One Man's Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell

X. The Songwriter

46 X TheSongwriter Throughout all the luck, good and bad, I wrote songs. I wrote them in the kitchen, in the car, in the evening, on holidays, but mostly when it was inconvenient. A lot of the work I put into a new tune was done when trying to sleep, before I would wake for the day and put my thoughts to the test. I have always had collections ofideasandtunespennedinan“ideacache”ofBlackBooks.Theywere the enduring, final resting place for all kinds of recollections, reflections , and the thoughts that occurred day-to-day. By my observation, it took eight pages of cross-outs to be able to settle on three four-line verses and a refrain. Writing is not writing at all. It’s editing windy cliché and dogtrot verse. It’s taking what you so loved the day before and, with a fastballthrowing motion, tossing the miserable piece of trash into the can in the corner. Sometimes songs take 60 minutes. Sometimes songs take six years. Further, when you finally get down to it, it’s not what you write, it’s what you don’t write. It’s as important to know what you don’t want as it is to know what you do. Lastly, when you learn to write the pause, the spaces between the words become as influential The Songwriter � 47 as the words themselves. But I don’t know how much can really be said about something that never happens the same way twice. Songs have always thronged around me like famished birds. On the day I put the finishing touches to them, they fly away. As they leave, others take their place. There are always a half dozen of the perky little dears pestering me for attention. Then this morning I find yet another tiny, figurative fowl quietly preening itself on the edge of my desk. THE SONGWRITER You play like you practice. It’s not how long, it’s how often. One song teaches another. So, it’s not when you get it . . . it’s that you get it. Get it? I still rarely did anything without my instrument. It was unfailingly around when I fishtailed a four-wheeler in the sand-filled storm drains of Midland, or when I saw the devastation after a tornado initialized one-mile swaths of Wichita Falls. It leaned up against a backroom table when I got my head stove in with bats by a marauding band of toughs in the parking lot of Anderson Fair. I played that guitar in the same parking lot when I became the “Mayor of Montrose” after my set on the outdoor stage at an annual Montrose Area Block Party, the Woodstock in the tropics for a few thousand dye-dressed people. I was elected mayor by a cabal of the local elite, and the honor was receiving the Shoes of the Mayor, an awfully outsized pair of Oxfords that any two people I knew could fit in comfortably. These revered futons for the feet were painted by hippie chicks in hippie colors, with a lot of celestial pictographs and peace signs. Between block parties the shoes occupied a hallowed 48 � One Man’s Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell space atop an upright piano on the stage at Anderson Fair. The piano was probably painted by the same hippie chicks. On yearly trips I drove the guitar, teeth clenched, into hurricanes to play dates in Corpus, Galveston, and Beaumont. And I did most every kind of odd job imaginable. My dog, that guitar, and I sold fireworks out on a lonesome two-lane asphalt highway , living in the roll-away plywood enclosure for up to ten days and nightsatatimeduringChristmasandNewYear’s.Iwrotetunesinthat long plywood box. I hung paper on people’s doorknobs in the wards of the big southwestern towns so I could keep something edible in the house. I drove a cab, strung fence wire, bought guitars, squeegeed windows, dug postholes, sold guitars, cleaned boats, mowed lawns, did construction and landscaping, and everything else I could to keep my authorship alive. It was a constant struggle from one gig to another, but I never did anything that felt below my station. My station was anywhere I had to be at a particular moment, so that I could continue. Rest on the laurels of last night’s performance and you might not eat regularly even...