So You Think This Looks Easy: Tales of a Troubadour

By Jeff Harris

This book reveals the life timeline of American Entertainer Jeff Harris. Pages filled with short stories of Jeff and his earliest memories, along with comical stories and mishaps that come along as a aspiring musician. These stories written by Jeff, give you an intimate peek into the author himself both privately and on stage.

From his childhood up-bringing, to the struggles of young adulthood and eventually making the decision of becoming a full time musician, these pages contain touching personal memories, life lessons and hilarious true stories that come from life on the road. This is an intimate reveal of Jeff and his life more than many have ever seen or known. Through these pages you will learn the history of his career, the decisions, the highs and lows, hilarious happenings and experiences along the way. This book is a reference to his behavior, reactions, choices and experiences that helped mold him into the man we all know today. There's only one Jeff Harris. It's a fun, laugh out loud read. Enjoy the ride!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098343156

Jeff Harris

Jeff Harris believes that children need stories to understand how to make tough decisions in difficult situations. He wrote Ginger’s Journey to help them think about what they would do if they were faced with that situation. Harris currently resides in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, with his wife and family.

Book preview

FORWARD

Who do you know that can get hundreds of people to sing, shamelessly, in unison, I want to put my finger in your tushy hole. Try it, you might like it? Yeah…you heard me right. And based on that perplexed look, devious smile or expression of sheer terror on your face right now…that’s what I thought. Not a soul.

Well…I know of only one, and I am excited to share him with you through this uniquely entertaining (and might I add, true, series of short stories authored by my lifelong friend…the unencumbered, unabashed, inoffensively offensive, and appropriately inappropriate, Jeff Harris.

I met Jeff when he was eighteen years old and had already been honing his skills as a singer/songwriter for at least five of those years. How could I have known back then that twenty years later, Jeff, through his successful music career, would take me on an adventure through Copenhagen, Denmark, that I couldn’t describe suitably if I tried. Nine days of bars, booze, bus rides, Christiania, pot, lesbian Eskimos, a broken toe, fresh bread and jam, and did I mention Christiania? In the bizarre world of my friend, these escapades are commonplace.

Anecdotes from this book will not only give you a glimpse of what life is like for a talented, mischievous and open-minded musician who has traveled through more than seventeen countries, performed thousands of shows in front of millions of people all over the globe, but it will also provide you with a respite from life that is often way too stressful and serious. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the bobsled run…

It’s a wild ride.

Author; LBC

Introduction

I’ve traveled a lot of places, I’ve seen a lot of things in this life of mine. I’m wise for my age. A lot of first impressions, mistakes I’ve made a few, but there’s just one thing in life that always remains true. When the sky is dark and there’s nothing left to lose, when you’re all alone and you’re lost and so confused, when you’re standing on the edge of life and thinking about jumping, when you’re down to nothing, God’s up to something.

Those are some of the words from one of my favorite songs I have ever written called "Up to Something." I have looked back on those words many times in my life and thought of them often during trying times to help me make it through. They still remain true today.

I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve seen more places in my life with a guitar on my back than I ever dreamed a small boy from Pennsylvania would. Tromping all over the place most of the time alone. Meeting strangers and making friends along the way. I have spent most of my life around music, and my personal faith, family and friends have always helped me make it through. I’ve seen good times and bad times, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, happy and sad and through it all I am still here. I have a lot of good memories, a couple of bad ones and a few regrets. However, mostly I have a lifetime of stories that I can share.

I never asked God to make me a singer/songwriter, it was a gift I was given and was smart enough to recognize early in life and work hard to refine my craft.

I am blessed with the things I have in my life - My family, my friends, my fans and my music. I am truly a LUCKY man, although at times it did not seem that way.

Here are a few stories and memories that I have on my amazing journey that can still continue. To quote singer/songwriter, Jamey Johnson, You Should Have Seen it in Color.

The stories in this book are true because I was there to witness them. On occasion my memories were blurred, but to the best of my ability this is how I remember them.

Nobody Saw It But Me

Living a lot of my life on stage, I feel I have a pretty good track record of being the only one who sees some strange shit. Good and bad. Being a patron of an establishment with music, as an audience member most of the time, your attention is directed to the stage. The audience watches me. What they don’t realize is, I watch all of them back. I have witnessed some of the strangest things you can imagine only from that viewpoint. Most of the time I see it all from MY vantage point. The problem lies there within. The ONLY one who saw it was YOU ALONE.

One of the things I love most about playing in a band is when you’re on stage and something happens in the audience. There is a good chance someone else saw it, too? You have witnesses. All with the same look - WTF? That Holy Shit moment in time. Most of my career I have witnessed it alone. Being a solo performer you are totally alone with an unrestricted view of everything. It can be mentally disturbing.

