Mugged Down Memory Lane

03 Feb 05 - 06:32 PM (#1398292)
Subject: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: Wrinkles

20 odd years ago I played and wrote a _lot_ of tunes.

When I started up again recently I found that much to my horror I couldn't play half of them. The comercials were no problems, music books and tab.coms did the job there; but me own stuff! How could I forget that?

Now, after listening to old tapes, and working it all out (a stange experience' listening to ones self to "steal" ones own tune!) I've reconstructed the old songs, tunes, chord-changes and keys for most of em.

Anyone else out there have similar experiences?

Wrinkles

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03 Feb 05 - 09:57 PM (#1398515)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: kendall

I seldom remember stuff I wrote, but I never forget a Bob Coltman, Utah Phillips, Tom Paxton song.

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04 Feb 05 - 03:31 AM (#1398665)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: GUEST

I've never forgotten anything I've written.

Which is nothing.

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04 Feb 05 - 04:25 PM (#1399337)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: Wrinkles

perhaps I should add I'd not sung for 14 years or played any instrument for over 10.

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04 Feb 05 - 04:45 PM (#1399357)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: Charmion

Good God, Wrinkles, what happened to you? I can't imagine going 14 days without singing, even when I've got the pneumonic miseries (I hum around the coughing fits). Playing instruments is less crucial to everyday life (at least for me), but 14 years without singing -- the mind boggles!

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04 Feb 05 - 04:59 PM (#1399374)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: Wrinkles

Steriods, taken to combat illness, warped my throat and I never recovered. Instruments, well first I broke my hand, then I'd bilateral frozen shoulder. add a dolop of depression during which I sold all my instruments, and there's the 14 year break ;-)

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04 Feb 05 - 05:04 PM (#1399380)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: DonMeixner

Well, welcome back Wrinkles. Glad to see you.

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04 Feb 05 - 05:10 PM (#1399383)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: Jerry Rasmussen

Yeah, Wrinkles, I've done a little of that. I've been writing songs now for fifty years (gasp!) and a few never got written down. Fortunately, I taped almost all of them so I too can go back and relearn songs from myself. As a personal project, I want to put everything I've written (except the really lousy stuff) on CDs. I don't "write" music, so I need some other way to remember it.

Jerry

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05 Feb 05 - 03:48 AM (#1399805)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: GUEST,Tunesmith

I have always had the desire to rewrite and "improve" all my early efforts, and to sort of consider them as still " work in progress", BUT I have always resisted this urge as I view those songs as examples of where I was musically and lyrically at certain points in my life.

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05 Feb 05 - 05:42 PM (#1400150)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman

I have twice & thrice as much trouble remembering things I've written, versus the traditional songs that are perhaps 80% of my repertoire, which I find relatively easy to remember even after years of not singing a given song.

I've often wondered why this is. My best guess is that somehow, in my mind, the songs I've written are still fluid, still at least theoretically open to change--what if I altered that line, that phrase, would it work better?--and so they never really quite jell in my head.

Whereas traditional songs, even if fluid (I easily swap verses in and out, etc.), have their own individuality apart from me, so I can grasp them more easily than my own stuff.

Weird. But a real problem when rehearsing and concertizing, because my own songs are, depend on it, the ones where I'll come up short and forget some line or get the verses out of order. I too would be interested in hearing from others who have that problem, and why you think it is.

Bob

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05 Feb 05 - 06:52 PM (#1400194)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T

Same for me Bob, and we're in good company too. I remember Roger Whittaker having two and a half minutes of silence on TV, in front of about five million viewers, while he tried desperately to remember the first line of Durham Town.

As to why, in my case I'd have to put it down to over confidence mostly. Going on without needing to do a last run through in my head because "I know that one backwards", then finding that FORWARDS is the problem (my comic songs do seem to contain a lot of words, delivered pretty fast). I DO run through these days and I forget much less often.

Don T.

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05 Feb 05 - 11:29 PM (#1400406)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: GUEST,Art Thieme

It's been nearly eight years since I've been able to play my guitar. Some days it drives me nuts. Some days I just marvel at how surprised I was when it really hit home and became obvious to me that I couldn't do it any more. And I insisted that, if I was going to walk out on stage at all, the music had to be done the right way if people were going to pay good money to hear me do it. Now it's a moot point since there's no ego or choice about it at all. --- Still, it seems like a cosmic joke of nature. I always figured the music would always be there... But, as I told Big Mick recently, I cherish what I can't do -- and hold it close -- knowing I once could---if that makes any sense at all.

