“You couldn’t have it if you did want it,” the Queen said. “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” Through The Looking Glass — Lewis Carrol
I have jam every day—well, most of the time it’s orange marmalade, but you get what I mean.
I’ve been thinking a lot these days about success and failure. One of the triggers for this was rewatching the film Collateral. There’s that scene in the film when Vincent, the professional killer, confronts his captive taxi driver and says to him:
Your business “plan?” Someday?
“Someday my dream’ll come…”?
And then he delivers the most devastatingly honest line the taxi driver will ever hear—or any of us will ever hear:
And one night you’ll wake up and
discover it all flipped on you.
Suddenly you’re old. And it didn’t
happen. And it never will. ’Cause
you were never going to do it, anyway.
The dream on the horizon became
yesterday and got lost. Then you’ll
bullshit yourself, it could never have
been, anyway. And you’ll recede it
into memory…and zone out in a
Barcalounger with daytime TV on for
the rest of your life…
Excerpt From
Collateral
by Stuart Beattie
Suddenly I am old. I look in the mirror at the dude with white hair and receding hairline and I wonder for a moment: Who is that? Then I realize it’s me. It’s how other people see me now. They don’t know me as a 25-year-old, rather good-looking young man with blue eyes and a head full of brown curly hair that made a southern lady comment to my half-brother: “Are you sure he hasn’t got some negro in him?”
And they don’t know me as a bearded Sephardim in Lisbon in 1981, 475 years after the Lisbon Massacre of 1506, after I escaped the mercantile paradise of the USA for a life in Europe as a weaver of words.
I don’t feel old. Though I have some aches and pains that come and go—aches and pains I never had before, even when I was nearing 45 and playing baseball in an amateur league, running, fielding, throwing, and hitting, still better than most of the 20-year-old German kids on the team who had only really started playing baseball 2 or 3 years previously
I never pulled any muscles or threw out my arm.
Now I have to avoid lifting stuff that I would have picked up with ease 5 years ago—OK, maybe 10 years ago. And lately when I go downstairs into the subterranean part of the apartment where my music room and the bathroom and the laundry room are located, I hold on to the banister all the way and am careful placing my feet on the stairs. No slipping or tripping allowed now. I used to slip and trip before and nothing much would happen. Maybe a scrape, maybe a bump. Now it could be a break or, even worse, waking up in a hospital bed wondering WTF happened.
Still, somehow, I have successfully arrived into what people refer to as “old age”. Seriously, I was not expecting to make it this far. I grew up in a city full of serial killers, child molesters and armed thugs. When I was a young man, the millennium was far, far away and I never thought I’d cross that line between the centuries. Then, just as suddenly, I was here, in a relatively safe northern German environment by the time Y2K turned out to be a nothing-burger. I was on cruise control, no longer playing baseball, but going out with a woman almost half my age, still actively writing tunes and playing music in my own indie country band.
“Someday my dream’ll come…”?
Well, yes, my dream did come. Kind of. Even though I never really dreamed it all that much. The last time I dreamed it really, and had the desire to follow that dream, was in Baltimore. It cost me the love of the woman who has reappeared in my songs and writings ever since the day I got on that Trailways bus and left her to go to Los Angeles.
After I got to LA, I realized that Hollywood is where dreams go to get murdered by a cold, hard, cash-based reality. None of the people I met who had made it to a position of prominence in “the business” were living out their dreams. They didn’t dream. All were clever, perhaps what you might refer to as talented or at the very least technically adept, and expertly able to navigate the shark-infested world of “the business” of entertainment, in music, film, comedy, whatever.
After my first week there and my close contact with a very reality-aware musician, the realization came: I had to prepare myself technically for the work which was to come. Everyone in the business was technically prepared or was able to learn quickly on the job.
Later that year, I enrolled at LACC (Los Angeles Community College) and started to study literature and the mechanics of poetry, so I could understand how the sausage was being made. I even took a course on music theory. Long before that, in Nairobi and Durban and New Delhi and Baltimore, I had just written stuff spontaneously, songs or stories or poems, without any technical knowledge, just from allowing the stories and poems and songs to crawl out of my head, through my fingers onto the page.
The musician, who eventually became a well-known composer of film music, confronted me one day after I had been there about a month playing songs on my guitar and writing little stories in a notebook. He told me it was time for me to make a choice, choose the path I was going to go down. “What do you want to do? Music or writing?” I thought about it for about 10 seconds and said: Writing.
