‘And Then I Wrote…’

The day before Thanksgiving my wife and I went to the local arts center for a showing of the best movie I am likely to see for a while. It’s not likely to prosper at the box office owing to its lack of explosions and flying superheroes, and the demographic it would seem to resonate with might be classified as mostly subterranean, but it resonated with me perfectly. It was the cinematic experience I needed, wondering beforehand if I would ever take pleasure again in anything.

I’m a stranger in the Marvel or DC comics universe, but the old show business universe is my neighborhood. I felt very much at home in the world of Blue Moon, a film by Richard Linklater which starred an unlikely Ethan Hawke as lyricist Lorenz Hart. I admire Hart as I revere Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Dorothy Fields, and all the others who put brilliant words to engaging music in the first half of the twentieth century. So many of them derived from the granddaddy of comic librettists, William Schwenck Gilbert, whose shimmering wit and wordplay (within the joinery of stanzas that precisely rhyme and scan) gladden my heart. (Blue Moon, in fact, is a worthy companion to Topsy Turvy, Mike Leigh’s film about the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, which I first delighted in 26 years ago.)

Blue Moon was a salubrious vacation from my daily slog, just as Hart’s lyrics (written to Rodgers’ tunes) are a relief from slovenly mediocrity of most current songwriting. The aesthetic of people going to the supermarket in their pajamas pervades all artistic expression, and with songs generated by Artificial Intelligence now landing on the pop charts, it would seem that the robots are wearing their jammies also.

Lest one dread that I’m launching into an “everything new sucks” rant, I want to say a word for those who devotedly ply the craft of lyric-writing today. I find that there is notable excellence in the realm of comedy. Randy Rainbow is the best musical parodist I have ever heard. Weird Al Yankovic is marvelous. And they are succeeding professionally, selling out theaters and arenas, rather than writing satirical ditties for no audience or compensation while stocking shelves at Walmart—or editing jazz newspapers.

I freely admit it here. I have been a songwriter for 50 years. I am an editor by accident. Songwriting is what I wanted to do with my life. I used to write song parodies at lunchtime on the brown paper bags in which I brought my sandwiches to school. Even in grade school, I used to spontaneously invent songs as words suggested a rhythm to me. (I was just as annoying as you might suppose.) Songs still just pop into my head while I should be thinking of something else.

Rather than just exhaling extemporaneous songs, I’ve paid meticulous attention to rhyming and scansion. If the tunes are my own, I endeavor to have them make musical sense. I put as much into what turns out to be a bad song as a good one. I don’t disown any of my creations. I love my ugly children as much as the cuties.

My songs tend to follow traditional pop forms and could pass for something written in the Songbook era, while some wink at the 1950s or veer into calypso, but they are not normal songs. A few titles will suffice: “The Scumbag Rag,” “Impending Doom is Getting Me Down,” “Cavorting with Kevorkian,” “I’ll Love You ’til Pigs Fly Out of My Butt,” “Brain Enema,” “Unabomber (Bomb My Baby Back to Me).” These are my Golden Oldies.

Despite the subject matter hinted at above, I flatter myself to think that I could have navigated on Broadway. Not that anyone who isn’t me would pay two hundred bucks to see my songbook musical, but all these pieces have a particular swing to them. Moreover, I can write lyrics to order at ludicrous speed. Songwriting has always been my superpower. My main career obstacle is that I have never left the planet Krypton, which is to say Utica, New York.

Happily, I have begun developing a tolerance to Kryptonite. For 63 years I endured indifference, undermining, and abuse. In 2004, one former audience member wrote of my performance, “After a bit a guy appeared and began playing the guitar and singing a repertoire of songs that were, or were supposed to be of the ‘political protest’ genre. I think they were intended to be clever and glib, but they were godawful…This feeble attempt at musical oratory and political satire had such a profoundly negative effect on my sense of humor that it has not since returned.”

Nevertheless, I begin to feel immune. I have been writing songs again, mostly topical parodies. One of my recent efforts, published in this space in November, may have caused your blood to froth. (I have received complaints.) I offer no apologies, but that is the sort of thing I’m writing now.

I’ve been meaning to get back into songwriting and performing for years, but years tend to pass. My knees are telling me I’m officially old. My bathroom mirror corroborates that report. (I won’t repeat what my bathroom scale said.) I also consider that close contemporaries, very much like me in terms of physique and medical history, have predeceased me.

And then I think of Lew Shaw, who turns 100 this month, with an excellent article in this issue. (Happy Birthday, Lew!) British jazz scholar Derek Coller, who contributed a fine story about clarinetist Tommy Gwaltney to this issue, was also born in 1926.

I was born in 1962, which (in such juxtaposition) begins to feel recent. I may not be able to compete with the robots on the pop chart—or get my picture hung up in Sardi’s—but there is indeed music yet to write.