Storytellers: The Weather and The Wait
Wade Ellis Wilby presents Hidden Track Storytellers. This is a creative writing workshop for fiction and nonfiction stories inspired by music. This first piece was inspired by Brock Butler’s song The Weather and the Wait.
I didn’t care to look at the broken LCD display on our now defunct stage clock. She’d been to one too many bars one too many times. She was just a souvenir now; A reminder that time was irrelevant. The last notes of tour were ringing out into the depths of my brain (thanks to the tinnitus) and Sarah was a scant 8 hours away from me. Nothing else seemed to matter now and I had no yearning for anything to matter the way it use to. It’s not that my reasons for getting into this whole mess have escaped me. In fact, they’re more real to me than they ever were in the beginning. I just never thought I would look back on my life and realize that the music was the easiest part of the journey.
The dorm room acoustic sessions that evolve to open mic nights that stumble into auditions that ramble into first gigs end up rolling down some hill in the universe somewhere and one day you wake up a musician. The kind of musician and the trail of destroyed relationships tend to differ from minstrel to minstrel, but make no mistake about it, at the bottom of the hill you will have a career and a laundry list of “what could have beens”. It goes with the territory. You spend so much time perfecting your craft you lose track of the world around you and usually, about a decade later, if the universe has taken you under its wing, you come to, and realize you have actual proof of all your hard work. It may be in the form of a discography. It may be in the form of rehab. One way or another your career is born.
Somewhere in that timeline came someone who believed in you and pushed you further down the hill. When that first person makes that first shove it creates a chain reaction of shoves, a domino effect of nudges that come with their own sets of ideas, responsibilities, and consequences. It is this shoving match that moves your mind further and further away from the music, no matter how hard you practice every day. Managers, accountants, publicists…all necessary evils to an end goal, but evils nonetheless. When I picked up my first Ovation in 5th grade (what a piece of shit that guitar was) I never thought I’d spend more time on the phone discussing the importance of playing Boston on a Thursday as opposed to NYC. I wish I never found out what a “major market” was. I wish I never learned a lot of things.
READ ON for more of this installment of Storytellers…
I guess all this thinking started today as I was walking past the green room; A green room I had been in dozens of times before. There was still a sticker from my high school band on the bathroom wall. Mike had his computer open to an interview I did at some festival a few weeks prior. My voice sounded particularly rough, which is par for the course at any festival, but it prompted me to go check out the footage.
I had no idea who the man on that screen was. My energy was visibly drained. Where was the metal t-shirt wearing idealist that started playing Wish You Were Here to impress his grade school girl friend? Where was the accomplished player who had shared the stage with The Rolling Stones, Sting and Pat Metheny – just to name a few? Where was the player who dedicated his life to his craft and keeping his band together? All I saw were dead eyes peering out from behind a cold shell repeating the same old bullshit responses I’ve been shilling out for years. The monotonous rasp of indifference drifted out of the Mac Book speakers like the requiem mass in D minor, and now, as the trailer doors were closing, I realized what the funeral was for.
I can’t keep this pace anymore. The weather and the weight are starting to show.
I’m happy. I really am. I know that sounds like a guy trying to tell himself he’s happy but it’s true. There’s nothing I would rather be doing. It’s just that the time has come to slow down. Decades will pass you by like nothing in this business and it takes some grand event to slap you in the face and wake you up. For me, it was that interview. That fucking interview…jesus I look terrible. How do the guys not see this? Do they see it? Do they think I can’t handle talking about this shit? How does Sarah not see this? Am I the only one that notices I’m dissolving?
Deep breath. Parliament. Street lights. This is my therapist’s office; an idling van and the halogen glow of urban illumination as drunk fans stumble by not noticing me underneath my walking cap of 12 years. Mike is settling. Eric is folding t-shirts. Pat is re-packing the trailer to balance the weight on the axles. Here I am, wondering why none of the aforementioned people and the love of my life can’t see I’ve been fucking destroying myself from the get go. Maybe the destruction is recent. Maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion.
Mike finally gets back to the van excited about us getting into points on our deal and we’re looking for the last of the speed to get us home. I elect to take the speed and the wheel as I have more thinking to do than I would like on a drive home from tour. I fill my to go cup with yerba and cut a few lines off the middle console sharing the powder with my navigator and we pull onto the interstate.
There are few things as nice as an early morning drive. There’s no construction and no lights….save for one…and when that light comes I’m going to have a long talk with the person I couldn’t find on that computer screen and ask him for forgiveness and advice on how to save his life.
Wow. You certainly have a way with words, Wade. Keen, acute insights of human emotions and the business of making music, conveyed with a simultaneously lucid and poetic, natural-born easy rhetoric. Will definitely be following this.