The songs I wrote on my uncle-in-law, David Carradine’s, Spanish guitar blazed a trail I followed into my future. I hoped one of them might do the same for him.
by guest writer Coby Brown
Stream: ‘Stars & Curses’ – Coby Brown
It’s often been said that some guitars already had the songs in them, but I was never much for the theory.
I had to work hard for the songs I wrote and resented the notion that if I just shook the right guitar, they’d fall out at my feet, ripe and fat. But then I became the temporary custodian of my wife’s uncle, Dave Carradine’s, Spanish guitar.
I’d known that my wife, Ever, came from a family full of actors when we’d started dating, but I couldn’t put faces to any of their names until we spent the holidays in her family’s adopted hometown of Telluride, CO. We stayed with her aunt Sandra, who ran the storied Telluride Opera House where Ever’s uncles, Dave and Keith, were scheduled to play with Peter Yarrow on our first night in town.
We arrived late and watched from the back of the house. Both uncles were familiar to me, but there was something about Dave that made me feel as if I’d known him all my life. Their set bounced along; Peter, Paul and Mary standards, Keith’s Oscar winner, “I’m Easy,” and highlights from his time on Broadway, but I was stuck on what I knew Dave’s face from. Kung Fu was before my time and Kill Bill hadn’t happened yet, but maybe he’d just worked his way into my subconscious through some kind of ’70s tv osmosis?
They closed it out with a song of Dave’s called “The Laughing Song,” which featured breaks in the music where he’d work himself into genuine laughing fits before continuing on with the music. The song ended when he was finally laughing so hard that it simply couldn’t continue.
“I told you, he’s just different,” Ever said.
I had to remind myself of that when she introduced me to both of her uncles after the show in the lobby of the Opera House. Keith was welcoming and warm, but Dave had looked down at my extended hand, puzzled, and then ignored me altogether.
Ever and I were on our last couple of runs down the mountain the next afternoon when Sandra called in a panic. Tanya Tucker was supposed to perform at the Opera House that night, but her flight into Telluride’s notoriously tricky airport had just been cancelled, so she and her band were driving up now.
“I need to stall until they get here. Tell Coby he goes on in an hour.”
If we’d been dating even a week longer, I might have said no, but if Dave’s reception was any kind of indication, I still had a long way to go to ingratiate myself with Ever’s family, so one hour later, I went on to a sold-out house of Tanya Tucker fans. I sang them a set of songs they’d never heard before, but they were gracious with me to the point that I felt like a hero as I walked off the stage. Still, nothing could have prepared me for Uncle Dave wrapping me up into a bear hug and giving me a kiss on the cheek. I guess I was in.
I’d see Dave in passing after that, either at family get togethers or when we’d bump into him at an event in town, but I don’t think he actually committed me to memory until Ever and I got married. Dave adored Ever and had flown to our wedding on the eastern tip of Nantucket from Turkey, where he was shooting nights, to walk her down the aisle. We’d just returned from having our pictures taken after the ceremony when we ran into him on the porch outside the reception dressed in a tuxedo having a smoke.
“Congratulations, Darling,” he said as he wrapped her into his arms. I figured I was next, but instead of a hug, I received a slap to the face so hard that it almost knocked me over. “Welcome to the family,” he said and walked off like it was the most natural thing in the world to have done. I had to fight back the urge to take a swing at him.
I’m biased, but our wedding was a 12 out of 10; the world’s greatest dinner party made up of the all the people we loved gathered in the place we’d met. After dinner and toasts, we crowded around a piano and sang late into the night. I was surprised to find Dave behind the keys at one point; I’d last seen him out cold, head tilted back and snoring loudly in a chair by the bar. Apparently refreshed, he now instructed me to hold the mic for him as he sang Ever a song he’d written just for the occasion. With his mesmerizing grin and that trademark twinkle in his eye, he soon had the room eating out of the palm of his hand, myself included.
The next day, Ever and I had to leave the farewell brunch early to make a flight and missed saying goodbye to some folks, including Dave. We were queued up to check in for our flight at the cottage of an airport when he ambled into the terminal, barefoot. He’d been so desperate to catch us before we left that, when he hadn’t been able to find a cab, he’d hitchhiked. A sea of star struck travelers parted as he made his way over the maze of stanchions and rope lines to tell us how much it had meant to him to be there. He was so earnest and heartfelt that I couldn’t quite square it with the rest of him, as if Hyde was back after a night as Jekyll.
