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

XXXV. Say in Your Owndamnway

236 XXXV SayinYourOwndamnway Sometimes the loudest sound in my cabin outside of Nashville was the rice frying. When songs are trying to become songs, it’s quiet as death, hour in and hour out, except for cursing punctuations in the midst of the music I envision. Write, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. Sometimes till you’ve made a huge circle of scrabbling in the sky, only to find you’ve come out the other side facing the original. It’s the worst of the work. It’s no wonder the frets on a guitar get ruts in them as fast as they do. Over and over, round and about, up and down, and back again. Poor damn guitar. Then, what you faithfully scrawl you must, discouragingly, learn. And it never goes as easy as you might suppose it would. You can write songs for 30 years, but your hard-won latest always turns out to be just different enough from the rest to qualify as a whole new sonorous complication. Ambition sure is lonely. I was very high on Texas Plates. But the hulking Godzilla of an entertainment label was no more impressive in its efforts to market my presentation than the independent from Austin that had buried my first. In my Black Book I wrote: Say in Your Owndamnway � 237 MUSIC ROW Those pencil dicks almost made me frightened to be who I was. December found us driving a few thousand miles doing dates in the eastern U.S., and all the while I was working on a song. It began clumsily, but confidently enough, at my desk back in Tennessee. On the interstate in Connecticut, it shed its confidence and its refrain. Oh, well. In Andy Revkin’s guestroom on the Hudson just outside of Cold Spring, more of the early musings became woefully obsolete and were summarily jettisoned. After we broke down in Torrington, Connecticut, a few days later, Sarah and I ended up at Tom Pacheco’s in Woodstock, New York. He and I traded stories and songs at the kitchen table. We lasted for hours. It had been a helluva long time since we had seen each other, and since I’d scrawled his name on my yellow pad at Brackenridge. When our traveling circus split the next day, I started in again on the piece, with my thesaurus, my rhyming dictionary, and my notebook arranged around me in the front seat of the Jeep. We took the thruway west. I rarely looked up. The next stop was Syracuse, where the Midwest begins, said Pete Seeger. Finally our route led down to the borough of Manhattan. There, with gigs completed and after Christmas with relatives and friends new and old, my hard work began to pay off. You have to have the patience of the ages to follow up on these three-minute wonders. A whole eraser or two later, my little glimmer of an idea that hardly resembled its original self started perking right up. As I completed the last of the verse, the irony of finishing a piece about courage and conviction on the barren, rocky plains of Central Texas while I was 20 floors above civilization in New York City was not lost on me. 238 � One Man’s Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell It was New Year’s Eve. And many of them I had seen from a stage, but on this particular one I put the music away for the night. On the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building, just after sunset, flash cubes of the tourists were going off like flares. Gazing back down into my glass, I was finally satisfied with my effort, and glad it was over after 3,000 miles of edits. 100 MILES FROM MEXICO A hundred miles from Mexico, me and my amigo, the coral orange moon. Dark so black poets don’t go. Ol’ fateful, willin’ who I am on a fateful, winding stretch of road One hundred miles from Mexico, the moon, the music, and me. A hundred miles from Mexico, backing down this highway, thumbing at the headlights. Gravel shoulder, Devil’s backbone. Before the headlights become the dawn me and my amigo will be gone. When I returned to the 100 Highway in Nashville, I left the bars to them that could, or would, and changed my focus to...