The Burden Of Talent

A Few Thoughts About Fame and Frustration.

I have a bittersweet task this week. I’m learning a song by my good friend Ric Taylor. It’s a beautiful song. One that only Ric could have written. I hope that I can do it justice Sunday, when I sing it for a gathering of Ric’s friends and fellow artists as we celebrate his life.

Ric Taylor passed away suddenly in late November.

I have a number of other half-written columns that I should finish up and post, but frankly, with Ric’s chords ringing beneath my fingers and my own voice singing his words, I haven’t been able to think about much else.

I go back twenty-five years with the guy, both of us being fixtures among L.A.’s singer-songwriters. People known by many perhaps, but obscure to the greater world. We usually crossed paths at Kulak’s Woodshed in NoHo on Monday nights. That eccentric, lovable little open mic.

Kulak’s has been a blessing for those of us who are afflicted by the need to write our thoughts and feelings into songs, and then play and sing them wherever we think that they’ll be appreciated.

It is an affliction. Especially for those who are really good at it, but have not become well known. Below a certain level of proficiency, playing and singing is a pleasurable hobby. But when you have mastered the art and craft of it as deeply as Ric did, it’s much more than a pastime.

Instead, it’s a love unrequited. A mission thwarted. It’s your life’s work unfulfilled.

We were already grown men by the time we became friends. Some would think it unbecoming to be out among fresh-faced kids when we were clearly too old to quote ‘make it’ in the music business. But like myself, and other veterans of the scene, Ric was a lifer. This was what he did. And quitting was never an option.

When talking about success in the music business, I like to sum it up like this:

“You have to be well prepared. You have to work really hard. And then you have to be struck by lightening.”

However hard you work and prepare, much of your fate comes down to dumb luck. That’s just the sad truth.

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It was unseasonably warm this past weekend in Los Angeles. I took my Sunday walk at sunset, and was surprised to notice that several of the houses I passed were hosting parties. Nice late-model SUVs lining sections of my usual route. One little wood-frame cottage had something going on in the backyard. Excited voices carried down the driveway to the street where I was passing by. I wondered what the heck was going on.

And then a sudden synchronized shout of group-disappointment reminded me. Oh yeah … Pro Football playoffs.

Oddly this year, there is a dove-tailing of sports and music brought to us by Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. A young woman functioning at the very pinnacle of show business, being joined at the summit of celebrity by her football-star boyfriend.

Sort of a perfect illustration for my little maxim. Without a doubt, both of these young people have put in the work. But if chance had not brought them the physical gifts and commercial opportunities required to hit that peak … they’d be hobbyists.

Their relationship is something akin to a corporate merger, isn’t it? Now being processed by a giant well-oiled publicity machine.

I won’t get into a rant about the role of marketing and media in deciding what society will deem to be important. Suffice it to say that this couple’s work and talent have been met by a lightening storm.

Ric also put in the work and the preparation. You don’t just pick up a guitar and play it like he could. You don’t blindly stumble onto musical compositions like the ones that underpin his inimitable lyrics.

And he did try to get in the way of a lucky break. He played out regularly in a big music town. He entered song-writing competitions and won a few. He toured some and courted radio-airplay in every way that he knew how.

Here he is photobombing yours truly at a conference held for just that reason. To help talent collide with opportunity.

What were we doing there? Couple of middle-aged guys like us? What were we hoping to find? Some stray miracle of chance that would push ourselves and our songs into the spotlight? Maybe.

Or maybe we were just collecting a little bit of recognition from our peers.

The problem that people like us faced is that the random hand of fortune had closed the door that either of us might have walked through, had we knocked on it a decade earlier than we did. By the time either of us knew what we had, the searchlight of fame had moved on to other musical styles.

L.A. had been the glowing center of our art form in the early seventies. But at that time I was in high-school and Ric was a shirtless stud guiding canoe adventures through the rapids of the American West. And singing to co-eds around the camp-fire.

