Baby Pictures: My Year on the Road with Baby Lester and the Buggybumpers

By B. John Burns

B. John Burns was a middle-class Catholic school graduate destined, in the eyes of everyone who knew him, for law school. But after an unexpectedly rousing reception for one of his original songs at his senior class talent show, the only destiny in his mind was to become a rock star. "Baby Pictures" is a compelling autobiographical novel that tells his story of a life touring on the road – filled with nightclubs, hotels, and all that came with it. This is the story of a lifestyle that no longer exists today, but one that should never be forgotten.

After a year of college, Burns dropped out in 1975, assuming that stardom awaited him outside the University.

For months he floundered hopelessly, searching for an entry into music. He joined his first band in January of 1976, a year that for him was a progression of false starts. Then, on Halloween Eve, he took a phone call from a stranger, a singer/guitar player/comedian who until then had worked for a west coast show band.

A month later, John was on the road with the Band. The eight months that followed were his coming of age. The band played the Holiday Inn circuit in thirteen states, from New Mexico to North Carolina, from Indiana to Wyoming. In several ways, John lost his innocence on the road. He nearly perished in a blizzard in the Badlands of South Dakota. His one and only skydiving lesson put him in the hospital in Texas. The people he encountered were a diverse cast of characters.

Throughout this one-of-a-kind book, readers will get first-hand insight into a life like no other. "Baby Pictures" is a snapshot of a lifestyle from a time gone by.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667841908

Book preview

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Copyright 2022

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-66784-189-2 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-66784-190-8 (eBook)

for

Baby Lester, Donna Marie,

Pete Trecazzi and his Hot Rod

&

The Great McGonagall

Steve Wilkinson

You never forget the people you travel with.

Contents

Acknowledgments

If Anyone Asks

Halloween

Nineteen Seventy-Six

Baby Lester and Donna Marie

Odebolt

Independence

Cedar Rapids

Fayetteville

Worthington

Nineteen Seventy-Seven

Albuquerque

Abilene

Independence II

Buffalo

Tiffin

Pierre

Indianapolis

Wilkesboro

Sioux City

Detroit Lakes

Pocahontas

Kokomo

Buffalo II

The King is Dead

The Real World

B. John Burns

The Music of B. John Burns

Acknowledgments

I am sincerely grateful to Alex McDavid and Theresa McClure, who lent their skilled eyes to me for careful readings of the fourth and fifth drafts of this book, respectively. Admittedly, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. Hopefully, none of them appear in the pages of this work.

And thank you to Baby Lester, for not firing me.

If Anyone Asks

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791.

Ludwig van Beethoven lived from 1770 to 1827.

John Ono Lennon lived from 1940 to 1980.

If, for whatever reason, anyone ever asks you "When did B. John Burns live?" there is a definite, unequivocal answer.

B. John Burns lived from Halloween Eve, 1976 to August 19, 1977.

Three days after Elvis died.

Halloween

The lot was empty as I arrived at Saint Augustin Church. My concern that I might be locked out was unfounded, as one door to the classroom below the parish hall was unlocked. Right there in the classroom, I changed into the white tuxedo slacks, the ruffled shirt, the white dress socks and the white patent leather shoes. The bow tie, cummerbund and the snow-white coat and tails were laid out on the arm of a sofa, as the wedding would not start for almost two hours.

June 9 was, thankfully, an enclave in the rain-soaked dreariness that was spring, 1990. With relatives and friends coming in from Massachusetts, New York, Tennessee, Wisconsin, California and who knows where else, I gratefully acknowledged our good fortune in having chosen a wedding day on which temperatures rose to the mid-70’s and there was not a cloud in the sky. That morning, I rose early and ran the six miles into the cornfields and pastures surrounding Easter Lake. Then I spoke on the telephone with my cousin Alison from Tampa and my grandmother in Worcester, neither of whom were able to come to Des Moines for the wedding. It was the last conversation I would have with my father’s mother in which she knew who I was.

Considering the business at hand, I felt quite relaxed seated alone in the basement of Saint Augustin. Pam would arrive within the half-hour with her hairdresser. The photographer was scheduled at one for group poses. In the meantime, there was a piano in the room. I pulled out the bench, removed the lid, and studied the keyboard pensively for a few moments before beginning to play. Random chord progressions and melodies. Stream of consciousness.

Pam was a little late. Family and other members of the wedding party trickled in, staking out dressing rooms to change into gowns and tuxedos. Until the photographer made his entrance, there was nothing for me to do but play.