That weekend we went to a garage sale and bought an old black Remington typewriter which was full of sand. It cost me $5. I cleaned it (a few toothbrushes with solvent and an old raggedy cloth), oiled it, bought a new ribbon for it, went to the thrift store on Santa Monica Boulevard and bought a stack of the cheapest paper they had, went back to where I was living, on North Hudson Avenue in Hollywood, set up a table in the living room in front of the window that looked out onto the street, and went to work.
A few years later, after graduating from CSUN (Cal State University Northridge) with a piece of paper that confirmed I knew something about English literature, I got the hell out of Dodge and arrived in Lisbon to begin my life as a romantic composer of word tapestries.
Being a professional lyricist is one way to crochet little doilies made with words. That line of work took off when I arrived in Hamburg. One of my connections at the various music publishers in town would call me when they had a band or an artist needing lyrics in English and I would either go and pick up a tape (cassettes in those days), or go to the studio and sit with the songwriter and singer and hammer out lyrics for the tune they were recording.
I even got some jobs writing librettos for what some people consider to be “serious” music. In GEMA, the German rights association, there is an actual difference made between (in German) E- und U-Musik – ernste Musik und Unterhaltungsmusik, serious music (E-Musik) and entertainment music (U-Musik). The royalty rates are different as well.
Sometimes the work pays very well, in a cash buyout, or in royalties. Royalties are good usually for the first year or so after the tune is released, then they get thinner and thinner. Unless of course the tune is a hit that never goes away, or is recorded again and again by different artists. Then the royalties are like a Christmas present that comes back each year. I’m always amazed when money comes to me for work that might have taken me an hour or two to complete. If only all my hourly wages could always be that good!
So I’ve had success doing that. Not, of course, the type of success Bernie Taupin or Tim Rice have experienced. But I completed my assignments successfully, got hired over and over again by publishers and producers and made money doing it. I was lucky. Taupin and Rice were luckier.
Dave Hickey, who I have been enamored of since I read his Air Guitar a while back, knew that it was all really just a matter of luck. And I can testify to that. A set of lyrics that I wrote for a song—in Italian—that has been a returning Christmas present for me since the mid 80s, only came to me because of luck.
I had just worked on a new LP as a writer and performer, had been promised my name would be on the front cover along with the two other guys I had worked with, but the album was released with only one guy’s name on the cover. So me and the other guy went to our respective publishers and pleaded for justice.
At a meeting where rival publishers were trying to capture as many songs as possible from the LP, the guy who I had worked with and who ended up with his name on the front cover of the album, claimed he wrote the Italian lyrics for a song we had worked on together. Every publisher guy and their assistants around the table looked at him in wonder, I raised my hand a little, then they looked at me. I gave them a demure smile and said: No. I wrote that.
My publisher remembered that moment about 3 months later and called me. I got the job to write Italian lyrics for a rising hit, which has become somewhat of an evergreen in Germany and France, has been rerecorded by others, and, like I described, brings me a nice rain of coins every Christmas.
This is how Dave Hickey described the process of selling a song—in my case the luck connected to getting the job:
“Billy said: It’s not about the quality of the song. That don’t matter. They can make a hit out of any piece of crap. … They’re not really doing business with us. What they’re trying to do is make themselves feel good. … You don’t have a chance [of selling a song] up next to me. … If he buys a song from poor old Billy Joe Shaver, who had to quit Junior High School, and who had three fingers cut off in a sawmill accident… When they buy one of my songs, they feel like they just fed a tramp at the back door. They feel great about themselves. … This kind of help depends exactly on the emotional defects of the people who are giving it out.” — Dave Hickey, The God Ennui
The publisher who called me for the job loved Italy, had a house in Tuscany and most probably at least understood the hook of the song (Domani) that had been wrangled over at the meeting where he was representing my interests.
[Trivia fans, read the footnote below]*
These days my me time is mostly spent writing songs (like I always had done anyway since I was 16). Now I record them on my computer, like everybody does these days, playing the instruments I can play, singing when I must, with the voice I have. I’m pleased when I successfully finish a project and then release it so that it appears on all the streaming services.
