When I was 29, it was a very good year…
I had bought a car and got gigs in the Pacific northwest. I was doing a singer songwriter thing in the Midwest where I lived in a big college town. I had been out to the Pacific northwest and back trying to maintain a relationship I was unable to maintain. I was writing songs and had opportunity to play them in front of small crowds for money, and in rooms where nobody gave a s**t for even more money.
I had quit my job in Iowa but was still living there. I would come back from three weeks away and play a few gigs at home or near home and go hang out with my friends unencumbered by the reins of steady employ and I really thought that I had made it. I wasn’t just getting paid. For a brief window of time I was making a living from just playing music. I felt superior.
Right before this great success had befallen me, I had worked at this restaurant/bar that wasn't the strictest about the drinking age but remained exclusive. It wasn't a big loud place. It was a long narrow place with one bartender. Cool people were allowed. There were no TVs and only one window out the front. I’d go there when I was back in town. My friends still worked there. It was 1999.
Cut to two thousand eleven. I was still on Facebook recreationally. There had in the decade that had passed been a band, four studio albums, a little touring, a bunch of local shows, some national press, a band break up and the twinkle in my eye of what would become the Iowa Opera House Project. A guy had started to, I’ll say, hound me there on Facebook. It was harmless, but insistent.
First it was like, “Hey Sam. How’s it going?” From a name I didn't recognize.
Then like, “Remember me?” In my messages.
I didn’t and it looked fishy so I didn’t respond, but it continued for months. It was not a flood of messages, but an insistent familiar trickle. I never responded.
Then, one night, when I had got home from the bars I had Facebook open and a message came in from this guy and I responded reflexively.
“What’s up?”
The guy was like, “Hey, Sam! I have been trying to get ahold of you …”
I snarkily responded and conversed and I believe it was at that point that the guy offered me to play a show in Omaha.
The band had played in Omaha. It seemed like a plausible offer, but I had put together somewhere in there that this was the guy who’d been trying to make contact for so long and was so, suspicious. I asked for a contract and things I might never have asked for had I not thought it was some sort of scam. I really went all out.
The guy said yes to everything. I barely could but as the thing progressed over the coming days, I started to believe it was real.
This guy had invited me to play a set opening for his Saddle Creek records album release show at a huge place in Omaha.
I said yes. I signed the contract. I arranged to borrow my neighbor’s truck and I went. It was the middle of winter. It was icy and cold. I took an acoustic guitar and a tenor guitar with a pick up in it and a compressor pedal and I went.
It was outrageous. I had asked for a ridiculous hospitality rider and a dressing room and after I loaded in I was shown the place and it was all there: whiskey, beer, nachos, a deli tray with meats and cheeses, a door I could close.
The guy from Facebook came and introduced himself. He was all aglow and stoked but in the middle of a label record release and he was rushed off. I saw him for ten seconds.
I played my set to a crowded room in this place called The Slowdown and I was a little drunk and I think it went fine. I was pretty overwhelmed. I went back to my room and drank and ate a little. Someone brought me a check.
I didn’t watch the show. I didn’t know anyone.
When things were starting to wind down the dude from Facebook who I barely recognized came back to my dressing room and said his wife would drive and I could stay at his place and come back the next day for the truck. I obligingly got in with them and we arrived at a nice suburban home where we retired to a den in the basement for another bourbon and some weed and listened to some records and talked about music and it was all very nice, but at one point I recall his wife saying, “I don’t think he remembers you.”
I was intrigued, because I did not in fact know anything about the person across from whom I was sat, now paid and drunk and high, he asked me if I did. I admitted easily that I did not know who he was. That I did not remember having ever met him before.
Ok, now we go back in time to the cool bar in Iowa City with me, drunk on whiskey and high and regaling my friends with tales of my tour adventures out west.
I met this kid. It was random and short. I may have talked to him a lot. I don't remember much. It's a long narrow bar. You talk to the person’s to your left and to your right.
I was 29. All grown up. He was 18, a freshman, I think, maybe 19. He was at the college. I asked him what he was in college for, what he was studying and he said, music. I asked him why he was studying music. You can just play music as much as you want and get good. He said it was because he wanted to start a band. It was at this point in the conversation where I think I laughed in his face and told him if that’s what you want to do, you should just do that. Go somewhere where there’s a scene and start a band. Just go for it. College is a ridiculous path to that, I told him.