A faint voice wafted in through the open door from the parking lot. Spewing an incessant succession of puns and one-liners with machine-gun velocity, it held the unmistakable tonality of my best man. Ah, that voice. A voice that recently came to me only through long distance telephone calls from Omaha, every 8 or 12 or 16 months. The first time I heard that voice, it was on a cassette tape played to me 14 years earlier.

As hands coaxed a soft improvisation from the church piano, my thoughts drifted back -- to Steve Wilkinson’s basement family room, summer of 1976. Still reeling from the failure of yet another band, I was invited there to discuss putting something together to play around the Des Moines area. A band of some sort. Any kind of band. Steve himself had just left a five-man lounge act -- Goss and Lisdahl, out of California. He had tapes to prove it. We listened to many tapes.

Dave Goss and Tori Lisdahl were, I learned, a Barbie and Ken outfit that covered all the hot disco and pop tunes of the mid-70’s. They had marginal musical ability, average singing voices, but marvelous stage presence. In each 45-minute set, Dave and Tori performed for about 30 minutes, and then walked off and let the backup band take over. That’s when things got a little strange.

Goss and Lisdahl’s backup band consisted of Steve, the drummer, a female bass player, Donna Black, and her husband, Lester. Baby Lester, as Steve called him. In character, Baby Lester ranted in a shrill, manic voice, assaulting the audience with weapons drawn from his vast catalogue of lewd underwear jokes and a suitcase full of props. Donna, his straight man, tolerated this silliness for only so long, until she demanded to see the King. After considerable coaxing, Baby Lester would vanish and, to the tune of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra (the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme), the King would emerge triumphantly. The King, of course, was Elvis -- with still a year coming to him at the time.

From the timbre of their taped voices, I formed mental pictures of this Baby Lester character and Donna. Lester, I decided, was a tall, thin preppy type with a greasy cowlick, something like Reggie in the old Archie comic books. My Donna had yellow hair pulled into two ponytails, and chubby cheeks.

Steve’s efforts to organize a band ebbed and flowed sporadically through the summer of 1976, and ultimately fizzled. In the meantime, I worked wherever work was available. On Halloween Eve, I had a playing job at the Canopy Lounge in the Plaza Bowling Lanes at the intersection of Douglas Avenue and what was then Harding Road (now Martin Luther King Boulevard), with two members of an earlier band. The trick-or-treaters were already coming to my parents’ house, and my father greeted them in the witch’s costume he brought out once a year for the occasion, as I dined on my mother’s famous spaghetti casserole before leaving for the gig.

The telephone rang during dinner. Being closest to the phone, I took the call.

Is this Mister John Burns? inquired a loud, unfamiliar voice.

That depends, I responded, in a guarded effort to avoid walking blindly into some unwelcome distraction.

Steve told me you were a funny guy, said the stranger, in what was sounding too much like the opening of a prepared spiel. It’s Lester Black -- from Omaha. Steve and I are putting a band together.

I play with two Steves.

This would be Steve Wilkinson. I need a keyboard player and he says you’re our man. I guess I should audition you first. How should we do this? How about this, do you have a piano in the room?

No, the piano’s down in the basement.

Well, set the phone at the top of the stairs, and run down and play something so I can hear how you sound.

So, like a trained show poodle, I jump up from the dinner table, drop the receiver on the floor, and scamper down to the basement to audition for someone, and I don’t even know who the hell it is. And my mother keeps asking what’s going on, and I can’t tell her because I have no idea myself. I can’t say today what song I auditioned with. I’m sure it was something I wrote, probably Mother Blues, Don’t You Love Your Son. Then I ran back upstairs and picked up the receiver.

I like that, the caller said. So when can you start?

"But who are you?"

I thought Steve told you. My wife and I are the rhythm section from his old band.

Then it hit me. It was like getting the call from Frampton himself. (Remember, this was 1976).

I know you! I screamed. You’re Baby Lester, on the tapes.

I made him do the Baby Lester voice to verify it, and it was him. Then he started talking about going out on the road. I have a week lined up with Jack Caldwell’s country band near the end of November, I explained, and I have to fulfill that commitment. Lester was hoping we could start sooner, but he agreed. We would all meet at Steve’s to rehearse before I left for Jack’s, he told me. After Thanksgiving, we would go out on the road.

The road.

From the beginning, I understood that if I was truly serious about the music I would inevitably find myself on the road. If you want to make it in the business, I had been told in Nashville, New York and even West Des Moines, you have to do the road. I had friends in bands who went on the road, and I envied them. The middle-aged boozers hanging around the Musicians Local rehearsal hall talk incessantly about the road -- how it ruins marriages and turned them into hopeless drunks. But there is no substitute. I dreamed about going on the road.