A few months after our wedding, I was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma in my sinus. I’d been chasing record deals since I was 23, but I was a few years past my music business expiration date now and broken from trying to write the “hit” I’d hoped would jumpstart my career. Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped trusting my instincts as a songwriter, gone deaf to whatever the muse might whisper into my ear so, eventually, she’d just stopped whispering into it.
Not long after my diagnosis, Dave’s daughter, Kansas, entrusted me with one of her Dad’s Spanish guitars while she traveled abroad. It was a beautiful, delicate instrument, gut-stringed and small bodied, but it produced a sound so powerful and evocative that I felt like I’d teleported to the village in Spain where it had been built whenever I played it. Strumming it made the old new, summoning fresh harmonic possibilities that begged to be investigated. In between rounds of chemo over the next year, that’s just what I did.
I was back at home after my second round of treatment. It had been a long week of in-hospital infusion, and I was so whacked out on steroids that I’d woken up at 2 am ready to start the day. I shuffled back to my office and sat on the couch with Dave’s guitar in my hands. There was a passage of chords I couldn’t shake, part of a song that was stuck in the becoming, had been for almost a year. I was crouched down low on the sisal carpet strumming through them when I flashed on how I could build them out into something new. It was the first definitive musical decision I’d made in an age, shortly followed by words as obvious as my next breath; a perfect storm of pharmaceuticals and perspective shift that I took down like dictation.
Hit the lights and kill the TV set
There aint nothing on I aint seen yet
Basic cable cannot save me
From the cards the dealer gave me
‘Cause when there’s a way to carry on,
then there’s a way to carry on
And nothing’s going to weigh me down
It’s not you or me or us or them
It’s not who or why or how or when
F*** good luck I’ll take my chances
On the present circumstances
‘Cause when there’s a way to carry on,
then there’s a way to carry on
And nothing’s going to weigh me down
Was this what they’d meant about the songs already being there? Had my hand strumming Dave’s Spanish guitar unlocked this windfall? I finally knew exactly what I had to say, had been trying to say my whole life. I knew this kind of writing had always been in there, somewhere. Had I just not had anything to write about until now, or had that this particular guitar released this song to me? Maybe it was both. Either way I knew I’d caught a tiger by the tail, and I was beaming as I slipped back into bed next to Ever.
I ended up writing an entire record on that guitar before handing it back over to Kansas. Stars & Curses was both a cancer protest record and a love letter to being alive. Getting sick had made me aware that everything I’d hoped a record deal might deliver to me to had already, always, been mine. I’d just had to notice. I knew that the songs I’d written for that record were my best to date, but I never imagined I’d be asked to sing one of them at the funeral of the man whose guitar had delivered them to me.
In 2009, Dave, like his father before him, died on location. A performer to the end, his service was a show. Once more, I was called on to the stage to sing to a room full of people who’d never heard of me; extended family and friends of his, movie stars, directors, several native Americans in ceremonial dress, a biker gang. I was the conspicuous one in my inconspicuous black suit, white shirt and black tie amidst a sea of turquoise jewelry, bolo ties and cowboy boots.
“Who’s the accountant?” I heard someone say.
When the time came, I played “Run Like I’m A River,” a song I’d written as a prayer for relief as I struggled to leave being a patient behind and become whatever was next. I walked out on to the stage that day as that person, thanks in no small part to the man we’d gathered to honor. This time, there’d be no bearhug from him waiting offstage when I finished. It was my turn now to send him one, through the ethers, in the form of a song birthed on his guitar, the one that had delivered me out of the darkness. I offered it now as a prayer it might do the same for him.
I will ask you plain
‘cause I just have one way to speak
Help to make me strong
because this world has made me weak
I remember when I started how there wasn’t anything
Any man or any country any court or any king
Could ever keep me from my calling
No wall so tall I could not scale
But now I feel like I am falling
Lord don’t let me fail
Let me run like I’m a river
Let me travel like a trail
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