry and rage about my father, who was not only constantly traveling, but also unfaithful and at the time using massive amounts of amphetamines and barbiturates. She eventually became so fragile and distant from us children, from her pain over her failing marriage, that I, as the oldest daughter, began to assume more of an adult role in the family.
The other problem was my body, which in retrospect I think of as an adorable butterball but which at the time seemed like a corpulent rebuke to my mother. I famously broke the zipper on my mother’s wedding gown when I tried it on at the age of ten, a story she took great pleasure in repeating for many years. She was very proud of her own ninety-eight pounds.
My father was by now living in Tennessee, and my mother, Dick, and my sisters and I moved to Ventura, to another house on the hill overlooking the ocean. That house was a sixties fantasy come to life—a low-slung, single-story ranch with natural stone and rock accents. It had a tiny outdoor area and an enormous indoor pool area with hot pink furniture and awnings. A beaded curtain separated the sunken living room from the rest of the house. The den featured a wall made of boulders with a built-in oven, and my mother and Dick had a round bed in the master bedroom.
Those summers of my early teens were glorious. Dad taught all of us to water-ski, and we swam in his giant rock pool that fed into the lake, and we went on long jeep rides at his farm in Bon Aqua, seventy miles from the lake house. We picked wild blackberries and he played guitar and we sang in the evenings. Out on the lawn after the sun went down, he made homemade peach ice cream with peaches from his orchard, setting off firecrackers while he cranked the ice cream maker. He cranked that old silver tub for an hour or more, but he never complained. He picked up all the kids in the extended family—June’s sisters Helen’s and Anita’s kids, and various other children in the neighborhood—and took us to the movies when it was too hot to play outside. Sometimes he took us to three movies in a day. He rented the roller skating rink so we could skate together, undisturbed by fans.
When I was sixteen, he took Kathy and Rosey and me to Europe with him, my first trip abroad. We visited Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, which made an indelible imprint. I found I was more a natural traveler than anything else, and that trip began a lifelong series of sojourns to Europe, and more generally a life circumscribed by travel.
I pondered for a moment. “Well, no.” It was the answer he expected, and so I gave it, but what I was thinking then, and what I understand more clearly now, is that it’s not just the singing you bring home with you. It’s the constant measuring of ideas and words if you are a songwriter, and the daily handling of your instrument if you are a musician, and the humming and scratching and pushing and testing of the voice, the reveling in the melodies if you are a singer. More than that, it is the effort to straddle two worlds, and the struggle to make the transition from the creative realms to those of daily life and back with grace. My father did all of those, as a habit of being. He provided a template for me, of how to live with integrity as an artist day to day.
I belong to an extended family of musicians whose members sprawl across generations. Some occupy positions of great acclaim (my father and my stepmother’s family, the Carters), some have modest but respectable careers marked by persistence and hard work (my uncle Tommy Cash), while others never made it much further than anecdotal obscurity (my maternal uncle “Wildman” Ray Liberto, a onetime raucous honky-tonk piano player with a handlebar mustache), and some are just embarking (my daughter Chelsea). At sixteen I did not intend to take my place among them.
Then, when I was a day out of high school, my father took me on the road. It was something of a graduation gift, and a chance to catch up on some of the time we had lost. Traveling the world, watching him perform, and singing on the bus were also the basis for a serious education. Early on he made a list of a hundred essential country songs, which he instructed me to learn, a wide-ranging selection that ran from old history-lesson songs like “The Battle of New Orleans” to classics like Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” As I was ushered into this treasury of song, it was thrilling to learn more about my father through his great love for the music.
I declined once more, but as I watched him walk out of the room, there was something about the look of his back, and the look of him walking away, and the memory of the thousands of times I had seen his strong back from the wings as he faced an audience, that made me suddenly realize what it meant to him. I called after him. “Dad. I’ll do it,” I said. That night, as we sang together, all the old pain dissolved. I felt the longing to connect completely satisfied. Under the lights, in the safety of a few thousand people who loved us like crazy just then, I got something from my dad that I’d been trying to get since I was about six years old. Oddly, I don’t think we’d ever been as close.
