Category: pop culture

What the jukebox taught me about writing

Editor28 Comments

Bobby Braddock’s been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. You don’t know the name, but I guarantee you know his songs:

“He Stopped Loving Her Today,” by George Jones. “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” by Tammy Wynette. “People Are Crazy,” by Billy Currington.

Here in Nashville, Bobby Braddock is a songwriting god.

Reading about him, I was reminded of something that’s easy to forget:

Songwriting, like any kind of writing, requires some talent, but mostly it takes a lot of work.

Songwriting is Bobby Braddock’s job. He can’t afford to sit around until something inspires him to write. He just has to write.

Listen to this. It’s from an interview Bobby Braddock did a few years ago with a website called larrywayneclark.com:

“Well, the people that think that lightning’s going to strike and that you can’t discipline yourself to do inspired work, I think that’s not true at all. You can make yourself write stuff, and you keep doing it and keep doing it and eventually the good stuff will come….”

That’s a great attitude when it comes to writing anything.

Here’s another example:

Couple years ago, I went to hear Bob McDill at the Hall of Fame. He’s another Nashville songwriter, one of the best: “Amanda,” by Waylon Jennings. “Good Ol’ Boys Like Me,” by Don Williams. “Gone Country,” by Alan Jackson.

Before he retired, he aimed to write a song a week. He had an office, and he went there, and he worked.

He said the song “Amanda” came in about 30 minutes, but “that’s the last gift I got. Afterward, it was blood, sweat and tears.”

He wrote a song with Dan Seals called “Everything That Glitters.” Here’s how it starts:

Saw your picture on a poster, in a cafe out in Phoenix;
Guess you’re still the sweetheart of the rodeo.
As for me and little Casey,  we still make the circuit
In a one-horse trailer and a mobile home.
And she still asks about you all the time;
And I guess we never even cross your mind.

There’s a lot of story in those six lines. McDill said he and Seals worked on that song for “months and months and months” until they figured it out, got everything just right.

Blood, sweat and tears.

Writing, any kind of writing, is work. It’s great if you’re inspired, but usually you’re not, and the only thing you can do is write through it, and if you’re lucky, the good stuff will come.

Cool hand, Luke

Editor30 Comments

I finally let Thing 2 (the 5-year-old) watch Star Wars. We watched the original trilogy over a period of about a week.

We watched the movies together. I explained the parts he didn’t understand and, when things got scary, I told him to cover his eyes or reminded him that it was only pretend, and I fibbed my way through what I thought might be the really disturbing parts (I said they were only burning Darth Vader’s costume on the pyre at the end of “Return of the Jedi”).

I thought he’d have questions about Luke Skywalker being Vader’s son and Princess Leia’s brother, but he took both revelations in stride. His only question came a couple days after we watched “The Empire Strikes Back,” on our way home from preschool.

“Dad,” he said, “where’s Luke’s hand?”

“Well, Darth Vader cut it off with his lightsaber,” I said, thinking maybe I’d made a mistake and that he wasn’t old enough to watch the movies, even though most of his friends had.

“But he gets it back, right?”

“Well, they give him a new hand, remember? On the spaceship, at the end of the movie? They give him a mechanical hand.”

“But where’s his real hand?”

“It, uh, fell.”

He was quiet then, but he asked me about Luke’s hand again the next day and the next, and I then realized he wasn’t thinking about Luke Skywalker as much as he was Mark Hamill, who played him. He wanted to know what happened to the actor’s hand in the scene where it looked like it got cut off.

“That was just pretend. He just pulled his sleeve down over his hand so you couldn’t see it, but it was still there, like this,” I said, pulling my sleeve down over my hand.

He understood and demonstrated to Sweetie when she got home from work.

I thought everything was OK until a few days after we’d watched “Return of the Jedi.”

“Dad, what happened to the snow monster’s arm?

“What do you mean?”

“When Luke cut it off. He didn’t have any sleeves. Where’d his arm go?”

PHOTO: Luke’s mechanical hand, from The Empire Strikes Back. Part of last summer’s Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination movie prop exhibit at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Ala.

Elvis is still everywhere

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Originally posted on another blog on Aug. 16, 2010.  Reposting it here on what would have been Elvis’s 76th birthday.

PresleyPromo1954PhotoOnlyToday is the 33rd anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. He was 42 then, so that means he would have been 75 today — the same age as the Dalai Lama and Woody Allen. That’s hard to imagine.

Still, I think it’s fair to say that Elvis changed the world.

Yeah, it’s easy to goof on Fat Elvis, with his sequinned jumpsuits and voracious appetite, but I’m not talking about Fat Elvis.

I’m talking about Skinny Elvis, the good-looking kid from Tupelo who walked into Sun Records in Memphis and basically invented rock’n’roll.

Of course, some people say Elvis didn’t invent anything, that he basically took rhythm and blues and made it safe for White America, but that isn’t quite right.

Somewhere in Peter Guralnick’s 2 volume biography of Elvis (if you haven’t, read it), he points out that Elvis was a sponge when it came to music. Elvis listened to everything — R&B, bluegrass, country, gospel — and processed it, synthesized it. He took all these musical strands and wove them into something else, something new.

Sure, odds are someone else would have done that if Elvis hadn’t, but Elvis did, so let’s give him credit.

He was sexy and dangerous, too, and that’s something teenagers hadn’t really seen before, at least not in one package. Girls wanted him, and boys wanted to be him. You wouldn’t have had The Beatles if you hadn’t have had Elvis.

John Lennon (I think) said Elvis died when he went into the Army, and I agree. Elvis’ music was never as raw as before he was drafted.

In the 1960s, he made a string of dumb movies and went Vegas, and in the ’70s, well, we all know about Elvis in the ’70s, but by then, he’d already changed the world by changing the music.

I think those early records — “That’s All Right,” “Mystery Train,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky” — earned him a lifetime pass and more than made up for later songs like “Rock-a-Hula, Baby” and “The Wonder of You.”

“Blue Moon of Kentucky,” after all, was a bluegrass tune — in waltz time, at that — until Elvis got hold of it and turned into a rocker in 4/4 time.

I’d argue that is something close to genius.