Cultural Sponge - The Joe Pagetta Blog

One of my favorite authors, Richard Price, was in town this weekend to read from his latest novel Lush Life and answer questions from the audience.  Lush Life is a fantastic novel, and to hear him read from it, New York accent and all, was truly special. I became a fan of Price’s many years ago when I first read Clockers.  What made the book particularly interesting for me was that it took place in a ficticious New Jersey town called Dempsey, that was clearly based on my hometown of Jersey City. Anybody growing up there would have fingered the projects in the book to be based on Curries Woods near the border of Jersey City and Bayonne. I’ve never really confirmed any of these theories, though, until yesterday.  Someone at the reading asked about Dempsey, and Price said it was based on a combination of several cities, including Jersey City and Newark. He also told a story about how a copy of one of his books practically saved his life while doing research in the projects in Jersey City. He didn’t said which projects, though. At least not yet.

I figured since we were in Nashville — and really, what are the odds that someone who grew in Jersey City would be at his reading — I figured I would tell him of my roots when I got my book signed.  So that’s me in the picture trying my best to make a personal connection with Richard Price in the two seconds it takes him to sign my book.  That of course never works, but I did tell him it was honor to meet him and that I grew up in Jersey City, in the Heights section. He said he gets confused sometimes and asked me if the Heights is where St. Peter’s College is (my college! wow, Richard Price has heard of my college). I told him that St. Peter’s is really closer to the Journal Square area, and then explained where the Heights are in relation to Hoboken. Why I didn’t say, “no, but that’s where I went to college” is a mystery. Like I said, these “personal connections on book-signing lines” attempts never work. He then said he mostly hung out in the Curries Woods and Greenville areas. Bam! Confirmation! Now, that wasn’t what I was going for, of course. I was hoping he’d say something like “Really? Jersey City? What the fuck is somebody from Jersey City doing in Nashville,” and then we’d have some kind of Northeast New Jersey/New York City bonding moment. Maybe even grab some coffee and shoot the shit awhile. But I’m a goofball, as anyone who’s ever read my account of meeting Springsteen knows. That kind of thing doesn’t happen.

I did have my theories confirmed, and that was cool. And I got my book signed. Richard Price kicks ass. If you haven’t read him, especially Lush Life and Clockers, you’re truly missing out on reading one of the greatest working writers today. He’s one of the masters of dialogue.

As opposed to, say, me.

Last month marked ten years since I arrived in Nashville with my ‘89 Oldsmobile and a 4×6 UHaul trailer. A lot has happened since then. I’ve had ups and downs and accomplishments and failures. Perhaps I’ll get into them all in a 10th-anniversary post sometime soon. But for now, I share what may be one of my biggest milestones since I moved here. I have a sandwich named after me at Savarino’s Cucina, the best Italian bakery and cafe in Nashville. The Joe Pagetta consists of prosciutto, mozzarella, tomatoes and pesto sauce. Fantastic! I now join several other Nashville Italian-American luminaries with sandwiches. Especially exciting is that my sandwich debuts along with The Felix Cavaliere, named for the legendary Rascals singer and songwriter, who also calls Nashville home. A few years ago, I was going through the security line at Nashville Airport on my way to New Jersey, and Felix was behind me. I didn’t know him at the time, and was too nervous to say hello.  When I got to New Jersey, I told everybody I know, “you won’t believe who was behind me at the airport.” Now look at us, next to each other on the sandwich board. It’s a beautiful thing.

If you’re in Nashville, go over to Savarino’s on Belcourt Ave. in Hillsboro Village. Get a Joe Pagetta. Get a Nick Pellegrino. Get an Al, a Felix or an Ed. Get a Corrado Jr. Hell, get anything. It’s all great. Finish up with a Cannoli and an espresso. Stop and enjoy life.

I can’t help but think of my father, who passed away almost a year ago. He would have got a kick out of this.

Lyrics  to a song called “The Year of Leaving,” to be performed “in the style of The Hold Steady.” The title comes from a line in Janis Ian’s autobiography Society’s Child.

