I almost used the title: “Sappy Singer-Songwriter Sends Self into Career Epilogue“, to save some of you a lot of time…
Hi. Writing a first post has been very difficult, because there’s no going back after this.
Six years ago I was making records and wouldn’t have talked politics if you paid me handsomely.
Six months ago, I was living in South Carolina, briefly trying to make a living away from the entertainment industry and enjoying the idle red-state chatter at my local Whole Foods(true), when I got a call from Andrew Breitbart. “Come back,” he said, “there are more of us than you know.”
Andrew, as many of us know, can be persuasive.
Six weeks ago he told me Big Hollywood was finally launching, and I was excited. Six days ago he told me to get a piece ready, but only if I was sure I wanted to jump in, and I started getting nervous…. about an hour ago I sat down to finally write the following ridiculous, and probably self-destructive, sentence:
I’m a singer-songwriter, and I’m a conservative.
Ouch. Why was that so hard?
Put simply, the intolerance of the left toward artists with non-liberal beliefs is a powerful, career killing dynamic. Believe. This means that open, possibly constructive discussions between political sides almost never happen in the arts. I think this hurts the arts, but that’s another discussion. Hollywood is a town of talkers, but artists who open their mouths in support for, say, the war, or opposition to, say, government funding embryonic stem-cell research, are marginalized wherever possible by the town. Anecdotal though it may seem, this is a story repeated over and over until it becomes a warning for every artist: ‘keep your mouth shut or your career – your living and your legacy – will be brutally damaged.’ For every Charlton Heston, successful (and old, er, dead) enough to bear the attacks, there are and have been thousands of entertainers and artists too afraid to lend their voice to anything remotely “Republican.” Think about it: Hollywood is the forever high-school with money – would you risk being forever shunned by the cool kids? It’s not like an artist gets to survive and then move on to college, to bleed the metaphor…
In the music business, where most of us create and live by our emotions, it might be even worse. In all my years of touring and recording in studios, I never encountered an openly Right-leaning musician. Not once. Outside of country music, I can name the conservative or libertarian recording artists on one hand – and that includes yours truly (which is being generous, trust me). Add the elegant gentleman in a tuxedo a few posts below and Alfonzo – I’m still on one hand!
On September 11, 2001, I was in a plane circling above New York City, waiting to land and play the Conan O’Brien show on the release date of my second, ill-fated Warner Bros. record, “King Of Yesterday”. Needless to say, we never landed, but in the weeks that followed I traveled to NYC several times to perform, and watched it crawl back to some kind of normality across the gut-wrenching road of sadness and shock we all remember. Like many people, I was politically re-awakened by 9/11.
My mistake, apparently.
The often self-indulgent life of a writer (actual quote from Richard Simmons to an ex: “Oh honey, musicians are the worst!”) had kept me whimsically free and ignorant of most world affairs, as I busily mined my love life for lyrics. Now I began reading lots of contrapuntal magazines, looking for truth among the data, but quickly found out that life went much easier if, when discussing something in The New Republic or the New Yorker, for instance, I didn’t also mention an opposing article in Liberty or, God forbid, National Review. Most of my friends were in music, TV, or film, and I was only just beginning to realize how much of a one-party town Hollywood was.
Sometime that year I was asked (offered the opportunity) to play a huge pro-choice rally in Washington DC with the Foo-Fighters and some others. I declined politely, as I had always declined anything political. My publicist and manager insisted that this was a huge break for me, as it meant lots of press and could launch me into a sort of rock ‘n roll benefit circuit, with artists who mattered and helped each other out… I declined again until they pressed me as to why. Then I told them.
