by Shawn Colvin
“The Story” is a good song. I’m proud of that song. I’m proud of it because it wasn’t easy to write, but I managed a lyrically beautiful portrait—albeit one-sided, I admit—of what was hard at home. The story that was mine to tell is of my experience growing up, and it was certainly fraught. My father was angry, my mother was trapped.
Whereas I tended to blame myself early on for any upheaval, in my teens and twenties the picture began to balance out more, due in no small part to the discovery of my sister’s friendship. She gave me some perspective no one else in the family could or would—maybe it wasn’t all me. So I wrote the song to her. I’ve got our father hiding in the basement and our mother being a housewife cooking for us upstairs. I put my mother in a cast-iron dress in an effort to be sympathetic about the role that she and her generation of women were forced to take on in the 1950s: expected to marry early, have children, and become housewives. It was as burdensome for my mother as for the next person, and she really had more potential and better ideas than were allowed her back then.
At the end, I used the color red as a tool for pulling some things together—one of them being courage, one of them being heart, one of them being my sister’s skin—she’s very Native American–esque. And using red as a metaphor, or as a symbol, for blood, which I say in the end is thicker than water. The family bond remains. After I got sober and entered therapy, it seemed as if all any of us had was our stories, and that we qualify to exist and to take up space and to tell them. This was mine. I was born to be telling this story. I do regret saying, “I seem to be nobody’s daughter.” I was going through a process of trying to define myself, and it was essential right then that I reject whatever version of “daughter” I’d played up until that time. The sick one, the troubled one, the one you shake your head over. It was time to let it go, and in so doing I lyrically disowned Mom and Dad. I’m sorry for that. Believe me, I’ve tried to stop loving my family. It doesn’t work.
When I was still living in my apartment in Greenwich Village, my father called out of the blue one day and said, “Write whatever you want to write.” I think in his own way he was letting me know that he knew it hadn’t been easy and that he was willing to accept some responsibility. A few years later, when I was living in Venice, California, he called again. This time he asked what it was like for me growing up. “If you still want to know tomorrow morning, call me back,” I said. I was really going to tell him the truth, and I wanted to be sure he wanted to hear it. I wasn’t sure if he would actually call, but sure enough my phone rang the following morning, and it was my father on the line. We had a short but healing conversation.
I hope I have outgrown all this at this point. Being a parent—if that doesn’t give you some perspective and a little bit of forgiveness, then you’re made of stone. It’s hard. I don’t care what anybody says. There’s no manual. I was forty-two when I had my child, so I don’t have the excuse of being too young. My mother and I are much closer now than we ever were. I know she’s proud of me. My parents moved to Austin when my sister was pregnant with Grace, so they also were there when Callie was born, and then when my niece Frances, Kay’s second daughter, came along six months later. They are called Mimi and Papa, which sort of represents a new birth for them, too, becoming grandparents. All of us have new roles now. It’s been enlightening to say the least, to have my mother watch me parent and for me to watch her grandparent. I imagine she gets a kick out of the countless ways I am baffled by this absurd responsibility, and I’m soothed to see how Callie, a little piece of me, loves her Mimi and Papa.
I still love playing “Ricochet in Time.” How did I know, drunk in Berkeley and working in stained glass, that I’d be traveling for most of my career? I was weary then, and when I’m weary now, like last Friday when I did two shows in a row at the One World Theater in Austin, “Ricochet” speaks for me and shores me up. Even the line about daydreaming in my room … well, it was about my attic room in California, but it’s totally about my hotel room now. I didn’t take too many planes or know too many names back then, but these days I sure do. How did I know? I just sat up in that room drinking beer and out it came, the first two verses, on my Martin D-28. Nearly ten years later, I wrote the last verse in New York on East Third Street. I’m still amazed it survived all that time and that it shows no signs of fading. Transformation and travel. It still gets me.