Performed by families and often about family, traditional country music spares nothing and no one in its gaze. In the deeply morbid early country songs about topics like dead babies, for example, lie the hard truths about mountain life. The best in this tragic genre—according to my dad, anyway—is an old tune called “The Engineer’s Dying Child.” The engineer’s baby is sick, but he has to go to work and drive ol’ No. 9, or whatever number it is, and so bids his wife: Just hang a light when I pass tonight—Hang it so it can be seen. If the baby’s dead, then show the red; If it’s better, then show the green. Happily the engineer sees green, but most infants did not fare so well in early Appalachian songs, which provided a way to take account of the losses and gather comfort.
I lasted for two and a half years on the bus with my father until, feeling the constraint a young girl feels in the constant presence of a parent, I moved to London. But an important part of my heart and soul was given form and expression on that bus, and I came to realize how a shared passion forges deep bonds between people, defining a family more deeply than blood connection alone could do.
Although they were best friends, my father tended to defer to John Rollins in subtle ways in conversation, due to John’s greater age and vaster wealth and his ability to genially command the world around him to bend to his ideas and plans. I cannot think of another person, apart from his own father, to whom my father responded in that particular way. I adored John Rollins, who was a superb raconteur with a refined sense of irony, and truly a self-made man. As a boy, he had studied obituaries in the newspaper to find when a funeral was taking place so he could unobtrusively slip into the family wake and get a free meal. Although by 1976 he was one of the richest men in the country, he and my father would try to “out-poor” each other at the dinner table with stories of their childhoods of abject poverty.
I was given a desk that was crammed into the corner of the office of a department staff member, David, and it somehow never managed to cross my mind that he might well have considered me an intruder: Johnny Cash’s kid on a lark in London, taking up a good deal of his space for the purpose of absolutely nothing that he could ascertain. Still, he was kind, and did not even resent his orders from Derek to take me around to find a flat.
By the end of my London stay, a few Anglicisms had seeded themselves into my mind, forever to remain: the proper use and spelling of the word “queue,” the reversal of month and day when writing a date, and an obsessive and unrelenting adherence to teatime, with proper tea brewed in a pot.
The CBS office building was in Soho Square, just off Oxford Street. I took the tube to work every morning from Hampstead and got off at the Tottenham Court Road station. My office was on the sixth floor, and I strove, with utmost diligence and gut-churning dread, to stay away from The Third Floor, which housed A& R and promotion. No woman was safe there; the taunts and come-ons were urgent, and not friendly. The men in those two departments were notorious: loud, predatory, debauched, and dependably drunk by four in the afternoon. They started drinking, as well as ingesting other substances, early in the afternoon, and most of the women I knew in the company absolutely refused to go to the third floor anytime after lunch. In the mornings, when they were still hungover, it was relatively safe if you got in and out quickly; if it was essential to go there in the afternoon, you took a friend.
Whenever I was at home in my flat, I began listening to four records on continuous rotation: Bob Dylan’s Desire, Tammy Wynette and David Houston’s album of duets, James Taylor’s Gorilla, and Janis Ian’s Society’s Child. These four records wore grooves in my personality, I listened to them so much. They held the entire content of my experience and my hopes. I had no interest in going to the Heath, the nearby park that everyone went on about as being so beautiful and peaceful. I did not care about peace and nature in the least; what I cared about was music, men, food, antiques, excitement, and being pretty.
I had read about him in Melody Maker, like everyone else in the music business in London, but I had not yet heard his music. I was sitting at the bar at the Hard Rock, Dubonnet in hand, when “Born to Run” came on the sound system. Sandy was talking to me, but I could not hear a word she was saying, so riveted was I to the music. The combination of urgency, poetry, testosterone-fueled guitars, and the relentless backbeat made me literally weak in the knees. It was as if William Blake had put on black leather and climbed a motorcycle. I was enraptured. I couldn’t begin to conceive that, thirty-three years later, I would do a duet with Bruce Springsteen on my album The List. That concept belonged to someone else’s life in 1976, not the shy, round girl sitting at the bar of the Hard Rock Cafe in London.
Brenda came to see me in Nashville late that summer. As we sat by the pool at Dad’s house on the lake, I was miserable, hating her for being so beautiful when I was bloated with hormones, hating her for having a return ticket to London. It had not even occurred to me—and it wouldn’t occur to me for another twenty years—that I could have argued with my father and simply gone back. It seemed a bad moment for my old, limp personality to resurface, but in retrospect, I’m grateful he could see the possible trajectories of my life, and intervened to keep me connected to him and the rest of my family.
