I always loved song writing but, when I was younger, performing and the terror that accompanied it for me just seemed like something I could never conquer. In my early twenties after playing in a couple bands then doing a solo acoustic thing for a while I decided to pack it in. I still wrote recorded and released records for most of my adult life and had a lot of fun doing that but I never performed again for over twenty years.
After my second album in 1987 I got a publishing deal with Criterion Music, publishers for Lyle Lovette, Rodney Crowell and the owners of the song “These Boots Are Made For Walking”. Bo, the CEO, a class guy whom I’ve since become good friends with, tried to get me a record deal and we did come close with CURB records but as soon as any label finds out you don’t play live that’s all they need to hear so it was not to be.
In 1994 I was at the Broken Spoke, a songwriter haunt in Nashville, where I had been commuting four times a year to write while under contract with Criterion. (After it was apparent I wouldn’t be signed as an artist we decided I would write for other acts). My good friend Rick Perry dragged me up on stage and for the first time in two decades I played for an audience.
My friend Jay recently told me a story about a guy who bought a baseball team in the south and spent most of his fortune doing it. When they asked him why he would take such risk so late in his life he said “If it don’t make your hands shake it ain’t worth doin’ “. I guess that pretty much sums up why I decided at this late stage in my life to start performing. You should never do what you don’t want to do but you should always do what scares the hell out of you. That’s because if it frightens you its probably because its important to you and you should do what’s important to you.
I heard Alan Shamblin (cowriter of “I Can’t Make You Love me” for Bonnie Raitte) talk about “running to the roar”. He says that when lions hunt the old lions will position themselves at one end of a herd of buffalo and the young lions will position themselves at the opposite end. The old lions will roar driving the nervous herd into the waiting jaws of the much younger and more dangerous young lions. Shamblin says it’s much safer to run to the roar than away from it. I’d have to say that every time in my life that I’ve done something that scared me to death it always turned out well. For twenty years I cut and ran and to this day I wonder how my life would have been different if I had sucked it up and faced my fears. So now, even though I know I will never be totally comfortable with the dry mouth, shaky hands and churning stomach that live performing gives me, I’d rather deal with them, than one day in my last breath be asking myself “what if”.