Chapter Fourteen
It wasn’t as if I’d made a conscious decision at Burgdorf not to write songs or play music. It just seemed to work out that way. Knowing that there wouldn’t be room in our cabin for a piano, I’d brought a guitar, but I hadn’t taken it out of the case since we moved in. I listened mostly to the tapes Rick played on our battery-powered cassette player. In a one-room cabin, when one of us listened to music, everyone listened.
Among Rick’s favorites were the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline, and Waylon Jennings. I not only listened but sang along to “Fire on the Mountain,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,”“Mama Tried,” “Crazy,” and “Put Another Log on the Fire.” Though I was not unfamiliar with country music, listening to it every day reminded me that the best country songs had a great story, a well-crafted lyric, and a performance that made you laugh, cry, or both.
One night, after hearing Jerry Jeff Walker sing about an Austin bootmaker named Charlie Dunn, Rick said, “You should go to Austin and record an album with Jerry Jeff’s band.”
“Interesting,” I said, and immediately put it out of my mind.
Several nights later we were entertaining a couple of Rick’s friends who had skied in when one of them asked if I’d ever played the piano in Gretchen’s cabin.
I had not.
I knew that Gretchen occupied her cabin rarely in summer and never in winter, but it was her cabin and I respected her privacy. Even if I’d been inclined to check out her piano, which I did know about, the cabin was unheated, which wasn’t conducive to keeping a piano in tune. But I was intrigued enough to ask the skier to call Gretchen when he got to McCall and see if she’d give me permission to enter her cabin and play her piano. Two days later word came in with another skier that Gretchen had said yes.
The following morning I hiked up the steep hill to Gretchen’s cabin in knee-deep snow. Idahoans call it “post-holing,” because each step leaves a hole deep enough to support a fencepost. I had no objective beyond seeing just how badly out of tune the piano was, or if it was even playable.
How badly out of tune was it? The piano was playable; it just wasn’t listenable. But in this situation my lack of perfect pitch was a blessing. Removing my gloves, I sat on the bench and played a chord. Ouch! It was way out of tune. But I heard it in my mind as it was supposed to sound. I played another chord, and then another. I stopped counting after the fourth chord. I just kept playing while my brain, in neural self-defense, replaced the out-of-tune notes with the correct ones. But then I encountered another obstacle. The outside temperature in the sun was –5°F. Gretchen’s cabin was in the shade and therefore at least ten degrees colder. After a while my fingers became too frozen to continue playing, and I went back home to warm up. As soon as I could feel my fingers again I resolved to learn how to play and write music on guitar.
The linear layout of chords on a piano was second nature to me. In contrast, the square configuration of chords on frets was as foreign to me as the Cyrillic alphabet. At first I found it difficult to adapt, but the thought of putting on layers of clothing, post-holing up to Gretchen’s cabin, and playing an out-of-tune piano until my fingers froze motivated me to persevere. That February I wrote most of the songs for my next album on guitar. I also turned thirty-seven.
When Rick again suggested that I record with Jerry Jeff’s band, the next time I went to McCall I reached out to some of the players. In March 1979, I left Molly and Levi in Rick’s care, flew to Austin, and recorded Touch the Sky. The Austin cats not only added a country music sensibility to every song but were even more talented than Rick had predicted they’d be. To this day I’m convinced that keyboard player Reese Wynans had fourteen fingers, but I couldn’t prove it because the extra four automatically retracted when anyone was looking.
I spent the rest of 1979 alternately living at Burgdorf and visiting my Goffin daughters. While I was there I collaborated with other songwriters, including Gerry. In January 1980, I returned to Austin to record a fourth album for Capitol. This time Rick and the children came with me. Sherry flew down from L.A. and took the cover photo for Pearls: Songs of Goffin and King. That album comprised new versions, with me singing, of nine vintage hits that Gerry and I had written in the sixties and a more recent composition by the two of us called “Dancin’ with Tears in My Eyes.” Pearls brought together a mélange of the men in my life that included my current boyfriend and two ex-husbands. I had written the new song with Gerry, who wasn’t in Austin, but Charlie was there to play bass on the entire album. In addition to his being an outstanding bass player, a friend, and a cooperative coparent, I knew Levi and Molly would enjoy having both parents with them in the same city. The situation was fraught with potential for disharmony, but Rick seemed to take it in stride.
I didn’t think about it at the time, but it’s possible that I was attempting to answer the questions that John Lennon had answered for me in “Imagine.” A similar question would become a permanent part of twentieth-century American pop culture a decade later when Rodney King, stammering with emotion, would ask, “Can we… can we all get along? Can we… can we get along?” In the twenty-first century Mr. King’s plaintive appeal would probably have been Auto-Tuned, set to a beat, uploaded, and viewed as entertainment by millions within an hour of the initial news coverage.
For so many years, I, too, had wondered why people couldn’t get along. In 1980, while I was recording Pearls, it almost seemed as if we could.