Thank you Cameron Crowe....
I was in 7th grade and had a graded writing assignment in English class that I completely forgot about so, in a panic at the breakfast table I copied the liner notes from the Led Zeppelin “Song Remains the Same” live album (if I remember correctly they were written by music journalist Cameron Crowe) onto a few pages of loose leaf paper and handed it in. I got an “A” with a drawn smiley face next to the grade, and I’ve felt vaguely guilty about this ever since. So I’m coming clean right now, and apologize to the memory of the late Mrs. Perry, who had to be wondering how a 12 year old could so eloquently draw a rock and roll line from Little Richard to Jimmy Page, but most likely she didn’t know who either one of them were. In other words, I got away with it.
But in stealing such words, I had inadvertently set the bar high for subsequent assignments, so I had to work extra hard to not be outed as a plagiaristic fraud. Which is something that still drives me to this day, so I feel like all of this was pre-ordained somehow. Thank you Cameron Crowe. I apologize. Sort of.
I kept writing. Random things in random notebooks. I hated the sight of an empty page, so I’d fill it up with something. Anything. Eventually it was reams of bad poetry after discovering Jim Morrison and reading all his bad poetry. Every kid had a Morrison phase back then. It was pretty ghastly stuff, but at least I never graduated to the leather pants.
I’d start a diary in a fever and then abandon it weeks later. I wrote about what I wanted to be when I grew up (play in the NBA for the 76ers). I wrote bad short stories in the vein of whatever short story writer I was reading at the time. I wrote about music and I wrote about the girls I was secretly in love with, and periodically I’d gather up all these pages from all these different sources and burn them in our fireplace.
I was terrible, but getting progressively less terrible. I could envision one day writing something that I did not feel the need to char. That was my goal. It kinda still is, actually.
During all this time our house was filled with the clickety-clack of my father’s manual typewriter. He wrote for a living….a grizzled newspaper man with his own column, and it just seemed effortless. He’d type faster than he talked, churning out words read by thousands of readers multiple times a week. I’d steal glances at his notes, and found it magical that the same phrases I was reading would appear on page 3 a few days later. To me he was part Jimmy Breslin, part Mike Royko, and part Pete Hamill. He was everything good and honest and fierce about the newspaper business. And he was ours. He woke the house up every morning by singing, because he couldn’t wait to get to work. “Find a job where you never notice the clock”, was his advice to me. Advice I didn’t take because I still run screaming for my car at 5pm. (I never got my dream newspaper job, but once I discovered these guys were paid about the same as assistants to the assistant managers at Rite Aid, I got over the slight. My Dad was happy AND broke. The man was a marvel.)
My oldest brother and my oldest sister both became wonderful writers. They had caught the same bug I did, but advanced much more quickly. I was still flailing away, shooting jump-shots of crumpled up pages into (or around…never did make the NBA) wastebaskets. But I never grew tired of chasing whatever it was I was looking for. Eventually I found a voice of my own. It only took about 30 years. I just wish my father was around to see it. I wish I could share my twice weekly columns with the man who wrote over 4000 of these things. I wish I could call him on the phone instead of visiting him in dreams.
I’m grateful for every single one of you who read these columns (paid subscribers most of all….every little bit helps). It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, and you’ve turned it into something real. It ain’t quite the platform that my father had, but if I keep at it for the next 37 years I’ll have about 4000 of these things. That seems a nice round number. Then I can retire.
In a bit….
—tf