If we had known our math better, instead of the usual counting off one, two, three, one two, three, we definitely would have succeeded better. Never believe the ads that come on the television and tell you that kids need instruments to be better at math, or that being good with music makes you better with all the higher functions beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Keyboards, flutes, oboes, guitars, cymbals, and gongs, none of it made my brother Campbell any better with math. Playing an instrument is not like pushing buttons on a calculator. A lifetime of listening to music, writing it, and six years of theoretical ponderings on notes, looking at everything musical from the voyeur’s perspective, none of that helped me either.
If we had known our math we might have done better in life and then would never have come to the decision that we did. We might have been lawyers, doctors, architects, programmers, something more stable and better paying. Maybe we would have simply had a better head for business and then we could have gone in together, opening up a company. One store, then two stores, then three stores, and then many more. They would have sold all kinds of merchandise for crazy low prices. We could have retired early. In some alternate universe we could be doing music for fun, on our own terms, living off of franchise fees and touring the country as some sort of duo.
If we had left town like we said we always would, that probably would have been better for us. We were musicians, maybe the South would have been better for us than the West. Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, even the Mississippi Delta, all those legendary places. Maybe if we had moved there we would have become legends too. Everyone who comes out of that world seems to have their own mythology and mythologies sell records and get concerts booked. My brother and I never had our own mythology, all we had was reality and that is what made us feel so poor, I guess.
Even if we perished in one of those places, we would have gone out with flames and glory around us. We could have spent quality time robbing banks, being outlaws, drinking whiskey by rivers, shooting bottles and deer, and making moonshine. But then we might have cheated one another at cards or dice, or run off with the other’s wife, and one of us would shoot the other. The survivor would not live much longer, of course. True to the ending of all the old songs, the survivor would have been brought to a tree and hung at morning, even if it was not constitutional or legal.
The West could not have been that bad. All that sunshine made us want to kill ourselves? That makes no sense. It is only the weather. And sun is good for you. Maybe we stayed inside too much, maybe it was the addiction to air conditioning that killed us. Our minds overdosed on canned air and felt tapped. But Campbell would play outside in the parks, he had concerts, I saw him and there was applause at the end of each one of his sets. He was never the main attraction, yet he always had familiar faces at every one of his performances. I had faces too, but they were always beet red from inebriation or covered in cake and ice cream.
If we had more recognition, more applause, maybe that would have changed things. Was it about success in general, that intangible target that always moved beyond our grasp? For a lot of artists, life just is not worth living if there is no recognition, no awards, no contracts. The money is nice, but is having one’s art out there, being bought and sold that makes them happy? I suppose it is a human drive after all. No one takes much delight in being forgotten. Most people who end up overlooked learn to live with it, or they die and pass without a notice. Maybe this was what would have stopped us after all, fame, or the gently sloping path leading up to that place where we could walk around with halos on all the time, not heaven, but a world resembling heaven on earth.