And then I never saw him again.
I was in that basement den in Omaha sat across from that kid, and his wife.
As he told me about meeting me at the bar ten or so years before I remember just feeling squeamish. It put a weird vibe on the whole night. He had assumed I remembered the whole time and then just didn’t respond because…I was too famous? Maybe? I don’t really know.
We finished our drinks and I went to sleep on the couch in their basement.
The next day he drove me to the truck.
He had included a second gig at a cool bar where the band had played once before as a bonus. That gig also had a guaranteed pay out, but I was so put off by discovering who I was to this kid that I just got in the truck and rolled out of town.
I was not yet aware that the kind of hangovers I had started to get in my late thirties, early forties were emotionally challenging. I’d had a head injury that fall and received no treatment for it. It was a weird kinda drinky druggy time for me.
Anyhoo, instead of playing the bar gig, I just ran home down I-80.
The band I had played in for the decade before had been done for not a super long time. I think I was kinda isolated. I didn’t really have a social group I could tell about my adventure. I just kinda crawled back in my shell and waited for spring.
Sometimes, all you can do is to cut the wire
to keep the whole place from catching fire,
And the weight of your misery
Falls fast
To where misery goes and you don't ask why she’s wearing your clothes
You just walk past
Cuz you're sittin’ on top of the world
Sometimes its easier than pulling up stakes just to le in the bed where you made your mistakes and
That doesn’t mean that you can stay down
And take your time before you stand up cuz you’ve got nothin’ to say about it
Nothin' to say about it
You can cry yourself to sleep at night,
Hold your head thinking things
Just ain't right
Well it’s not those things. It's you.
And you can sleep like a baby if you live your life true.
Truth is hard to find
To tell the truth
The truth is most people don't pay it no mind
Especially when you’re sitting on top of the world.
Sometimes its easier than pulling up stakes just to lie in the bed where you made your mistakes and
That doesn’t mean that you can stay down
And take your time before yo u stand up
Cuz you've got nothin’ to say about it
Nothin’ to say about it
Nothin' to say about it
There have been long periods of my life where it all seemed pointless and grey. Things continued to happen as if it weren't, but the landscape of my life felt flat and although not entirely joyless, certainly nothing was quite as focus tipping as what I was doing to myself every day.
What could have led to a fruitful musical connection to a label and an artist who admired me was just skipped over as being a bit much.
I saw myself as a songwriter at the time, without doubt, but my goals as such were to write good songs.
In a way that is still pretty real to me. All the rest of it is b******t. I decided to get good at performing because the songs deserve it, so there’s that. But any aspirations I had to fame and financial fortune I have left to forces outside my control and hope that if an opportunity arises I’ll be clear headed enough to see it and take what is offered with grace and ease.
I’m not that easy, but I think I know how now.
Something about a half century makes the kind of immediacy of one's self horrification stomachable if not palatable.
Getting to a place where the principle of doing what you said you would do becomes an obvious benefit because you have seen it go the other way is both harrowing and nice.
Real life ain't that easy all the time and it might just be you making it hard for yourself. You can trust me, I know.
We redefine success not as a compromise, but as the result of experiencial redefinition.
The kinds of things you want at 30 are not the kinds of things you want at 56, and there is a reason for that.
Holding on to what you were certain was the most important thing as a younger person is often a flaw.
If you are old, like me, try to recall what drew your attention, what goals you had when you were in your twenties. Are you still chasing those goals or have you let them go in favor of goals that suit a person more aware of a bigger picture that has come into a focus only time could bring you?
Do you possess the ability to communicate these things?
Does it seem important to?
Will you?
Here's the thing: you are a communicating vessel. It is unavoidable for you not to pass on some obvious details of yourself, so all you really can do is try to live right. Try to have some principals that overarch your behavioral choices.
Open your heart, and then work on what’s in there, and realize the whole time that you are not done with that work. You can still learn and grow and change and you will and you do, even if you think you have refused, or finished. And there is an extent to which you get to choose what these changes are. So, pay attention to what good is because the world sees you in it and that good is important.
https://youtu.be/6pja0x7YzWk?si=mLtvK0mx6NxgpliD
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https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/lucky-13
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