One day in September of 1983, I drove to Hollywood to pay a visit to Tower Records, on Sunset Boulevard, undoubtedly the best record store in the world for many years. I was on a kind of vision quest. I had gotten some money for my birthday and I planned to get as many Lps (yes, vinyl) as it could buy. I'd decided to buy cold, too, meaning, I was going to look through the vast bins and pick albums of artists I'd never heard of, all in the folk category.
My pop career had just nosedived into a steaming pile of heartache and bitterness and over 100 of my songs had been stolen from me via a crooked contract. My shyster managers had swindled me out of 60 cents on every dollar I'd make, so I did the unthinkable. I broke my contract. I waited for the hammer to come down on me, but it never did, except for the fact that my material wouldn't belong to me for a full seven years. I needed something new, so I decided to change directions and go into folk and Celtic folk music, fueled by the budding California Celtic scene that had just begun on the west coast. My managers couldn't touch any new songs I might pen. Take it all, I thought. Sod you. I'll write new stuff. I knew very few names in these genres, so I went to Hollywood ready to reach blindly into the grab bag. I came out with several Lps, which I chose using three bits of criteria:
Cover Design
Instrumentation
My instincts
Out of the several albums I brought home, there was only one that was crap, but I'm not mentioning names. That's not playing nice. The three best I played until they wore out. I've only just recently been able to download them online, and it's great to be reunited with these artists who virtually saved me my sanity in a dark and desperate hour.
The first, and most inspiring was John Renbourn, who used to be with Pentangle back in the late 60s and early 70s. I'd heard some of their stuff back in the day, but I guess I wasn't ready for it or something. Although I didn't even recognize his name that day in Hollywood, I bought his album, Sir John Alot Of. Here's a video of John playing English Dance, a cut off of that album.
The second album caught my attention for two reasons. First, the women on the cover were beautiful, dressed in pagan attire, adorned with flower garlands and bearing bouquets of flowers and herbs. Secondly, the artists were local. It was titled, Music of the Rolling World. Ruth Barrett and Cyntia Smith, the liner notes told me, played dulcimer, an instrument that I'd loved since I'd heard Joni Mitchell's Blue album. Here are Barrett and Smith in a funny little promo video; I couldn't find another video of them. I want to add that later that year I saw them in concert at some little pub in L.A. or there abouts, and they were awesome.
Lastly, I came to Legend, an album by Clannad. I admit the album didn't at first do much for me. It was over-produced, and lush with synthesizers; not at all what I was looking for. Some of the songs grew on me though, and led me to look up some of their earlier recordings. Here they are in 1977, performing Teir Abhaile Riú. Yeah, that's more like it.
I have these three groups to thank for leading me to other great artists like the aforementioned Pentangle, Silly Wizard, The Incredible String Band, Bert Jansch, Golden Bough, and so many others. And now that I'm back to being a musician--after a 20-year hiatus--these musicians are speaking to me more than ever before.
So we've reached the end of this entry. How about a little Pentangle for good measure? (That's John Renbourn playing sitar on the left and the late Bert Jansch on banjo, on the right.) Have a great week!
We musicians have a special relationship with our instruments. We fall in love with them, often name them, and sometimes refer to them with either male or female pronouns. When I got my very first guitar--a little $14 6-string that my dad brought home to me as a surprise for my 14th birthday--I took it everywhere I went, even to bed at night, where I gently placed it on the other pillow.
It was my first 12-string, however, that I fell head-over-heels for. I'd been wanting one for over a year and I finally found one at "DisCo", a forerunner to today's Walmart or Kmart. After I saw it, I knew I had to have it, so I saved the $42 it cost from money I made working in a local music shop after school. Deni's Mom took us, and I came home proudly hugging "John Dylan Bumagi" (pronounced boo-MAH-gy... long story). That guitar took me to San Francisco, Hollywood, Laurel Canyon, and across the country on tour. I played it in concerts and on television, in schools and prisons, nursing homes and coffeehouses.
It wasn't until 1973 that I got a really nice 12-string, a Takamine. Unfortunately, that was stolen in 1978 when my house was burgled, and John Dylan Bumagy ended up getting auctioned off (along with all my other instruments which included a Martin 12-string, a Story & Clark piano, a clarinet, a 5-string banjo, some penny whistles, Indian flutes, and recorders, an Irish bodhran, and a bowed psaltry exactly like this one) in The Big Dump of 2001. My heart breaks when I think about it, so I just don't. Moving on...