At some time in the future.

But now the call had come. It was my time to put up or shut up. It was not just some band that called, either. It was Baby Lester. The mythic legend of Steve Wilkinson’s basement jam sessions. I noticed as I hung up the telephone that my mother and my father had set down their forks and were trying to make some sense of the frenetic one-sided conversation, the scramble downstairs and the four-minute piano concert.

All appetite for my mother’s casserole was displaced by the excitement of having suddenly been handed, by my standards at least, the keys to the big time. What a relief it was going to be, finally having a steady gig. For as long as the Baby Lester thing worked out, there would be no more bands thrown together on Friday mornings to muddle through long four-hour sets on Friday and Saturday nights. No more weeks, and months, without any work at all -- except, of course, the Pinkertons thing.

At the same time came a rush of panic. In my twenty years, I had never supported myself. Could I hack it with a serious band? Would they be disappointed with me once they really heard me play? The summer of 1976 had been a pleasant one for me. Maybe I wasn’t ready to leave home. What would I tell Norm and Tony, who I was playing with that night at the Canopy Lounge? We were talking about putting something together.

After two sets with Norm and Tony, however, I felt little regret about breaking the news to them. We came in unrehearsed, and without a bass player. We rented a bass guitar with the intention that Norm and I would switch off on the bass and let the other play lead and rhythm -- with Norm on the guitar and me on the Rhodes electric piano. Some musicians with whom I’ve played can jam convincingly for four sets. As good a friend as he was, Norm unfortunately wasn’t one of them. And neither of us was much of a bass player. In four years of playing professionally, Halloween, 1976 was for me among the longest, most painful nights on stage.

Rather than the three- or four-chord progressions upon which an unrehearsed band generally will rely to fake its way through four sets of music, Norm came in with an armload of sheet music from Broadway shows, and only one copy of each. I doubt there were four songs that night in which the three of us were playing the same music at the same time. My original songs were no less complex. Norm tried to follow on the bass, using the same stab-in-the-dark walking rhythm on every song.

What kept the evening from being total humiliation was the fact that it was Halloween Eve, and the regulars were already too inebriated to distinguish our lame efforts from the records we were trying to cover. A special breed is out bowling on a Saturday night, and then cooling off in a little room like the Canopy Lounge -- especially on a Halloween Eve. I admired the creativity of their costumes, but when I returned two months later with Baby Lester and the Buggybumpers I realized that’s just how they dress.

I managed to assuage any feelings of guilt about running off and disappointing Tony and Norm with the belief that they were as disgusted as I was with the way the night had gone. Certainly no one would raise the question of a second gig. But Tony did, and I had to tell him. I had to tell him I was going out on the road with another band at the end of the month. I had to tell him there wasn’t room in the new band for either him or Norm, since Steve Wilkinson would be the drummer and Baby Lester the guitar player.

I know. I was doing the same thing to them that a different Steve had done to Tony and me just two months earlier, when he put us together in a band and then shuffled off to Houston. I felt like a complete shit. I packed up the Rhodes, took my $75, and made for home.

About a mile down Douglas Avenue, something was going seriously wrong with my sky-blue 1966 Buick Electra 225 -- the Blue Angel, as I called her. The engine suddenly died. I coasted into the parking lot of the Here’s Johnny’s Restaurant and popped the hood. I had absolutely no knowledge of auto mechanics, and have none to this day, but I deduced that the problem might be related in some manner or form to there being no fuel left in the tank.

I slammed down the hood of the Angel in a fit of intense Irish fury over my stupidity -- and only then discovered I had managed to lock the car door with the keys still in the ignition. The hits just keep coming.

A family of seven came out of the restaurant which, at 2 a.m., was closing down for the night. I accepted their offer of a ride to my West Des Moines home, where I called a cab to drive me and my spare keys and my two-gallon tank to a 24-hour Amoco station.

Don’t be foolish, my father said, awakened by the commotion downstairs. I’ll drive you out to your car.

No, I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want to talk to anybody. I don’t want anybody’s help. I just want to get my goddamned car and go to bed.

The whole ordeal, including a stop for a club sandwich and fries at the Country Kitchen, ended around 4:30. Just before bed, I dug into my pocket for what was left of the proceeds of our miserable Halloween gig. Fifteen dollars. I tried the other pocket. Nothing. Same with the back pockets. Where’d the damn money go? I know I had given the cab driver a five and told him to keep the change. That driver must have gotten a hell of a tip.