The Year of Leaving

I was walking in DC
Listening to the Hold Steady
And trying to stay positive
I was jealous of all the people on bicycles
I considered taking up smoking again

This is the end of the year of leaving
I’ve gone too far
This is the end of the year of leaving
I’m staying home from now on

I was driving in New Jersey
Trying to make a left turn
To get to the Dunkin’ Donuts
The median was all fence and barbed wire
I resolved to start drinking more water

This is the end of the year of leaving
I’ve gone too far
This is the end of the year of leaving
I’m staying home from now on

I’m tired of saying goodbye
To everyone and everything
There was a time
When everyone meant everything

I was moving around the kitchen
Looking for a bottle opener
To punch a hole in a can of fruit punch
After awhile I gave up on the endeavor
And remembered I was gonna start drinking more water

This is the end of the year of leaving
I’ve gone too far
This is the end of the year of leaving
I’m staying home from now on

Galleycat was there at Madison Square Park in NYC last week when writer William Maxwell — among many things, author of the novel I wrote about here in march,  So Long, See You Tomorrow – was remembered by the National Book Foundation. Those honoring Maxwell on the eighth anniversary of his death included Christopher Carduff, editor of a two-volume collection of Maxwell’s fiction for the Library of America, Dan Menaker, the former Random House editor,  Edward Hirsch, poet, Ben Cheever, novelist, and Stewart O’Nan, author of Snow Angels.

O’Nan, according to Galleycat,  “attributed his own literary career to discovering a copy of So Long, See You Tomorrow in a used bookstore more than twenty years ago … (and) still recommends So Long to people to this day: ‘It’s 135 pages and there’s a lot of white space on those pages,” he observed. “You could read this entire book instead of watching that crappy movie on Starz tonight.’ ”

I couldn’t agree more.

Caught this off of RT. 55 in Andalusia, Alabama.

I’m proud to report that as of this afternoon, I’ve completed my first “metric century” (62 miles/100 km) on my bike. It was part of the 2008 Harpeth River Ride. I felt pretty good through most of it, and as I sit here with a Red Hook ESB recuperating on the couch, I still feel pretty good. That may change at any moment. It was a great ride, and the Harpeth Bike Club folks truly know how to put on a bike tour. The rest stops were stocked with plenty of beverages and sustenance, and ample port-a-potties, and the route was well plotted and marked, with a good mix of straightaways, rolling hills and challenging ascents. My only regret is that I probably didn’t take the hills as strong as I should have, riding off my saddle a little too much, but there’s always room for improvement.

The best part of the ride, and any ride really when you get into the hills and farmlands outside of Nashville, is being reminded of just how beautiful it is in this area. There’s really nothing that gets tired about riding and coming across cows, deer, wild turkeys, mini-horses, regular-size horses, old barns and gorgeous wide-open fields. And there’s really no better way to see it than on a bike.

So this thing — biking — that started as a curiosity and a quit-smoking aid a year ago, has become a bit of a passion. Can my first century be far behind?

(Thanks to the Harpeth Bike Club for the above photo. More are on the club’s Flickr site.

I’ve been doing some blogging on the PBS blog, Remotely Connected. Check out pieces on American Experience: Walt Whitman and American Masters: Marvin Gaye.

It’s interesting to note what people hear when they listen to music. I always notice the lyrics first, and as a songwriter, tend to focus on the song structure. My friend Jonathan, however, an accomplished guitarist, engineer and producer, hears sounds (or at least he used too…we’ve been talking Dylan lyrics quite a bit lately). My wife Kathy, a singer, hears harmonies. If she’s singing along to a song, she’s likely singing the third or the fifth or some other harmony. I’ll always sing the melody or the lead. Meanwhile, I’m sure there are other people who don’t hear music in any of these ways, but instead take the whole song in emotionally.

I mention this, because every now and then I come across a song that when listened to in the way I tend to listen to music, is an aural feast. “Angels on a Passing Train,” on Marah’s new album Angels of Destruction!, has been an obsession since I picked up the record several weeks ago. Everything about the song is dramatically over-the-top, much like the band itself, and I can’t get enough of it. There’s nothing necessarily experimental about the way the song is structured. What’s unique is the way band gives you, the listener, what you want. They don’t make it easy, but they don’t make you work for it, either. They make you wait for it.

The song starts off simply enough, with an A minor chord played for four bars on acoustic guitar. Then the verse progression arrives with the full band. Already, things get interesting. The verse progression goes on instrumentally for 16 bars before the vocals kick in, even though the eighth bar ends with a build-up and drum fill, telling my ears and my chest the first verse is coming. But it doesn’t. I have to wait another eight bars before the vocals start, bringing with them these glorious lines: “Sunday morning sunlight/mixed with moonlight in your eyes from last night/Coffee tastes like birthday cake and we get older/ with every sip I take.”