From that stage I have witnessed, fights, drunks, unimaginable behavior, sex, drugs and Rock and Roll. I have seen weapons, nudity, people passed out, carried out dead and alive. Some of the things I have witnessed left a scar.

In this book I will review some of those scars - moments in time that are burned into my brain as a memory. In the following pages, I hope to give you an inside look at me and why I am the way I am and do the things I do. What made Jeffrey. Remember some of the stories in this book I witnessed all by myself. I hope you enjoy them all.

Family

The best way to start this journey of memories is at the beginning. I was born Jeffrey Lee Smith March 22nd, 1970, in Bedford, Pennsylvania. Yes, my real last name is not Harris, it’s Smith. I was born the third child and oldest son to my parents, Jerry Lee Smith and Patricia Hershberger.

I grew up in a simple middle-class American town called Hollidaysburg in the middle of the central Pennsylvania mountains.

Both of my parents were born and raised in Bedford, Pennsylvania. They went to school together and met at the age of fifteen. My father was raised on a farm just south of Bedford in Mile Level. He was the oldest son to Francis "Star" and Virgie Smith. The Smiths were a hard-working blue-collar family. My grandfather Star ran a backhoe and my grandmother Virgie worked in the kitchen at a local nursing home. My dad and his younger brother, Jim, grew up with jobs to do around the house and on the little farm. Dad would have to get up in the morning, feed the animals, wake Jim for school, feed and dress him and then walk with him three miles to catch the bus to school. My dad never made it to school on Mondays, because after he dropped off Jim he would return to the house because Monday was laundry day. Dad left home at the age of thirteen and went to work on a nearby farm. Dad said when he was old enough he went to work. It was an ethic he learned and instilled in me and my siblings very young.

Mom grew up a few miles north of Bedford in the little village of Wolfsburg, the daughter of Thomas and Mary Louise Hershberger. She had an older brother Don, and she was the young daughter in the standard post-World War II family. Mom grew up in a white house with a picket fence with a Dad, Mom, Son, Daughter and family dog, the picture of America. My grandfather Tom was an electrician for the State of Pennsylvania and my grandmother Mary worked for the local doctor who delivered me. They went to church, belonged to the local Elks club, played golf and Bridge, and attended cocktail mixers and Saturday night dances. My mom grew up in a house built by her grandparents on a nice piece of land and it was well manicured. She was a high school majorette, in the band and among the more upper middle-class social scene. Mom grew up in a more comfortable environment than Dad.

My parents met, at the age of fifteen, one afternoon when my father was helping my grandfather Star dig a ditch for a waterline. Mom was visiting at one of her girlfriend’s homes and Dad walked over to talk to them. It was that simple, the moment my parents met and began to date. They stayed together until my father passed away in 1999.

At the age of sixteen, while still in high school, my mom became pregnant. Mom and Dad were married in Cumberland, Maryland on May 7th, 1958. Dad was seventeen and mom was sixteen. They had to get married in Maryland because at that time they were too young to be married in Pennsylvania. Dad moved in with Mom at her parents’ house and continued to go to high school and worked. My mom quit school after eleventh grade and began to prepare as a new mother.

In 1959 along came Pamela Sue, followed by Cindy Lou, Jeffrey Lee and finally my younger brother, Troy Lee. Mom and Dad began an unexpected family and marriage very young. All of us children were unplanned and later gained nicknames. Cindy was Quits, I was Slips and Troy was AH, Shit. There is an average of about five years between all children.

In 1968 my parents bought their first house in the little town of Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, about thirty minutes away from Bedford and my grandparents. A little white three-bedroom ranch house in Hollidaysburg is where I grew up with lots of neighbors and loads of kids playing outside.

We settled into our little family life and all had a part to play. Dad took a job working at a local furniture store and worked days while Mom was a stay at home mom with the kids. They owned a home, so there were always chores to be done around the house. Grass to be cut, bushes to be trimmed, leaves to rake, wood to stack, garbage to be taken out and so forth. We all had our jobs. Later if we were old enough to get a part-time job, you did, but you still had your jobs at home. I always say my father had children for three reasons. To cut grass, rake leaves and shovel snow. After all us kids moved out of the house, Dad bought a big-ass riding lawnmower with a bagger and a snow blower. He had a plan all along. We were just free labor like the Amish, but we had food on the table, a place to sleep and were warm. Everything was taken care of.

My parents helped with their jobs around the home as well. I worked a lot with my dad and my grandfathers and they taught me a lot about tools and how to fix things. Guy Stuff. I learned about how to fix almost anything and this was before the time when we had the convenience of stores like Home Depot, Lowes and Walmart. You had to fix things with what you had available. A whole lot of creative Redneck engineering went on. It may not be pretty, but it works, was said a lot. I learned lessons and information starting very young. Sometimes you have to think out of the box to get things to work. I grew up exercising my young mind to figuring things out, how they worked and how to fix them. I learned first-hand, use your time wisely, work smarter, not harder, have the right tools for the job and be safe. Still the most important underlying theme, Get to work!

