A procrastinating writer is too easily pulled away from completing his novel.
If the first resounding slash of Neil Young’s fingers over the metal strings thirty-two seconds into “Cowgirl in the Sand” didn’t slam you into the back of your chair or against whatever you happened to be standing near or leaning against the first time you heard it, perhaps this essay is not for you. It was a primal moment on my first encounter with it over a half-century ago, the explosion of sound connecting with some cavernous horde of existential rage that I had only a vague notion was there inside me, my head jerking back in a maniacal, cultish, orgiastic-orgasmic death rattle thingy, my body writhing in an awkward White-boy dance that is best experienced, should you wish to give it a go, alone.
Now that’s the way to open a song.
Which is all to say that the idea for a piece on song intros descended upon me a couple of days ago while driving north by northwest across a thirty-five mile stretch of US 26, Oregon’s Sunset Highway, on my way from Portland to the state’s wild, magnificent North Coast. I was headed, more specifically, to the lovely little hamlet of Manzanita where my wife and I own a small beach house one block off the ocean. That stretch on US 26 between Milepost 10 and Milepost 45 represents the middle third of the trip, if measured on the map. Measured aesthetically, it is a natural wonder, undulating and meandering up and down, right and left, through the beautiful Coast Range with its lush stands of Western Hemlock, Western Cedar, Douglas-Fir and Sitka Spruce monopolizing the view out to the horizon.
The plan was for me to spend a couple of days of uninterrupted writing on my novel in progress. A stalled progress, I am sad to report, these past few weeks. I am easily discouraged when I come to a problem in plot or design; my fingers stilled, my imagination gone seemingly as vacuous as Donald Trump’s moral sensibility. Panic sets in rather quickly. This is no mere bout of writers’ bloc, I tell myself. I am a fraud exposed, having no right to put one word after another in the hope that someone will set some time aside to read, let alone be transformed by, the finished product. It was in this state of mind that I packed up a few things for the drive across the Coast Range to the beach house, promising myself that no words would be written over the next few days that were not in direct service to the novel.
I should explain why a promise was needed. In my last round with this affliction, I found that skipping over to a couple of new ideas for essays lurking inside my head while showering or flossing my teeth or cleaning the smudges off the glass top of the coffee table or brushing away the digital dust on two short stories begging completion since early 2021 was an acceptable method to earn me the right to continue calling myself a writer.
Writers write, right? It’s the what-to-write part of this process that’s problematic. The novel was stalled. Flaccid. Dormant. Kaput. You choose the word. With the essays and short stories in play, my fingers were typing. Words flowed out onto pages. Only I knew that the prolific output flying off those keys was, in fact, a dodge from completing what will surely be acclaimed the Great American Novel if I can only get around to writing it. The burden of denying this masterpiece-in-the-making to an intellectually starved reading audience was becoming too much for me. Venue, I thought. All will be well with a change of venue. A surge of commitment to the novel filled me.
To Manzanita, then.[*]
It is my habit, on moderate to long drives alone within the state, to listen to Oregon Public Radio, allowing its eclectic programming to provide a soundtrack to the splendorous awe imbued within me by the scenes playing out on the other side of my windshield. The Coast Range, however, is not entirely receptive (ahem) to FM frequencies. The listening experience is beset with interrupted signals, scratchy transmissions or other radio stations mysteriously hijacking the show at some important development in an interview – with George Saunders or Marilynne Robinson or Percival Everett, let’s say – or news story or musical interlude.
Streaming has not been a problem. I brought up Pandora and played the Beth Hart & Joe Bonamassa station which usually assures me of two or three long blues[†] pieces to fill up significant stretches of the drive. I recognized immediately the organ riff leading into Boz Scaggs’ arrangement of “Loan Me a Dime.” A good omen. The vast Oregon wilderness, that part not felled in savage swaths, unfolded before me on every winding turn with Boz and company turned up to MAX volume. To my astonishment, the blaring horn section fading into the ether at song’s end led straight into the soft syncopated organ, bass and lead guitar of Merle Saunders, Jerry Garcia and Friends live rendition of Positively Fourth Street. I made a mental note to record the moment, including location, date and time on my Top-Ten Great Segues List, one of the many top-ten lists sitting forlorn and abandoned in my desk drawer, unused for the almost eight years since my friend, Brian Doyle, passed away, taking away a most worthy opponent with whom to argue, heatedly at times, over pints of Hammerhead Ale, our respective candidates for Great Books Made Into Great Films, Great Books Made Into Not Great Films, Best Covers of Original Songs etc…[‡] under the sun in the back courtyard of the Fulton Pub & Brewery along the Willamette River on the south side of Portland.
