What’s interesting to me is not that these practical adaptations happen (in retrospect that seems predictable and obvious), but what it means for our perception of creativity.
It seems that creativity, whether birdsong, painting, or songwriting, is as adaptive as anything else. Genius—the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work—seems to appear when a thing is perfectly suited to its context. When something works, it strikes us as not just being a clever adaptation, but as emotionally resonant as well. When the right thing is in the right place, we are moved.
Scarlet Tanager by Joe Thompson
In my experience, the emotionally charged content always lies there, hidden, waiting to be tapped, and although musicians tailor and mold their work to how and where it will be best heard or seen, the agony and the ecstasy can be relied on to fill whatever shape is available.
We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that—the art of it—is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.
CHAPTER TWO
My Life in Performance
The process of writing music doesn’t follow a strict path. For some composers, music is created via notation, the written system of markings that some percentage of musicians share as a common language. Even if an instrument (traditionally a piano) is used as an aid in composition, this kind of music emerges as a written entity. Changes in the score might be made at a later date by performing musicians or by the composer, but the writing is largely done without input from actual players. More recently, music began to be created mechanically or digitally, by an accretion and layering of sounds, samples, notes, and bits dragged and thrown together either physically or in the virtual world of a computer.
Though much of my own music may initially have been composed in isolation, it only approached its final shape as a result of being performed live. As with jazz and folk musicians, everything was expected to be thrown into the crucible of a gig, to see if it sank, floated, or maybe even flew. In junior high school I played in bands with friends, covering popular songs, but at some point, maybe after a rival’s friend pulled the plug on us at a battle of the bands, I contemplated playing solo.
After some time rethinking things and learning more songs written by others in my bedroom, I began to frequent the coffee house at the local university and realized that the folk scene represented there was insular and needed refreshing. Well, at least that’s how it looked to me. This was the late sixties, and I was still in high school, but anyone could see and hear that the purism of folk was being blown away by the need of rock, soul, and pop to absorb everything in their path. The folk scene was low energy too, as if the confessional mode and folk’s inherent sincerity was somehow enervating in and of itself. That couldn’t be good!
I decided to perform rock songs by my favorites at the time—the Who, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the Kinks—on acoustic guitar, believing that some of those songs were written with as much integrity as the folkier stuff people in the café more often heard, and that they might therefore find a receptive audience. I seem to recall that it worked; they had somehow never heard these songs! All I’d done was move the songs to a new context. Because I performed them more energetically than the standard folk artist might present his own material, people listened, or maybe they were just stunned at the audacity of a precocious teenager. I played Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran on ukulele, shifting the context of those songs even further afield. I might have even risked scratching some dirges on a violin I’d inherited. It was an oddball mishmash, but it wasn’t boring.
I was incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years, so one might ask (and people did) what in the world a withdrawn introvert was doing making a spectacle of himself on stage. (I didn’t ask myself such questions at the time.) In retrospect, I guess that like many others, I decided that making my art in public (even if that meant playing people’s songs at that point) was a way of reaching out and communicating when ordinary chitchat was not comfortable for me. It seemed not only a way to “speak” in another language, but also a means of entry into conversation—other musicians and even girls (!) would talk to someone who had just been on stage.
Performing must have seemed like my only option. There was also the remote possibility that I would briefly be the hero and reap some social and personal rewards in other areas beyond mere communication, though I doubt I would have admitted that to myself. Poor Susan Boyle; I can identify. Despite all this, Desperate Dave did not have ambitions to be a professional musician—that seemed wholly unrealistic.
Years later I diagnosed myself as having a very mild (I think) form of Asperger’s syndrome. Leaping up in public to do something wildly expressive and then quickly retreating back into my shell seemed, well, sort of normal to me. Maybe normal is the wrong word, but it worked. A study in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 1994 by Felix Post claimed that 69 percent of the creative individuals he’d studied had mental disorders.1 That’s a lot of nutters! This, of course, plays right into the myth of the fucked-up artist driven by demons, and I would hope very much that the converse of that myth isn’t true—that one does not have to be nuts to be creative. Maybe some problem of some sort can at least get the ball in play. But I have come to believe that you can escape your demons and still tap the well.
When I was at art school in the early seventies, I began to perform with a classmate, Mark Kehoe, who played accordion. I dropped the acoustic guitar and focused on the ukulele and my hand-me-down violin, which now had decals of bathing beauties stuck on it. We played at bars and art openings, and together we traveled cross-country and ended up playing on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Busking, as it’s called in Britain. By this point we had a look, too—a variation on Old World immigrant, I guess is how you would describe it. Mark adopted a more Eastern European look, and I gravitated to old suits and fedoras. I had an unkempt beard at the time, and once a young black kid asked me if I was one of those people who didn’t ride in cars.
We played mainly standards. I would sing “Pennies From Heaven” or “The Glory of Love” as well as our own arrangements of more contemporary fare, like “96 Tears.” Sometimes Mark would play an instrumental and I’d strike ridiculous poses—bent over standing on one leg and not moving, for example. Something that absolutely anyone would be able to do, but that I—or my “stage” persona—seemed to think was show-worthy. We realized that in a short amount of time we could amass enough cash to cover a meal and gas for an old car I’d picked up in Albuquerque. One might say that the reviews of a street performance were instant—people either stopped, watched, and maybe gave money, or they moved on. I think I also realized then that it was possible to mix ironic humor with sincerity in performance. Seeming opposites could coexist. Keeping these two in balance was a bit of a tightrope act, but it could be done.
I’d seen only a few live pop-music shows by this point. At the time I still didn’t see myself making a career in music, but even so, the varied performing styles in the shows I had seen must have made a strong impression. In high school around Baltimore, one could attend what were called Teen Centers, which were school gymnasiums where local bands would be brought in to play on weekends. One act was a choreographed Motown-style revue, and at one point they donned gloves that glowed in the dark when they switched to UV lights. It was a spectacular effect, though a little corny. Another act did a Sgt. Pepper–type revue, and to my young ears they sounded just like the records. Their technical expertise was amazing, but it wasn’t original, and so it wasn’t all that inspiring. Being a cover band, even a really good one, was limiting.
It wasn’t only purist folk acts at the university coffee house. There were also rock bands, some of which had virtuosic musicians.