I slept little that night and woke up feeling violated. I worked my butt off for fifteen lousy bucks. I can’t believe I took that stupid job at the Canopy Lounge. I can’t believe I let myself run out of gas. I can’t believe I locked the keys in the car at 2:30 in the morning. I can’t believe I agreed to go out on the road with Baby Lester.

Wait.

The road.

That’s not a bad thing, is it? I sat up, opened the curtains and looked out -- into a cool, breezy autumn day. My favorite kind. The kind of day I might be going to a Hawkeye game if I was still at the University of Iowa. This is good, I thought. Tomorrow is November. There’s the election, the gig at Jack’s, and then out on the road with a serious rock band. Baby Lester and the Buggybumpers.

The adventure of my lifetime.

Nineteen Seventy-Six

If I had been born two or three years earlier, it would have been Vietnam -- or Montreal, or Leavenworth. Those were the choices. To look back in one’s old age satisfied that he has lived fully, there must be that one adventure carving a distinct swath between youth and adulthood. For my father, for instance, there were the summer hitchhiking trips to Idaho during college to fight forest fires, and then the Pentagon during Korea.

For me the Great Divide, most definitely, was Baby Lester and the Buggybumpers. Over two-thirds of my life ago, everything preceding 1976 is a blur, as if it all happened to someone else. All that has passed since is clear recollection. And every thrilling moment of that rich experience is permanently etched into my memory. In the four and a half decades that have followed, it was always my firm resolution to one day sit down and set that recollection to paper, while it is still fresh. It is a story I was not prepared to tell in 1977 -- or 1987.

Anyone trapped in an audience for my longwinded accounts of when I was on the road might be led to believe that the travels with Baby Lester and the Buggybumpers spanned a period of years. In truth, however, the first call on Halloween Eve and the one telling me the band would play no more came just 293 days apart. In less than a year, we performed in 13 states, and traveled through 18. I broke my back, wore out two cars, nearly had a finger amputated, nearly perished in a blizzard, met numerous celebrities and, for the only time in my life, had a gun pointed at my head by a sultry redhead in a burgundy felt jumpsuit.

I was an unlikely candidate for the road. I was born in the suburbs, living in one or another my entire life prior to meeting Baby Lester. We were by no means deprived. We were a solid, loving, middle- to upper-middle class family. In the eyes of my family, and myself, I was destined to become a lawyer. All my early heroes were lawyers -- JFK, Bobby, Gene McCarthy (actually JFK and McCarthy weren’t lawyers. I just thought they were). Even Nixon.

But then came February 11, 1974. The Dowling High School Senior Talent Show. There is a poster hanging on the wall of my music room advertising what would be the Beatle’s first performance in the United States on February 11, 1964 at the Washington Coliseum. My own baptism would come exactly ten years to the day after that.

I had taken piano lessons steadily for six years. One afternoon in September of 1972, for the first time, I managed to write a song, a lame effort called Last Airport Home. A year later I was writing one new song every day. But until I saw the notice about February 11 in the Dowling Aquin, it never occurred to me to expose them to anyone besides my most intimate friends. The Senior Talent Show was the debut for me and my original tunes. I bounded onstage wearing a Frankenstein mask and played six bars from Edgar Winters’ Frankenstein. The original piece that followed was a rocker composed especially for the performance, Raw Spaghetti Doesn’t Bother Me, But You Are My Onion. What I heard then was something I did not expect, and something I had never experienced before.

Applause.

Enthusiastic applause. I went completely numb, and my head seemed like it would explode.

Later in the show I did an encore with members of our State Championship Runner-Up football team, covering Guy Marx’s Loving You Has Made Me Bananas and my own horrid Ain’t No Woman Gonna Get My Job Blues. It was working. I looked down over two hundred faces that had generally ignored me for three years. Today, I had them in the palm of my hand.

Forget being a lawyer. I had found a better destiny.

It was a simple matter of time, I knew that day, before I would be discovered by some agent or promoter. And the rest would be rock and roll history. By the time I graduated from high school, I had written the words and music to nearly two hundred songs. Until I had sat down and written my first song, musical composition was a species of inexplicable sorcery. I certainly couldn’t do it. These songs I wrote, I reasoned, would have to be good, simply because they were original. If I had a catalogue of original songs, I was a commodity the music publishers and record producers couldn’t ignore.