That September I entered Vanderbilt, and with my year’s worth of credits I managed to take mostly sophomore classes, trying to fit myself into a program where I was already two or three years older than my classmates. I was not only older, however, but far more experienced, not to mention eccentric, than the other students. I had no interest in the social aspects of college, which made it impossible for me to feel a part of the community, and I don’t think I spoke more than ten words a day for the entire academic year. I liked my studies, particularly a creative writing class, which was taught by Walter Sullivan, a brilliant writer himself, and while I found a mild sense of camaraderie there, I still made no real friends.
I sat quietly holding his hand while he ran through his repertoire of tics—jerking, trembling, murmuring. Trying to think of something to engage his attention, I finally said, “I’m writing a book, Dad.” He harrumphed, emphatically—one of the peculiar ways he liked to communicate.
He grew still and stared straight ahead through the glass doors to the nurse’s station while I talked. When I finished, he turned to me with surprise. “You got me. With that chapter.” He thought for a moment. “I didn’t know you felt all those things then.” Neither of us spoke for a moment or two; then softly I said, “Well, I did.” Dad’s eyes glazed a bit, and he said quietly, “Just to think of you makes my heart swell with pride.”
I saw our dear friend John Rollins for the last time on New Year’s Eve 2000, at Cinnamon Hill, when I was there to see in the new millennium with my husband, John, and our baby, Jake. As John Rollins walked out of the house into the balmy evening, wearing his pink golf shirt and white trousers and wishing everyone a happy new year, I said good-bye to him and thought to myself very clearly, This is the last time I will ever see him. He died of a heart attack while taking his afternoon nap that spring, in his offices in Wilmington, Delaware.
In 2009, my youngest daughter, Carrie, went to London for a short visit. She called me from Hampstead to ask me the exact address where I had lived, and then an hour later she e-mailed me a photo of herself, twenty years old, as I had been, standing in front of No. 3 Carlingford Road. A chill went through me; it was like looking at a photo of a time traveler who arrived where her mother had begun, with all the beauty, circumspection, and grace that I had longed for, and strained to glimpse. Today, I can’t sit on a beach and look at the moon without realizing that my life is more than half over, and that the same moon that reproaches me now with my unlived dreams once drew me across the ocean with mysterious promises. My life was changed utterly by my six months in London. I often think that perhaps I didn’t stay long enough, but I’ve forgiven Dad for making me come home. It makes my heart swell just to think of it.
T-Bone Burnett, an old friend, once told Joe Henry, “Don’t stop working, just stop worrying,” advice that Joe passed on to me that has since become my mantra. Now, even when I do worry, I keep working. Work, I remind myself, is redemption.
When the time came to produce four demos to send to Ariola, I called Rodney Crowell. I had met him only once, at a party at Waylon Jennings’s house in 1976, when I was still attending Vanderbilt. He was at the party with Emmylou Harris, her husband and producer, Brian Ahern, and his old friend and recording engineer Donivan Cowart. That night, when everyone started passing the guitar around, Rodney and Donivan played a song they had just written called “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight.” I was stunned. I thought it was just about the best song I had ever heard, and perversely my heart sank. Writing a song that good seemed so far out of my reach that I felt like giving up my dream of songwriting. I was rattled, and even a bit despairing. Susanna and Guy Clark, longtime friends of Rodney’s, were also at the party, and at some point in the evening Susanna introduced me to Rodney.
Many nights have passed and many miles have been traveled between the circus tent and the Muffathalle, and thousands of dirty clubs and late shows, bone-rattling buses and grimy motels, and dressing rooms that smelled of piss and cigarettes. There have been nights of sitting backstage and staring at a face in the mirror exhausted to the point of being unrecognizable, and endless airport hallways I’ve walked at dawn, with a paper cup of milky lukewarm tea and a painful sense of longing for home. There have been audiences who were curious, restrained, drunk, ebullient, resentful, respectful, there to defend my dad’s honor or to try to catch a glimpse of him in my voice or face, or almost entirely absent. But through all of it, I worked hard, I paid attention, I sang to the six percent even if only two percent showed up on a given night, I sang to become better, I sang for the band if no one else was listening, I just kept doing it until it felt like home.
