The Accidental Lead Singer
I am guessing that there is a pivotal moment that comes in the life of any songwriter where he crosses a certain bridge. If the songwriter is like me, he probably starts out full of self-doubt. How, you ask yourself, could anything that I WOULD WRITE be “good enough”? — good enough to be heard in a concert, or good enough to be on a record, or good enough to play on the radio, or even good enough to sing to yourself when alone in the shower or a car?
These doubts are exponentially magnified if the songwriter in question is, like me, musically untrained and has been told, since an early age, that he does not have a good singing voice. I unquestioningly accepted that latter judgment as gospel (doubly so, as this verdict was delivered by the nun who taught the music classes at my Catholic elementary school in Northwest D.C.). So I never set out to be a singer/songwriter — just a songwriter. And, when in high school I first had an inkling that there was music playing in my head — music that I was sure was NOT then on the radio, and so MUST be “mine” — I resisted ever believing that I could be a good songwriter. Until what I knew as rock-n-roll radio seemed to change, and for the worse (but, thank God, not forever).
Anyone reading these blogs knows that I am not a kid. I’m over 50 and, as much as the “major” part of the music industry prizes youth, I cannot bother now trying to hide or disguise my age, or shave off even a few years. Sure, if you’re 30 saying that you’re really 25, that’s one thing. But you’re not going to get away, at 50-plus, with saying that you’re thirty. That being said, have I mentioned in any of my prior posts that, compared to most men and women my age, I do look rather young — I bear maybe a single crowsFOOT at the corner of each eye. Not crowsFEET — foot, the singular. People ask, “What did you DO for your skin to still look this way?” I cannot be sure, but I think it can be answered in two words: No sun. My family never spent more than about a week any summer at the beach; we didn’t belong to a country club; had no pool; and throughout most of grade school I was inside the house with my nose in a book.
So, back to how rock radio changed for the worse, and what it did to make me a songwriter. By the time I had my driver’s license, the classic rock of the 1960’s was being replaced by absolute drivel. Where once you tuned your car’s radio dial and out blared The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Credence Clearwater Revival etc., now came John Denver, Chicago, and (the horror, the horror) Disco. I found myself driving around Maryland and DC thinking to myself, “What is this SHIT! I could write better crap than this.” And I was sure that my earliest efforts would likely be real crap — but I was equally sure my crap would be better than THAT CRAP. (On the disco side of the ledger, one must of course exclude The Bee Gees soundtrack for SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER.)
Originally posted by bigteninchrecords
It still amazes me to read, here and there when I have somehow wandered off the true path, that Chicago was one of the highest selling acts of the 1970’s. Now, some of their stuff was okay, but I automatically turn them off if they appear on my airwaves, just because of what they still represent to me: the near-death of the rock radio of my early youth. Alright, I just did a Google search to check, and Chicago was the 5th best selling act of the 1970’s, with Elvis Presley in the No. 1 spot, The Rolling Stones at No. 6, and McCartney and Dylan at Nos. 9 and 10. So, maybe America did not quite lose its collective mind as I had suspected; but come ON — Chicago? On any list with those four GODS of Rock-n-Roll? Things were seriously messed up in the 1970’s. That is largely what drove me to write songs.
Not that I thought I’d be some “savior” of Rock — for me, that mantle was claimed by one album, from what (even in the late 1970’s) seemed like an “old” band, and one very new band. The saviors appeared, nearly at the same time, in the persons of The Ramones and in the album SOME GIRLS by The Rolling Stones. SOME GIRLS was blaring from the dorm room windows of nearly every building on campus as we seniors were moving into our rooms at the start of our last year of college (late summer 1978). It was this glorious announcement, embraced by everyone at school, that the long dark days of soft-shit-rock and disco were OVER. Rock was back and in a bigger way than we could imagine — what with the rise of the New Wave and Punk movements. The following decade of the 1980’s was, for me, in many ways better for rock-n-roll than even the 1960’s. This time, not just the guys, but also the girls (e.g., The Go Go’s and Joan Jett), were grabbing guitars and drums and making amazing music. Thank God I was in Boston (attending law school) for the early years of all this great new music — college and other Boston radio stations were playing it all the time, and I was able to see The Ramones perform twice at Spit. Perfect name for a club to showcase punk bands. So perfect that Spit should have been in NYC.
If you need to hear anything more about how rock radio totally sucked in the 70’s, just go listen to The Ramones’ ROCK ’n’ ROLL RADIO. Amazing song — shockingly, only the band’s SECOND single. My band, Cold Beer & Broads, wholly by coincidence released our second single — FIRST AMENDMENT BLUES (THE F.U. SONG) — as an homage to The Ramones. But I digress, and I certainly do not intend, even by implication, to compare CB&B to The Ramones.
No way — for I didn’t have their balls. They went for it as kids. I was too much a high school nerd gunning for one of America’s elite universities. I knew I’d not make the time, given that objective, to learn an instrument or try to form or join a band. I was a total pussy insofar as actually pursuing music was concerned. And yet, I wrote. By the time the 1970’s were ending, not only was I writing, but I had also crossed that bridge I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. I had come to believe that the songs I was writing — or at least some of them — belonged on the radio.
