On tour: the lyrics

The last chapter of my little road journal

[Notes from a week on the road playing tour photographer for my friend, Chris Barron, lead singer of the Spin Doctors. Life is too short to ever stop having new experiences.]

As promised, I am going to bring this little rock and roll “Dear diary…” to a close with this final chapter.

The prior two focused on the mechanics of it all. The routine. The business. The plumbing beneath the tour life of a solo performer.

Today’s final chapter is about the heart of the matter. The meaning. Or what I made it of anyway.

To be honest, sitting down to write this feels a little like walking out onto a bare stage. In back: a curtain of heavy, dark fabric. In front: a single microphone illuminated by a row of spotlights all focused to create a single circle of white.

The first night of my little tour ride-along last week, I stood side-stage with my friend, Chris, as he was introduced and then walked out to play.

“I would be scared to death.” I thought to myself.

That choice to walk out in front of an audience strips you bare of the soft, comfort of shadow. Under a light that feels harsh and unforgiving, you are displayed for scrutiny; exposed for judgment; left vulnerable to criticisms that wound in ways that linger and scar.

That is the thing about spotlights. To step into them is to be revealed. There is a certain armor in being part of the crowd rather than standing in front of it.

“I would be terrified.”

That was my deep, visceral feeling the first night of tour. I feel it even now in writing about it. I would be terrified.

And, yet, I routinely write all of this deeply personal stuff that maps out my flaws and failures in sharp relief. I write about things I know will make some think less of me. I just pour out my weaknesses and struggles like pancake batter onto a hot griddle as if there is nothing at all to fear in making a meal of oneself.

And while walking out onto a stage with nothing but a guitar would scare the hell out of me, I can tell you that I have never felt a single pang of fear at hitting “post” on something I’ve written. Not a single twinge. Not even when the words I’ve put down are harvested from hurt or lay bare the things I carry with shame.

Chris and I walk out onto different stages. While they differ, each fixes a person under the hot arc of a spotlight before an audience. I could never handle his. Yet, I walk out into my own as comfortably as if it were just a living room lamp casting warm light on a familiar rug.

I have spent a good portion of the time since getting home thinking about Chris’ stage… or his spotlight rather, and what makes him walk out under it.

I was swept up in how uncomfortable it would be for me and how hard it was to understand him feeling comfortable under it.

Why? Why does he walk out under that particular glare? How? How does he do that night after night?

What is it that either relieves him of the anxiety I would feel or compels him to do it despite that anxiety?

I have spent the last week since getting home sort of spinning over the answers to those questions and how to distill them down into some meaning sharp enough to share.

There is a reason this entry took this long to write. My spinning felt psychoanalytic. It felt like I was plumbing a friend for what made him tick. And that felt invasive and speculative and uninvited. Chris didn’t invite me along on tour in the hopes I’d work up a read-out on him as if I were doing an intake of a patient who neither signed up for treatment; needed it; nor waived HIPAA.

So, my spinning was halting and aborted over and over. I would start to think about it and then be like “Yeah, don’t try to analyze your friends, dude. That’s gross and wrong and will be wrong and is gross and wrong.”

Then I had a wholly unrelated set of experiences and issues pop up in my own life.

My last few posts on here - or, more accurately, my posts about them elsewhere - drew vastly less attention than any prior post on any prior subject.

Suddenly, my loosely framed out Plan to Survive as a Writer was in danger of entirely combusting.

Granted, that “plan” was to just 1) write stuff here; 2) talk about it elsewhere; and 3) hope that it somehow attracted enough paid support to survive.

I didn’t say it was a great plan. I even put “plan” in quotes all sarcastic-like.

Nonetheless, it was my only vague semblance of a plan. And even a “plan” in quotes is better than none at all. At least you can tell people “Oh, I have a plan.” when they ask how you’re possibly going to survive as a new writer with no discernible Plan B or reserves to fall back on.

And now my vague plan-that-wasn’t-a-plan seemed to be possibly doomed.

If I couldn’t talk about what I wrote elsewhere, I couldn’t attract new readers… and if I couldn’t attract new readers, who would I so bedazzle with prosey shit that they’d delight in giving me gas money?

I had a couple days of panicky crisis assessment.

Was I sure the issue was suppression on Twitter? What if people just hated everything I’ve written lately? What if the entire universe of people who are somehow unhating of my writing had already been fully reached?