Over the years, I’ve created my own musical universe, inspired by the popular music I like, but always coming up with something that is mine, my version of country music, my version of rock music, my version of finger-picked music, my version of a comic song. Every one of my songs fits into this pretend place they inhabit, a timeless place that has resonance with certain eras and places. It’s like a parallel universe, where a song exists because it deserves to exist, even if two million people haven’t heard it. After all, it came from the same crazy mystical place where every other song ever written has come from—Through the Looking Glass and Wonderland
The songs I write these days don’t make me very much money. When the shekels do drop from heaven, I chuckle, use the money to have a nice dinner with a friend, a glass of wine included. The tip is usually not included in the royalties I get from my new songs, so I dig into my own pocket and reward the servers for their service. That’s OK. I have just celebrated another success—receiving money from the big bad record machine.
Failure is normal. I fail each day at many things that I attempt to do.
If it’s writing stuff, like this here, I let it sit for a while, then go back and edit out the places where I failed noticeably. And if it’s a story, then I let it sit longer and go back a week or a month, or sometimes a year or two later, read it again, and notice the failures I didn’t see before. Most of the time, I can successfully edit out the mistakes. But I’m sure there are plenty of readers who have a keener sense of style or better knowledge of grammar and are happy to pronounce my piece a failure. That’s fine. I’ve already moved on to something new.
A few years back I wrote a song with the title: I’d Rather Be Lucky. I also gave that title to the album. Here are the lyrics:
I’d Rather Be Lucky
Are you dreaming of a mountain made of solid gold
Maybe you want to be famous before you get too old
Or you want to be beautiful in the eyes of all to see
Climb to the top of the ladder, never fall into obscurity
You want to sleep with a sexy woman
Make love with the hardest man
Well maybe you can
Maybe you can
Surround yourself with yachts and cars
Book your seat on a trip to mars
Oh yeah, maybe you can
But I’d rather be lucky than rich any day
If I can dodge that bullet, everything will be OK
I’d rather be lucky than famous in your mind
And live life in love before I die
I’d rather be lucky
Oh yeah, I’d rather be lucky
Let’s say you’re a big boss with a thousand slaves to drive
When the revolution comes, how will you survive
When nobody loves you, you’re a desert with no rain
Empty of all beauty, a statue with no name
If your army doesn’t save you, can you make another plan
Maybe you can, maybe you can
Surround yourself with a wall no one can break through
Not even you, not even you
But I’d rather be lucky than powerful any day
Dodge those bullets, get safely away
I’d rather be lucky than a statue in the sand
Live life in love, hand in hand
I’d rather be lucky
Now you might like the music, you might not. Everybody has their own taste and their own opinion of what they like to hear. However, I successfully made myself clear in the lyrics, and (in my own opinion) successfully put the song and the music together in a recording. My voice is what it is, and I no longer have a band to provide me with backing vocals or other musical input. So that’s that.
Like grains of pepper in a salt shaker, failure sits together with success in all I do—in all anybody does. That’s part of being a human. People who need desperately to paint everything they do as a success, are failures. They know that, can’t face it, and so try and shield themselves from scrutiny with lies. They are actually only lying to themselves.
Failure and success are the two sharp blades on the sword we always carry with us, the sword we use to fight the demons on our trail trying to catch us, the sword we use to fight the demons on our path trying to stop us.
Here are some words from a much more successful failure:
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all
Love Minus Zero/No Limit
by: Bob Dylan
*Trivia footnote: On the album that I wrote with the guy who claimed to have written my Italian lyrics on the Domani song, there was another song we worked on together: Indian Boy. That song was taken by Al Bano & Romina Power, translated by them into Italian, and put on one of their albums. That was, of course, kind of amusingly ironic.
But the best is yet to come!
When Tyrone Power was chosen to star in the film Solomon and Sheba, directed by King Vidor, the original plan was to shoot the film on location in Italy. That being the case, both King Vidor and Tyrone Power took Italian lessons from my mother, Milena Antonelli, who, through her job at the Italian Consulate in Los Angeles, had good connections in Hollywood. King Vidor came to our house for the lessons, my mother went to Tyron Power’s house. As it happened, the studio heads wanted to save some money, so film location shooting was changed and they went to Spain instead. That’s where Romina’s father died of a heart attack, on set, after two months of filming. So Romina singing one of my songs almost 30 years later is a strange way of completing a circle. Thank you Romina!