I have no idea what I’m doing. That’s what I said to myself a couple of years ago when the thought of writing this book began bouncing around my head. And truth be told, I also said it as recently as five minutes ago, but now at least I have experience and perspective to keep my ignorance company.
I know that it must seem like an odd, if not somewhat gauche pairing of pleasure and pain, but my first book, like my first lost tooth, my first bowel movement, and even my first lay, happened in spite of any effort or planning on my part. I suppose the lesson here is that letting things happen naturally is the best way to go about life, or maybe it’s the worst way, who knows. Either way, life happens. I didn’t intend on writing a book about my childhood, and although I did, it became a book as much, or even more about my adulthood.
The process has generally been burdensome, but with just enough enlightenment and joy to make it all worth it, and to call me to write one more book, and then another and another. After living the life of a singer-songwriter for nearly four decades, I assumed I had become immune to the risk and unmoved by the thrill of laying out my life’s details and emotions for others to pick through. I guess not, because my need to write books now eclipses my interest in bathing, eating, making money, socializing, and generally maintaining my status as a productive member of the human race. I suppose, like all addictions, writing is a self-inflicted fate.
I found, to my perturbment, that the skill set I developed while writing commercial songs over all these years did not transfer much into writing a book. Maybe the art of crafting and rewriting a verse or a chorus did come into play some while repeatedly tangling with troublesome chapters, but songwriting did not give me the giant leg up that I had hoped it would.
That said, I do think that commercial writing, no matter the medium or purpose, does seem to carry with it a universal formula. Write about a topic that anyone would be able to connect with, especially emotionally, but do so in a way that no other writer can or will. That has always been to me, the formula of a hit song. That combination seems true of a bestseller book too. You want it to be your distinct voice, but the reader must find at least part of their story in yours. But that’s where the similarities between book writing and songwriting seem to part ways.
Writing commercial country songs, especially during the 1990s, the gold rush period of Nashville, was about getting to the point quickly and driving it home all in under three minutes. And if you could do it in two and half minutes, well then, all the better.
“Get to the chorus fast, knock ’em out with a killer hook, and then leave ’em feeling Thanksgiving-Day-full, but still wanting to eat,” a great Artist & Repertoire man at Atlantic Records once told me at the beginning of my career. I thought he was crazy, but it turns out he was crazy like a fox.
Books are different. Instead of time constraints, you have word-count expectations. I thought learning to whittle a stirring lyric down to its under-three-minute birthday suit was hard. But saying something important, amusing, and worthy of repeating, and doing so in a word count somewhere between a haiku and War and Peace, well, that’s why I have less hair now than I did when I first started this book.
This isn’t a book about my whole life. Well, it is, but told through the window of only one year. Remembering the intricacies of my lunch order today is hard enough, but digging out the details of life from forty years ago, and telling them in a way that would be worthy of a legitimate, full-length book, now that was a challenge. Thankfully, 1977 was nothing less than the most important year of my life.
That year began with the execution of Gary Gilmore by firing squad. The TV series Roots aired and became my first window into a part of the South I was raised in but thankfully never experienced. And as a reminder of similar brutality, Stephen Biko died on an Apartheid-era jail cell floor in Pretoria, South Africa. Among loftier heights, the twin Voyager probes replaced Apollo in the heavens. The space shuttle Enterprise made its debut and Star Wars hit the big screen. Led Zeppelin sold out the Detroit Silver Dome, and by summer’s end, the King lay dead in Graceland. No wonder 1977 was a year that defined a life.
Just over one month ago, on November 5, 2018, the Voyager 2 probe left the heliosphere, crossing the line where hot solar winds meet cold interstellar space, some 11 billion miles from earth. Maybe it’s just far enough out there, out where boys play among the stars. And maybe, just maybe, Matt Bourgeois and Timmy Stege can catch a glimpse of it and remember Starmount 1977.