It's like the Beatles song said:
"What do you see when you turn out the lights?
I can't tell you, but I know it's mine."

So watch for a new CD from here one of these days---but it will be from old concert tapes. I think Dennis Cook is still working on making those sound O.K. We'll see!

Art

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06 Feb 05 - 10:01 AM (#1400628)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman

**WHEW** Art, your post comes really close to the bone.

   I didn't think I would get this confessional, but if this will help you, here goes. I have just come out of a prolonged period ~3 yrs more or less~ where I couldn't play or sing or listen to music at all. Admittedly this was a period when I went through problems with ills and ailments.

   But the two were not obviously connected...it was more a severe musical depression. I didn't like the stuff, didn't want to be around it. This, from somebody who started pickin' at age 9 and couldn't stay away from it for 50+ years, was shocking. So shocking I didn't even want to inquire into it too deeply. All I knew was that, if I never played or heard music again in my life, that was how it would have to be.

   Then, glorious fun, I started again. Very gingerly. Putting together a songbook was what got me back my insatiable curiosity. The songbook turned into a full-fledged re-imagination of traditional music for me, and I must say posting and reading posts here at the DT have been part of the therapy.

   Oddly enough I never stopped writing songs. Not many (for formerly prolific me, who've written literally thousands)...a dozen or so per year...but they kept coming.

   I don't know if your inability stems from physical reasons but I know mine was mental... Thank goodness there's light at this end of the tunnel, even if possibly dimmer.

   If I can add a word of comfort, it''s this. I would enjoy and encourage your music at the level you can do it NOW, not THEN. We can't get back to THEN. I sure can't whip a banjo like I useter, nor do all those fancy things on the guitar either. For one thing, without any specific deficits in the fingers, it took a certain energy level that is diminished now.

   BUT...and it's a very big but...I have seen oldtimers make music that's very little in the performance and very much in the spirit. Balus and Abigail Ritchie. A deaf man named Abner Keesee in Virginia I will never forget, whose singing was a tuneless roar that made the two songs he sang me into masterpieces of strangeness. Crockett Ward who could no longer hear his fiddle going slightly out of tune. Not to mention numerous people who never had much technical facility. And I know it is the singer and the song and the player even if sloppy and technically flaky.

   Art, don't give it up. You're one of the good ones.

   Best wishes ever, Bob

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06 Feb 05 - 10:11 AM (#1400639)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: Flash Company

Hi, Wrinkles, I guess your absence from singing an mine are of about the same length. In my case it was a lung problem which led to loss of confidence and stage fright (something which had never bothered me before!).
I struggle sometimes to remember the words, but usually get most of them back. Problem is, I can't stop rhyming even when I can't sing them. Thank heaven for Mudcat, at least I can post them.

FC

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06 Feb 05 - 10:15 AM (#1400643)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman

Two more things.

First, even severe technical deficits can be overcome. I've seen a man whose hands were basically arthritis-(I guess)-knotted claws use a slide and a grab and snatch right hand technique, basically smashing the strings, for a very fair effect. Using open tunings, slide or not, is a way to play using even your forearms if necessary.

Think of Harmonica Frank Floyd whose guitar playing was club-fisted blatant approximation. Think of Dock Boggs who turned a very limited faciilty into a two-finger picking style (not to mention a tonguetied singing style) that has mesmerized thousands from the days when he first sat picking on the street in Norton, VA. And so on, and on.

Though I can certainly appreciate the desire to go out at a flamin' peak level, I know when I didn't have the music, I didn't have a bit of iron in my soul I badly needed. I'm glad it's back, at whatever deep discount.

The second thing is a reminiscence for all you forgetters of song lines, verses, etc.. 1969, Cambridge, MA...Joni Mitchell in concert, clinging dress, thin as a candleflame, swaying fetchingly, hung up...marking time on the guitar....utterly lost and asking the audience to supply her the next line, which never came. Hey, and she wasn't even OLD. I bet we all can cite equivalents from admired singers. It's life, and sometimes it even happens on stage.

