Staying Indoors To Write

About a third of the way through editing Spy Rock Memories, Part 7. It's the longest chapter yet, and really needs to be cut down by about 2,000 words (why, I ask myself, did I feel the need take several days to write all those words if it's going to take me several more days to throw them out again?).

But the real question is: it's a glorious sunny day in New York City. Summer is fast fading away. There are a million (well, two or three, at least) things I could or should be doing outdoors instead. To stay inside and write or to go outside and do whatever?

I guess it all depends on how important I consider this work, and how urgently I feel it needs to be done. In 2005, London enjoyed the sunniest and warmest summer in almost 30 years (if you're at all familiar with English weather, you'll be aware how remarkable this can be), and I spent all but a couple days of it sequestered in my dimly lit north-facing room frantically trying to finish a 160,000 word story of my life that at the time seemed vitally important "Why?" my friend Paul frequently challenged me, "Have you got publishers camped on your doorstep with bags of money who just can't wait to get their hands on that manuscript?"

As it happened, he was quite right; not only were there no publishers, with or without bags of money, but while I did finish the manuscript, right about the time the chilly winds of autumn began stripping the last leaves from the trees, it never went further than a box under my bed, where I believe it still rests today, unread and unmissed by anyone other than a handful of friends and a couple of agents.

So why, six years later, does it seem similarly important to turn my back on summer in order to complete a still more obscure story, one about a mountain where only a handful of people ever lived, and that only a slightly greater handful of people has ever heard of?

I have no idea, except that maybe I'm six years older, and if it doesn't get done soon, I don't know if I'll ever find the time and energy to do it. Anyway, if you were wondering where I am on this beautiful last Wednesday in July, that's where. If it's any consolation, at least my writing room is now a south-facing one, and a fair bit of sunshine manages to come streaming in.

Glass Houses

Yesterday's PPMB "earning a living from your music" discussion has died down a bit, but bits of outrage and hurt feelings are still flaring up, most frequently in the form of "What makes you think I wanted to make a living from my music anyway?"

Fair enough, and given that it's not unheard of these days for pop punk musicians to have second (or first, depending how you're counting) careers as lawyers, teachers, real estate appraisers and God knows what else, why indeed would we expect someone to trade a secure and comfortable job - especially if it's one for which they're still paying off the student loans - for the considerably riskier prospect of traveling around the country in an old van and quite literally singing for one's supper?

Some of the musicians I worked with in the 80s and 90s ended up as lawyers and professors - MTX's Aaron Rubin and Sweet Baby's Dallas Denery come to mind - but that usually came after, not during or before their musical careers. The great majority were young, barely if at all employed, and with few if any prospects. As Billie Joe Armstrong put it when I interviewed him in 2001:

At that point I'd been playing music my whole life anyway. I knew that I would end up playing music regardless...I just didn't want to be one of those guys driving around in a car with a bumper sticker that said "Real Musicians Have Day Jobs."

But being that committed to playing music had its price: for Green Day it meant years of living wherever the rent was cheap or nonexistent, long rides in vans to play shows where there might or might not be an audience or a paycheck, and complete, utter uncertainty about what, if anything, the future might hold for them.

And they had it relatively easy compared with many bands; by the time they'd been around three or four years, at least some money was coming in from record sales. By contrast, the Offspring's "overnight" success took a full 11 years, and many of us know someone or several someones who are prodigiously talented and should be internationally famous and rich beyond their wildest dreams from playing music, yet never made it beyond the coffeehouse or bar band circuit.

So it's a crap shoot, though perhaps not as much of a crap shoot as some would have you believe. When I hear people say, "Oh, Green Day were lucky, they just happened to be in the right place at the right time," it kind of makes my blood boil, because they were pure and simply a great band who were totally committed to their music and getting that music heard by the world. They would have been successful in whatever time or place they found themselves.

But that's not actually what I meant to talk about today: what I realized from the reaction to some of the comments I made here and on the PPMB is that musicians can get very touchy indeed if someone suggests that they're not doing as much as they could to advance their music or their careers, and on further reflection, I don't blame them at all for being mad at me. Not just because everyone has to make his or her own decision about how much of their life they can stake on the dream of playing music full time, but even more because my self-righteous pronouncements masked a considerable degree of hypocrisy on my own part.

It's not that I'm not personally pursuing a career as a musician, and never seriously did, even when I was in bands. My audiences, or lack thereof, made it clear that my ultimate destiny lay elsewhere. True, being in a band and playing to people who enjoyed our music (it really did happen sometimes!) was one of the best and most exciting things I've ever done, and would still qualify as my idea of a dream job, even today.

My talents apparently lay elsewhere, though, and for a while that elsewhere involved helping other bands to get their music heard by the public. It wasn't quite as exciting as being a pop star myself, but it was what I seemed to know how to do, at least until I walked away from it for reasons that aren't completely clear to me even now. But when I left the music business, my motives, muddled as they might have been, were largely about wanting to do something creative myself instead of facilitating other people's creativity, and the thing I most envisioned doing was writing.

Of course I'd been writing for many years already; Lookout Records itself was an outgrowth of Lookout magazine, which I'd started publishing in 1984. Ironically, as things turned out, I ended up writing less once I'd "retired" from the record company than I did during those years when I was supposedly too busy to do so.

During that time at least a dozen friends have written and published books; I've helped out with proofreading or editing on some of them, but haven't come close to producing one of my own. Well, I've written one, a rather lengthy memoir, but after two agents passed on it - and in retrospect, I can see why - I gave up, threw the manuscript in a box under the bed and forgot about it.