When I got home from touring Europe with Suzanne in January of 1988, I was beat but I was full, full of longing to be a star, full of the rain in London and the churches in Italy and the dark mornings in Stockholm. Oh, my goodness, I felt worldly. My view out the window on Third Street looked smaller. There was such a vast universe out there—how was I going to be part of it? I knew that the only thing for it was pen to paper. This was now my job. I had jet lag, and I couldn’t sleep. I played guitar and lit candles and longed for my life to start, longed for the crazy drummer who escorted me through Europe, longed to go back there. I played some chords and sang, “It is the dead of the night, the dead of the night”—which it was. Then I did something new. I became a character in my own song, someone not me. I became Eleanor Rigby, one of all the lonely people, who sat in her room in London at night alone with her pen and paper. She had a life, too.
John and I had a major tiff about “Dead of the Night.” He had written an interlude for the guitar solo where the song changed keys. It was beautiful, but he wanted to be co-credited as a writer on the song. I was ultraprotective of the stuff I’d written alone, mostly because I could hardly believe I’d even done it, and John’s wanting credit just about undid me in the power-struggle department. I reared up and told him he could shove his interlude, and he backed down. The interlude stayed, and I kept sole credit as songwriter. You can imagine how the room looked after that standoff.
For as long as I can remember I’ve kept composition notebooks, the kind with the black-and-white splattery covers. Not as a kid, but by the time I made my living in bands I was keeping them. I wrote down lyrics to songs I needed to learn, to songs I wanted to learn (think twice before you tuck into “It’s All Right, Ma”), set lists, phone numbers, and all the games we’d play between sets, our favorite being a complicated affair we called the Alphabet Name Game.
Then I started writing with John and the composition notebooks took on new meaning. I actually composed—badly, perhaps, but I did. I suppose I have fifteen to twenty of them. With each new record I’d start a new one, so I have all the drafts of the songs I’ve written and drafts of ones I’ve never finished, like “Hurricane.” Maybe one day I’ll finish it. They live in my music room in varying states of decay.
Steady On was released on October 17, 1989, the same day as the earthquake in San Francisco. It was time for “the push.” It really amuses me now to remember my naïveté about the actual business of promoting a product—the product being me. I was on a huge label, Columbia, and they had the means to send me hither and yon to promote the record and to get me on TV, which was what they did. My little world was about to get much bigger.
I performed the song “Steady On” on both Letterman and Carson. It takes all day to rehearse for sound and camera blocking. Then you get dressed and made up, and then you wait till nearly the end of the show, when the music is slated to be taped. For three minutes you play your song on national television, and then you are done. It goes by fast. After the Carson show was over and I was walking back to my dressing room, Freddy De Cordova, The Tonight Show’s producer, walked beside me and thanked me for being on the show. I was still breathless and cooed back, “Oh, thank you for having me!” which must have been the oldest setup line in the book. He growled back, with a lascivious grin, “I’ve never had you!” Welcome to Old Hollywood.
A few weeks after I was on Letterman for the first time, I got a call from his producer; their musical act for the evening had canceled. Could I come in and do a song—like, right now? This is one of my fondest memories. I put on a thrift-shop green-printed minidress
, some little black pumps, a Kangol hat because I was having a bad-hair day, slopped on some makeup and went up to the studio, walked onstage, and played “Diamond in the Rough,” solo, no rehearsal—not necessary, since it was just me. Playing solo was something I was 100 percent comfortable with. I don’t mean to brag, but after I was done, David Letterman announced on the show that he wanted to marry me. He never followed up, though, the big tease. I think it was the minidress. Now it was time to head out on the promotional tour.
First I tackled the USA and learned about the real job of being a salesman. Radio was still a key factor in the success of an artist like me, that and relentless touring in hopes of creating a grassroots following built on hard work, not hype, of loyal fans, station by station and city by city. We reached out primarily to an album-cut-oriented format called Triple A radio, but Columbia believed I could possibly cross over to other, wider-reaching formats, like Top 40, which produced hits. The record company had radio representatives that covered different areas of the country. I would travel from one major market to another, and even some not-so-major ones, visiting any radio station that would see me, and thanks to Columbia a lot of them would. Once there I’d usually sing a couple songs live on the air and do a short interview. I’d do two or three of these a day. Then there was press, which meant taking up residence in a hotel bar and speaking with any publication that might be willing to talk to me. (I think my personal record was nineteen interviews in a row in Oslo.) At night I would do a show, sometimes in a tiny club where nobody came out to see me. That’s how you did it in those days. It was about making literal connections instead of virtual ones. It was a crazy amount of work, but it’s what you signed up to do, and thank God for it, because building my career slowly and steadily is at least part of the reason I’ve had some longevity.
