Am I in love? No, I thought I’d been in love, but I guess I wasn’t, it just passed over. I guess I haven’t met the girl yet but I will and I hope I won’t be too long because I get lonesome sometimes. I get lonesome right in the middle of a crowd, and I’ve got a feeling that with her, whoever she may be, I won’t be lonesome no matter where I am. – Elvis Presley
I’ve thought about that passage a lot. Elvis Presley didn’t die from drugs. He died from loneliness. He was just some nobody that no one expected anything from who rattled and changed the world. He really only wanted to sing for people and get his mother out from under the weight of poverty.
His success actually drove her to drinking. She worried about him too much. She died at 42. He died at the same age.
He had tons of people around him. He only felt good singing for people. He probably just wanted to sing to one person forever. He probably was always singing to some ideal he never really met or something he thought he met and didn’t live up to the aching in his heart.
Sometimes I wonder if I ever fell in love. If perhaps, I just fell too much in love with the concept of love.
Pop songs? I’m not sure if they help or hurt.
Kim Fowley said that pop music was “lonely songs for lonely people.”
That’s pretty much every Roy Orbison song.
I used to wander around lost and alone listening to John Lennon sing “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party.”
Smokey Robinson via the Who. “I’ve Got to Dance to Keep from Crying.”
No love is perfect. Nothing hits the peak of first love or early love. Too many couple who die jaded, conflicted, married too soon – not best suited for the long term.
But I’ve seen some old couple in sync. I’ve seen funerals where you know that just like Johnny Cash, the person that survived barely wanted to go on.
I went to a Mason ceremony a while back and met this fantastic older gentleman. He was a veteran who had brought a young man with Down’s Syndrome that he had been working with and almost everything he had to say inspired me.
We talked about music. I almost always talk about music. The stuff he liked was fine, but nothing revelatory to me. Creedence, I think.
He told me that I really had to check out a local band that his son really loved Uptight Sugar.
I put it in the back of my head, but I’ve heard so much music. My thirst for new stuff isn’t the same as when I was paying big money for imported copies of NME and buying albums from the bottom of the Billboard charts that only college radio was playing.
The name sounded cool, but I didn’t expect much.
Took me about two weeks to do a lazy YouTube search and I listened to a song called “Diggin’ Holes” and this swell of music hit me so hard that I purchased their entire EP. I knew I loved it after like 30 seconds, and I keep listening to that song over and over.
The music hits you first always, but the lyrics speak to me too. This guy has been hurt. This dude can convey it.
I had some odd dealings with the music writer Dave Marsh. I don’t think he’s a great guy, but his writing made me love music a lot and shaped my tastes. He wrote that music was the sheer conveyance of passion and emotion.
It’s probably not that original (nothing really is), but I read it there first.
I went to see the band and liked them even more. They do Beatles brunches as Sunrise Jones. Their lead singer and songwriter David Hamilton seems to be the nicest guy. He runs around trying to please his fans, and then he runs right home to be with his family.
The whole thing made me a little crazy though. He’s been around forever. Why is there nothing online? Why only one EP with only four amazing songs?
Why isn’t this guy a rock star?
I don’t really want him to be a rock star so he can be rich. I don’t want to see him in a hot tub or on a reality show. I just want him to be comfortable enough to write more songs and be happy. Maybe it’s selfish. He probably is happy. Maybe I just want more songs so I am happier.
Then his wife posted this on Facebook.
My Uncle wrote a marriage song to my Aunt. He was in the music business forever. It was alright. It’s a wonderful gesture. It wasn’t that.
That’s the sound of a guy who has been broken saying thank you. That’s the sound of a guy who will die if he loses what he just attained. That’s beauty. That’s passion. That makes me jealous I’m not married to him, and I’m attracted to Tomboys who have no use for me.
Then he turned it into this which is just unbelievable.
It has drive and flow. It’s pop, but it’s trippy enough for a festival crowd blitzed on whatever drug they need to reach bliss 6,000 feet from the stage.
Why isn’t this dude huge?
Maybe that’s selfish of me.
I’ve written a lot comparing Orson Welles to Clint Eastwood.
Orson was too much of a perfectionist. He made perhaps the greatest film of all time and then struggled to get financing. He struggled for final cut. He wound up doing wine commercials. People forgot his brilliance, while others overestimated it.
Clint Eastwood just has a vision and gets things done. Far more prolific. No angst. More bang for the buck.
I don’t know which is better. I don’t know if Welles should have been less of a perfectionist.
I do know that Vincent Van Gogh didn’t have a real friend in his life. I do know that it doesn’t matter how much his paintings sell for because he’s dead. I do know that going to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam was one of the best most visceral experiences in my life.
I was in love for real once. It didn’t work out. It wasn’t fair. I still think I got cheated. It put me down for over 20 years, which was stupid and my fault. I tell people to move on all the time now, but no one knows that hole inside you unless you felt it. Maybe I over dramatized it. I don’t even know. I just know I thought we were going to take over the world and we didn’t, and she’s fine, but it killed me.
Loneliness is worse that a bullet. It’s worse than a hot flame, actually it is a hot flame.
I keep saying it. Almost every John Lennon song before he met Yoko Ono was about finding a true love, and almost every one after was him congratulating himself on falling in love.
After my break up, I wrote a letter or an email to a friend about a ton of songs I kept hearing on the radio.
They were all old break up songs.
I was obsessed with David Ruffin’s “My Whole World Ended.”
People told me to move on. I should have. More fish in the sea. Whatever.
A woman in line for a Jon Brion concert gave me the old “It’s better to have loved and lost” line and I asked her what her worst break up was.
She said, “I married my high school sweetheart.”
I’ve never even really raised my voice to a woman, but man I just wanted to punch her. I didn’t. I’m just honest.
I didn’t really want or need kids, but I would have had them for her. I just wanted to lay in a bed somewhere, watch movies and talk or listen to music and talk, and she listened.
So I want this dude David Hamilton to be huge. I want him to be a rock star, and I’ve expounded over and over again. You don’t get your music heard by getting married and having kids. It’s too much of a time commitment.
You make your fortune like Warren Beatty or Jack Nicholson, and then you have kids and settle down. Plenty of fish in the sea.
But then again I don’t really believe that do I?
The finished product of “In a Hole (At the End of the World)” is obviously what should be released.
That demo or love note or whatever it is. That’s the truth. That’s what made me cry.
Dude still seems equally in love. I’m happy for him. He wrote that song. He wrote a few more. That’s something. That’s a ton. Good for him.
You should listen to him. I envy him with what he has now. Wish he had the time to make some more for me until I find someone to disappear with and have the same thing.