So all the time I wrote and wrote — mostly in my head, with the lyrics on little scaps of paper tucked in my wallet (I think I still have all those scraps). Usually there was an accompanying melody playing in my head. I still can’t explain how that happens; it just does. But never did I think, despite having crossed the songwriter’s crucial bridge of having “faith in my own talent” — that I’d end up singing any of my songs. Even when Cold Beer & Broads came together, my plan was for my co-writers to sing everything, depending on whose voice was best suited to the particular song. We stuck to that plan. On the Six Pack EP we are soon to release, John Macom sings GET ME HOME BY CHRISTMAS EVE and JENNIFER ANISTON (WHY ARE YOU MARRIED?). Charles Czarnecki (who also produces all our recordings) sings FIRST AMENDMENT BLUES and CLIFF NOTES OF LOVE. But somehow, I ended up singing SUMMER GIRL and VIRGINIA. It wasn’t supposed to play out this way.
On SUMMER GIRL, Charles pushed me early on to take a stab at the vocals. I resisted, and he insisted. “It’s right in your range, and it’s a ‘storyteller’ kind of song, and you can do that.“ So I gave it a shot. Way, way too many shots. Countless studio takes were recorded, as I learned what to do, and not to do, and yet never really learning to “sing”. I hated my output, but Charles — through the miracles of digital technology and using his own considerable skills (he’s one of those mythical guys you hear about in the music industry with “golden ears”) — managed to cobble together a usable vocal track. I was never in love with it and still am not. Yet, we managed to get the song on broadcast radio stations in almost half the USA (22 states, when I last counted). So, arguably I didn’t totally suck. I secretly suspect that some of the program directors who gave SUMMER GIRL a shot did so only because they loved the cover art, which is posted at the end of this blog (or maybe they were Chicago fans in their youth and just have no taste in music whatsoever).
We released SUMMER GIRL right at summer’s end 2014. As 2015 commenced, we were facing mostly just doing final lead and backup vocals on the 3 songs that would come to round out the SIX PACK: JENNIFER ANISTON, CLIFF NOTES OF LOVE, and VIRGINIA. John had already put down final vocals and almost all the backups on our love song to Jennifer. He was slated to do VIRGINIA, when we learned that his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and she’d be having an operation, with John thereafter taking a leave of absence — from everything but his family. So we knew that, for months probably, he’d be unavailable to us in the studio.
Right after this happened, some young guys I know in NYC’s tech startup world asked me if I could be a last-minute replacement to give a talk to several hundred entrepreneurs on the subject Fundraising For Startups. Normally, I decline to do public panels and presentations and the like. I hate the attendant preparation — to me, it seems too much like having to get ready for a test. I swore after passing the NY State Bar Exam that I’d do everything in my power never again to take, or feel like I was facing, a test. But I agreed to do this presentation.
It went very well. Lots of post-speech expressions of thanks and follow-up questions from the audience. Even some people tweeting and calling me “charismatic” — at my age. I was taken aback. I also received some emails thanking me for all the good information conveyed. I noticed that one came from a woman who appeared to have her own business as a vocal coach. I wrote to her solely to say something like, “It was nice to see someone from outside the tech world was there, and since you work in music I’ll share with you that side of my life.” I sent her MP3’s of our 3 singles released to that date. She wrote back and said something like, “On Summer Girl, you actually have the notes in you, but it’s clear nobody has ever taught you to sing.” So I said to myself, what the f*ck, John is lost to us, and I wrote and love VIRGINIA, and maybe I should see if this lady can help me, so that I can sing it on the record.“
On and off for six months, not quite weekly but close to it, I would then meet with this fabulous teacher: Maria Fattore, formerly a professional opera singer. (See link to her website at the end of this post.) She taught me so much in so little time, it was amazing. Now, mind you, I did not know ANY of even the most basic things about singing. Nothing about breathing in any form. Nothing about how to get some resonance into my voice (still working on THAT, truth be told). But after six months, there was a night-and-day difference in what I could do with my voice. I am not really “good” yet, to my ears. But I am so much better that, when my own mother heard the final master of VIRGINIA this past winter, she had no idea that I was the singer. In contrast, when I first played her SUMMER GIRL, she immediately exclaimed, “Oh my God, that’s you singing!”
I can listen to VIRGINIA now without any of the cringing that still accompanies a playback of SUMMER GIRL. I even enjoy listening to VIRGINIA (and it doesn’t hurt that John found time to work out most of the basic ideas for the backup vocals on that song). It sucks that I became a real lead singer (or almost one) because of a near-disaster that befell the Macom family (note to reader: John’s wife is recovering). But that’s what happened — by accident, or fate, or what-have-you.
You have to be a bit of an egomaniac, I guess, to think you can write songs that belong on the radio, especially when you’ve had no musical training and play no instrument. But I have believed that, unshakably, since the end of college. Now, I am beginning to think that I might turn out to be a not-too-bad lead singer, with a little more time and a lot more practice with Maria.
I take solace in the fact that, however bad I may sound, every now and then I’ll hear someone else’s voice on the radio, and I can say to myself, “Well, shoot, I can sing better than THAT crap.” And even if that’s not true, I hold firm to my belief that most of my melodies are far more memorable than whatever song I’m then listening to (provided it’s not Elvis, Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones, The Ramones, and so on).
I really don’t know how else you step into a recording booth if you don’t think you are, on some level, better than most of the crap that’s always on the radio. OUR CRAP IS BETTER THAN YOUR CRAP!!! Heck, it’s like being back on the playground in elementary school. It is sublimely juvenile, and that is part of what makes growing older and making music a shitload of fun for me.
You can reach Maria Fattore here: http://www.nycvoiceteacher.net
Listen up: https://soundcloud.com/cold-beer-broads
Read up: http://coldbeerandbroads.com/
Follow up: http://coldbeerbroads.tumblr.com/
