LAST DAY HOME, FOR A WHILE...

Last day home, for a while; wife’s car has a new power steering pump, mine’s getting a new alternator, and daughter’s getting new brakes. And once again, vehicles have eaten my bank account.

(There is probably a song in that—but a lot of people have been writing songs lately with that same theme. I already have one, from well over a year ago, “Talkin’ Overpriced Coffee and Gasoline Blues,” and I’ll probably leave it at that. It predicted $4-a-gallon gas way before it happened. I don’t want to be prophetic any more about things like that.)

I have instead gone back to my roots—“roots” in this case being happy, bouncy, danceable little ditties about death. The result is “When They Die, I Put Them in the Cookies.” It got pretty good peer review, and I’ll record it when I get back to the Squirrel House. I’ll also ask the band if they’re comfortable having it on the setlist for the Labor Day Weekend concert, and let it be their call. It’ll be a family crowd there in Central Point’s Robert Pfaff Park, and while I’m pretty sure the kids would love the song, I’m not at all sure how the parents would react.

The music publisher in California has the three contest-entry songs from Marge and myself--they cashed the checks. Guess we’re in the running. I got myself on these guys’ mailing list about four years ago, and have managed to stay there despite a lot of moving around and changing of e-mail addresses. It’s a worthwhile place to be.

Their “contests” are for the purpose of obtaining material for somebody-or-other’s album for which the publisher doesn’t have enough of the right songs already in the “catalog.” At that point, a call goes out to the mailing list (which I’m on). Winner of the “contest” gets their song on the album. In this case, they’re trying to fill three slots, I understand, so there may be three winners. I have tried to send them material frequently enough so they’ll remember who I am, and infrequently enough (and close enough to what they ask for) to not be bothersome—always a danger in this business. What I send them is always in response to a call, however; like most publishers, these guys don’t accept unsolicited material.

I’m not sure there’s a lesson in this yet—nothing’s panned out yet. If there is, it’s part of the “you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket” rule. It is necessary to be everywhere, in other words, letting as many people as possible know who you are and what you do (and maybe also what you can do for them). And not stop, of course.

I was trying to explain city planning to a colleague recently, and was emphasizing the importance of vision—what former President Ronald Reagan used to call “the city on the hill.” First, you gotta show ‘em the city on the hill, he maintained—then you (and they) can figure out how to get there. City planners tend to look out 20 years, asking what kind of community do people want to have 20 years from now. I can’t apply the 20-year window to myself; in 20 years, I’ll be almost 79 years old (if I’m in fact still around). But what about FIVE years? Is it possible to reasonably say where I want to be (as the Beatles put it) when I’m 64?

I won’t be retired yet (my wife says I may never retire because I like my work too much). I expect I’ll be playing a lot more music, though—a paying gig every weekend and a full summer Concert Season are probably not too outrageous to expect. An album a year, with both retail and internet sales, is probably doable, too. More connections in Nashville—not for myself so much as for the publishing business’s clients. I’d like to help somebody else become a success. (And I sure do know a lot of good writers now—nearly all of them unsigned and unrecognized.)

As far as getting signed to a record label myself, I don’t think I’d hold my breath (or anyone else’s breath, for that matter). In five years, the record industry as we know it will probably have morphed into something different, or been replaced by something different if it proved too resistant to change. With luck, there’s places for more writers in that New Order than there is now. That’s the part I can’t control.

Good arguments, I guess, for staying as visible as possible. As my friend and fellow writer (and Nashville resident) Bobbie Gallup puts it, “It’s not who you know—it’s who knows you.”

Joe