Painted Pony

It was the icebox winter of 1972. The Pennsylvania hills were covered in blue glaze that locked the land in a glassy silence. Coming up the last hill the car's tires whirred on the frozen patches, fishtailing through the black woods until the lights of an old farmhouse broke through bare branches.

Inside the house a bearded man sat cross-legged on the floor with a Martin D-28 guitar cradled in his lap and a lit Camel dangling from the corner of his mouth. He stretched his hand towards me and introduced himself. "You write songs," he said, as if my arrival had been foretold in a vision. "So do I." He crushed out his Camel and launched into one, punching out the chords with the force of a ten-pound hammer ringing on suspension bridge cables.

"I met me a Bearcat Woman, high on a mountain side"

Then he segued into another, and others after that. There was a tale about a union soldier who retreated from a bloody Civil War battle.

"Sassafras on the wind
Fog in the morning where the river begins”

From that first encounter with Fritter our two worlds were in close orbit. Sometimes gravity tore things away from the one and added to the other. The dust between us never quite settled. It was a dust made of molecules of inspiration that hung in clouds of chaos until we shaped it into songs.

We spent the next few months in the old farmhouse writing tunes and getting our new band tight. It all came easily, like breath. Music was in my pores and in my blood. It fueled and fed me like invisible bread. Every new song stretched the horizon a little further and made me want to explore what lay beyond. The world seemed on the verge of becoming some penultimate thing, capable of the perfect fulfillment of possibilities, and I was alert for the moment's arrival. There was little to tie me down and even less to keep me grounded. When the creative euphoria hit it was like helium. I could no more weigh it with considerations than I could keep the clouds from floating by.

Fritter would lay out his lyric concepts in big dense chunks, like ore in slag. I grabbed the scribbled pages before the ink was dry and forged the melodies. By summer we'd worked up a decent set of originals. We felt good about the musical direction we were taking.

One afternoon the two of us took a 12-string guitar, a 12-gauge shotgun and one of his notebooks out to the barn. The wind blew fresh from the north and ragged clouds raced overhead. Everything seemed to be going somewhere. Inside the barn I emptied both barrels of the gun into a beam. Splinters flew back in our faces and some of the shot hit the far wall making tiny puffs of dust that coiled upwards in the light between the slats.

We climbed to the upper level, opened the bay doors, and sat on the floor still covered with hayseed from years before. I started strumming a chord progression on the 12-string while Fritter flipped through pages of his half finished verses. "Here, check this out," he said handing me the notebook.

"There's a frost on the wind as it scours the town
Shutters in place as the awnings come down
Sap is barely flowing and there's ashes on the sun
Yield to summer's sister, the gentle painted one
Ride the wind, read the breeze, and be gone
Painted pony with the dancing eyes be gone
Take a part of me along…”

By the end of the day we’d completed the song. The Painted Pony was a metaphor for our dream. We'd spent a lot of time those first few months talking about getting out of Pennsylvania and setting up our project in Colorado. From there we could hop to LA and be near the music industry for short periods, and we'd have the scenery of the mountains for inspiration the rest of the time. The record deal would come down eventually, we could feel it. But it wasn't quite time for us to go.

It took six more months for the band to finally pull up stakes and head west. When we did it was without Fritter. In the end I was the wandering gypsy and he was the one rooted in the soil of home. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was embarking on more than a move west. I was beginning a lifetime of riding the wind and being gone. Sometimes I wish I’d been content to stay where I was. Sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever get to where that pony is going.


Copyright 2009 Craig Bickhardt. "Painted Pony" copyright Craig Bickhardt and F.C. Collins. Incidental lyrics copyright F. C. Collins.

The Vital Vision

We can't sell a product people don't need. A song has to either move the audience, make them laugh or cry, or it has to become the soundtrack for their lives-- meaning it must be a song they fall in love to, or heal to, or commiserate with somehow. It must grow into something essential that they can't live without. This requires a motive on the writer's part, and some vision. Vision is the sense that connects perception to significance. It's when you see something, know why it matters, and convey that meaning to others. When the writer shares his vision, the listener begins to perceive what's behind the song.

Great songs don't usually happen by accident. They are deliberate acts of creation motivated by genuine emotion and a fascination with the process. You can't search for buried treasure unless you go to the right beach with a metal detector and begin scouring. Writing without purpose or vision is like sitting in a chair in your den and hoping there's treasure under the couch cushions. You'll just end up with a few nickles and dimes-- a cheap song.

I was thinking about a verse from Townes Van Zandt's "To Live Is To Fly". Here it is :


It's goodbye to all my friends
It's time to leave again
Here's to all the poetry and the picking down the line
I'll miss the system here
The bottom's low and the treble's clear
But it don't pay to think too much on things you leave behind

The thing I like about this verse is the wacky reference to the PA system. I get a sense of purpose from those lines. Clearly Townes was writing with some vision, otherwise why refer to a sound system in a club? Why give it significance? Well, maybe because it represents the highs and lows of the troubadour life in a detail that the rest of us overlooked. The purity and depth in the sound system equates to the ideal moment in a traveling musician's life-- after driving thousands of miles, eating fast food and sleeping in noisy hotel rooms on mattresses that are too soft or too hard, he gets those precious 90 minutes on stage during the best gig of the tour. Townes' motive was to accurately convey how this kind of life feels, and his vision made the connection. The chorus says:

To live is to fly
Low and high
So, shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes

Having been on the road myself for many years, I can tell you this is not only accurate, it's perfect. There have been many days when the detachment of the road has felt like flight. It's an addiction. I'm never more alive than when I'm in flight, and the lows and highs on the road are more extreme than when I'm perched safe at home. Flight is freedom, but freedom sometimes means sacrificing a bit of security. Townes was living this song in the moment of it's creation (or re-living it, which is still valid). The remarkable thing about this simple chorus is that it captures some emotion and a rather profound philosophy in four graceful lines. How can a writer do this unless he is actually experiencing the song? We can't find the key to this type of communication unless we have vision. Vision is vital.

Where are you on life's journey? Can you show us? Can you open a window that allows me to see and feel what you see and feel? Do you have something in mind, something in heart, something in soul? Townes says later in the song:

We all got holes to fill
Them holes are all that's real

Songs fill the holes for many of us, or at least they clean the wounds so we can begin to heal. That's their purpose. But the world is choking on songs without purpose-- clever gimmick titles that strain at anything to say nothing. I hear tons of them and they never move me or touch me or make me smile or cause me to shed a tear. They just play in my ear for a few minutes and then they are forgotten.

Don't invent. Observe. Show us what you see. Much is revealed by the song in the end. As writers, we can't fake it. A great, true, core idea, and a deep emotional experience is the lifeblood of a song. Find the vital vision and follow it. See life and feel the words.


copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt
photo copyright by wolfgang staudt (creative commons approved use)