Progress

..from
a couple of old geezers venting about how things have deteriorated since ‘our
day’. Vaguely apropos of that, I usually have no idea what I’m going
to write about when approaching these P&W follies of mine and so I have
adopted a standard preparatory procedure. First I have a quick squiz at Christchurch’s
The Press to see if anything has happened in my home town since I was last there,
then I go to The New Yorker and peruse a bunch of cartoons, which I find good
for the soul, but rarely helpful in finding a subject – the exception
being the P&W I wrote on New Yorker cartoons.
So, this time round I was browsing through some cartoons when a teaser for an
book review caught my eye. ‘A crucial difference, I think, between successful
and unsuccessful artists is the ability to survive disappointment.’ I’ve
subsequently read the Joan
Acocella piece on Willa Cather, (worth reading for the extracts alone),
but because the initial quote resonated with me I copied it to my hungry blank
page in hope that it might inspire something..
Then another article, this time about Charlie Chaplin, caught my eye. I can
remember bits from Chaplin’s 1936 movie Modern
Times that I must’ve seen as a nipper and I know I saw Limelight,
although I only really remember the theme
tune (which I only recently discovered Chaplin wrote), and even though I’ve
seen Richard Attenborough’s biopic Chaplin (starring Robert Downey
Jnr) as well as perhaps a couple of Foxtel bios, this article posed some interesting
questions.
‘Why did Chaplin, alone among his peers of silent-comedy genius, make
great talking pictures? In part, because..blah, blah, blah… And, in part,
because of a quality that drew reproaches throughout his career – he had
something to say.‘
It got me thinking that perhaps it’s worth having another look at Chaplin’s
career, so I’m going to check out as many of his movies as I can find.
He was raised so high in the American public’s estimation and yet it’s
pretty evident that his reputation hasn’t fully recovered from the subsequent
trashing it received.
My own experience as a songwriter, particularly these days, is that writing
a song utterly depends on my having something to say, although it’s obvious
that what I’ve had to say through my music hasn’t always met the
public’s expectations and my career has been somewhat marginalised as
a result. I’ll Be Gone was the one obvious exception where I
managed to encapsulate something that caught the public’s imagination,
but I still see songwriting as a vehicle for whatever is going on inside my
head at the time, come what may.
It doesn’t get any easier. As the discussion between Sam and me suggests,
I’ve become one of the legion of world weary and cynical old men who are
never happier than when shooting the breeze with similarly disposed curmudgeons
and I’m certainly not driven to put these desiccated complaints to music
and inflict them on my remaining loyal listeners – that really would put
me in novelty territory.
Speaking of which, there was the Xavier Rudd episode and the slightly
more recent Max Merritt tribute, but even they were written some time
ago now and what promising new song ideas I have embarked on recently remain
stubbornly wordless, as if daring me to complete them.
I just watched the (Sir) Paul McCartney special on his ‘New’
collection of songs and he used the incentive of singing his just-written songs
over the phone to his ‘missus, Nancy’ in NY to get songs completed.
Maybe I should try something similar. (I wonder how I get in touch with Nancy?)
Mind you, playing to 50,000 – 100,000 strong audiences is a pretty compelling
incentive and that’s unlikely to happen to me anytime soon.
I comfort myself that success in the music business is not all its cracked up
to be. I’ve had a taste of it and you soon discover the hysteria’s
not just confined to the relationship between artist and fans – it’s
absolutely pervasive. If you can survive that with your integrity intact you
were an oddball to start off with, and while it can be said justifiably that
I’m some sort of an oddball, I’m clearly not that sort.