For You

Last week my son, Max, asked if we could switch cars for a day—he was going on a long drive—so, no problem. (It makes me think of my dad, who would give up his car at a moment’s notice to one of us needy kids. Dad wouldn’t even blink. He’d take the bus that day. The bus! Dad was a saint.)

The worst part of switching cars is that I’m unable to access my phone, so I can’t listen to my audio books, or get lost in a personal playlist of songs. So I got in the car and drove to work in silence. Which turned out to be nice.

At the end of the day, as I got in the car for the drive home, I unconsciously pressed the power button on the radio. But what started playing wasn’t the radio. It was the CD player. And the song that was playing was one that I had written. And the voice that was singing was mine.

Clearly, this requires an explanation.

I’d wager that at some point in everyone’s young life they imagine what it’s like to be a rock star. I did.

It’s 1973. I’m in high school. I spend countless days wearing out my Band on the Run and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road albums by listening to them in endless, constant rotation. I see my brother, Jonathan, playing the guitar and singing, and think, he can do it—so how hard can it be? It turns out if you want to be good, it’s pretty hard. 

Still, even though I know I’ll never play as well as Jonathan, and God knows I’ll never be able to sing like him, I keep at it. I learn enough chords that my fat fingers can play, and then play along with my favorite songs until I get of few of them down pretty good. 

A few years pass. I mess around trying to write my own tunes, and then start to add some words to the tunes, because, you know, Paul McCartney writes a ton of songs, so how hard can it be? (I’ve said something like this before, but it bears repeating: If you’re Paul McCartney it might be easy. If you’re David Beedle, you’re just kidding yourself.)

We’re in the late 1970s now. Jonathan—out of pity, maybe?—will sit around with me and we’ll play stuff together. More time passes. Jonathan’s actually pretty good. He’s in a band that plays, you know, out. (He actually practices way more than I ever would. Of course he’s going to be better than me.) All of a sudden it’s the early 1980s. I don’t even know how it happens, but Jonathan brings me along to sit in with him and two musician friends of his: Frank, a bass player, and Tom, a drummer.

I am petrified. Because believe me, I don’t belong in the same room with these guys. They humor me as I try to keep up. I spend most of the evening trying to tune my guitar—the rest of the band waiting as I pick a string and turn the tuning peg: “David, you’re flat.” “Now you’re sharp.” “Flat again.” “Give me that guitar, I’ll tune it.”

The night moves along without incident. We play a selection of covers and also—this is the really exciting part—original songs. Frank and Jonathan have a bunch of them, and they are all good. I come home from that first night tingling from the excitement of the creative energy and fun in that room, and from not making too much of a fool of myself. Somehow I am allowed to tag along next time. And the next. And soon, I’m not as bad as I once was. And soon after that, one night, after we do a couple of Frank’s original songs, and then a few of Jonathan’s, Frank looks at me and says, “What have you got?”

My testicles rise into my body, my colon clenches, and the blood rushes to my face, expanding it, balloon-like, until my eyes are slits and my lips are big, fat gummy worms.

“Uhhhhh … Uhhhhh … nothing.”

Now, the fact is that I had a stack of original songs at home, written on scraps of paper, napkins, post-its, and spiral notebooks. Songs that I was sure, as they were first coming to me, could be number-one hits. Standards. Sadly, however, there’s always that “next day,” when you return to your incredibly great song only to discover it is the biggest, embarrassing load of horse manure ever conceived.

Let me step sideways here for a moment to comment on why we were practicing in the first place. To be truthful, it’s kind of a blur to me, and I never asked. I just kept showing up, waiting for the group to come to their senses and kick me out of the band. I was fairly sure that we were never going to play live shows—at least not with me in it. I recall only two times we played in front of actual people. The first was at an outdoor festival, where we stood in a field and ten strangers watched us. I was petrified. I hated it. 

The second was at Jack and Leslie’s wedding. Jack is my brother-in-law—but he wasn’t at the time. He was my roommate with whom (along with two other friends) I had spent the last three years enjoying a … let’s say “carefree” … existence. When Jack met Leslie, got engaged, and moved out, it signaled the oncoming, unavoidable shift of priorities for a lot people in my circle. Especially me. It was 1984 and I was twenty-six years old. It was time to grow up a little.

And oh … I was madly in love with Laura, Jack’s sister. 

Problem was, Laura wasn’t quite on board with the whole “love” thing yet. Or even “dating.” She seemed quite happy being “friends.” 

So, when Leslie asked Jonathan, Frank, Tom, and me to be the band at their wedding (what was she thinking?), I was all for it. I was in desperation mode as far as Laura was concerned, so I’d do anything—even sing and play in front of one-hundred people. Then, shockingly, the rest of the band said, sure why not?