Well, mostly forgot about it; occasionally I'd dredge it up in my memory and brood about it for a while. Meanwhile, I've come up with at least two other ideas for books and apart from drawing up a partial outline for one, done absolutely nothing about them. As it stands, I can barely muster up the initiative to write more than a small fraction of the blog posts that occur to me.

I don't have that many demands on my time. I don't have a job, and don't have to have a job, although given the extraordinary cost of living in New York City, I could certainly use some extra income, the sort of income that could be generated by writing a few magazine articles or the like. Instead, I find myself mulling over the idea of moving to some small town in the South or Midwest where I could live for a half or a quarter of what it costs me here.

How is that different from a musician sticking with a lousy dead-end day job instead of throwing himself wholeheartedly into his music? Well, for one thing, the musician could end up homeless if the music doesn't start paying off fairly quickly, whereas I could spend the next ten years collecting rejection slips and still be reasonably certain of where my next meal is coming from and where I'm going to lay my head that night.

So while we both might have a certain degree of cowardice in common, my own would seem to be far more egregious. What, after all, do I have to fear, apart from rejection, and any collateral damage that might wreak on my ego? It's not like my ego has ever done me any great favors anyway; on the contrary, it's been directly responsible for most of the misfortunes and misadventures that have assailed me thus far in life.

Maybe I'm just lazy? I have no trouble whiling away whole days reading message boards or newspapers from half a dozen countries, all the while seated at the very same computer I could be using to write my own stuff. Whole days can go by without my having produced anything of substance apart, perhaps, from a rather substantial grudge against myself for being so useless.

But laziness, procrastination, whatever you want to call it, is just another form of fear, the way I see things. The same goes for self-defeating attitudes, the kind that have you telling yourself, "Well, nobody really wants or needs to know what I have to say anyway."

It may very well be true that I've got nothing important to say, or lack the skills to say it in a sufficiently interesting way. So what? I'm not forcing anybody to read my writing, and at least so far, am not even making an effort to convince anybody they should. It might be worth wondering why I still feel the need to write at all, but on second thought I've been doing that all my life.

The crux of the matter, though: until I put my own ass on the line by trying to make a go of my own long dreamed of writing career, I'm on pretty shaky ground when it comes to hectoring young musicians to show more commitment to theirs. So I apologize, and at the same time invite you to turn things around and nag me about when I'm going to finish that book/article/memoir/blog post. It's no less than I deserve, and hell, as much of a pain as it might be at times, you'd be doing me a favor.

Write Or Rewrite?

As some of you know, i spent a couple years writing a memoir which I finished in the spring of 2005. At that point I showed it to a couple of agents, both of whom were not interested in representing me, and in a typically (for me) childish fit of pique, I tossed the manuscript into a box under my bed and more or less forgot about it.

Now that I've moved and no longer have a bed to store things under (these days I'm sleeping on a futon on the floor), I'm not really sure where the manuscript has gone, though I think it's around here somewhere. But the real question - it's also stored on my computer - is what if anything to do with it. Lately, people seem to have been asking me what ever happened to it - my stock answer: "Nothing" - with increasing frequency. That plus the fact that I'm not getting any younger leads me to believe that maybe I had better get round to doing something with the manuscript, even if it's only to walk down to the bottom of the stairs and deposit it in the trash can, erm, I mean recycling bin.

As I remarked here a few days ago, I've been seriously considering giving up on the whole memoir business and turning my attention to writing something else, probably a novel. But the reaction to that idea seems generally negative, and I myself am kind of disinclined to just toss the whole thing as well (in case it's unclear, my 1,000+ page suicide note turned journal is something entirely different from my 511 page memoir. The suicide note might actually make more compelling reading at times, but it's way too raw and personal to contemplate publishing.

But the memoir has serious problems, too, one of the main ones being that it tries to cover too much material: my dysfunctional childhood to my teenage greaser/hoodlum years, my hippie/psychedelic gangster era, back to the land, drug and alcohol abuse, zine publishing and playing in bands, and of course the Lookout Records adventure, which is really the only aspect of my life the general public is likely to be interested in.

The result is a rather exhausting string of anecdotes piled in a ramshackle manner atop each other, with not enough attention devoted to the incidents that really mattered and a perfunctory name check of a host of events that probably don't. "Rewriting" this mess would more accurately mean taking a meat ax to the existing text, which in turn might feel like taking said meat ax to the sinews and fibers of my life, which, however unimportant it might seem to the general public, is of at least passing interest to me.

The other big problem with the memoir is that it contains too many recriminations and self-justifications. At the time I was writing it, I was still very angry at certain people and events that I felt had contributed to the downfall of Lookout Records and the stiffing of the many bands I had signed to it. Whether my anger was justified or not isn't the issue; the fact that I hadn't successfully dealt with it and moved on is.

My account of my last years with Lookout too often resembles the lancing of an especially putrescent boil: yes, it needed to be done, but that doesn't mean that the contents of said boil need to be publicly displayed. Today I've gotten over most of my resentments toward others with regard to the Lookout debacle with the possible exception of those I harbor toward myself, which leads me to believe that if I'm going to do a memoir at all, it will need to be so different from the one I originally wrote that I might as well sit down and start over from scratch.

On the other hand, that's a lot of work I'm talking about there: maybe two years, if the last version is any indication. Whereas if I set about rewriting the original, I only need to take out a lot of stuff and completely rewrite a few chapters. In theory, that is.

Actually, I just realized that all this dithering is yet one more form of procrastination, and that the only way any version of this memoir is going to get done, let alone published, is if I stop thinking and talking about it and simply sit down and start working on it. And that, my friends, is the scary bit. Very possibly you'll be hearing more about this tomorrow.