October Song

A Memoir of Music and the Journey of Time

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

It was late in the fading light of the first day of the long trip, somewhere on the Tri-State expressway about forty miles southwest of Chicago. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other on my phone, I fiddled with my iTunes playlist, trying to find Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in the mess of my music library.

"Relax, babe," I said, smiling.

"How'd you think I'd feel about you if you killed us," Leslie grumbled, more nervous than upset.

The car had swerved a bit but I'd stayed in my lane. Leslie insisted I'd been trying to text someone, probably my son, but I'm pretty sure I was looking for that song, one of Dylan's most lyrically creative tracks, the one with the snappy rhymes and the jazzlike, stream of consciousness lyrics. It's been said that Dylan was probably inspired to write the song after reading The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac's novel. That may not have been true, but I liked that kind of artistic association, so I was going with the story.

"It'll be all right," I said.

"Relax, babe? Really?" Leslie laughed. "Not exactly relaxed when you're all over the road."

"Okay, okay," I said. "I guess it wouldn't be good to die before we get started."

"Let's at least get a few hours in before you endanger our lives," she said.

I put my phone in the cup holder between the seats and touched her leg.

"I am so happy you're here." Keeping my eyes on the highway, I kissed the tips of the index and middle fingers of my right hand and planted them on her cheek.

"Me, too," she said. "It's so cool."

Two month ago, I entered a songwriting contest. It was a complete whim. I had set up a Google alert on my computer for anything connected to writing or writers, as I had published a couple of books, and every morning I was emailed a list of articles or blog entries connected somehow to those two subjects. One morning the alert sent me a Web announcement for Rapunzel's 12 Annual Songwriting Contest. Now, I play guitar. I've written some songs, mostly for the fun of it, nothing serious, although I take the writing seriously. I put my heart into it, but I'd never sold a song or professionally recorded one. But you know how this goes: everyone who has ever played guitar has dreamed of being a rock star.

I used to play in a band in my early twenties and performed at some coffeehouses and bars with another guitarist. Rich was more of a lead guy; I was more rhythm and picked a little. We liked the same music — Dylan, Stephen Stills, The Eagles. I'm sorry now to say we even played some America. The lead singer, Dewey Bunnell, sounded like a less-harsh Neil Young, and the band's debut album was pretty damn good. They turned lame and sappy after that, but hey, America was big at the time. Our band got pretty good, too, but of course we were never going to be stars. Hell, we were happy to get a gig at a dive saloon on a Friday night. The songs I wrote back then were folky, the same kind of material I wrote in college. The benefit to those kinds of songs, at least back then, was that the songs sometimes impressed girls. In the two or three years after the undergraduate years, I wrote maybe one or two others. They were nearly always about where I was in my life at the time, personal songs about a relationship I was in or about to end. When I look back at those years now, writing those songs was like writing entries in a diary.

It was thirty years until I wrote another song.

Marriage, kids, Little League practice, and my career as a reporter took priority over any silly rock 'n' roll dream. The Fillmore East would have to wait. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would have to wait. I had a bathroom to paint, a yard to mow, and kids to pick up at school.

Then, after a divorce and a career shift from daily reporter to teaching college, I found myself in Florida, writing at Jack Kerouac's house in Orlando.

I was a lucky guy. Somehow, the members of the board of the Jack Kerouac Project liked the personal story I sent them about a brief and unexpected encounter with Muhammad Ali at Chicago's O'Hare airport. The story was about how my father's dream of being a boxer had shown up in the DNA of my children, especially my youngest, Graham. From the time he was ten until he was about seventeen, Graham wanted to fight. When my father was a teenager, he boxed with his school buddies in the basement of his parents' house. Graham watched a lot of boxing and mixed-martial arts on TV. My dad had shown him the traditional boxer's stance, where to keep his fists, how to punch. And then, coming down the corridor at Terminal One at O'Hare one morning while waiting for a flight for a getaway to Oregon with my kids, there was Muhammad Ali. There's poetry in that. So, I wrote about it. It all fit together somehow. And the board of the Kerouac Project thought so, too. So much so that they awarded me a writer-in-residence opportunity, a chance to write for a couple of summer months in Kerouac's home, an old tin roof Florida cottage where he pounded out The Dharma Bums on a manual typewriter late into the night. During my time there, I worked on a manuscript of my own but also wrote a few songs, the first attempt in decades. Kerouac's humble little house was such an inspirational place; it had such an artistic vibe emanating from its walls. It coaxed me to pick up the guitar and compose again. I also was at the end of a relationship with a woman back in Chicago. That gave me some material for at least one song. I wrote another about a cross-country road trip I had taken. All road songs are good ones, right? But the one I thought really stood out was the third one, a song about my two sons. They were teenagers at the time: one in high school, the other in college. I won't get into all the details, but they had been struggling with school, finding their own way, some health matters, life stuff. And while they wrestled with it all, I was some 1500 miles away in the middle of Florida. I thought "A Better Day" had a nice rhythm and positive, relatable lyrics. And it seemed perfect for Rapunzel's competition.

