Stirring the Imagination

I arrived in Nashville to write songs for the first time on the day that Marty Robbins died. It was December 8, 1982. The timing of my arrival seemed uncanny to me because Marty was one of my biggest boyhood heroes. How this came to be is a story in itself.

Before my father retired he worked at WIP Radio in Philadelphia for over 50 years. The station played a little bit of everything in the early 1960s- from Perry Como to Charlie Rich to Bobby Darin to Marty- before turning to Sports Talk in the late 1980s.

Mom kept the radio tuned to WIP all day long while she tended house because it made her feel close to pop. Sometimes a DJ on the air, either Bill Webber or Ken Garland, would share a joke with my old man as he sat behind the engineer’s glass. That would be the highlight of our morning as mom ironed and I played in the kitchen. The little joke beamed him home again for a few seconds through the radio waves.

I used to imagine how things looked down there inside the tower at Rittenhouse Square- the electronics glowing with ten foot tubes, or maybe it was fifty foot tubes, with wires running everywhere like tentacles and stuff bubbling in strange tanks. And there was pop behind the glass wearing his Buck Rogers headphones that could hear music on Mars. All in my weird inner world.

Every once in while the station manager would cull the LP library to discard duplicates and worn records and dad would bring home a magical stack for me. In one of them was Robbins’ “Gunfighter Ballads”. Now this was a record made for stirring up the imagination of a young boy. I spent hours listening to it on my little suitcase turntable while the bright sunbeams crept drowsily across the floor and I slid over a few inches along with them so I could stay warm. I dreamed of gunfighters at night.

Marty’s tall tales were wonderful, but he wasn’t the only raconteur on the radio back then. Muscular story-songs were popular in those days. Johnny Horton sang “Sink the Bismarck” and “North to Alaska”. Johnny Cash was scoring with “Wreck of the Old ‘97” and others. Jimmy Dean did "Big Bad John". It was a good time to be a storyteller and a great time to be a kid who loved flights of fancy.

I’ve noticed that words in books and words in songs can evoke something in my brain that pictures and movies can’t. It’s almost as if actually seeing something that I’ve previously only imagined is sort of a let down. I don’t know why… maybe I should’ve lived in a time when the tribe story-teller was a mystic who sang his tales before the campfire.

Sometimes it seems to me as if all of our imaginations might be getting weaker, or maybe they’re just full of sludge. Maybe we’re so visually assaulted with images of violence and horror that language seems to be an insufficient stimulant. Our films use special effects that try to supplant our imaginations, and yet the computer graphics can rarely outdo our nightmares. I think the inner sludge needs a good stirring up occasionally, but maybe mere words won't whisk well (bad alliteration).

I had a close friend and collaborator who passed away a few years ago. He once wrote a song about a guy who hunted alien beasts in outer space called “Star Trapper”. It’s an amazing song, full of larger than life imagery and sound track potential. He wrote another one about the Algonquin Indians’ mythological spirit-possessor, the Wendigo. We used to sing it together and I always felt like we might accidentally call the Wendigo into our presence if we did it with just the right amount of mojo. That’s the power and fun of a freshly stirred imagination.

Losing my friend was tough. Losing Marty and the other story tellers of my childhood was like losing collaborators in my land of enchantment. I don’t think I’ve ever really replaced them.


copyright 2009 by craig bickhardt

Finding The Reverence

A friend of mine recently went to hear Jimmy Webb speak about songwriting. Jimmy talked about how the American songwriter is in decline because younger writers no longer study their creative ancestors.

We can debate whether this is a temporary trend or a sea change, but it's the premise of Webb's argument that interests me. There's a difference between pushing the art forward, and abandoning the past altogether. Sometimes what appears to be a clean break is actually a brilliant and rather large leap, but we must still be able to determine that it is a forward leap and not merely the abandonment of disciplines and principals that have governed the art of songwriting since the days of the Childe Ballad authors.

A song cannot be whatever we say it is any more than a novel can be four words and a cover. You might ramble from melody to melody with no sense of theme, weak symmetry, no fixed choruses, and I will admit that you've written something. But I would no sooner call it a "song" than I'd call a grocery list a "poem". Yet some have even attempted to get away with that hoax, and as a result poetry has also been in decline.

It isn't enough that a songwriter can claim an influence, he must also demonstrate what he has made of that influence. Dylan wasn't copying Woody Guthrie, nor was he just singing like him and abandoning everything Woody stood for in his writing. He was taking the leap forward, and in retrospect we can see it clearly today. When we look back from some future vantage point, will we clearly see the reverence for the past in any of the current songwriters on the scene? I can't name many I'd include on the list of reverential writers, maybe Josh Ritter, Brett Dennen, and a couple of others.

The field appears to be dominated by writers who lack the discipline or the reverence. They have the talent to sing and play instruments, they have the recording skills and the software to get it down, they have the drive and the incentive to be famous, and they have street teams on social networks to promote them. But having all these things seems to make them rather impatient with study. The one thing they apparently do not have is any abiding interest in what happened before they got here. Sure, they've listened to Sgt. Pepper and they've already stolen a few production ideas from that classic. They own a beat up copy of Blond On Blond from their parents' record collection. They listened to that LP long enough to discover that Dylan sometimes makes obscure allusions and that he writes a lot of songs with four or five verses.

But this is merely the "trappings" of influence, no different than donning a Nehru jacket and saying you're influenced by the Beatles. Influence in the reverential sense means being involved with more than the superficial aspects of the past, it means tracing the roots and analyzing the elements.

It's safe to say that never in the history of our culture have so many superficial similarities existed between the musical artists of today and the musical artists of a previous generation. Look at the clothes, hair styles, images and artwork and you'll see 1969. Listen to the CDs and you'll hear production that reminds you of the Byrds, the Beatles, "Positively Fourth Street" and Joni. But check out the songs. The lyrics are unfocused, the choruses unmemorable, the ideas lack the motive to really communicate. It reeks of self-indulgence. Simply put, no one has told these folks that they haven't worked hard enough, that they haven't written their best song, that they need to develop their instincts and hone their craft. No one has said, "No".

Could it be that the break down of the old model music industry is to blame for the deterioration of the American songwriter too? It certainly looks that way. In the past when a songwriter was told, "It ain't a hit, sonny" he went away and wrote a better song. Now that same songwriter just goes home and cuts a record. The resulting morass of mediocrity has lowed the standards of artist and listener alike.

Try as you might, you cannot become truly accomplished at anything without study. You may think songwriting frees you from that awful obligation-- the one you hated every night as you did your high school homework-- but it doesn't. I have studied songwriting as long and as hard as any doctor ever studied his profession. I've also studied poetry just as long and hard, because I believe it has a lot to teach me. My advice to all the young songwriters out there is this : take the time to really study and find some reverence for what got us here. Just because you feel an impulse to write a song doesn't mean you're ready to take on that responsibility (yes, you are responsible and accountable for what you put into this world). You must allow the well to fill before you draw water.


copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt