I keep hearing that in my head every day. The Album he would have made if he hadn't died.
It's only an accident that I'm making an album. What I'm presenting is a collection of songs that I like singing at this moment in my life. Plus a few I hadn't done in a long time. For instance, I was kind of shocked to find out there was no recording of me singing Somebody's Friend.
How I've sung it has evolved much over the years.
When I wrote it originally, with the "radio" audience in mind, we made a big demo that we thought would sound good with a reggae beat. I still love that recording. Ginger Freers nailed that vocal. But that didn't work for the show. It had to be more angry and raw than that.
I could hear what I wanted in my head, but I couldn't reproduce it until I realized I was hearing a guitar lick. David Robyn helped me with that.
Since I don't play guitar, what I ended up with was my piano imitation of a guitar lick, which has its own weird sort of authenticity. I have a special relationship with Somebody's Friend, the promise of false cures.
As I was riding the bus the other day, after having had a discussion about "rise from the grave" life experiences, I kept hearing the title phrase in my head: The album he would have made if he hadn't died.
I can't say that this is that album. I don't want to try to live up to that kind of pressure. The pieces I've been composing are more concert/choral/orchestral type. They need a lot more formality. My Mass, for instance, will be performed in the Spring. And I'd definitely want that to be a part of my musical legacy.
But that would make a great title for something. Or even a meme.
#IfHeHadn'tDied
However, going up to someone on the street and asking. "Hello, what would you have done if you hadn't died?" sounds more like a slasher pic. Ah, ye cynical world.
After I got home from #WDS2013, just as it all seemed like some big dream, came these from one of the attendees of the Summit, Mike Rohde, who made one of these of every speaker and activity he went to. He took a few years off and gave me a cooler haircut.
So I immediately made his graphic the primary one on my some of my social media. And it totally changed my image. Hip and cool, that's how I be.
That was followed by many tweets and blog entries which you can find at #WDS2013 on Twitter.
And then came this blog entry and graphic from an artist and attendee named Peter Grundy, who was very praisy about my performance (thanks) but then said this:
I hope I can keep this story in my mind on days I think dont go to well and realise I should treat every day as a bonus round.
And that made it all worth it. Because if he got the message, then who knows how many others did, also? Not that I'm selling a message. It's nothing more than a change of mind, this living in the bonus round. It's a frame of reference.
But the blog wasn't enough. He also sent this incredible woodcut design.
Wasting no time, I asked him if I could use these images for the album I'm recording and he said yes.
So, a little spark lights a couple more sparks.
But, best of all, by donating my service -- though I considered it a privilege -- as performer to World Domination Summit, I realize I'm joining a community of artists and, together, we are now creating a new adventure for ourselves.
The knock on the door seems so dramatic in retrospect
But he barely mentioned it in his diary
The Crixivan was just another drug
In a long line of drugs
Another punishment
In a long line of punishments
Instead, he wrote about his friends
A woman he nursed after she got too drunk at the ASCAP Awards
And the strangers
Who were slowly discovering him
And each other
On this new thing: The Internet
About "Bro. Jerry,"
A minister who used his lyrics Going It Alone
In a sermon
Because a parishioner's son had died of AIDS
A sermon?
It had been years since he had even been inside a church
He thought of himself as the
Worst of the Worst kind of human being
Ashamed and angry and pissed off at churches
Why would a minister use the writings
Of a queer dying of AIDS?
In the pulpit
About meeting, online,
A 20-year old straight boy with AIDS
Named Shawn Decker The Positoid
He wrote about his ears
Now painfully blocked up
About strangers whose lovers were dying
Locally, his music and his diary were being discovered
LA legend, Al Martinez in the LA Times
Before running it, he mentioned the song
CONNECTED
"Are you SURE that was Anson Williams [Potsie]
In the Waiting Room?"
It was almost in passing,
That he mentioned the package arriving
The FedEx knock at the dorr
He had almost forgotten about it because
Of mix-ups in the paperwork
Crixivan arrived May 22, 1996
He simply wrote that he had to take it on an empty stomach
And another drug on a full stomach
"..if I take the Crixivan at 6, 2, and 10, then I'd have to eat (and take the Saquinavir) at 7, 3 and 11. LUNCH AT 3? Dinner at 11? But I suppose I could eat lunch at 12, take a snack at 3 with the Saquinavir, dinner at 7, Crixivan at 10, and eat a snack with the Saquinavir at 11..."
But would any of it work?
Nothing had, so far
But he was determined to work it
He was a happily compliant patient
Meanwhile, he was wasting away
Nobody wanted to say it out loud
But he was dying
His doctor decided to put him on TPN
Total Parenteral Nutrition
He was being tortured by a daily friend The Thing That's Killing Me
(complete with link)
Because his digestive system had just stopped working
He was wearing diapers
TPN, someone said,
Is what they give people just before they die
To give them a few weeks
To say goodbye to friends and relatives
A PICC line insertion into his veins
Which terrified him
Needles!
Nutrition infused directly into his blood
Meanwhile, the would-be producers of his musical
Are demanding rewrites to the score
Jim was starting on his fourth draft of the book
And they still had no theater and no money
Finally, the PICC line was inserted into his arm
A tube ran up his vein to his heart
He was ready to be fed
Then, a foul-up in his health insurance
He had the line in his arm
But no way to get the food
So, he drove to the agency and,
Sick as a dog, was herded
From one window to the next
Until someone gave him a phone number
"Another phone number?"
His arm throbbed.
His ears were blocked.
His stomach hurt.
His diaper felt moist.
The pay phone didn't work.
He desperately raced home
On the phone, paged through the system
Until he found a human voice
A woman
A voice that actually helped him
He fell in love with her
The nutrition would arrive the next day
Exhausted, his newly-ported arm throbbing,
He laid down to sleep
"I had this really weird dream last night, too. The weirdest I've had in a long time. Some dictator had taken over and we knew him and he wanted something from us. But I didn't have any AIDS meds left so I got sicker and started dying. The weird part is that I smiled at the thought that I'd thwart his plans by dying. I was triumphing in death."
It was his and Jim's 11th anniversary
NEXT: Things start to change. Plus, a little accident in front of Tim Curry.
After he got home from
The Last Cruise of His Life
After he had accepted that he was dying
With New infections taking over
Ear infections
Parasites defeating his immune system
All he had left in life was Jim,
Thurber the cat,
Jim’s childhood piano
A Radio Shack cassette of his songs
Recorded by himself in a single hour
And a desire to see his show
Just once
And the Internet
It was a new thing at the time
Like many desperately ill people
Needing help
Needing information about their disease
Needing community
Some trapped alone
Some with an abusive spouse
Some searching for alternative therapies
He went out onto the Net
And just told his story
About just being a patient
How being a patient makes you a nurse
People wanted to hear his healing music
So he gave the Radio Shack cassettes away
He signed and numbered them
“Remember me!” he sang. “I existed!"
He always gave it all away
He’d sing for anyone, anywhere
No matter how sick he felt
And, since he had nothing left to lose
He just told everyone that someday
He’d be in the rock and roll hall of fame
Or win a Tony
But right now, what he wanted most in life
Was to see his musical just once
One time before dying
But he knew little about theatre
He was just a guy with a cassette
It was Jim that made his songs into a musical
And Jim who filled the stage with people
People from the dying man’s life
Created The Last Session
How do you get something like that produced?
His cassette of songs
“the score” they called it
Recorded in a single hour of studio time
Of him singing the songs himself
Where are the orchestrations?
What are the harmonies like?
Which characters sing which songs?
He didn’t know
What he did know was that his ears were blocked
His throat was sore
This stomach hurt
They were burning things off his skin
He had massive diarrhea
He was eating only the BRAT diet
Banana
Rice
Applesauce
Toast
The BRAT diet
And the clock ticked away
Time had made him its numbering clock
He had wasted time
And now did time waste him
I was really mean to Kim Kardashian in my previous post about the Celebrity Nullification Game. I'm sure she's a very nice lady. I think I'm just allowing her to embody the kind of TV celebrity most of us love to hate. Hey! They put themselves out there. Jeering from the sidelines is part of the show, isn't it?
So I was mean. But it totally subverts my angelic sweet guy image.
In acting class, I learned that I've not been speaking with my real voice. That what I think is my real voice actually sounds like a phony voice and me speaking in very low tones is actually my real voice which sounds like my fake voice (to me). It's a trick that played by your cranium.
That's why we hate recordings of our own voice.
So, I need to find my true voice! It's so weird to think that my real voice is not my real voice, but a phony voice that's hiding the real voice.
Today, we were at a memorial service for a Broadway actor named Kevin Gray. I didn't know him. But there's a kind of communal spirit in theater that's similar to church. Traditions they hang onto that tell them who they are. These memorial services are done sparsely. Usually in an afternoon. By permission or even a donation by the theater owners and performers. No one is ever "introduced" before coming onto the stage. They just come to the mic and speak: co-actors, friends, family.
The story they told of Kevin was that he was a most fearless and powerful singer/actor/dancer who changed a lot of people's lives in the theater by being a generous actor, and hilarious and fiercely professional. The stunning revelation was a video of him with Marie Osmond in The King and I. She was fantastic! And there's a clip where she talks about how he really just made her so comfortable. In the clip, I saw it. The way his King was more aggressive in taking Anna's waist. Pulling her closely with a strong jerk. Taking control. Brilliant.
When your entire life depends on going from show to show, stage to stage, as a gypsy, you find these rare people who simply make you happier because you get to be around them. A community is passed on, one person at a time. His death was shocking. A heart problem. He was still young and about to go into teaching, and he dropped dead shoveling show.
The heartbreak in the room was palpable. This was one of the good guys.
While waiting for Jim, who was having lunch with his Character Man team over a bowl of soup at the Polish Tea Room, I paced in front of the Majestic Theater, and like a prayer, recited my Richard II scene in my low voice. I sent Jonathan Marro an email about it and he said he was also practicing his very low tones. We're both looking for our real voice and we're gonna find it.
I wasted time and now doth time waste me
For now hath time made me his numbering clock
Yesterday, I sat at the piano, cleared my mind, and just started playing songs in no particular order. Jim had gone out to see Mark Nadler's new show at the York -- a last minute invitation and I was too exhausted from a long day of walking and socializing with some friends.
So, he went off to see it (and said it was fantastic). I knew Mark Nadler way back when, doing piano bars in the Village, a job for which I was not suited but wasn't bad at. At long as people could talk and drink, I was fine to have in a corner. Mark was more ambitious. I had no idea how be a night club entertainer. Did I mention Jim said it's great?
So, I was home. I watched a bunch of "Arrows" episodes, which put me in a zen mood and then I went to our little upright -- or, rather, Sylvia's upright. Barbara Spiegel's mother. She lived here until she died. Barbara says she would love knowing her piano is being used and sung around.
Knowing I'm going to be singing "Rescue" and "Lazarus Come Out" on Saturday, I started with them. Cindy Marchionda, from my acting class wrote me and said she wanted to be part of the Bonus Round Band that night. She asked, "How many are there?"
I said, "I don't know. Maybe just you and me."
That morning, I had worked out a duet arrangement for us and revised a "Lazarus" score. She'll lead the audience plus anyone else who comes to be in the band. (She didn't know she'd be the band leader. Never volunteer for anything; they may make you do something). So, I knew I needed to review those changes.
We're gonna turn "Rescue" into a love ballad. Not change any words. Just have a little fun with the animalistic imagery. And "Lazarus," it needs a new score. I've learned so much with Mark Janas as my musical mentor. Now I can look at it and know exactly how to write out the score.
But I didn't want to think about any of that.
I wanted, last night, to return to the original source. Open my heart and sing whatever came into my head. That's what I did with The Last Session. Over and over. And I still love singing those songs. They've become richer and more meaningful to me over time. I will sing them until I die (again).
And I didn't want to think about "shows." I wanted to play the songs that turned me on the most. And I'd know them because they'd be the ones to rise to my consciousness as I finish the current one. But that was my starting point.
Rescue -- and because we're making it a medley -- play a segue right into "Lazarus." Which, when I tried it, worked beautifully. Rescue is in E, so the B is common to the key of G, which is where we're going to get to "Lazarus." So, instead of playing an E chord at the end of "Rescue," I played a G chord, downshifting into the octave pulse in the left hand.
I thought about the show. That's how we'll do it. Easy.
Then, I sang it and tried to forget about Saturday's show. I am singing "Lazarus," but I"m thinking, "What song do I want to play next?"
Then I remembered "The Craving."
"The Craving" is a very dark song. It's about addiction. But there's something in the music that haunts me, and it reaches some very deep levels of sadness, which made me think of "Dead Inside."
Suddenly, I'm Tom Waits, I guess. Can't find the downside of low.
There I go again. For my next song, the Downside of Low by Roy Orbison.
Rescue
Lazarus Come Out
The Craving
Dead Inside
Well, as long as we're in hell, we might as well go for the jugular.
Holy Dirt
Holy Dirt, the anti-hymn. The place where everyone dies. Now, normally, in New World Waking, we would go into "Lazarus Come Out." But I've already sung it and Holy Dirt is so very D-flat. I love D-flat. What else do I have in D-flat. And there it was, like a gift from above.
At A Hospice, In the Atrium
The sound of sadness. The comforting sound of letting it all go. Of being nothing.
Richard II: No man with nothing shall be pleased until he be eased by being nothing.
"Hospice" ends on a healing note. So, time for change of pace.
Franco Ate The Paperwork
He’s Coming Back
My Thanksgiving Prayer
War By Default
And then I got tired of not remembering the words to War By Default. So, went back and sang "Rescue" so review the changes. It'll be nice doing it as a duet.
That was the approximate order, at least as how I could reconstruct it. I didn't turn on anything to tape it nor did I stop and take notes. This was just what I wanted to hear at that moment. I was actually surprised that there were so many.
"Franco" and "War By Default" are from New World Waking. I was shaky because I couldn't remember all the words, but what was interesting to me, as a musician, was how I jammed on the music instead of playing them as written out in the piano part of the score.
This used to intimidate me when I was making the transition from singer/songwriter to "composer." How I never played any song the same way twice, because I've always played according to how I felt at any given moment. The emotion would color which octave I'd play in, and the tempo.
And I felt this put me at a disadvantage in the world of theater because the goal there is to write down something very specifically for the musician/accompanist who is looking at it for the first time. In bands, we just wrote down chords. And you can do that, to a certain extent in score music, but for the most part, the more specific about which note, where, the better a chance that it will be played in a way that won't make you cringe.
A choir or chorus needs specificity.
I felt like a bit of an idiot when I began with TLS. I didn't know how to write any of it down except for the most rudimentary notes and chord symbols. And in that first workshop run, on Melrose Avenue I didn't "arrange" the vocals. We just made them up on the spot.
Then, one day, you wake up and someone says, "The producers would like to see a score."
Gulp. I don't think I had ever even seen the score to a show, much less have the knowledge to write it out to professional standards.
So, when others came along and began arranging and playing and changing things, I was utterly lost. Even if I didn't like something, I didn't know how to tell them what was wrong or how to do it right. And I'm not blaming them. This is what was in my own head. I was an amateur to the process -- and I was dying, a not insignificant part of the story.
We didn't have time to teach me four years of music theory.
But, before all that. Before The Last Session was even conceived as a "show," there was just me at a piano playing what came to me with no rules, no expectations. They came from me in a flow.
They were nothing. Just songs I had to write. Like any of another million gazillion songwriters.
But they were things I need to say. Things I needed to express, and all I had was my mind, my voice (which is really the whole body) and my piano. (We always picture "throat" when we write "voice," but the voice comes from the whole body).
Just songs that I had to write. Songs I needed to write. Songs that, when I was in the pocket, actually heated me up from the inside. A furnace fires up when I'm just playing what comes when I think no one is watching.
When I go into the studio on the 15th, even though there will a guy at the board, and maybe a friend of two, I'm going to try to get into that head space and just play it like I'm feeling it. Shut out the rest of the world and just go in. Feel for the inner heat and then follow it like a puppy dog.
ABC has a new series called "Flash Forward," and I was watching it on Hulu. (Yes, that's a plug. No, they didn't pay me to mention them). In the pilot, everyone in the world has a suddenly 2 minute, 17 second blackout where they experience a dream, a vision. They see themselves and what they're doing exactly 6 months from the present day.
In other words, they know what they're going to be doing, and where they're doing it, six months from now.
But one of the characters intrigues me. He's a Korean FBI man who saw nothing, meaning he was either asleep or dead (though others said they saw themselves asleep or dreaming). More clues arrive and he learns he's going to be murdered in March.
His reaction, at first, was fear. So, he fought back against the investigation they're going through to piece together a "mosaic" of that day (from as many witnesses as possible).