Bob

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06 Feb 05 - 11:09 AM (#1400687)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: Amos

There's a boy here in San Diego who plays regularly at the Park, or did. He has no arms; they qwere deformed into stumps at birth.

He plays with his bare feet and does so better than a lot of people who are endowed with normal limbs. His toes have been worked to the point where he makes chords with them and they are practically prehensile.

He sounds pretty good. But what really tears at you to see him play is the sheer guts of the guy, and the long trail of self-disciplined and painful learning he must have fgone through to develop such skills.

A

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06 Feb 05 - 01:37 PM (#1400797)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: GUEST,Art Thieme

Bob,

It is truly grand to be in touch with you here. Your music has been a part of my life for the last 40 years at least. And I really want/need to thank you for that.

My main problem is MS. Check out Robert Frost's poem "The Oven Bird" It ends with the line: "...what to make of a diminished thing."

I spent 20 years "diminishing"---with a decade of spinal surgery for the same symptoms as MS, wearing Depends secretly, falling down more and more frequently, bowel dysfunction, totaling my car because I couldn't find the brake or the gas pedals, hands getting more numb all the while, a slew of missed diagnoses from carpal tunnel to spinal stenosis--each time thinking, "Damn, this time I'll get the right skinny on everything."--- Finally, I got to Mayo Clinic. After yet another neck vertabra fusion there---and a MAJOR MS exacerbation while in their hospital--(so they could watch me in action) -- well, 2 months in hospital there----ultimately led to the MS diagnosis. That was '97.

Knowing what it was felt positively liberating!! I finally KNEW! --- (And they found prostate cancer as well ;-) They ARE thorough up in Minnesota.


Bob, the instruments were a larger part of what I did than anyone knew I think. I followed my own lead---guitar and banjo were like a pitch pipe for my singing--a metronome too.--I'd do a riff or two or three so I could think of the words--or cover a mistake--or just to catch my breath. Never did it the same way twice. Never, ever, worked in a group. Group structure and discipline didn't go well with my music and 6 or 7 note range. (Nobody ever quit my group either. Got to keep all the cash too. ;-)

And here is a main point: First symptoms were about 1982 or 83. By the time I quit, 1997, accurate chording was impossible. I'd tried all the above "suggestions" and maybe 50 more -- all without anyone knowing I was adapting at all. I went to a 000-18 instead of a D-28. I used a cane to walk in public---and a walker at home. Adapting my Martin to a 9-string guitar and making up that KING OF THE NINE STRING GUITAR blurb was a smoke-screen to cover diminished picking skills and needing to strum more instead.

Folks were shocked and some were angry when I "gave up so easily"---as they saw it. How do you explain to friends and fans, who look, and are, so hurt by your abdication that you've been fighting this thing for 15 years and it's now at the point that it is simply too far from what you need/want it to be.

I've tried to make these points in various threads over the years here, but your being involved, Bob, has prompted me to more candor than usual---even for me. I'm not sure why that is, but it is.

I made a project of going through all the tapes given to me after I did gigs over all the years. From those I culled eleven 90-minute cassettes of songs that were not on any of my released records or CDs. It's a slew of material--and Dennis Cook has put all of it on CDs for me to pick and choose from. A tedious job, I'm sure. But that's where the material came from that should eventually be a new CD for me.

The banjo (only in the open-G tuning) is something I still mess with whenever our granddaughter, Chloe Moon Thieme, feels like dancing.

As I said, It's great being in touch.

Art Thieme

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06 Feb 05 - 02:28 PM (#1400839)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman

Art, I am touched and humbled.

I did not, till now, realize the extent of what you're up against. After I posted, I combed a few other threads and gradually got an idea that you were facing something pretty serious. In fact I had just revisited this thread to add a caveat that I hoped I was not being naive in my generally upbeat commentary. Instead I found your friendly, considerate reply. Thank you for that courage.

I'll say what I had intended to say...that I was afraid my well-meant jabber was all too easy for someone to say who isn't battling MS or any of the other diseases that attack your very ability to coordinate enough to play. That is way out of my league, and I hope I did not come over as unnecessarily Pollyannaish. Especially in view of what you said about friends thinking you "gave up too easily." Believe me, I was not implying that, though I see I could have been construed to be.