Sometime during the practice sessions in the months leading up to Jack and Leslie’s wedding we christened ourselves The Club Stella Bowling Team. (Note: None of us bowls.) The other thing that happened around that time was that I started bringing in a few of my feeble songs to the band. Once again, they humored me.

(I’ve got to say, Leslie was an absolute champion, allowing us to play a setlist at her wedding that had absolutely no regard for any wedding band traditions … or any audience in general. I mean, we played at least ten original songs, including one called “Stinky Whiskey Lips.” 

Now that I think of it, Leslie was an absolute champion each and every day of her life. I miss her so much. We all do.)

I brought a date to the wedding. Not cool on my part. I don’t know what I was thinking, except that I had lost my mind, what with this whole unrequited love thing I had going on with Laura. (I mean, look at her in that picture with Leslie. How could I not be in love with that girl?) Maybe I thought Laura, seeing me with another girl, might be jealous? Highly doubtful.

Yet somehow, the gods smiled upon me that night, and Laura and I got to talk at the end of the evening. And there was something there. And my date was not happy. We broke up on the drive home.

Two months later, I finally wore Laura down and for some strange reason she decided to give us a shot. Exactly one year from the night of Jack and Leslie’s wedding we were engaged. Jack and Leslie’s wedding would be the last live gig for the Club Stella Bowling Team. Our parting gift from Jack and Leslie were custom-made bowling shirts. I still have mine.

But the band wasn’t dead just yet. It turned out all we really wanted to do was record our own original songs. And during those early months together with Laura, I wrote a song about her called “For You,” and funny enough, the song didn’t seem all that horrible the next day, or even the next week after I’d written it. So I presented it to Jonathan, Frank, and Tom. I let go of my fear of rejection and failure … and braced myself.

That’s the song that was playing on the CD player when I got into Max’s car last week.

Club Stella worked slow. Jonny, Frank, and I each had songs we wanted to record, and we agreed that we wanted to do it right, at a good studio, with a skilled engineer. Studio and mixing sessions came in dribs and drabs—stretching out over months, then years. We recorded “For You” in 1989, four years after I first played it for the band.

Driving home last week, hearing that song come out of the car speakers, I realized I hadn’t listened to it for a very long time. Long enough that when I heard it, unlike so much of my own work that always seems dated and cringe-inducing, I kind-of liked it. Maybe part of it is the nostalgia. Or maybe that it’s honest and simple. But mostly because it reminds me of a special moment in time.

After the song was over I clicked the back button and I listened to it again. And then again. With each repeated listen I began to hear what I heard back then—back when we first practiced it … and especially when we recorded it: 

I remember Jonathan coming up with all these great guitar fills, and him deciding it would sound better if he used my twelve-string guitar. I remember Frank meticulously working out these interesting melodic bass figures on his fretless bass, improving the arrangement of the song, and how he insisted (correctly) that we record him doing some heavy breathing after the “chill is everywhere” line. I remember Tom deciding not to use drumsticks but instead choosing to tap his hands on his drums like bongos. I hear my shaky voice, desperately trying to stay in tune, and remember the million takes it took to record my singing, and how our engineer, Glenn, pieced together all the takes into some semblance of an actual lead vocal. (There’s a moment near the end where I sing “your heart needs love,” and on the word “love” Glenn double-tracked my voice to make it something much more than just, well, my voice.) Beyond that, the vocals only work when Jonathan comes in and harmonizes. Only then is it real, only then is it special. (I begged Jonathan to do all the vocals, but he refused. He never said it out loud, but the meaning was there: This is your song and you’re going to sing it.) Even now I marvel at how these guys, so much more musically talented than me, dove into my little song with such passion and creativity and support.

For a while we tried to get the Club Stella Bowling Team noticed, sending demo cassettes (cassettes!) to local radio stations, and well, anyone who would listen really—but attaining rock-star status wasn’t something we took seriously. Even our marketing letters, written by Frank, were strings of jokes.

As for me, I was simply happy we attempted some kind of creative music statement, and that we’d have a memory that we could actually listen to thirty years down the road. Which is right now, come to think of it. (And I mean, really, how crazy is it that my son was listening to the Club Stella Bowling Team in his car?)

I pulled out my old guitar a while back. I hadn’t played it in at least twenty years. Max asked me if I remembered “the song you wrote for mom.” I knew bits and pieces, but honestly, it was no good just me playing it. First of all, if my voice was shaky back in the 1980s, imagine how horrible it is now. Not to mention my fat fingers fumbling for lost guitar chords.

No, if I say that the song is good only because the rest of the band made it that way, it is not false modesty or a humble brag. It is absolutely true. 

If I learned anything from my part-time flirtation with being rock star, it is that many of the most powerful moments in life happen when we are part of something bigger than ourselves. Otherwise, how will we ever have the opportunity to be elevated by the other members of the band?

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The Club Stella Bowling Team – “For You”