Then, in this most recent episode, he suddenly began to get giddy and loose. They were all drinking together in a bar, for instance, and one of the characters cautions him about drinking too much.
He looks at the scold and says, hey, man. I know when I'm gonna die. I might as get some living in.
Other characters begin to act in the same way. Released from the normal, daily fears, they suddenly feel free and positive and without a care.
That feeling. That's what I called the bonus round.
I was aware of my giddy freedom, personally, but I wasn't aware of how much I weigh myself down with fear and anxiety until the day they told me I was going to live. I sang about this last week at Kulak's with my original "Lazarus" song. It's on the Bonus Round Sessions CD.
And I've written about it many times over the past years since coming back to life. It was almost visceral. I can tell you the exact moment of the epiphany, when I felt the weight of the world come back down on my shoulders. I was in the living room holding the vacuum cleaner and it descended like a thought, a feather of anxiety touched my clean mind. It flew in and out so quickly, I almost missed it.
For a moment it went away. But then, as if coming out of amnesia, the kind you only see on soap operas, I remembered "the weight." I could feel it pressing down on me. The pre-bonus round Steve. Like a child being reborn into a world of fear and anxiety, and yet created only by my mind.
One second I was carefree and had limitless potential.
The next moment, I was the worry rat thrown back into river of anxiety to drown.
The other night, at Kulak's, as I was about to sing "Lazarus," I was explaining to Tatiana, a young writer on the scene, that Lazarus, in the story, was brought back to life.
Her first question was, "What did he think about that?"
In Flash Forward, some of the characters are saying, "The future saved me."
I remember when I could see my future. And like this FBI character, there was a certain comfort in knowing I had only just so much time and no more.
I'm reminded of the old Chinese saying about how a child who dies has the longest life and an old man, the shortest.
I know that that state of mind, of perfect freedom, is available. I know it is because it's only a state of mind. Having gone there, I know what it feels and tastes and smells like. The question is whether I have to know when I'm gonna die to get there again.
Its time has passed. It was a great idea, conceptually back in the early days of the very limited world wide web. "A place where everyone can have his own website," all organized into communities with virtual street addresses.
I set "The Steve Schalchlin Survival Site" up in the Broadway community because we had just finished our first staged reading of The Last Session and now I was Sondheim. In fact, I was Jerry Herman, Neil Young AND Stephen Sondheim. (It's a dead link now.)
And, because I was dying of AIDS, no one dared tell me different. I would go out of this life as the suddenly discovered genius that never was, except for this one last work, a testament to his own life.
And then I ruined it all by living. Oh, well. Can't lose 'em all.
Nowadays, with social networking, "having a website," is kind of meaningless unless you're trying to sell something. Virtual neighborhoods aren't really neighborhoods if the people "living next to each other" have no interaction. A nation of monks, as Dean Pitchford described songwriters.
My relationship with Geocities gets even more complex. It was the creation of a gay man, John Rezner, and his partner, David Bohnett. David said it was really John's vision. Until then, those who weren't schooled in computers had only email and listserves and BBS's. Having your own website was huge!
Plus, the interface, which improved over time, made it possible for non-html coding of webpages. I had already taught myself HTML by clicking on websites, picking it up randomly. So, I was slightly ahead of the curve in the early days and my website got some attention, especially because of its unique subject matter: Man dying of AIDS puts diary online.
David took a personal interest because John Rezner had died of AIDS some time before. "The Last Session" was about to, or had just become, a little mini-phenomenon.
So, when Geocities went public, the first big New York Times Business Section story began with three paragraphs about my online diary. I was always very proud of that, to feel newsworthy. I wonder if that article is archived?
But, Geocities just never made any money, and when the web went "social," it became "a cultural relic" (according to this article). And now, Yahoo is shutting it down.
The truth is, though, many people were helped by Geocities. Their lives where changed. I am a living testament to this. Thank you, David. And here's to the memory of John Rezner.
"MONDAY MORNING NEW YORK TIMES Business Day section. In an article about Geocities, they include my little Survival Site in the story. Of course, they spelled my name wrong, but, HEY! When ya got a name like Schalchlin, you learn to cope. Can't wait until people start typing "Schachlin" into Yahoo and coming up empty. Another brush with fame goes slipping through my fingers. *sigh*"
So I put "Schachlin" into search at the NYT archives and found it. :-)