All I said was that I couldn’t add my voice to an organization like NARAL, that I was conflicted over it, having been raised Catholic with an adopted sister from a third-world Catholic charity… My manager, at the time also handling the top female act in the world, asked me to sleep on the decision (remember that) and think carefully about what I was saying. I had no idea what the impact of turning down one event would be, but let me tell you, my press opportunities dried up quickly after that. No more tours with cool people, no more Jann Wenner parties. Don’t get me wrong – that single conversation wasn’t the death of my career, but it sure didn’t help. (Actually, the album art may have had more to do with it, but that’s another story…)
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I’ve gone on to live an indie existence. It’s been a financial struggle, but creatively free and fulfilling.
Now, I’m a small fry, but that’s what awaits any recording artist who might speak out in support of the Right today. They’ll be ostracized by the music press, by other musicians, and, most frighteningly, by their fans. Of course, there’s always that mega-hit that forces Rolling Stone to cover you, but artists on the way up are the ones at risk, and they have plenty to fear already. Almost anything can derail a career in its infancy, and it usually does – that’s the music biz! Lovely people, most of them can go to hell, but my listeners are a wonderful bunch. I know I’ll upset some of them by writing openly here, and it hurts me in advance.
I mean, I don’t really know what Tom Waits’ politics are, since even his recent political songs are more about the human condition than anything else. If Brian Wilson can even form cogent thoughts on anything other than music I certainly haven’t been drowned by them, and that’s how I like it. (Unless it’s Randy Newman or Leonard Cohen, who can say whatever they want when they say it so well.) My musical heroes have always been about the songs, the melodies, three chords and the truth (as another manager told me); not political posturing within their music, not mixing the two. Over the years I’ve turned down almost every fund-raiser or benefit I was invited to play, whether I agreed with the cause or not, because I’ve tried to be assiduous about keeping art and politics apart. I’ve been cautious because I care – not that everyone LOVES me, but about my songs. After all, nobody wants to be Ezra Pound.
So, for the most part, I’ve been careful to keep my political opinions quiet. When my landlord proudly pushed a John Kerry sign into my front lawn, I quietly paid the painful tax of living in an artsy neighborhood, because people talk. Occasionally something leaked out, but for the most part, I’d think of actors sitting on Jay Leno’s couch saying stupid stuff about topics they knew precious little about, and it kept me from ever entering into what I always saw as a vanity conversation. Back when it was on a network, the Bill Maher show was something I turned down twice because I thought it insulted real discussion. Of course, looking back today that show was positively civil compared to the talking-head shouting matches on the “news” channels we’re asked to endure.
Now, I’m not what is commonly referred to as a “shouter”, I’m no tip of the spear, “hard-core conservative” (at least i don’t think so), but I do believe we’re in danger of losing everything that’s important, and that’s got to be worth at least another voice. Maybe I just have less to lose now, but after watching this last, incredibly divisive election of a marvelous teleprompter reader, I just can’t stay completely quiet. I’ve always tried to tell the truth, emotional truth, in my songs, so I guess I’m just a moth to the flame – can’t resist this chance to be honest about what many people feel but are afraid to reveal. Andrew, Mark Steyn, Bill Whittle and many others have said it: we cannot continue to sit out the media wars and expect any result but one. And that is losing. And losers go home. And winners get to design the houses the losers have to go home to. And I will stop with this riff.
Last Spring I was approached to write on another political blog ….oh, who cares, they never paid me anyway… it was MSN. They were looking for a “conservative” counter-point to a (lovely) liberal songwriter I know, because they were concerned (momentarily, it turns out) that they were being perceived as, wait for it… liberal. When they called and told me they’d been searching for a conservative, non-Country or Christian recording artist and had heard I “might be one”, I chuckled and asked how long they’d been looking. “Well, for a while, actually…” Apparently they were all the way down to me.
Conflicted, I turned to my audience for support or guidance. My “fans” are really my distant friends, and what they lack in number they make up in kindness to me. I didn’t mention my politics, just that I was thinking about doing so. Aside from a couple exceptions, what I got was a slew of letters begging me not to do it, in case I turned out to be a conservative or, as one doting fan put it, ‘a neo-con Bushmaniac warmongering fascist’. I was informed that if either were true, some of them might never be able to listen to my songs again.