I had my first baby, Caitlin Rivers Crowell—the “Rivers” for my dad’s mother’s maiden name—shortly after Right or Wrong was released. (She was born at seven a.m., weighing seven pounds, seven ounces, and when she was about seven months old I began recording my second Columbia album, whose centerpiece was my song “Seven Year Ache.”) She was a dark-eyed, tiny beauty whom we called “Baby Elvis” because of her wild shock of black hair. I was overcome with emotion on becoming a mother, and shocked at how quickly, and permanently, my worldview changed. I was stunned to find how territorial I felt, how flooded with love and fear for the baby’s safety. I had been a free spirit, a nomad, someone who went back and forth to Europe constantly, who mixed records until six in the morning and liked to hang with the guys in the band. Suddenly I was walking a colicky baby in the middle of the night, obsessed about every burp and wheeze and cry. I adored my new baby Caitlin, but I didn’t have a clue about how to balance being a mother of an infant and a four-year-old stepdaughter with the demands of making and promoting records. My anxiety levels were off the charts.
By December and January I was eating nearly a dozen oranges a day. Typically, I eat no more than four oranges a year, as I find them either too tart or too bland—and definitely too watery. It was one of the coldest winters on record, and the house stayed warm until it got down to about fifteen degrees; below that, the beautiful old virgin pine just could not hold the heat. For days on end, as the temperature hovered around zero, sometimes dipping below, we all stayed close to the stone fireplace in the great room. Rodney kept the fire going (a full-time job), and the little girls played quietly with their dolls on a green turn-of-the-century Chinese rug that had been rescued from an old brothel in western Kentucky. I sat in a rocking chair next to them, profile to the fire, a little melancholy, with a bag of oranges on my lap. I ate my way through a new bag each day, tossing the peels into the flames as I rocked. The wild, bitter aroma of singed oranges cut the somber iciness of the room and soothed me. It was my personal statement against the chill. I spent many long days like this.
The girls were so adorable and funny that I began to take it for granted that they would remain little. I had always pictured myself as the mother of small children, and in my own myopia and self-absorption I couldn’t imagine that they would actually grow up and become women. If I had thought more about their development—as well as my own—rather than just reveling at being in the moment with them, I would have been stricter. I would have been diligent about imparting life lessons and establishing regulations and tasks. I would have consciously modeled behavior for them and taught them to cook.
And yet, with John and me in the second year of our relationship, it became a little rocky as John suddenly found himself a father to three girls, two of whom were adolescents and resentful of the fact that I had pulled their lives apart. Much of the time, our desire to make it work outweighed our skills in managing the difficulties, but desire can become commitment, and commitment can make the forces of the universe work to your advantage. That’s what happened for us.
My mother grew up middle class, in San Antonio, Texas. She was the daughter of Tom and Irene Liberto, staunch, devout Catholics and second-generation Italian Americans. (In the immigrant exhibit at the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio, there hangs an enormous portrait of my great-grandparents, Angelina and Frank Liberto, who came from Sicily in the late nineteenth century.) Tom Liberto, my grandfather, was a bespectacled insurance salesman who was also an amateur magician, champion gin rummy player, and rose gardener and breeder so renowned that he was asked to create a special rose for Lady Bird Johnson on her visit to San Antonio in the early 1960s.
We married in 1979, when I was twenty-three years old, and I effectively ended my childhood with him. We were not only perfectly suited to help each other resolve the most egregious character traits left from our difficult childhoods, but we bonded in exhilarating creative and philosophical exploration. Unfortunately, we were both fairly untethered to anything earthbound and, finally, were too similar.
I put down the paper and put my feelings about the incident completely aside and turned my attention to the contours of my new life with John. The next day we traveled from Rome to the Amalfi Coast.
I howled into the phone when I told him of our loss. He listened quietly, only murmuring little grunts of sadness. When I finished, he told me a story about his own mother, kneeling in the fields after the death of Jack, his brother, and how she thought she couldn’t make it through another moment. She would cry out to God to help her, and then that moment was accomplished, and soon another day had passed. And then another. Then he gave me some advice, something he seldom did unless it was specifically solicited. “Cling to John,” he said. “I’ve seen so many couples break up because of the loss of a child.” I took that advice seriously, and it was the clinging to each other that got John and me through that time, and strengthened us, when so much potential for disintegration afflicted us.
I once asked Mom what she remembered about Patsy—not as someone who would have a professional take (for that I would have called my dad), but as a woman who had been so deeply affected by her. She laughed but didn’t ask why I had posed the question. “I didn’t know her well,” she admitted, “but your daddy and I did have her over to the house not long before she died. She had a mouth like a sailor, and she didn’t put on airs. She was just Patsy, comfortable in her skin. I admired that. But that beautiful voice and body were so different from her . . . roughness.” Mom paused. “I love her singing,” she said passionately, present tense, and after considering the matter a while added, “Well, she was very friendly.”
He was a Baptist with the soul of a mystic. He was a poet who worked in the dirt. He was an enlightened Being who was racked with the suffering of addiction and grief. He was real, whole, and more alive to the subtleties of this world and the worlds beyond than anyone I have known or even heard of. He was the stuff of dreams, and the living cornerstone of our lives.
That little incident might well stand as representative of what happened to me constantly when I was coming of age, which I recall as a series of bizarre interruptions, rapid changes of plans, stops and starts, occasional great events, and temporary but intense confusion. I was always without money, but somehow I managed to travel the world first-class; find comfortable places to live and unusual, interesting people to stay with and go out with to restaurants and music clubs; sign contracts for grand ideas; work my way into peculiar circumstances in remote locations; and generally live off the grid, and outside the normal patterns of young adult development.
Late in the afternoon of the day before I left to go back to New York, Dad stared out the window at the lake and said sadly, “The gloaming of the day is the hardest part.” I said I knew that it was. His head tilted down to his chest. “I feel so bad,” he said, and that was one of the only times in my life—maybe the only time—that I ever heard him complain about his ailments. It was extraordinary, and shocking, to see his stoic resolve crumble before my eyes. “I know, Dad,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
When we were about to mix the song “Black Cadillac,” Julian came into the studio looking very uncomfortable. He had an idea, he explained, but before he would tell us what it was, he insisted that I could stop him and tell him to fuck off at any time. He was stumbling all over himself to get it out, but finally explained that he wanted to try to put some warped mariachi-type horns on the end of the song to echo the horns on my dad’s “Ring of Fire,” as a kind of homage to the content of the lyrics. I surprised myself by agreeing immediately. It turned out to be an eerie moment and a subtle reference that not everyone got, but those who did found it hauntingly effective.
With time the unbearable becomes shocking, becomes sad, and finally becomes poignant. Or maybe poignancy isn’t the conclusion to grief. Maybe there is something beyond poignant that I haven’t experienced yet. I was able to renegotiate my inner relationship with my dad through the first few years of his absence, and much has been resolved. I hear him come on the radio in a taxi or a store, and my heart aches and is soothed at the same time. Both people I know and total strangers talk to me almost daily about their love and admiration for him.
I hung up and within the week wrote “Like Fugitives”—about my mother’s death; about the public insanity surrounding my father’s death; about the forthcoming film Walk the Line, which had recently been previewed for me, and which I found to be an egregious oversimplification of our family’s private pain, writ large and Hollywood-style; and about the torment my sisters and I were suffering from losing so many people in two years. I ended the album with a track that was seventy-one seconds of silence. To me, it was the only direct tribute track to my mother and my father, both of whom had died at the age of seventy-one.
Today, when I think about that moment and the scene I witnessed, the most unsettling part of all was the depth of the injured silence. I started crying. Robin Rue, a literary agent friend and mother of one of Carrie’s classmates, came and stood next to me, and we put our arms around each other. “All this in the name of God,” she said somberly. I was startled and looked at her through my tears. Of course, I thought. She’s absolutely right. Religion. For what other reason do people ever act with such absolute inhumanity?
In the months since my father’s passing I had come to understand that the loss of a parent expands you—or shrinks you, as the case may be—according to your own nature. If too much business is left unfinished, and guilt and regret take hold deep in the soul, mourning begins to diminish you, to constrict the heart, to truncate the vision of your own future, and to narrow the creative potential of the mind and spirit. If enough has been resolved—not everything, for everything will never be done, but just enough—then deep grief begins to transform the inner landscape, and space opens inside. You begin to realize that everyone has a tragedy, and that if he doesn’t, he will.