He was wrong-place right-time, and I was right-place wrong-time. The fates have to line up just so, for the doors to swing wide as you arrive prepared. Trends rise, and after a while, they recede.

The leading wave of that trend found Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills & Nash, and Jackson Browne, honing their craft at The Troubadour in West Hollywood. America needed some tuneful philosophers to guide us through the materialistic forest as sixties idealism began to fade.

Fame shouldn’t be the primary concern of an artist. But if you aim to do it at something more than starvation level, some degree of renown is necessary. People can’t buy what they’ve never heard of.

The early nineteen-seventies would not have recognized a creature like Ms Swift. Packaged up in a Vegas-style sequined body suit? That sort of thing was known to be the death of art. Like a bloated Elvis Presley holed up with his entourage of enablers.

When people like Ric Taylor learned the craft, it was an insult to call a song ‘commercial’. Back before MTV, and radio-playlists, and American Idol gutted our music.

The merchants of fame want all of it to go to a very few, so that getting their own cut of the dough is less complicated. It’s more cost effective for the managers and the record-execs to funnel all of the attention and riches to one MASSIVE touring act than to divide it between fifty smaller acts on fifty smaller tours.

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Most people who can absolutely light up an open mic are doomed to failure if they try to hit the big-time. And most of them know it. That’s a lot to carry around with you. Especially when people thank you after a set, saying, “You have a real gift”. Especially when you’ve been hearing that since before your hair started turning gray.

Ric heard that all the time. Hell, I must have told him fifty times myself. That didn’t make his burden any lighter.

Ric would smile when his peers reminded him how great he was. But it was a smile with sadness at its edges. He wanted so badly to get the songs to all of the people whose lives would be made better by them. When all of your savvy friends dig your songs, there must be a million others who would also dig them. And a few thousand who desperately need them.

That’s why Ric turned up at the open mics and drove two hundred miles for a gig that wouldn’t even cover his gas money. He was a singer-songwriter, goddamn it! And that’s the goddamn job!
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I set up a minimalist busking rig out at the bluffs Saturday afternoon, and played for whoever happened by. I didn’t tell anybody I’d be there. It was just me and my dear friend Alexia who drove me there because my van was in the shop.

I tried to force all expectation from my mind. Just a guy with a guitar and voice singing for free, in case anybody needed to hear some songs.

For most of an hour, I was ignored. And then people started to gather around and listen. The emotion of each song registering on every face. That opened me up and buoyed me up. Until the burden that I bear, was bearing me.

And it all made sense for a little while. By the time that I packed up and my new friends moved over to watch the sunset, my heart was as full as my tip-basket.

Each of us has a talent … a gift. Something of which we are uniquely capable. Yours probably has nothing to do with anything mentioned here. But it’s in you nonetheless. If you ask me, the only requirement that comes with such a gift, is that you pass it along. That you contribute what you’ve been given with as little quid pro quo as your heart can manage.

I know that Ric never made the big impression that he wanted to make. But he surely made a big impression on those of us who knew and loved him. He never stopped hoping that the weight of his gift would turn lighter than air, and lift him up at last.

Somehow it’s fitting that he was found in his car by students after he had just finished teaching them. Passing it on as best he could, right up until the clock ran out.

They say it’s going to rain Sunday in Tarzana. The big outdoor event that Ric’s friends had planned to remember him, will probably have to move inside the little community house there. We’ll be overcrowded and probably wet. But we’ll be there, with his songs on our voices and each other in our eyes. And if eternity has a window, maybe Ric will be watching with a smile on his face; his burden lifted, his mission complete.

This is the song of his that I chose to learn and sing next Sunday in Tarzana. A rare appearance with a pick-up band of ace players.

Edit: The Ric Taylor Tribute Show has been postponed until April 7. Due to a very strong response, an outdoor show is our only option. And the big storm coming in would make a mess out of that. See you in April!!