But all the years of climbing into vans and going to crummy little dives and staying in worse motels didn’t prepare me for this. Maybe it was the isolation, maybe it was the pressure of finally getting my shot, or the weirdness of selling myself, or the inevitable exhaustion, but I wore down quick. After two months of it, I got a break at Christmas and just cratered. The depression was back, and instead of feeling rejuvenated because of the time-out, I actually sank further down. I remember sitting in the kitchen on West Fourth Street frantically talking on the phone to my friends, perusing self-help books. I was plagued by bleak thoughts, daily crying jags, and the undeniable sense that I did not have another round of promo in me. I might have been able to manage it if I could just have stopped, but now was definitely not the time to stop. This was it. I’d worked all my life for this.
My therapist, Myra, insisted I see someone who could prescribe an antidepressant for me, so I went to some pasty psychiatrist who gave me Prozac. Just like magic, three weeks later I was not only well, I was supercharged. Did most people walk around feeling this sense of overall well-being and optimism? I mean, it was really heaven.
Prozac was a great gift to me. I had many, many productive years writing songs, making and promoting records, traveling the world under its effect. The notion that this kind of drug can take away one’s creative spirit is caca to me. I thrived on it.
With the New Year, 1990, came new promise and new goals—I was going global. I went on my first international promotional trip, which I will never forget. The label was having a big conference in Sydney, Australia, and I was one of the new artists picked to go. It was a dream before I even got there—I was flown first class on Qantas. I could write this whole book about flying first class on Qantas. I had never flown first class anywhere. I was in a massive seat in the nose of a 747 with lovely Australian flight attendants feeding me and doting on me. I was thirty-two, but I might as well have been five. After being given steak and ice cream and chocolate for dinner, I was tucked in for the night. We flew over the South Pacific, and I woke up to a steaming cup of coffee with a view of the sun rising over Fiji out my window.
We came in to land over the red rooftops of Sydney, and I was shown how real men party. I will only say that there were goats in hotel rooms and that the mantra of the convention was “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” I was thoroughly charmed by the Australians and by the country itself—it was February and high summer, and Sydney was a tropical paradise. The convention moved at one point from Sydney to Hamilton Island on the Gold Coast, and I took a helicopter to the Great Barrier Reef to snorkel. Honestly, I still can’t believe it. We got dropped off on a plank in the middle of the ocean, where they tossed us some snorkel gear and dumped us overboard. It was spectacular.
From Australia I flew to Stockholm (the worst jet lag of all time; I was practically hallucinating) and all through Europe, doing much the same drill as I had in America, but with more exotic locations and languages. It was grueling, but so utterly enchanting. I was on stages in London and Amsterdam and Milan and Dublin and Glasgow and Oslo and Madrid and Hamburg, doing my show and my songs. By the time I got back to New York, I’d been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Folk category.
On February 21, 1990, I took Stokes with me to the Grammy Awards at Radio City Music Hall. I won. I still have the cassette tape from my answering machine that night. I just listened to it. Congratulations from so many! John, Kim, of course. My lawyer and my therapist! Buddy and Julie yelling “Yeehaw!” T-Bone Wolk, folks from back home in Carbondale. I’m struck by the outpouring of joy for me in these messages, and I feel so much pride in this achievement, more now than then, in fact. Just an award, yeah, but it was a proclamation. I turned out all right.