I have to say, that was a crushing response. As someone who spends his life on stage trying to connect with people, the idea of repulsing them with my thoughts drove me more deeply into the conservative closet.
Virtually everyone told me to stay quiet, including my manager (#4, if you’re counting) but something in me was dying to speak, maybe in search of understanding…I don’t know. Freaks need love, too, and reading Jay Nordlinger’s dispatches from Davos while smiling alone in my little library could only do so much. Listening to talk radio podcasts in the wee hours after late sessions was driving me further into a solitary intellectual life, so I reached out and actually met Hugh Hewitt (the greatest) for lunch. We sat down to order all-American burgers, and before the water even reached the table he told me I shouldn’t do it, that I would destroy my career by acknowledging my beliefs, and he cited compelling examples.
It was becoming the forbidden fruit, this telling the truth thing…What would Meisner tell me…what would Buk do? I had to do it.
Well, the project went away before I could do real damage, but after a while it came back, the way things sometimes do out here between Brentwood and Malibu. I found myself on the phone with a big-shot music biz veteran who had most recently been extremely involved in producing an extremely large benefit for an extremely over-dramatized cause with an extremely large and world-wide pseudo-celebrity whose name sounds very close to “bore”. (C’mon, he was cool. I don’t want to print his name) This big-shot said he’d seen me play and was a fan, we had a mutual friend, and that because he was fond of me, as much as he wanted to run with our political music project and thought it was a winner, he felt compelled to tell me that things would be very difficult for me afterward. I told him I understood, but that I wanted to do it. Then, this very generous man of high standing in liberal political circles told me he would not take yes for an answer. Not yet. He told me to sleep on it (!) and to understand that things would likely be very bad for me in the music and film business once I was branded as a conservative.
What can I tell you, I blinked.
Aaaaaand that’s when Andrew came to see me. Andrew Breitbart, with his silver hair, and his silver tongue, telling me there was a party, and I was invited… No, I’m kidding. He never pushed and his hair retains lots of color. He’s never been less than completely straight with me about the possible consequences of speaking freely in this town…. but he kept inviting me to parties. And I like parties where I can say what I believe without first calculating the cost. So what can I say, I’m out (just ask my remaining Facebook friends.)
In the end, music is its own justification, and the joys of song transcend people and time, at least for me. I’m sure there’s a juicy story behind the writing of Good King Wenceslas, but you could tell it to me again and I’ll still forget it before I can ever get that carol out of my head. Our songs are our children, as we like to say, and I imagine mine having lives of their own, where they find their way into other people’s lives and are welcome friends (At least that’s how I once described it while drunk, and I’ve been using it ever since, so make fun but understand it was REALLY cool at the time). If I talk about things political or social at all, and disagree with prevailing orthodoxy of the hip and kind, am I now standing behind a once welcome friend in their doorway, making evil faces and yelling over the words of my songs?
People can think I’m crazy or stupid, but if it changes my music for them, that’s a heart-breaker.
My goal has always been to get a couple songs into places where they’d be hard to get rid of, so the fact that even a few people have gotten married, had babies, made babies, fallen in love, made or mourned friends to my music is the fulfillment of my creative life. It’s like the old cabbie told me after I explained to him that I wasn’t a religious man: “You,” he said, “You have a ministry of song!” In some small way, stuff I’ve written will last long after me, whether I like it or not, and that still amazes me.
So. I’ll end this wildly self-indulgent post with something a French fan emailed me as i was tip-toe-ing out of the closet. We have different politics (surprise!), but he wrote: “…since the release of “No one…” I follow your career. I remember checking the website during more than 3 years when you were divorcing from Maverick, without any updates, and one day you came up with Sarah! I remember the joy It gave me.
So in a nutshell, give us some joy, defend your ideas…be yourself.”
That’s the plan.
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