So you see, I have a certain idea of a musical instrument being a kind of sacred space, where the music grows and swells, then bursts through the sound hole to fill small rooms and concert halls alike. Recently, I found some photos that just amazed me. They were taken by Bjoern Ewers for the 2009 season of the Chamber Orchestra of the Berlin Philharmonic. Fantastic views of the inside of musical instruments that make them appear to be sacred spaces--cathedrals--dedicated to the one truth that is Music.
Inside a Violin
Inside a Contrabass
Inside a Guitar
As Yvonne de Villiers, designer and founder of Luna Guitars wrote on her blog, where I found these images:
"So next time you are holding your guitar (or any instrument) in your arms, close your eyes and think about the space inside. Imagine yourself there. What an amazing sanctuary to contemplate the music uniquely yours to express, the songs uniquely yours to sing!"
Slowly over the past six months or so I have been coming to terms with who I am as a writer. To be honest, most of that time was spent asking myself questions; the answers have only just started to come to me.
The biggest and most significant discovery was that I am in fact a character-driven writer. I know that will come as no great surprise to many of you who have read my work, or who have been following along with my writing process over the past four or five years, but it came as a huge revelation to me because I've never set out to be any kind of writer. I just had all these people in my head that I wanted to bring to life. But then, I'm character-driven in my life, overall. I love people, I love meeting people, and I especially love unique, eccentric people.
I'm also a character-driven reader. You can keep your left brain action stories that follow a linear route to the quest's conclusion, I'm much happier reading books that are more intuitive and spontaneous. Like real life. My real life, anyway. I like to watch a character sort out their issues on the page rather than move from scenario to scenario. I enjoy watching their personal evolution rather than their emergence, like the children of Zeus, fully formed from the author's head. I tend to like the messiness of life both in books and in the real world.
The one thing that spoils meeting certain kinds of people is their obligatory question, "What do you do?" That has always irked the crap out of me. I live. I learn. I fall down and I get back up again. Why not ask, instead, "What makes you tick? What turns you on? Who are you?" Even when I worked in the high corporate world and had a job to brag about, I hated that question, "What do you do?".
So over the weekend I finally sorted out my recent writing dilemma and confusion. When I finished the second book of my trilogy, I found myself at a dead end. I was blocked. That has changed and I'm busy scribbling away--my author's eye has reopened and I'm finding fodder all around me. Here's where I am:
Every book I want to write is going into a cryogenic vault for one year. This includes Left to Write (my memoirs), Harley & Collette, and Enharmonic Intervals.
I have moved the manuscripts of my trilogy into a single volume titled, simply, Beyond The Bridge: A Rock & Roll Trilogy. The single volume will be comprised of each book in its own section.
I am rewriting everything, making each book longer, the story deeper, and the characters more complex. It has occurred to me that what I've written and published is only about half the length it should be and half as deep. These are some fascinating characters and they deserve better. Simply put, I'm not done with them yet and they, apparently, aren't done with me.
I have already started the rewrite of With A Dream and I've found so many places where the story, as well as the characters' development, can be expanded and broadened.
I am no longer listening to writers' "rules". I am writing as I like to write. I will employ adjectives and adverbs. I will use our rich language and shut out the voices who tell me, "You shouldn't...". In a word, I'm writing for me now, not the sheeple who spend their time and energy telling their blog readers what to do and not do. Screw them. I'm weary of self-proclaimed pundits and thought police both in the wide world of politics and religion, and in writing. As the saying goes, "Here's a quarter. Call someone who cares."
I've spent my entire life trying to get past the sentries that keep me outside of my creative self. I could see in, but something always held me back from integrating with that creative self. I wrote lots of music and lots of stories, but I never felt that I went in very deep. I never "opened a vein" so to speak. Something always held me back. Most of the time it was the rules. Of course, I'm not referring to the basic elements of style and grammar, I'm referring to rules people make up for whatever reasons--mostly publishers whose concern is focused more on the cost of ink and paper than it is on art.
Sod them. Not listening anymore. I'm writing for me.