We worked our whole life as a family. Dad started his own Insurance Agency and sold Real Estate later on. Mom eventually went back to night school. She got her GED the same year my younger brother Troy graduated. She said, I quit with the first and finished with the last. Mom took a job at a local Elementary Cafeteria and she loved that job and the kids that went through that school. Growing up, each year we went from schools to sports, to holidays, to grandparents’ visits, birthdays and family vacations. We were a normal hard-working, middle-class, Sunday church - going American family. We were raised right, taught respect and good moral values. We kids grew up and went off to college and began our own lives. Deeply instilled in us was the most underlying theme, Get to work!

It’s also important to know, no one else in my family played guitar and sang. My brother and sisters could only play a radio. We still have no idea where my Gift came from? Maybe the Mailman was a guitar player?

Elvis, The Beatles And Mom

For most of you this will come as a shock, but I, a lifelong musician and music fan, grew up in a home with little or no Beatles influence.

Four months after my birth, my oldest sister Pam was killed in an automobile accident. She was eleven years old when she died and my family was devastated. There was my dad and mom, my oldest sister Pam, my sister Cindy and Me, the baby boy, a typical American family until tragedy struck. I myself have no memory of my sister Pam at all. Just pictures and items around the house that belonged to her or involved her existence.

One of my most vivid images, still to this day is a photo taken of Pam, Cindy and me all together. Pam was holding baby me and the photo was taken by a professional photographer like Olan Mills. That picture has been on the shelf in my parents’ home my whole life. Although I have no memory of Pam, I have been told that she adored me as her little baby brother. I grew up knowing I had a Guardian Angel watching over me and still do.

When I was too young to go to school, even kindergarten, I spent the whole day at home with my mom. My dad was working and my sister Cindy went to school. In my parents’ Living Room we had a huge console stereo. Probably the biggest piece of furniture with the exception of the sofa. It was huge. Inside was a turntable, an AM/FM radio tuner and a place to store record albums. That stereo was a big part of my life growing up and my daily routine. It, along with the music, influenced me back then in ways I never could have imagined.

My parents had two places to store records in their home. One in the stereo and another piece of furniture just called The Record Cabinet which held albums and 45rpm’s from my parents and sisters. There were some great records in there. Upon my discovery of the music available, I would find the first albums belonging to a band called The Beatles. My sister Pam was a HUGE Beatles fan. She lived through Beatle Mania, had their records, and loved their songs and handsome looks. She was a Beatle Maniac.

Being young and naive, I would put on one of the Beatles records on the turntable and begin to listen. Soon after that, my mom would enter the room and ask me to put on something else and she would be crying? I didn’t understand. She would just ask me to put on a different record, not The Beatles. I was bringing up a horrible memory and had no idea. I would immediately change the record.

My parents and grandparents were all big music fans. I remember my grandparents on my Mom’s side and their record collection as well. They had big 78rpm records of Big Bands and Orchestras. They had records like Glen Miller and his Orchestra and were fans of Laurence Welk. We watched that every Saturday evening. My mom and dad were music fans as well. They were teenagers before and during the discovery of Rock n’ Roll. Mom was a fan of the cute boys like Pat Boone, but her record collection had more from one artist than anyone else, Elvis Presley. Yes, Mom was an Elvis fan. She was a teenager growing up during the discovery of Elvis and she was hooked. She saw his movies, bought the soundtracks and had a lot of his albums.

I remember learning very early during that time, that when she asked me to play something other than The Beatles, if I put on Elvis, Mom would sing and dance with me and stop crying. The Beatles were a cue to sadness, but The King made her happy again. Some of my earliest memories in life were there in that living room singing, dancing and laughing along with Mom to Elvis’ music. I used to stand on the stoop step to our fireplace and sing and dance making Mom laugh as she played along. That was my first stage. It would remain my stage for many years to come.

I have always heard the phrase, Music can either make you forget or remember everything. That’s so true. The sound of The Beatles music brought back a tragic memory in my family’s history and made my mother cry. I avoided Beatles music for years to come growing up. I still heard their music on the radio, but every time a song came on, Dad or Mom would change the station and never say a word.

Being a lifelong musician, it is very unusual to me that I grew up with no Beatles music as an influence on me. Elvis Presley’s music, on the other hand, had a big influence. That probably is one of the reasons for my mild obsession with Elvis’ music, life and history till this day. The Beatles played a huge part in a lot of musicians across the globe. They influenced future acts’ music, style and dreams to write songs and become famous. Not me in this case. It’s ironic that The Beatles were heavily influenced by Elvis and his music. Two of the biggest, most influential music acts in history. They influenced the World and generations to come. Strange how I grew up