A few years later, back home in Chicago, I wrote another song, a love song. It was for Leslie. We had been together about three months when I composed "Under the Moon." I was compelled to write it, the same way I was compelled to write the one for my boys. At that time, my sons had not yet heard "A Better Day." They would have felt ridiculously self-conscious if I played it for them. But the song for Leslie, well, I had to sing that one to her in person. I'll admit, I was nervous; worried I might be opening up my heart too much too soon. But she didn't run or hide when I strummed the guitar and sang the lyrics to her for the first time. That was a good sign. I hadn't looked into the eyes of a woman and sung a song like that in a very long time.

"Who does this kind of thing?" Leslie asked, after I played. I sensed she might have been a little overcome by the gesture, this old guy with the diminished singing range, picking his way through minor and major chords.

"I guess I'm not a guy who hides his feelings," I said. "That can be either wonderful or a complete disaster."

She kissed me and appeared as if she were holding back tears. Chalk one up for the romantics in the world.

So, there I was with two decent songs. One fresher than the other, but in both cases I believed I'd put together a pretty good combination of words and music. No Lennon and McCartney stuff, but not bad. Plus, I had already made MP3 files of each, crudely recording the songs using a Radio Shack microphone and a little mini recorder and stored them on my computer. Nothing special. It was just a way to have a record of the music, a lazy way to compose, really, so I didn't have to transpose the music with chords or scales.

I attached the music files to an email addressed to Rapunzel's and hit SEND.

I hadn't thought it through much. It was just some silly contest and what was Rapunzel's anyway? Maybe just some shabby bar in a remote part of Virginia and maybe this contest was nothing more than an Appalachian version of The Gong Show, that 1970s TV program that mocked awful amateur performers. After sending the email with the songs, I forgot about the competition.

Three weeks later, I received a response.

"I'm a finalist. One of my songs made the cut," I told Leslie over the phone. I was perplexed, somewhat astonished, and skeptical. This contest must be nothing, just some crappy, regional thing put together to spike beer sales at the dive that was Rapunzel's. And who really would pick one of my songs? Really? There must be a hundred applicants who were a lot more talented than me?

"There are thirty finalists, and all of them — including me — are being asked to come to Virginia to perform live," I added.

This was ridiculous. Nuts. What was I going to do? Travel some 700 miles to play a three-minute song in front of a bunch of drunks in a bar?

"You have to do this!" Leslie said, without hesitation. "You simply have to go."

"I don't know."

"You're going," she insisted.

"I think I need to find out more about this place, the contest, and everything," I said, continuing with my doubts. "It just seems a little crazy."

I sounded like a sad, old man. In my twenties, I would never have questioned traveling there and performing my song. I would have driven to Peru to sing music I had written. But at fifty-seven, I was wary, cautious. Could I get time off from my freelance reporting work at CBS Radio in Chicago, and a day or two from the college where I taught? What would it cost? Is this worth it? Why should I do this? This is stupid.

But just as I was questioning the idea, I was also thinking about whether my guitar needed new strings and how to best work in some practice. One of the songs, the one about the boys, I hadn't sung in years. Still, I could pull it together with some concentrated effort, right? Hell, I used to do this all the time. I'd memorize chords, licks, and lyrics every week for all those gigs decades ago. Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms: "Old men don't grow wise. They grow careful." I did not feel old, and certainly did not want to be careful.

I got on the Internet.

I googled Rapunzel's. I googled Lovingston, Virginia, Rapunzel's hometown. I googled the Blue Ridge Mountains. I googled music in western Virginia. I googled famous songwriting contests. I watched YouTube videos. And I found enough to make up my mind.

The area around Charlottesville, Virginia, just north of Lovingston and Rapunzel's has been a hub of indie musicians for years. The Dave Matthews Band is from Charlottesville. They got their start in the region. Maybe they even played at Rapunzel's in the early going, who knows. Guitar players, fiddlers, harmonica and mandolin players have flocked to central Virginia to play in music-lover bars, taverns, and on stages big and small. One might describe the area as a mini Nashville, at least the way Nashville once was when it was still friendly to songwriters. Rapunzel's was said to be a welcoming place for musicians. Plus, it appeared relatively famous. It not only had local wines, local beers, even espresso, and shelves littered with secondhand books, but it also had an elevated stage, a solid sound system, and an honest-to-goodness professional recording studio. Like the Empty Bottle in Chicago, maybe even The Troubadour in Los Angeles, Rapunzel's was the spot for new, emerging, evolving artists; a folky, alternative country mecca in a small town just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the heart of Virginia's wine country; a big red barn of a building, dusty and funky and rough around the edges, and absolutely, superbly magnificent.