The only lingering question really was when to turn professional -- when to publicly announce to the world that I was ready to don the mantle of superstardom. I was realistic enough to realize that none of this would set well with the parents, at least at first. And, while my parents would ultimately come around when they saw for themselves just how lucrative the business was for someone at my level of talent, I knew that a decision not to attend college would be a certain source of conflict. And being that I depended upon my parents for every dime that went in and out of my pocket, procrastination was very easy. So, after graduating from high school, I took a summer job as a Pinkerton guard and then headed off in August to the University of Iowa.

All through my freshman year, my eyes remained focused on the overarching objective -- to drop out with as little resistance as possible, record a ground-breaking debut album and head out on a highly successful concert tour. One half of all the money I had earned over the previous summer went to the purchase of a Baldwin organ for my dormitory room. Being the freshman with the organ in his room, needless to say, became a source of instant notoriety for me, and for my two lucky roommates.

Confident that my future was set, I was not besieged by the pressures that tormented other freshmen. It was unnecessary to waste time wading through tedious texts, memorizing irrelevant matter for masochistic examinations. Group lectures were time for reading mail, drawing cartoons and checking out the women I was too timid to approach. I went to the Big Ten football games, dabbled in local political activism, and wrote song after song after song after song on the Baldwin organ. Rifling through them today, I cannot find a single one worth keeping. At the time, I wasn’t aware that it mattered.

As the end of the school year approached, I knew that it was time to make my move. I have never, before or since, experienced anxiety of the level that haunted me during the final month or two of that second semester, as I prepared to announce to my parents that I was leaving school for a career in music. I resolved to take it up with them over spring break. But I couldn’t muster the courage. Spring break came and went and I was still a student. When I returned to Iowa City, I sat down at the typewriter and composed the letter every parent dreads to receive.

My father responded within the week. His letter was neatly typed, I imagine by a typist outside of his office to spare the additional embarrassment. My decision was a foolish one, he noted, and Mother had cried for hours after my letter came. They would, however, support whatever path I chose to take, as long as it was well-considered.

There were two conditions. First, I would accompany the family to the Cape in June before leaving for wherever it was I had to go. And second, I had to meet with a psychiatrist before I did anything. These were, I saw even then, reasonable requests from someone whose world had just been turned upside down.

The psychiatrist wasn’t a bad idea -- not because I questioned the sanity of my actions, but in view of the fact that in coming out of the closet, in a manner of speaking, I had endured probably the most traumatic few months of my life to that point. The doctor, however, seemed as uncomfortable with me as I was with him.

What is it you’re here for? he asked me, after a few moments of us staring across the desk at each other.

My father sent me. I’ve decided to become a musician.

Do you play an instrument?

I’ve played the piano for eight years.

Well, then, your decision seems perfectly normal. Risky, but sane. Is there anything else?

Not that I’m aware of. You tell me.

So, to earn his fifty bucks, the psychiatrist asked me a very short list of questions about things I like and things I don’t like, and pronounced me of sound mind. The final hurdle to starting my new career had been cleared.

I know, when I say this today, people think I’m just trying to be funny. But it’s absolutely true. In May of 1975, I honestly believed that I would arrive home from college, unpack my things, and immediately assume my new role as the rock superstar of the ‘70s. It wouldn’t even be necessary to send out my material. The word would get out -- John Burns has cleared his calendar. He’s tanned, rested and ready. By fall, the debut album would be released and, with the reunited Beatles as a back-up band, I would tour the world. Maybe that psychiatrist missed something after all.

Of course, it didn’t happen that way.

I got my job back as a Pinkerton guard, to hold me over until I figured out what the hell to do. Getting paid to wear a uniform and sit around and do nothing was fun when it was only for the three months between high school graduation and the start of my freshman year at Iowa. By late July, I began thinking in terms of supporting myself on $2.10 an hour, working my way up to Pinkerton sergeant, and doing this for the rest of my life. What they were giving me were the graveyard shifts all alone in the dark, damp warehouses. For weeks at a time, the only human voice I would hear would be that of Cleo, the dispatcher, to whom I was expected to call in every hour on the hour. For the summer of ‘75, I lived in a dark tunnel with no apparent exit. I have never felt like that before or since. I had no idea what to do.

Through it all, I never stopped writing music. All of it was primitive, uncommercial and unappealing. But it made me feel good. By the end of that summer, I had written my first 500 songs. To that date, I still had no real concept of how to write a song. What I had learned was how to speak through music.

It was a satisfying voice.

