I don't want to bore you with one of those biographies that's just a list of things: where I was born, where I went to school. Too often, when we look at a life - even our own - we see only the peaks, as if life were a string of isolated events, like islands in an immense ocean. It's only when you dive down into the depths that you find the great oceanic floor that connects them and from which they all arise.
Songwriting. Think up a melody and some words and out of nothing you have made something - a song. It has always struck me as rather god-like and magical. Yet it is also miserably hard work. Songwriting is the great ocean floor of my life.
The songs I heard on the radio when I was a kid bored me stiff. Vic Damone, Dinah Shore, 101 Guitars Go South Of The Border; the stuff my parents liked sounded phony. The songs my teenaged sister listened to weren't much better: Fabian and Frankie Laine. In the suburbs of Miami, Forida where I grew up, there wasn't a radio station worth listening to. The only music I liked were the songs I made up in my head.
But slowly things began to change. We moved to Los Angeles and my sister entered her pseudo-beatnik phase. She started hanging out in coffee houses and listening to folk music. I tagged along whenever I got the chance. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Dave Van Ronk, Dick Rosmini, Judy Henske, Ian and Sylvia. I learned a song here and a song there, just enough to get the idea, then quickly began writing my own songs on guitar. There was now an urgency about it. I had no idea how I would do it, but I knew I had to make my living as a songwriter. It was not a decision I consciously made; it was a compulsion. I had no choice. I was fifteen.
On a pleasant Sunday evening in February, 1964, I was sprawled on the shag carpet in my parents' ranch-style house south of L.A. when the The Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Probably every adult within hailing distance of my age remembers that night. This is one of those seemingly isolated mountain peaks rising out of the ocean. To understand the enormous impact it had on a generation and indeed a whole culture, one has to look far below the surface. The cultural changes were relatively slow in coming, but an entire generation of musicians, singers, and songwriters woke up the next day in a very different world.
I remember getting ready for school every morning while KRLA blared "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." Riding the bus to school with a transistor radio glued to my ear: "She Loves You." Doing my homework every night with MEET THE BEATLES on the turntable. I had found the most wonderful music in the world and I listened to it every waking moment. It was fun and sexy and exciting. It was a carnival ride at full-speed.
Suddenly it seemed the world was full of great music. On Balboa Island, Dick Dale and The Deltones were generating the wail and drone of massive surf. Local L.A. bands were starting to heat up Sunset Strip dance clubs; Gazzari's sizzled. Mose Allison was grooving at Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse. The Troubador, Insomniac, and Ash Grove were showcasing the best in folk music.
Then the other shoe dropped. Bob Dylan released BRINGIN' IT ALL BACK HOME. I played it for hours, over and over and over. I had an unslackable thirst for it. My parents looked at me like I was an utter maniac, which I was. All they heard was a nasal-voiced non-singer chanting unintelligible nonsense. To me it was passionate, hypnotic, emotional, physical truth. I had finally heard a real Poet.
Bob Dylan's rock mantras, The Beatles, the folk boom of the early 60's, surf music, each of these had an immense impact on me. Yet, at the time, each was a distinct and separate musical entity, an isolated mountain peak. We did not know they were all slouching toward San Francisco where they would become psychedelic-political-folk-rock. Or London where they would become psychedelic-political-blues-rock. I just liked the way they sounded. And more than that... I liked the way they made me feel.
This is the universal power of music, all types of music, all genres. Good music makes us feel. When I looked beneath the surface I found there was indeed a deep level where all these isolated island peaks were connected. And that connection was emotion. These things you could make out of nothing, these songs, had tremendous power to communicate and evoke feelings. I was shy, unhappy, isolated, plain, and had no confidence in myself at all. But I could write songs. Everbody loved the Beatles, people were wild about Bob Dylan. Maybe, if I wrote the right song, I could make people love... me.
Of course I thought this was a brilliant idea at the time and no doubt uniquely my own. The truth is that anyone who has ever attempted to write a song has probably had exactly the same idea. It all started with the troubadors; eight hundred years ago they were right out front about it - "I'm singing this song to make you fall in love with me." We tend to be slightly more subtle now, but not by much. It's a dangerous thing to do. When it works, there is no higher high; when it doesn't work there is no more bitter rejection.
I spent a few unsettled years, moving from place to place. Santa Cruz, San Francisco, France, London, Boston, always writing songs. I've written a bit about this in Nick Drake: A Place To Be. so I won't go into it here.
Eventually I settled back in L.A. where I proceeded to do what I had to do. I needed to make my living as a songwriter. It's not an easy profession in which to survive. You either write big hits or... what? I didn't know. Most recording artists write their own songs or their producers write the songs, or writers who've already had big hits write the songs. There is only a handful of songwriters who actually make a living writing songs. I spent several frightening, impoverished years getting a foot in the door only to discover that I actually hated trying to write hit songs for other people. When I was not able to get a solid artist deal for myself, I turned to television, theater, and alternative markets where I wrote songs that satisfied my soul and made my living.
There's a whole generation of kids who grew up listening to my songs on The Disney Channel and, as a result, I feel loved and rewarded. I've written and produced hundreds of songs, ran production for a record label for awhile, hated it, quit, produced a dozen or so albums. But I never lost that yearning, the need to write songs of deep, ocean-floor emotion. Ones that would make me feel like I felt when I heard Dylan's "Visions Of Johanna" or Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U" or John Lennon's "Imagine" or Sting's "Fortress Around Your Heart" or... there are so many. WATER FALLS DOWN is as close as I have gotten so far. Like all artists, I am never satisfied with my own work. There are things I want to re-record already, I've re-mixed a hundred times. I could keep on making changes forever, trying to fully realize the way it sounds in my heart and head. But I know I have gotten hold of a corner of what I was looking for and that's something of immense importance. To be able to say, "I have captured a little piece of my vision," that is something big. It's there, in that album.
Well, if you've read this far then you know just about everything about me that's really worth knowing. Why would anyone care what schools I went to, where I studied music (or didn't). That's just a list. What I'm talking about is the education of an artist. It is a lifelong process; it never stops. Anyone can learn if they're willing to pay the price and spend the time. It's not easy and I don't think anyone does it unless they must, but I would not, and could not, live any other way. I write songs and sing them and I will keep doing that as long as I live. And I'll keep working on my diving bell so I can go deeper and deeper, down into the oceanic abyss where everything is connected.