And that little full-throated scream into the pillow led to equally unhelpful “solution brainstorming”.

Should I try to write more widely appealing stuff? Should I work up some list of things people might want to read about and focus on pumping out Shit People Will Pay For?

And then I had a Guinness and then another Guinness and stayed out until 5 am talking with someone who wanted to tell someone about the unbelievably difficult, dysfunctional, harrowing things they had gone through as a kid.

And then I was too tired to really catastrophize or consider selling out in some miserable, vacuous attempt to just get money anymore.

That little mini-meltdown dropped the last tumblers into place though and left me with some clarity about my friend, Chris, his spotlight, my own, and what it all meant.

Chris wrote the song “Two Princes” when he was 19-years old. As he explained onstage one night, he wasn’t trying to write a hit song. He was trying to write a song that worked. Spin Doctors hadn’t put out a single album yet. I’m not sure they even had a record contract. The album “Two Princes” appeared on wouldn’t be released until years later and then wouldn’t get airplay until a year after that.

Once it caught fire though, a big record label and all of the people who barnacle onto a rising act selling millions of records came out of the woodwork with opinions and demands and expectations. And suddenly Chris was under extreme pressure to “write another big hit”. As a 22- or 23-year old.

And, again, from Chris’ perspective, he had never even tried to “write a big hit song” let alone sat down and written one on purpose.

He had tried to write songs that he thought had just worked as songs. One became a huge hit; others on that album became lesser hits.

While we have never had a deep conversation about it, I know that the aftermath of that initial tidal wave of chart success was bumpy and more importantly, Chris HATED the entire proposition of trying to write for popularity. He hated it so much, in fact, he describes the product of even his brief attempts there as the worst shit he has ever written.

Chris and I are a few years apart. We are men in our 50s. One of us has been a writer for three decades; the other is two days shy of the three-month anniversary of his writing career.

Neither of us is cut out to write for commerce. That is limiting in ways that are stressful. It makes things harder. I will invariably have to grind and grind to merely eke out a fraction of what some mass-appeal pap would bring in. I don’t care. I want to like what I have put into the world.

Chris, I believe - although I can’t speak for him and shouldn’t try - seems to feel the same way.

Two nights ago, he played at a nice little club not far from me. I went ostensibly to shoot the show but more to hang out and support my friend.

The show was typical of what Chris usually brings to the stage in these solo shows: stories that illuminate who he is; what was going on in his life when he wrote a song; what it was about; etc..

He played ballads on guitar and blues on ukulele and talked about relationship failures and songs written in the aftermath. He had the room leaning in and howling over the backstory behind video shoots. He was confessional of personal struggles and self-deprecating.

The playlist was genre-less and roaming. The songs were impossible to bucket.

The audience, as is also typical, had no idea what to expect beforehand other than knowing his popular Spin Doctors catalogue. The ones who came only to hear those songs, as is always the case, sang along; applauded loud and long; and seemed perfectly contented with the night.

The ones who came in to meet a performer rather than hear a song left even happier though. They lingered afterwards to talk with him and led off the conversations with something personal about how his music intersected with their own lives. They got albums signed for people who weren’t there. They took selfies with him so they could use them as part of telling others the story of the night.

They were photographs as memories not as collectibles.

Chris walks out onto a stage into a spotlight that was comfortable for him long before he had ever written a song that became a hit and has remained so as a result of fighting off the impulse to write to please everyone else but him.

To step out into a spotlight is to be revealed.

If you’re going to do it and like it - or even survive it unwounded - you better be pretty damn comfortable with the person illuminated for all to see.

To love it though, to be so at home that 10,000 watts of cold white light feels like the warm yellow cast of a table lamp in a favorite room, you better be getting up there for a reason that matters to you regardless of who agrees or how loud they’ll clap.

We all have a spotlight somewhere. Chris’ is on stage behind a microphone. Mine is on the page, in writing, published to be read.

I would never come to love Chris’ spotlight. If I ever write a book, I would hate touring and doing readings to support it.

I’m not sure whether Chris would love mine.

Confessing your deepest personal stuff feels like a really bright light to a lot of people. Feels like an old brass lamp on a weathered side table to me.

Find your spotlight.

Find that circle you like stepping out into because it is where you are able to do something that makes you feel fulfilled and happy as if it were what you were always meant to do.

Because it is.