Yo. This is Vince. Out here on the edge of the high desert these days.
We have moved the Journal section of the VinceBell.com website here, and will be writing regularly again. And Live Music's Cool at Live Music School, the monthly podcast, is back with a July installment. Look for updates to the website soon, too.
I just finished writing a one-man play about the first 30 years of my life in music. Like a hoard of locusts, it has insatiably taken this entire year to date, and threatens to devour the rest of the quickly evaporating calendar. Rehearsal is a daily down and dirty out on the stage of The RealDeal, the house concert series I host in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I'll be out there again today before lunch.There were at least three complete drafts of this hour-long performance piece of words and music. Each got seriously considered, labored over as if it were the words of the Buddha, and summarily jettisoned. The first was OK, but wandered in to and out of cheeky, cheesy music business with no consequence worthy of daytime TV. The second was about that decade I spent relearning how to walk, talk and play music again, after a car accident. It told the truth, but had the liability of a grievous tale without the simple reward of accomplishment sufficient to create a relief of an ending. The third aspired to tell both stories through the eyes of the writer.
Big miscalculation. When I showed the third draft off to Tanya Taylor Rubenstein, a veteran of the stage, and one-person play, she tore it apart and sent me home with a passel of notes to absorb before she would hear it again. I call her "Coach."
The final script is a more complete narrative, and tells both stories, and I just may be on to something. Taken together with Coach's advisement, there is poetry in the story-line of the prose that not so obviously rhymes. And there is, as Tim Hardin once said when I was a puppy in music watching him from the wings of the stage at the old Majestic Theatre in Houston, "...a reason to believe."
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