The cosmos was talking to me. I was the Lou Gehrig of obsessive music listeners, the luckiest man on earth. The burden of the novel slid from my weary psyche as I was commanded to write something about song intros; to call out, as lyrically as possible, what most of us appreciate without much, if any, conscious recognition. I knew that I was on new intellectual ground. I considered what fortunate literary journals and magazines would be most appropriate for the essay’s proper international unveiling. Thoughts of Pushcarts and Pulitzers and Man Bookers and the concomitant interviews on the late night talk shows and global speaking tours crossed my mind. In a state of largesse, I pulled the car over and emailed a request to some fellow writers whom I knew to love music, offering them a chance to participate in the piece’s creation with joint authorship split evenly among us. I understood from their lack of response that the genius behind this extraordinarily kind and magnanimous gesture was too much for them to comprehend. I would go it alone.
A taxonomy was lacking. I made a mental note to speak with an attorney on how to copyright whatever I came up with. There are the Iconic intros, the song revealed from the opening notes like those off the flute-recorder on Warren Zevon’s “Veracruz” warning of Woodrow Wilson’s warships amassing at that port city’s harbor-mouth during the Mexican Revolution. The congas no sooner begin on The Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” then I’m screeching Mick-like before he and the boys even join in. Teaser intros, like those first thirty-one seconds of “Cowgirl in the Sand” with Young noodling playfully on the strings before that angry explosion kicks me in the head like a seemingly content mule as I, ignorant of its anger, walk too closely behind. There are the Mellifluous intros, smooth and alluring, like a cool river on a scorching hot day where the listener jumps in mid-stream to float along, refreshed, if not reborn, like those first acoustic strings on Wilco’s “One Sunday Morning” pulsing in harmony with my heartbeat as if the song had been playing inside me all along. Finally, there’s the We Don’t Need No F**king Intro category. “Layla” the undisputed GOAT here, the song at high pitch from the first note. Young’s “Like a Hurricane” another example, exploding with full force straight out of the blocks like a… well… hurricane, my eardrums ringing long after it ends.
A future essay, I told myself, still beholden to my novel as the car made the final descent out of the Coast Range. First up after John Banville[§] extols upon the deep layers and cultural significance of my magnum opus on the front page of the Sunday Times Book Review. I arrived at the beach house, ready to get to work, setting up the dining room table with all the accoutrements of the writing process – Bluetooth Speaker, a stack of recent New Yorkers, a couple of books, a tin of THC-infused gummies, laptop, three boxes of Cheeze-Its (extra toasted) and a fifth of Maker’s Mark – ready to pour out ten thousand words or so over the next couple of days examining the philosophical conundrums of modern life. I took a full gummy, booted up the laptop and opened the file, ready to go, when I decided that a few Apple Music mixes might lubricate the senses, increasing the possibility for endless epiphanies on the frailties of the human condition, exposing core universal truths that have eluded all other writers up ’til now, grateful that they would be revealed to me. The angelic chorus of women’s voices introducing Van Morrison’s “Snow in Anselmo” wrapped me in an embrace so warm and comforting that I dropped to my knees, brought to tears, instantly transported to that pancake house north of San Francisco open twenty fours a day, Van and I staring through that window at the deer crossing the street, the waitress saying that it hadn’t snowed there in over thirty years but there it was, just ‘laying on the ground.’ I am not worthy, I mumbled to myself. How could any novel – Even Mine! – match the raw truth flowing out of that small tube of a speaker in the middle of the table? I closed the file without a word written and brought up a new document in MS Word, popping another gummy and opened myself up to the muse, coming-to deep into the wee hours the following night, buck naked and splattered with orange flakes, my flesh sticky with spilled bourbon, the boxes of Cheez-Its shredded into pieces, the gummie tin and the fifth both emptied, the music blaring. I read the draft of my new essay, the one now in your hands, in preparation for rewrite when a text from my wife came in, inquiring of my arrival time back to the city. Alas, it was time to pack for my journey back across the Coast Range.
Sigh.
I have done what I can, for now. I am empty. These words, dear reader, are a gift for you. For you, alone.
To Portland, then.[**]
I’ve got a novel to work on, for God’s sake.
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[*] Kudos, and apologies, to Richard Fariná.
[†]Mostly white men mimicking the masters. I know, I know.
[‡] The Horse’s Mouth, Cloud Atlas and Bonnie Raitt’s cover of Richard Thompson’s ‘The Dimming of the Day’ at #1 for each of the above categories, respectively. There was no argument there.
[§] Or Hilary Mantel or Marilynne Robinson or Kazuo Ishiguro or David Mitchell etc…
[**] Blah, blah, blah, Richard Farina.
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