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

V. Music Where the Words Are the Important Part

21 V MusicWheretheWords AretheImportantPart On many a lonely road to nowhere but my next gig, my instrument set me apart from the mainstream. It rang with an identity in sound that was distinct from any other guitar. It’s fair to note that most of this distinction existed only between my ears. My first few lessons about the ragtag of showbiz taught me that if you couldn’t fool yourself first, that if an idea didn’t light you up like Times Square, you couldn’t fool anyone else into believing they were on Times Square. That guitar and I were growing up in a showbiz life together. I was a hopeless kid in an art world that delighted in its own shadow. My saving grace was that I was young and tough enough to be a pain for one loudshoutingwhile. But I got tired of playing in between songs on the jukeboxes in the same hick towns. Not very far into it yet, I was bored. I even grew weary of well-intentioned folk clubs. I didn’t write folk music, and I didn’t think folk music. It wasn’t my music, my statement. But more often than not, my best efforts to write currently applicable themes were mistakenly referred to as folk music simply because I chose to compose and play with the acoustic guitar. 22 � One Man’s Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell Folk music was from an impoverished but proud era that I barely understood. It was a WPA thing back in the 1930s, populist and status quo. By the 1970s its message and the way it was performed had degenerated into the traditional. The words and music I wrote had nothing to do with the traditional . They were as brand new as my naive but developing thoughts could make them. If I lagged in accepting some of the world and its music, the world lagged in its understanding of me, my messages, and how I chose to put them. I was growing up in a brave new setting with perspectives of its own. Although they were far from me at the time, I was working on my own traditions. John Lennon’s writings had been coming together in my thoughts since I was a kid. By the time I started living on my own and trekking outside the Montrose, his tunes blew me through the wall. It didn’t hurt one bit that Lennon also played a guitar similar to mine. In three verses and a refrain, he retired a generation or two of the finest poets, as far as I was concerned. He wrote unflinchingly on themes and topics that had nothing to do with the tired old traditions, and he approached the tired old traditions in novel ways. He was in the forefront of a group that presented music different from, but solidly based in, country, blues, and rock ’n’ roll. I would love and learn from the music of many others in the mixed bag of musical styles that were the ’60s and ’70s, but Lennon was, for sure, the first. He wrote a bold poetry. His words and music seemed to convey the same message. He was someone who could spin a tale with as much attention to what the piece said as to how it sounded. The music amplified the lyric. I had always been into the well-written verse. Lennon recast the treatment of music, and he recast the relationship of lyric to music. Music Where the Words Are the Important Part � 23 The Beatles albums were hip, beautiful, and moving, every cut. And they rocked. But no duckwalking here. Instead they used those conventions, and several others, to create an interpretation like no other before them. Their music even showcased other music, other arrangements, other instruments. The Beatles brought an intellectually powerful perspective that just hadn’t existed before they arrived on the music scene. A later phenomenon of popular music and an acoustic player himself , Bruce Springsteen, said it well with the line in “No Surrender”: “We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.” I wanted to write like Lennon but be even more lyrically involved and illuminating. I wanted my music to include the diversity of sophisticated arrangement that his used to accent his lyrics. While I was learning some of his...