Chapter Thirty-Four
Music and Mom
Eight years ago, at the age of forty, I picked up a guitar and
decided to learn how to play. I’d been regretting for years not having learned
to play guitar when I was a kid, back when my mind was still malleable enough
to soak up that kind of learning, and I didn’t have to work a job, pay bills,
pay taxes, keep the fucking car in running condition, or worry (too much) about
where my next meal was coming from. I also didn’t know then (as I know now),
that most of the guys in my high school who did
play guitar only knew three fucking
chords. But those three chords were getting them noticed. By girls. Pretty
ones. Those three chords were also getting them laid, by many of those same pretty girls. This was, naturally, the
most closely guarded secret in the halls of my high school. If word had gotten
out that taking just ten minutes to learn three chords yielded, like, ten
thousand songs, every non-athletic dude in Montgomery County would have been
buying, borrowing, or stealing a
guitar, just to have a shot at getting into the Jordaches of that girl in class
that they sat behind and fantasized about for an entire period.
But it turns out that, for me, playing guitar was (and is) another
artistic endeavor for making shit up. I was way too old (and married) at forty
to start playing guitar solely for the purpose of getting laid, but I did learn
something about myself that was kind of a surprise: I like making music way
more than I ever liked acting. I’m not nearly as good at making music (I’ve
been acting professionally all my adult life), but I have been picking,
plunking, and strumming for eight years now. So while I’m never going to be Jimmy
Page, or John Mayer, or even “Weird” Al Yankovic, I am turning into a pretty
good Larry Brantley, who sings and plays guitar with his band, McKinney Root.
Don’t look for us to be touring through your town any time soon. There’s only
three of us, we’re all middle aged (except for my upright bass player, who is technically
north of middle aged, but never acts like it), and we all have families and
full-time jobs. (Actually, I really don’t have a full-time job – meaning a job
I have to go to, and work forty hours a week, and fill out a time card and
Incident Reports, or attend Sensitivity Training. For which I am profoundly
grateful.) My point is, we like playing music together, but we also like going
home after 10pm on a Friday night, to sleep in our own beds and beg for sex
with our significant others. (I’m speaking only for myself in that last
sentence. Mostly.)
In music, as in every other creative undertaking I’ve ever had, I’m a
collaborator. Yes, I could probably make a few extra bucks playing wine bars
and restaurants and coffee houses as a solo act, but making shit up is just so
much more enjoyable for me when I’m doing it with other people. I’m a huge fan
of creating something that requires other people with skills and talents I
don’t have. Technology being what it is today, I know people who are their own
one-man bands, using foot percussion and looping and harmonizers to sound like
more than what they actually are: a guy (or girl) sitting on a stage, spending
more time pushing buttons than actually singing or playing an instrument. Mick
Fleetwood, interviewed in the film Sound
City, said it best: “The down side
[of music technology] these days is thinking that, ‘I can do all this on my
own.’ Yes. You CAN do this on your own. But you’ll be a much happier human
being if you do it with other human
beings. And I can guarantee that.” That’s coming from a guy who has
been making music with essentially the same group of friends (Fleetwood Mac)
for 37 fucking years. Pay attention,
young people.
I believe the reason I enjoy making music more than acting is twofold.
First, making music feeds my need for instant gratification, the pure joy that
comes from playing the right note, at the right time, and hearing my friends
and me sync up a harmony that has been eluding us, and suddenly it’s there, and we all hear it. You don’t
need an audience for that. You don’t need the appreciation of anyone other than
the guys and girls you’re playing with. It’s not quite an orgasm, but it’s
fucking close. Secondly, I’m much more willing to be vulnerable while singing
and playing than I ever have been as a character on TV or in film. You’ve no
doubt heard interviews with actors who say they are able to “lose themselves”
in a role. I have never been able to
do that. Not once. In twenty-three years of creating characters, whether they
ran for years on a TV series, or just thirty seconds on a commercial, I was
always on some plane of existence where I was still Larry. Most of the characters I ever played never required a ton of
vulnerability, but any acting coach worth a shit will tell you that the first
thing you must learn to do, if you wish to be a real,
honest-to-motherfucking-goodness actor, is let
go. Let go of yourself, your ego, your hang ups, your fears, blah blah
blah. I could never do it. Still can’t. I don’t really need to completely let
go of myself to be funny, and since funny is mostly what I’ve done in my
career, I’ve been okay with it.