First Grammy night, 1990
(Photograph courtesy of Stokes Howell)
At a function the night before the awards show, I ran into Bonnie Raitt backstage—I’d never met her—and she grabbed my arm. “I voted for you,” she whispered. The secret’s out, Bon! Holy, holy, holy shit. You know what? It just doesn’t get any better than that.
13
Days Go By
Larry Klein, 1991
All this time we’ve been a face in the crowd,
Now we’re living in color and laughing out loud.
The First Avenue uptown bus from East Third Street to Thirty-fourth Street was my mode of transport to visit my therapist, Myra. I’d been seeing her since 1985, after trying and firing several numbskulls in the mental-health profession. One, for example, upon hearing me profess to feeling pretty bad, quipped, “What else is new?” Sacked her. No doubt I was boring, but she was getting paid to be bored. I’d also seen an intimidating, butch woman who informed me, as a matter of course, during our first—and last—session that I wasn’t allowed to hit her. Oh, okay. Then there was the one who proudly told me I had a “scrappy” personality. She ended sessions by getting up to wash dishes—her office was in her kitchen.
Myra Friedman was smart, funny, perceptive, and grounded, a bubbly Jewish redhead with patience and empathy to spare for all of us neurotic fools. Her place felt safe, I suppose because she felt safe. She has been able all these years to witness and validate my external successes and failures, along with my internal milestones and setbacks, while still managing to confront me gently and steer me carefully toward autonomy and self-awareness.
The time had come for a follow-up record to Steady On. I felt then, as I do now, that if Steady On were the only record I ever made, I’d be content with that. But clearly another album was expected, which was both thrilling and terrifying. While promoting the first record, I made attempts to remember snippets and bits of lyrics and melodies, some of my own and some from John, so I’d have a slight head start when it came to getting twelve new tracks together. I was on the bus ride to Myra’s office, and I was thinking, God, why can’t I just feel the pure, unconditional love of the archetypal mother and be done with this shit? Then I heard a lyric—“Please no more therapy / Mother take care of me”—and although I didn’t have the breakthrough with Myra I was hoping for that day, the line I’d heard in my head and the rhythm to it were locked in. That son
g became “Polaroids,” and it was the last song I would ever debut at Passim. I recall sitting backstage there sometime in 1990, putting the finishing touches on it. I had to have the song ready for my people at Passim so they could see I wasn’t a slacker.
The writing process for my sophomore effort had begun, but I didn’t know what to do about a producer. Musically the obvious choice was John, but personally I wasn’t so sure. We did go into the studio together at one point to begin the next project, but I found I couldn’t do it, could not work alongside him or even be in the same room with him. John was over the breakup, but I wasn’t. I had to look for another producer.
The only candidate I chose to have a meeting with was Larry Klein, Joni Mitchell’s producer, bass player, and husband at the time, which didn’t hurt his case. They were making exquisite records, and I had to figure that Joni would suffer no fools—Klein must be sharp. I met with him in New York in late 1990, and he was quite sharp, actually.
What I hadn’t bargained for was his sense of humor. Klein is a complete and utter goofball who will lean into you and lock eyeballs intensely, then whisper whatever the movie quote of the day is—like “Is it safe?” from Marathon Man—followed by gales of laughter. During my tenure with Larry, I was to be inundated with all manner of novelty tapes, from the Jerky Boys’ prank calls, to Orson Welles losing it as he does a frozen-peas voice-over, to an extremely blue sexual guide to the signs of the zodiac by Rudy Ray Moore. Larry might, in the middle of a serious discussion, turn to me and say, “Uh, Shawny-Shawn-Shawn, uh, what would you do if, right now, I shat, pissed, came, sneezed, puked, laughed, and cried, all at the same time, what would you do?” He never waited for an answer, being too busy cracking himself up. I managed to throw him once—he was nursing a terrific pimple on his nose, an absolute monstrosity. I looked at him and asked casually, “Are you planning to have a flea circus on that thing?” For a moment he was stumped, until he realized I was referring to the Big Top bulging on the end of his schnozzle. Flustered, and not amused, he said, “Fuck you,” and swiveled his chair around to the recording console while the engineer and I rolled on the floor for days.
