Hey the column below is already up at Knoxville Voice (http://www.knoxvoice.com/)!
It's not on the front page, but search around, you'll find it. And while you're searching you can check out KV's local music issue -- there's a roundtable discussion with scene vets, Jack Rentfro's blogging from Bonneroo, and much, much more. Check it out.
My Body, Your Soul
Looking back at a one-song songwriting career
by Scott McNutt
I’m out of touch with the music scene now, but in the ’80s and ’90s, I knew folks in local groups. I was a fan of Smokin’ Dave & the Premo Dopes, the Homeboys, Sea 7 States, RB Morris, the JudyBats, the Swamis, Scott Miller, the Viceroys, the V-Roys and many more. And I made one contribution to the scene myself.
The band I followed most closely was a late ’80s group, the Taoist Cowboys. I gravitated to them because I fondly remembered the old Homeboys song, “Looking Back,” a wistful, bouncy reminisce on love lost, written and sung by Scott Carpenter, public defender by day, country-rocker by night. Scott became a guitarist and sometime singer in the Taoist Cowboys, and the Cowboy sound somewhat echoed the Homeboys.
The other Cowboys were Brad Deaton on bass and Jeff Bills on drums, scene vets both, and Bob McCluskey, lead guitarist and main singer/songwriter. Bob was a head-scratcher. He looked to be 12 and not yet shaving, but he wrote songs as if looking back on eight decades of a twisted, yet romantic life.
The Cowboys played infectious pop. You liked it whether you were afflicted with the rockin’ pneumonia or the boogie-woogie flu ‑ or the punk runs or the garage cooties for that matter.
I envied those guys their talent and skill – and the adulation that engulfed them when they were up on stage. That was the only side of being in a band I saw. I didn’t consider the years of hard work, dedication, and practice leading up to those few hours performing.
I tried guitar lessons. I learned that I hold a beat like a broken metronome, I keep time like a stopped watch. Once or twice in a session, I might get it only to quickly lose it. You must have rhythm to play guitar. I quit after six months. I would never do what the Taoist Cowboys did.
Except, I wrote song lyrics. I wrote lyrics in high school and continued to throughout my twenties. Most were like my song “Past Imperfect, Present Tense.” An extended metaphor juxtaposing romantic entanglement and verb conjugation, the song was past imperfect. It was very, very bad. But at the time, I didn’t know.
Many Taoist Cowboy shows later, I decided, circa 1989, to ask Scott Carpenter if he’d care to peruse my songs. He agreed, and one night he and his guitar graced my Fort Sanders apartment. He thumbed through the sheaf of lyrics and quickly selected one song: “Body and Soul,” a collection of metaphors about unrequited love built on a could/would construction, as in “If I could give you…/Would it be enough to…?”
To my everlasting delight, Scott whipped out his guitar and strummed a jangly mid-tempo countryish tune while singing the lyrics – my lyrics. I loved it. After running through it a couple more times, he pocketed the lyrics, and we went down to the Longbranch to celebrate.
Half an anxious year passed before Scott told me that, in the Cowboys’ next show at Planet Earth, they would perform “Body and Soul.” I went. I heard. I barely recognized it. The jangly country tune I’d adored in my apartment had morphed on stage into a hard-driving rocker filled with lyrics I didn’t write.
When Scott asked after the show what I thought of it, I said something like, “It sure changed a lot.” I don’t try to be ungracious. I just have a knack.
Despite my initial surprise, I quickly warmed to the finished song. The faster tune was catchy, and the words were still substantially mine, just vastly improved by Scott’s contributions. For example, he transformed my ungainly line, “If I could give you the hands from my arms” into the sweet “If I could give you the embrace of my arms.” Plus, he added a bridge that anchored the lyrics’ stylized sentiments to real feelings. Listen and decide for yourself: Free MP3s of “Body and Soul” and all the songs on the Taoist Cowboy’s swan-song album, Punt, are available from Jeff Bill’s Lynn Point Records at www.lynnpoint.com/taoist_cowboys/index.htm
When the Cowboys performed “Body and Soul,” I’d count how many people danced to it, secretly dreaming it would become the hit that propelled them (and me) to the Big Time – or barring that outcome, that at least some of the fan adulation might get deflected to the song cowriter. Ha! Sometimes Scott generously gave me a shout-out in the song’s intro, but no one cared. No woman ever presented herself to me declaring that, yes, if I could give her the blood from my veins, then that would be enough to appease her.
For some time after that, about the next ten years after that, I fancied myself a songwriter. Talking with songwriting friends, I would inevitably suggest collaborating on a song. Scott’s bandmate, Bob McCluskey, Scott Miller, Todd Steed, RB Morris and others heard the whine of my songwriting wheedle. I recall RB’s laconic response to my self-important suggestion that we should write a song together: “We should, huh?”
Returning to the metaphor from my lone local music contribution, nowadays I realize that most everything I wrote, when it wasn’t simply bad, was all head, no heart. While I supplied a body for “Body and Soul,” Scott gave it soul. I may have brought the song’s skeleton, but Scott’s necromancy put flesh on its bones and jolted its heart beating. I was Igor the bone collector digging through a graveyard of rhymes to provide genius Dr. Scott-kenstein the specimen to spark rhythmical life into. Yes, I, I…I better stop with the metaphors before someone connects their foot bone to my ass bone.
Anyway, go hear the Taoist Cowboys and many other Knoxville bands of the last three decades at Lynn Point’s Web site. If “Body and Soul” appeals to you, credit Scott Carpenter. If it doesn’t, well, don’t blame me. ;-)
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