My parents could see that something was happening to me, though I thoroughly isolated myself and rebuffed all efforts to help. One night after work, in August, my father came downstairs with one of his carpool buddies, to listen to me practice.

I know someone in Nashville, the friend told me, who sells insurance, but used to be a record producer. If you send him a tape, he might listen to it and give you some direction.

By that point, I was willing to do anything I could to dig myself out of the hole I had fallen into. I made an appointment for September 5 at Lariam’s, an 8-track recording studio just south of Ingersoll Avenue on 28th Street, selected 30 minutes of what I considered to be my best material, and proceeded to rehearse, day and night, until the afternoon of my studio gig.

To listen to that tape today is acutely embarrassing. Seeing what it meant to me, and how it had brought me out of my shell for at least the time being, everyone -- my parents, my sisters and my friends – was tremendously supportive, telling me what a work of genius it was.

You need to get out and sell yourself, I was told. Go to the cities. Pound the pavement. Knock on doors.

So I did. I gathered all the money I had saved since the school year ended and bought one of those $100 unlimited one-month Greyhound Bus tickets. I would go to Nashville. I would go to New York. I would visit Boston and Washington, seeing friends and relatives all over the eastern United States. Best of all, I would escape the stagnation I had drifted into in Des Moines working for Pinkertons.

Everyone who had salved my struggling ego with lofty praise after the recording of my demo tape was now preparing me with Don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t happen all at once, and The competition is unbelievable out there. What they didn’t realize was that, as unrealistically high as I had estimated the quality of my songs, my new-found excitement was truly over the prospect of travel -- and not over hopes of instant superstardom. On the last Friday of September 1975, just after dinner, I boarded the Greyhound Cruiseliner for the initial leg of my very first cross-country solo road trip.

The first leg was a short one. Shortly after midnight I arrived in Iowa City to stay overnight with my sister and her roommates. Politely, they listened to my demo tape, and commented that we were poised on the brink of musical history. Tomorrow I would arrive in Nashville.

Nashville, especially in those days, was the country music capitol of the world. At the time, I didn’t write any country music. To be honest, I loathed country music. I was told, however, that there was more than just country in Nashville, and that the publishers’ doors were open to the hungry songwriters.

It didn’t happen in Nashville.

I would return there nine years later to pitch my songs. By that time, Nashville was another New York or Los Angeles. In 1986, a writer could no longer simply walk up and down Music Row, calling on publishers. By ‘86 you had to write to the publisher for permission to submit. Unsolicited songs are rejected summarily.

But in 1975, Music Row was reminiscent of Tin Pan Alley. All the doors were open. A young writer like myself could easily obtain a half-hour audience with any publisher -- except for the monsters like Columbia or Tree. There were six songs on my demo. Publishers listened to 15 to 20 seconds of each song, then fast-forwarded to the next. The assessments of my work were painfully consistent.

Your writing is not commercial. You write for yourself, not your audience. I don’t understand your lyrics. You need to listen to the work of successful songwriters and ask yourself why their songs succeed and yours don’t. You need to work with other musicians. You need to find a band.

Had the criticism not been so consistent, my nature would have led me to characterize them as products of ignorance and jealousy. But now, for the first time, I was coming to the realization that perhaps the world doesn’t owe me a living for the simple act of slapping together three verses and a chorus. And it really didn’t bother me, either, because I was having a hell of a lot of fun down there in Tennessee. I stayed at the home of my cousins, the Thompsons, whom I hadn’t seen for probably 12 years. They were toddlers the last time we’d had any contact but, though still in high school, by 1975 they had grown to become world class party animals. In one week, I saw a side of Nashville many permanent residents never encounter in a lifetime.

On my very first night at their house, my Uncle Dick and Aunt Pat listened to my demo. Pat, who in her lifetime has never breathed an unkind word to anyone, remained in character. Pat praised me. Dick, who had left a six-figure sales position with American Optical several years earlier to earn a doctorate in Literature and a new career as a high-school teacher, was more honest.

It’s just too cerebral, Johnny, he told me. This is Nashville. Forget everything you’ve heard about Nashville being the big cosmopolitan center of art and music. It’s all that shit-kicking stuff down here. Broken marriages, rivers of booze and ruined lives. If you don’t have that in your songs, it doesn’t work for you in Nashville.

Don’t discourage him, Dick, Pat protested in my defense. I think they’re wonderful songs. And I don’t like that word, shit-kicking.

Dick, of course, was right. The lesson was reinforced on the very next day, my first on Music Row. By Wednesday, it was apparent that my entire