"It looks pretty legitimate," I explained to Leslie. "Rapunzel's has some weight in the music community, it seems."

"So then, you are going?" she asked.

I suddenly felt so very young, the way I did when Rich, my old guitar friend, and I were booked to play our first gig at a coffeehouse on the campus of Clarion State College in Pennsylvania; young like I did when my college girlfriend agreed to drive with me to Florida over winter break; young like I did when I wrote one of my first songs in a cabin in Cook Forest in the Allegheny Mountains during a weekend getaway with college friends, a song I was proud of even though it was an annoying, entirely corny, John Denver-esque ode to the wilderness.

"Would you go with me?" I asked.

"I most definitely would go with you!" Leslie said.

That did it.

Still, there was one thing I needed to tell Leslie before any details could be worked out on whether to fly or drive, when we'd leave, or how long we'd stay.

"Good news and bad news," I said. "The good news is I'm a finalist, of course. I told you that. The bad news ..." I paused. "They didn't pick your song."

Leslie laughed. "What's with that?" It didn't matter. She was still going and so was I.

We had five hours of driving before we'd reach the first night's hotel, a Holiday Inn Express in Washington Courthouse, Ohio, a town I didn't even know existed until I mapped out the two-day route to Lovingston. It would be our first hotel of a five-day trip that would include endless driving through mountain towns, lots of wine, startling scenery, and more than two dozen original songs, one performed by a middle-aged guy with an old Yamaha six string resting on his knee, and his best girl cheering him on from the front row.

It was late when we pulled off to a rest stop somewhere in Indiana, just past the towering and eerily futuristic wind farms in the dreadfully flat terrain near Chalmers. As I waited for Leslie to return to the car, I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror. Who the hell is that guy? Time had so altered what I was seeing and so changed the man who was looking back. In that moment alone in the parking lot in the cool darkness of a late October evening, I detected echoes from so many years ago. There before me was the image of a young man with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair, and wire-rimmed glasses like John Lennon wore, checking himself out in the car's mirror just before heading into a neighborhood tavern and a stool near the bar to play America's "Horse With No Name" and maybe a melody of his own, something he wrote late one Saturday night in his dorm room. All he had to do was find the courage to share it with the beerdrinking crowd, who, although barely half-listening, was secretly longing to hear something special.

There were salty tears in the corners of my eyes.

"Girl from the North Country" — Dylan's song of longing and past love — appeared in the random playlist on my iTunes library and quietly played from my car's speakers as we traveled somewhere along the gloomily flat terrain near the border of Indiana and Ohio. I had a lot of Dylan in my playlist.

"What the hell is it with me?" I asked, not expecting an answer. We were getting closer to Dayton now. We'd missed an exit and had to circle back to point the car toward I-70. I had spilled gasoline on my sweatpants — my comfortable driving uniform — when I carelessly overfilled the tank somewhere near Indianapolis. I had to change into jeans, the pair I had planned to wear for the performance. The little Nissan had no traditional trunk, so I tossed the saturated sweatpants on the floor in the backseat and for a hundred miles, the vaporous odor assaulted the inside of the car.

"You're just clumsy," Leslie answered, jokingly.

"It's not that. Not the pants," I said.

"I'm confused. Are the pants making you high?" I laughed.

"No, it's the damn song," I said, turning up the volume a bit.

Leslie listened.

"It's just you. It's who you are," she said.

"I'm not sad. I don't long for some girl 'from the north country.' But songs like this make me cry all the freakin' time," I said.

Leslie reached for my hand and laced her fingers in mine.

Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You." Ray LaMontagne's "Jolene." Graham Nash's "Sleep Song." Dozens of others. Songs of yearning. I find myself singing the words and quietly crying. Not bawling, just a little whimpering. I'm not lovesick. I'm not longing for something. It's just the echoes, those cruel echoes of the past, past loves, people now gone from a life. Every love has left a mark, all the way back to middle school. I too am left with tenderness, like the inky sting of a tattoo artist's needle when he is done. It started in middle school. Her name was Michelle. Dark, shoulder-length hair, the walk of a ballerina, toes pointed outward, always a straight back. Michelle had good posture. She was quick to laugh. And if a seventh grader is truly able to exude elegance, she could. She sent me notes in class. Her friends told me she "liked" me, and I was her puppy love slave. But it wasn't actually Michelle that turned me to mush. It was the idea of Michelle.