I had a birthday this week. (Aquarius) I enjoy birthdays and believe that we all have a right to make the most of our own personal holiday once a year. I’ve always felt that way. I was surprised that no one picked up on this fact when I was in high school and was absent on the same day every year. In fact, staying home on my birthday was probably the only luxury that being an honors student ever afforded me. It was the only time that I assumed some sense of entitlement with my mother, who never objected to my refusal to waste a birthday at school.

I spent this year’s holiday quietly with my family. I used the time to be my usual introspective self. After some consideration, I’ve determined that still, in a rotating sense of perspective, I want out, I want in, I must stop and I must begin. I won’t detail the specifics of each item here, but I was pleased to discover this time that I also have a number of things, as I scream headlong into a lifetime spanning two score years, that I have absolutely no desire to change. This is a departure from the customary list of resolutions that often stares back at me post-birthday and it pleases me a great deal. It shows that I’m living with purpose and enjoying the rewards of my conviction.

Having tacked on another year, it occurs to me today that to live a memorable and remarkable life requires not greatness but engagement. To be involved. The greatness that I long believed was the goal is merely the result. Engagement is the goal. Action. The goal must be pursued daily, even hourly. It is folly to aspire to engagement over a long period of time, such as a year. It makes greatness elusive, something for which there will always be time. In truth, a lifetime of countless moments of engagement is in and of itself one of achievement, value and greatness. These moments must be countless. Their numbers are our only defense against time that cannot be frozen and hours than can never be relived.

I thought of this while watching a video of Todd Rundgren performing one of my favorite songs. I believe the clip to be a sublime piece. For a moment, I allowed myself to become melancholy about it, since no performance by Todd at which I’ve ever been present has come close to what this clip seems to capture. I’m too young to have been there in 1978 and a great number of things have changed since then. However, I don’t believe that the moment in this video could have been planned. It only exists because of engagement, the pursuit of significant moments that, however unexamined at the time of their occurrence, as a gestalt may amount to something that can be called great.

My birthday gift to myself then, is greatness that defines itself. In realizing that I have things that I would not change, I’m already in motion. I have only to pursue the small piece of ground illuminated by my headlights, the precious few feet that in time will surely add up to a remarkable life’s journey if I do not gaze beyond, and miss them.

Rush hour music, indeed.

Peter Guralnick wrote an exhaustive, two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. I read Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley when it was first published, but I’ve only gotten to the second one, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, now. Unlike many people, I enjoy the 70s Elvis more than the early one. I know he was troubled and I know now just how troubled, but I just like the music and the show better late in his career.

Since the guy was said to have died by the time I was in first grade, I only know of the Elvis show what I’ve seen in the few concert movies that exist from the 70s era. I love the theatrical aspect of it and I just love the sound of that glorious band, raw in their sophistication, if you can dig that.

However, the more I read of this book, the more I’m struck by how different Elvis had it than I do. Sometimes, I just have to laugh. I know the guy was super huge and everything, but if you put that aside for a minute, as a recording artist, the guy had it so easy.

The book is full of references to recording sessions during which upwards of 24 masters were recorded. 24! How many times did I read stuff like this? “In August, a recording session was scheduled for which RCA hoped sides would be produced for the gospel album, a pop album and the four singles Elvis was contractually obligated to provide.”

All the guy had to do was go to the studio and sing. The band was assembled. He’d pick songs that he liked and they’d run through them if he felt like it. Other times, he would just give karate demonstrations to the musicians and then go back to Graceland. If he cut a tune that they hadn’t planned on, their guy would hustle to arrange the publishing particulars. Or, it would be, “Hey publishing guy, what kind of material do we have available to record?”

Good Christ. That’s gotta be a tough life.

I write songs, play and sing all the parts in the studio, engineer and mix the recording, review the test pressings, oversee the production and then promote and sell the records myself. That’s what a majority of recording artists have to do now. There’s very little money and you have to know how to do pretty much everything if you want to see your vision through. And it takes a little longer than a single recording session.

Sometimes I see singers in bands and I say, “You mean all the guy has to do is sing?” Elvis wouldn’t even do that sometimes. At Elvis Presley’s level, it was all the bread changing hands, but in the rest of the world, in the modern age, I have no idea what breeds that mentality when it exists.

I’ve had to train myself not to do everything. I came up knowing that no one would ever hand me anything and that if I wanted to make records, no one was going to make it happen but me. I’ve never felt that I had the right to claim something was outside of my expertise. Deep down I thought, “Who the hell are you to think anyone else would do it for you just because you can’t?”

It’s a slow process, learning to let go of certain things. It began with me saying that I don’t have to play the drums. I Ebayed my drums some years ago and got a nice new Telecaster, which in the distant past would have been an indulgence I’d have never allowed myself, since I had one Tele already. I’ve regretted not having my drum set a few times, but I still think I did the right thing. The other thing I’ve tried to loosen up about is graphic design. I’m not a designer, but I did my own album covers, because “who the hell else is gonna do it?” I’ve since tried to leave that to some designer friends.

I don’t want to get to a point where all I have to do is show up and sing. Of that, I’m certain. But for all of the legends surrounding Elvis Presley and the way he’s been deified over the years, I can honestly say that I know a ton of people, myself included, that he’ll never have anything on. Pfft… you mean all he has to do is sing?

That’s kinda cool.

I played a gig the other night. It wasn’t my gig. It was with the other band I work with as a guitarist and keyboardist. The show was at one of the “better” clubs in North Jersey. It’s a big room and it has a nice sound system. We were the opening act for some group from Boston. Though we only had about an hour on the stage, maybe less, I took a few moments as I played to indulge in some introspection.

Music is a very peculiar calling. It puts up a fight most of them time. It’s not easy to play an instrument and sing. It’s even more difficult sometimes to put yourself out in front of other people. A performer experiences a constant emotional push and pull. On the surface, he appears to be an entertainer, attempting to make others happy, to give others some enjoyment. However, there’s very often another force at work, the overcoming of the judgment by those people you seek to entertain, should it be a negative one. So are you really playing for them or you? Does it matter what the audience thinks or not? This push and pull is just a subtext to yet another layer, which is the hope that at some point during the performance the music you’re creating will take on an energy, a significance, a force that transcends all of that ping pong of the ego. When that occurs, there is an event of pure forgetting when the music being produced is beyond the grasp of the mind or heart. Some believe it to be a manifestation of the divine in us. All of the control being exerted as the musicians make their sounds suddenly becomes effortless, beautiful and bigger than any human.  Most musicians live for that fleeting experience and their performing lives become an unending quest to lengthen it.

I believe that I felt it happen once on the last gig. Any insecurities I may have had in using someone else’s amplifier or not being pleased with the monitor mix floated away. I looked out into the room at all those people and in peace I proclaimed to myself that: a) I do not understand this experience. b) I have no feelings about my lack of understanding. c) I feel neither vulnerable nor defensive. d) This is what I was born to do. Not because I’m in this life to perform and make music, but because this is the way that I learn. It is through the eyes and experiences of a musician that the mysteries of my path begin to make sense to me.

This is why I do what I do.

Photo by Scott Higgins