. . . into cold, hard cash.
John Stewart, that onetime member of The Kingston Trio (and the writer of “Daydream Believer”) has some advice for you from beyond the grave:
Ah, the California girls are the greatest in the world;
Each one’s a song in the making.
Singin’ rock to me I can hear the melody,
The story is there for the takin’.
Drivin’ over Kanan, singin’ to my soul:
There’s people out there turnin’ music into gold.
. . . thereby tipping his hat to the Beach Boys, who made a career of the SoCal playgrounds he, they, and I all grew up in.
Some people translate Stewart’s wisdom roughly into: “it’s a cakewalk.” They are, I think, contemplating his album that featured “Gold,” which was a huge success—his record company was demanding a hit at the time. The money people pressed; he delivered. Three of the songs on that LP charted. Piece. Of. Cake.
Yet what he really meant, I believe, is that 1) success is a fickle, arbitrary thing, and 2) any writer—even a songsmith—is (as Joan Didion once pointed out) always selling someone out; one mustn’t get too sentimental about that fact.
Also, we must always remember those who never got commercial success on quite the terms they wanted, or never got it at all:
Well my buddy Jim Bass he’s a-workin’ pumpin’ gas—
And he makes two fifty for an hour;
He’s got rhythm in his hands as he’s tappin’ on the cans;
Sings rock and roll in the shower.
Drivin’ over Kanan, singin’ to my soul:
There’s people out there turnin’ music into gold.
He reminds us here that music and driving can be the most primal pleasures in the world; done right, they rival sex.
On occasion, we simply succumb to the sheer beauty of creation—or the created world, for that matter—and count (as Edna St. Vincent Millay once put it) “many a year of strife well lost” in its pursuit. Millay called it “one white singing hour of peace.” So she had to mean writing, listening to music, or sex, or driving, eating, or looking over the edges of a mountain—because it couldn’t have been anything else, really. You know: creating, and appreciating creation.
Here’s how it went, I suspect: Maybe your new song, featuring Stevie Nicks on backup vocals, will be a hit and make the managers happy—get them off your back for a time. Maybe you’re Jim Bass’s counterpart in the music business (or any other aspect of arts/entertainment, for that matter): more a working stiff than an artist, at the end of the day. You may never be a megastar in the way some of the other singer-songwriters of the 1960s were. And perhaps, while not quite being okay, that’s still . . . okay.
One always wonders how much of the song is a man’s motivational session with his muse, and how much is a jaundiced (perhaps even bitter) take on the commercial aspects of creation. But we’ll never know, and Stewart walked a line in performing the song: it’s a come-as-you-are party, balancing the pain and pleasure of the creative act. The glass is half-empty, but also half-full.
And here’s the thing: at the end of the set (or after the album comes out) whether or not you’ve made “gold” in the sense of “money,” you have achieved the creative alchemy it took to sling your guitar into a convertible, drive over the Santa Monica mountains, thrill to a sunset in the late 1970s . . . and somehow bring art into the world, accompanied by a thumping baseline and stunning harmonies. Gold.
After that, commercial success may happen, or it may not: the audience finds you, or it remains lost. It could be that you bite on leather, tighten your belt, and soldier on in the cause of creation.
UPDATE: Wait . . . it’s not the same without 1970s aviator-style sunglasses? I think I can help you:
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