There are several aspects to my vicarious life that I will address throughout my life story (current WIP, some of which I might blog). I am focusing on the trapped singer inside my body here. If I could do anything just once, I would choose to sing all my emotions out in one killer song. I’m not sure which song I would choose but I am certain I would want to sing it exactly the way Beth Hart sings “I’d Rather Be Blind”. I am attaching links to a video of her singing the song straight through, because the vocals and guitar are perfection - and to a vocal coach reviewing that video.
ALSO - Joe Bonamassa’s guitar solo in this is as close as it gets to hearing my second husband play again - the tone and style are much like his.
Beth’s delivery of this song exemplifies my core - my soul, my dreams, my pain, my life, the best and worst of me and my life, my deepest emotions, my path and my past, my addiction to emotion, my passion, my talent (both realized and unrequited), my childhood and my adulthood, my innate knowledge of what I need to do but haven’t managed to accomplish – so my biggest failure. If you listen to the video with the vocal coach reviewing, you’ll know exactly how I listen to music.Even though I sang at home, probably enough to drive my parents crazy during my fascination with opera, once I got to school and was made a ‘listening bird’ in singing class, I kept it only at home and tried first to release this need through playing the accordion. I wanted piano but when I first started (age 7) we lived in a small house and didn’t have room for a piano. I settled for accordion and was grateful later when I realized that back then it wouldn’t have been possible to carry my own piano around.
I enjoyed making music, alone or with others, at a young age.
On weekends when we gathered with the families of my parents’ friends, I was happier inside with the men who were playing music than I was outside playing with the kids, so I took my accordion and they allowed me to sit it. I learned “Carnival of Venus” for Bill Lynch, the first guitar player whose music I fell in love with, and “Harbor Lights” for my Uncle Charlie because he insisted it was the only song worth listening to. I also played solo, group, and band in American Guild of Music competition, and in local bars (yes, boomer kids got to go in bars) and concerts. So, carting around an instrument was part of my life.
My dad’s best friend played guitar and sang, alone and with other musicians. I spent many hours listening to him.
I played out my teenage angst and mourned my first divorce on that accordion. I also got seated in the supply closet in typing class because the teacher insisted that I had to be cheating to get 120 wpm on a standard typewriter when the truth was, my fingers were practiced and limber e enough to do that.
But no matter how much I played or what level of success I reached on the accordion it never satisfied my need to sing. So, I started living vicariously through other musicians and singers, particularly one singer. The first time I heard her sing, she probably hadn’t reached her teens yet. I was in a mall with my parents and siblings when her amazing voice silenced us (not an easy task with my family) and drew us, along with hundreds of shoppers, some coming out of stores, to the area where she was performing. She was amazing even before we saw it was a child but more so then. Years later, when she was twenty, our paths would cross again when she hired the man I was dating as her band leader and lead guitarist. I spent the next twenty years listening to her sing and doing everything I could to make her famous.
The making her famous part was because I thought she was good enough to be famous but also because I carried a tiny bit of responsibility/guilt for making her lose that opportunity. When I met her, she was twenty years old. Her father had controlled her career since she was six and now, she had a backer with deep pockets and many conditions. He wanted (as did her father) to keep her innocent little girl image so her mother had to be with her on the road, overseeing every move she made. Eventually, they allowed me (I was twenty-seven) to be her chaperone if her mother couldn’t be present. She fell in love with her bass player and kept it secret for a while but grew tired of that arrangement. When he asked her to marry him and get out from under the controlling hands that held her, she talked to me about it and I encouraged her to follow her heart. She did and the backer dropped her – after investing a couple of million dollars in her. Part of me believes he was a bit perverted to want to own her private life and the other part wonders what if. Maybe she should have waited for him to release the first album and make herself known before following her heart. It was ultimately her decision and I supported it.
I sat in bars, hotel lounges, concert halls, night clubs, television audiences . . . for years, listening and encouraging, across the country, before during and after my marriage to her guitarist. I was always *there* when she was down, when she had candle and Tupperware parties, when she needed batteries for her mic, when she needed someone to walk her in because there were motorcycles in the parking lot, when she wanted someone to ride home with so she didn’t have to stay for equipment breakdown and truck packing, when she had a meeting in Nashville and didn’t want to go alone . . . My friends said she used me. I said they didn’t know it was the opposite. As with my kids, if she accomplished what I wanted, I knew I would be as happy for her as I would have been for myself.
And, no matter how badly my life was falling apart around me and it did while I knew her – my father was diagnosed with cancer and died, I went through a horrendous divorce, a major corporation sued me, I bought the money-pit house and lost what little money I had left after the divorce judge gave half of everything I owned before the marriage as well as everything we bought during the marriage to the husband who made much less, I was assaulted, I was determined to be totally and permanently disabled . . . No matter what was happening, I knew if I sat somewhere listening to her sing the rest of the world disappeared for that length of time. We used each other.
She gave me many memories to use. My favorite was riding with her to a competition. She drove a van that apparently had great acoustics and wanted me to critique as she practiced. Her song was “Down on My Knees” recorded by Trisha Yearwood, who is tough to beat. My friend out-sang Trisha on that one. Listening to her sing that song repeatedly as she drove was overwhelmingly satisfying – the uniqueness of having so much soul and pain without grit impacted me, believing that no one could possibly beat her (she took first in the regional, third in the national) was exciting, and her ownership of “love is not a matter of pride” made me love her as much as I loved her voice.
In the end, she didn’t deliver. She was more content to be a big fish in a small pond. If I had had her talent or she had had my drive and courage, one of us would have realized our dream.
As a young adult my brother and his friends played a lot of music in the basement and in bars. I was always there. Both of my husbands played guitar and sang, one professionally, as did another man in my life after them, and had a number of friends who were musicians and singers. My daughters both took vocal lessons – the older didn’t let me listen and the younger sang nonstop in my home for years. When any of my friends or family were successful, it eased the pain of my inability to do it myself.
In the end, though, nothing short of singing like Beth Hart, Haley Reinhart, and Karise Eden combined will satisfy this need. I’m putting it on my agenda for next life.
