Tales from the Musical Trenches

While everyone hears stories about famous musicians, the barely visible world of struggling musicians is jammed with juicier stories, more colorful characters, and a powerful streak of hopeful desperation. In my own long musical career, I have played, toured, and recorded with everyone from the unknown to the revered. Those who put their futures on the line to pursue dreams unlikely to ever come true possess a peculiar, mad optimism that creates lives more fascinating than those of the stars. The world of struggling musicians is a world of heartbreak and hope, death and redemption, near-starvation and triumph, addiction and epiphany. Most of these stories are taken from my own life and experiences. The stories Celts, Kilts, and Kips; Freiburgitis; The Swiss Birthday Party; Galileo's Hood; and Looking For Ireland, read in that order, chronicle my first musical trip to Europe, and form the framework for my novel, The Last Buskers of Summer. A few stories are based on real experiences with a few details altered and the timeline compressed to prevent tedious digressions. Back to the Stone Age-which contains the seeds of my novel, Ghosts Behind Walls-is very loosely based on real events, but with imaginary characters and life circumstances dropped into the story, while A Few Tunes in the Pub and The Last Busker are fictional. I have to admit that historical accuracy may be a bit off at times. To paraphrase Sellar and Yeatman, authors of the cleverly mangled version of English history 1066 and All That, history is not so much about what really happened, but rather what you remember. My musical life has introduced me to extraordinarily interesting and inspiring people, and has taken me to places I would otherwise have never known. But it is always the music that is the most important thing to all those who have chosen this difficult and unpredictable life, and it is always the music that sustains and nourishes us, even in the face of our self-imposed hardships.