You recognize how much is hidden behind the small courtesies and civilities of everyday existence. Deep sorrow and traces of great loss run through everyone’s lives, and yet they let others step into the elevator first, wave them ahead in a line of traffic, smile and greet their children and inquire about their lives, and never let on for a second that they, too, have lain awake at night in longing and regret, that they, too, have cried until it seemed impossible that one person could hold so many tears, that they, too, keep a picture of someone locked in their heart and bring it out in quiet, solitary moments to caress and remember. Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.
He learned that the Cash name did indeed originate in Fife, with Ada, half-sister of King Malcolm IV. She married Duncan, earl of Fife, and was given a land dowry of what is now Strathmiglo and the surrounding area, and the Falkland Forest, which comprised nine thousand acres in the year 1160. Ada and Duncan built a castle in the area, which has long since vanished, but our family roots and our visceral and spiritual connection to this area of Scotland run deep. My father developed a profound love and deep interest and passion for this part of Fife, and in 1981 he filmed a television special at Falkland Palace, where he reveled in the Scottish connection.
On our arrival in Falkland late in the morning, we were disappointed to find that the palace was closed for the holiday week. Just about everything was closed down, in fact, except for the little restaurant at the top of the hill, where we had a ploughman’s lunch of bread, cheese, and pickles—a more satisfying meal than one offered by any four-star restaurant.
My anesthesiologist, Dr. Eric Heyer, sauntered up. I suspected—and hoped—that he had a wicked sense of humor, which I thought I had glimpsed in our consultations up to this point. I had total confidence in his ability to keep me deeply unconscious—“ below the level at which the brain can imprint memory”—and immobile during surgery, but I was also counting on his wit to help me get through the next half hour, while I was still awake and anxious. I looked at him eagerly.
The following night, as I left the television stage after my song, I saw George standing in the wings, waiting to go on. He was clapping for me, but I shook my head and said despondently, “It wasn’t as good as rehearsal.” “It’s never as good as rehearsal,” he replied, and I saw then that he was nervous. George Harrison was nervous about appearing on a television show and performing a song. I thought about that so many years later, when I attended the memorial for him in Strawberry Fields in Central Park the first weekend of December 2001, a few days after he died of lung cancer. He didn’t take his Beatles baggage to the guest spot on the Carl Perkins television show, but was just in the moment, wanting to be good, like the rest of us.
I have also been driven by a deep love and obsession with language, poetry, and melody. I had first wanted to be a writer, in a quiet room, setting depth charges of emotion in the outside world, where my readers would know me only by my language. Then I decided I wanted to be a songwriter, writing not for myself but for other voices who would be the vehicles for the songs I created. Then, despite myself, I began performing my own songs, which rattled me to the core. It took me a long time to grow into an ambition for what I had already committed myself to doing, but I knew I could be good at it if I put my mind to it. So I put my mind to it.
We all need art and music like we need blood and oxygen. The more exploitative, numbing, and assaulting popular culture becomes, the more we need the truth of a beautifully phrased song, dredged from a real person’s depth of experience, delivered in an honest voice; the more we need the simplicity of paint on canvas, or the arc of a lonely body in the air, or the photographer’s unflinching eye. Art, in the larger sense, is the lifeline to which I cling in a confusing, unfair, sometimes dehumanizing world.
At that moment the owner came up to me and said with authority, as he pointed to Rhythm and Romance, “No, no, no. This one is not good.” He flipped through a couple more albums and pulled out King’s Record Shop. “THIS one. This is a great record.” I looked at him and smiled. He didn’t make the connection. Shyly, I said, “It’s me.” He still didn’t understand. I raised the album next to my face. “C’est moi. It’s me.” “Oh my God!” he gasped, and we both laughed. We retired to a nearby café and drank a bottle of red wine together and talked about music. It’s me. They are all me, the good and the bad.
I have a fear that I have a personal quota, bestowed at birth, of first-rate songs allotted to me, and I worry, after every new song I write, that I have finally reached that magic number. So, inevitably, mixed with the satisfaction of accomplishment is anxiety and sadness that this might be the end. The uncertainty is vexing, but it keeps me humble. I am always a beginner, again and again. I work, even when I worry.