Your story is a real learning experience for me. I admire you more than I can say for your long battle and that unvanquished spirit that comes through so clearly in your posts. I cannot think how I can have not known this through all these years of knowing about you, hearing your music...your fine ear for the right touch in the right place that makes a song come alive.

Your sentence "I thought the music would always be there" is a real heartbreaker. I once wrote an unlucky-in-love song called "I Thought You Would Always Be There," trying somehow to convey that sense of the floor being pulled from beneath you... all of us starting out with that kind of blissful ignorance, thinking that what's here now will always be here, only to find that's not so, that time takes away, eventually, everything. Bitter wisdom of aging, which still takes my breath away in surprise.

What you have said about the instruments goes equally for me. While I've always primarily been a songster, only slightly a picker of instrumentals, the guitar, banjo, mandolin etc have been extensions of my hands in very much the way McLuhan argued. Strung-up fingertips, as it were, for pulling music out of the air. I could no longer imagine life without them (at least until my three-year hiatus/I-hate-us) than I could imagine life with no hands.

I'm right with you, too, in that, though I doted on the idea of singing as a group (Chad Day, Molly Scott and I briefly made a Weavers-style trio, and I did jug band and oldtime country music with Joe Bussard et al in Maryland for a while), I never could really function in a group. Too individualized. Couldn't remember rehearsed moves because I was too used to making it up as I went along, and every performance was different. In a sense I had no learned moves to fall back on because I was always improvisational and could never really be any other way. So music had to be a loose framework.

Art, I am pleased to be in touch with you and only hope you can feel the genuine fellow feeling coming through the awkwardness of words. Be as well as you can, my friend. And may music find a way to stay part of your life and doings in every possible way.

Bob

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06 Feb 05 - 03:01 PM (#1400870)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: Dharmabum

You're right Bob.
The two threads could be combined into one.
Check out the Musical Compromises thread for reference.

Thanks for sharing Art.
As you well know,this damn disease can effect the same person in so many different ways at any given time. Seems the only sure bet about it is that it's a progressive disease,even if it doesn't start out that way.
I guess I was lucky in that after only a few months of milegrams,spinal taps & assorted tests,I was given the diagnosis of M.S. back in 84.& You're right,it was a relief finally knowing. I remember thinking I had a brain tumor.
In the 20 years since,I've relapsed & gone into remission a number of times. I guess the hardest relapse was the time it took the use of my hands from me for almost a year.
That's when I tried to take up playing the hammer dulcimer by strapping the hammers on with rubber bands.
Luckily,I eventually got my hands back enough to form chords again. Good thing because I really sucked at that dulcimer thing!

But you're right about dealing with other peoples expectations.
Sometimes I feel like I just want to grab some folks & say "I've got no choice but to accept my fate,why can't you".
I see it not as "abdication" but as "conservation",or Making the most of what you've got left.

Now,how'd I get up on this soapbox,& how the hell am I gonna get down?

Ron.

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06 Feb 05 - 10:08 PM (#1401242)
Subject: RE: Mugged Down Memory Lane
From: GUEST,Art Thieme

Ron----Ya don't get down from a soapbox. You get down from a goose!!

Bob----I'm really doing well here. As I've said in other threads, "The more things change, the more they get different." It just takes mental working-through-it to get to where it don't matter any more. And what you were hearing from me is some of the stages, arguments I had with myself, and sundry ruminations I muddled through to get from there to here. It's all a glorious adventure. Humor sure does help. (And having the American election over helps a ton as well.) I'm thinking of changing my name here at Mudcat to Larry Derrol (however that's spelled)! He was one of my favorite fictional characters---from Somerset Maugham's novel "The Razor's Edge". And your comments were all taken seriously by me. I fully understand what you were saying. I only wanted to say fairly clearly where I was coming from---and why! Writing it out helps me see stuff clearer. These days, I never can say the right thing off the top of my head. MS has real cognitive aspects to it. Recent memory etc. I feel like that fish, Dory, in Finding Nemo.

Anyhow, I'm tired. G'night---as I suspect they say in Australia. ;-)

Art

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