Writing this book has been a journey of things found and things lost. Starmount is why I am the way I am. It’s where I found the headwaters of every little stream and river of my being. I found out why I tear up at the sight of an osprey, its white breast against a blue sky. I discovered why I lose all sense of time and place sitting beneath a pine tree or by a rippling creek, or better yet, sitting beside a crackling campfire at the end of a long day’s adventure. I found out why friendship and shared experience, for me, turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. I found out why at fifty years old I still think playing tackle football is a good idea, even though I only do it once a year now on Super Bowl Sunday. I found out why public debate about religion makes me want to take a long hot shower, but intense conversations about Sasquatch seem comforting to my soul. I found out why my distaste for fish hasn’t lessened my love of fishing, or that while I have too many cavities and root canals to count, I would still trade a month’s salary and my left nut for a couple of Reese’s Cups. I found out where my love of music began, a love that has led to a lifetime in the music business. Even now, good lyrics cause me to levitate and moving melodies still spin me around.
But halfway through the process of writing about life-affirming childhood discoveries, I lost my original best friend. My father. Losing a father while writing about your childhood, well, talk about your feet leaving the ground and your head spinning round.
They say that you become a man on the day your father dies. Maybe that’s because the thunderous clap of his departure eclipses every boom and blast you’ve ever heard before. You no longer flinch at the sound of storms, war drums, or bumps in the night. Fears of what could happen, settle into the certainty of what already has. And for the moment, the loudest sound in your ears, are mere echoes off old canyon walls.
They say you become a man on the day your father dies, but I think you become a child again. And though I no longer wet the bed, cry when I scrape my knee, or call out for my father’s attention, I still dream unfettered, tantum unrestrained, and on occasion, peek under the bed for Sasquatch.
It turns out that life is no fairer or easier just because you gain some measure of insight into it. In fact, life’s indignities become magnified when you write them down on a blank page in front of you. In the end though, perspective, no matter what manner of injury you suffer acquiring it, does have its place.
As boys, we pinky-swear to hold onto our friends forever. But as young men, we give up on those same childhood friends and childhood places, sometimes as effortlessly as tossing a wrapper from a car window. And then, decades later, as old men, we scour the earth for them one last time.
An internet meme made its way to me a few days ago with an uncredited quote that hit home. I researched it a little, but I couldn’t find who the original author of it was. But it is well worth repeating here:
At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.
I think that’s true of all of us. It’s certainly true of the Sons of Starmount. Why would we have ever thought there would be a last time to go outside and play together? That’s not a ten-year-old’s ethos. Endings, especially the permanent kinds, are more of an adult construct.
It’s true that I no longer go outside to play with friends in the casual way I did on Starmount, but because of Starmount, I still ask my friends to go outside all the time. It takes a little more effort now to round everyone up and get them out to a mountain trailhead or to the put-in beside a wild river. The obstacles can be far more daunting than a closed door, a rainstorm, or finishing your homework. Work schedules, family schedules, pulled muscles, or a good game on the TV, all stand in the way at times. Though the process of getting outside is one of two steps out and one step back in, once we’re there, childhood dreams reflood our bodies and shared adventure becomes the only thought in our heads.
I have discovered something in writing this book that brings me a measure of comfort now that it wouldn’t have at ten years old. The world is smaller than I first thought. And through the grace and cruelties of life, we are not as disparate as we make ourselves out to be on most days. Though you and I may not know each other and may have come of age in a different place and time, some of our most valuable experiences and memories are well acquainted. That unrealized commonality is what allows us to laugh at each other’s jokes even though we don’t totally understand the punchline. It gives us the empathy to cry over each other’s losses, even though the grief isn’t ours to carry. And best of all, that passive sense of individuals belonging to one another allows us to find general contentment in each other’s attempts at being human.
Most of us have a time and place in our childhood that sets the course for the adults we grow up to be. I found mine: Starmount Drive, Tallahassee, Florida, 1977. If you haven’t yet discovered your defining moment or place, I sincerely hope that reading this book has cracked open a door, dislodged a stuck memory, or rearranged a thought, enough so that you eventually find your place and time. For better or worse, painful or liberating, I can tell you that finding your place and time is worth it. Thank you for indulging my attempts at being human in this book and my celebration of finding out why I am the man I am.