Cowboy Confessional

I hacked out a slightly different version of Cajun Queen over the weekend. It is still a work in progress and I sorely need to find a better drummer than me. For a song that was whelped as a solo slide guitar piece, this tune is evolving in unexpected ways.

There are parallels for writers. I chatting with Dear Old Dad over the weekend. He started writing his first book and got stuck constructing the outline, having no idea where he was going with his memoir (the old man is leading a damn interesting life). He has lots of good stories to tell but he didn’t know what the theme and point of his book would be.

Sometimes the written word is like a song that you are monkeying with in studio. In Cajun Queen I knew something was missing — it did not sound complete. I started grabbing the odd and assorted percussion instruments laying about. Not liking tambourines much at all I grabbed that last.

Much to my dismay it was exactly what I needed.

My advice to Pop was to write nothing but different high-level outlines no deeper than two levels. I suggested organizing each outline around different centers of topic. After hacking through three or four, he would start to see patterns emerge — common themes that would tie the book together. I also suggested starting at the end — finding the one story that made the biggest impression on him personally — and opening the book with it. That would automagically set the tone and theme tight away.

Cajun Queen is a case study of setting the tone. As originally performed, it was a slash-and-burn blues bit focusing on slide guitar riffs, which themselves were much different than what has now been recorded. But for some unexplained reason I wanted conga drums in the song and laid that track first. That changed the center — the focus — of the song leading to the dueling guitars you hear now.

Sometimes you gotta go where the universe tells you to go.

I hope Dad starts his memoir with a meeting he had. It was with a colonel who serving in Vietnam during that troubled little war. Dad and his band of engineers worked some typical magic, rigging up motion detectors and shoving them into bamboo stalks (bamboo in Nam is about the size of a man’s thigh and grows tall enough to obscure the sun). At night, huey choppers would fly down the Ho Chi Minh trail tossing sharp-ended bamboo stalks loaded with Dad’s invention along the trail. These electronic stalks could discern the difference between an ox cart or an infantry division rolling down the road. They could tell the difference between marching boots and tank treads. The bamboo would radio this intelligence to U.S. commanders.

After a very business-like briefing, the colonel came over to my old man and said “We see them coming now. You saved a lot of my men’s lives. Thanks.”

Now that’s a theme we all can live with.

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