Making music is the one artistic space in the universe where I can truly
say, “Fuck it,” and let everything
go. That doesn’t make me a great musician, or even a competent one. But it does
make me honest. I’ve had dozens of
pictures taken of me over the last few years while playing with the band, and I
find none of them very flattering. But I do find them honest. I make faces when
I sing certain songs that, taken out of context, might lead you to believe I
was in the process of shitting a porcupine. I don’t care. I have no
affectations on the music stage, because I simply don’t have the bandwidth for
them. I’m too busy trying to not fuck up the song; I have no time to think
about trying to look cool.
You totally thought I was kidding about
the “shitting a porcupine” face, didn’t you?
Since I picked up a guitar eight years ago, I’ve been incredibly
fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of musical talent where I live in North
Texas. Some of those talented folks even call me a friend, and have given me
lessons, tips and advice here and there, that has improved the quality of my
playing. But only one person gets all the credit for getting me started singing
in the first place, and that’s Brenda Patrick Brantley Cook. Also known as “my
mom.” I know I’ve said some unflattering things about my mom in these pages,
even if they are true, but I believe in giving credit where it’s due. Mom was a
hell of a singer back in the day. She was even part of a radio show back in the
Sixties and early Seventies. The Hillcrest Baptist Church in Austin, Texas was
one of the first to start recording sermons and music for later broadcast on
the radio. Mom was part of a trio of singers that provided the music for those
churchy programs. The trio was known affectionately as “God’s Golden Gigglers,”
for their propensity to start snickering at something or other during each
week’s taping, which led to giggling, which often proceeded to full-tilt
howling laughter. Evidently the more the pastor and the audio engineer would
try to get the girls back on task (they were, after all, singing traditional
hymns – not exactly light-hearted fare), the worse the giggling would become,
until everything had to shut down long enough for the cackling trio to wear
themselves out. This happened, I’m told, almost every single week for the
better part of nine years.
I first started singing in church, because that’s where Mom was singing.
Shortly after we moved to Conroe, our family joined the Mount Calvary Baptist
Church, a tiny white clapboard chapel with a gravel parking lot, an out-of-tune
piano, a reverend’s wife who could play a mean accordion, and a congregation
mostly left over from the Civil War. Mom would often play the piano to accompany
the choir, and one Sunday during service, while Mom was at the piano and the
choir was giving hell to “The Old Rugged Cross,” I got up from my pew, walked
over to stand beside Mom, and started singing harmony with her. I was, years
later, told by some family friend or other that the general belief was that, at
that moment, I’d been filled with the Holy Spirit, who had at that exact second
given me the ability, not only to sing, but to sing harmony. The plain truth is, I liked the sound our voices made when
she was singing one note, and I was singing a different one, but they somehow
blended. After that I’d pretty much stand beside the piano every Sunday that
Mom played. I had no real understanding of the words I was singing; it was the sound we were making together that
thrilled me.
Mom would spin me records from The Bill Gaither Trio, The Heritage
Singers, even the Oak Ridge Boys. It was all a little hokey for me, even at
that age – but it taught me to love harmony. We’d listen to tracks over and over,
and she’d teach me how to pick out parts, and which ones were in my range. Once
or twice we even sang duets at Mount Calvary, which was a little scandalous,
given that most of the folks in that tiny congregation had zero musical ability
whatsoever, and tended to look upon anyone demonstrating a talent they did not
possess as “showing off,” and quote James 4:16 (”As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil!”).
That was the first and only creative collaboration I ever had with Mom,
but it turned out to be one of the most important collaborations of my life,
because it gave me a deep and abiding love for music that is stronger now than
ever. But after Dad killed himself and Mom crawled inside a bottle, there were
no more duets for us around the old piano. I still sang, but only in my room,
and now I was accompanying the likes of The Eagles, The Allman Brothers,
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Mamas and the
Papas. As I got older and moodier, I delved into music where the focus was more
on instrumentation than vocals. But the love of harmonies never really left.
And when I finally decided in Middle Age to pick up a guitar, I picked up an acoustic.
I never wanted to learn how to shred Eddie Van Halen’s Eruption, but I did want to be able to perform some old John Prine
songs – in three-part harmony.
And
let me tell you: that’s some good shit.