So now we’re into it. An eight-bar verse? A 16-bar verse? How about 32-bars, and every eight of them ending with the build and drum fill and that feeling in your chest that something’s about to come crashing in (the best choruses always come “crashing” in). When the chorus does finally arrive, around 1:35 into the song, with “Here we go/it’s just around the corner!” it’s big and beautiful. The lyrics almost feel like an inside joke at this point, like the song is that friend you’re walking around with in the city, who keeps telling you he knows this great place to eat, and it’s “just around the corner.” He keeps telling you this at every corner, until, once you’re there, he says, “see, I told you, it was just around the corner.” I think Jonathan’s done this to me before.

So we get there, chorus and all, with the title-line hook. Now what? Eight-bar instrumental verse progression — like the beginning, only a little shorter. Time for the next verse? That would be too easy. Instead we get eight bars of everything broken down, just a little piano, bass and background noise. When the second verse does arrive, with the line “Welcome to the dog house,” it might as well be “Welcome to the fun house.” The band descontructs the verse progression we’ve already been introduced to, instead delivering it with a heavy, bouncy emphasis on piano, bass and accordion. You finally make it to the joint around the corner, and it’s crazy in there, filled with distorted mirrors and people walking on stilts. The wackiness continues for 16-bars before we’re rewarded once again with the chorus, delivered four confident times. The ending gives us one last taste of the carnival-like atmosphere as we march back out on to the street. It’s a rock song that works on every level it should: lyrically, structurally, sonically, and yes, emotionally.

This kind of approach to rock music isn’t new, of course, but it’s rare these days to hear a band go for it like that. Marah has always delivered live (I became a fan after seeing them in Nashville several years ago) and while I’ve read some critics declare that the band doesn’t deliver on record, I disagree. Even before this record, I thought they did. There’s no doubt, however, with this one.

I’ve had a beat-up, 25-year-old copy of William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow in my library for almost 15 years. I’m not certain where I got it, but I’m pretty sure it was from a street vendor in Greenwich Village, where I often picked up paperback books for fifty cents or a dollar. I was drawn to the title. Shortly after discovering it, I wrote a song called “Everything Turns to Pink” (performed frequently with the Joe Pagetta Band and recorded for our 1995 six-song demo) that started with the lines “So long/See you tomorrow/Farewell/I’ll see you again.” The weird thing was that I never actually read the book, until recently.

I like to think that sometimes I’m drawn to finally read books I own but haven’t read, or haven’t read in awhile, for a reason; that perhaps you have to be ready to read them. I wrote recently about how discovering a hard back copy of Ian McEwan’s Atonement in an antique shop in Lebanon, Tennessee spurred me to finally read the novel after owning a paperback copy for two years that I had always been meaning to get to. I’m glad I did. A couple of summers ago, it was The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. For years it sat there on my shelf, but for some reason that summer it called to me. Maybe it was the existential crisis I was going through (there is no better novel for such a thing). Last summer, I re-read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

Which brings me to William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. I read an item recently in the Tennessean about Nashville author Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, Run) and her favorite books. Newsweek had asked Patchett to name her favorites, and the Maxwell book was at the top of her list. I think Patchett is great, and her endorsement of the book was enough to send me into my library to track down that old paperback. It was time to read it.

So Long, See You Tomorrow is a slim novel that packs an enormous amount of emotion. Coincidentally, like Atonement, the book’s narrator is elderly, and by telling his story, trying to make amends for something he did, or didn’t do, in the past. In the case of So Long... the narrator has never forgiven himself for not reaching out to childhod acquaintance Cletus Smith and offering his sympathy and friendship after Cletus’ life takes a tragic turn. He attempts to atone for this by writing Cletus’ story, and the story of all those people whose lives were forever altered by the love affair of Cletus’ mother and the tenant farmer next door, Lloyd Wilson. The narrator has gone through so much in his own young life, including the early death of mother — so much that he had no control over and couldn’t change — that you wonder how one seemingly insignificant event, a chance encounter in a high school hallway, could weigh so heavily on his mind. He surely knows there was nothing he could have done about the fatal events surrounding Cletus’ mother’s affair, or the state of his parents’ marriage prior, but he truly believes he could have made a difference in Cletus’ life. Perhaps just by being a friend. Or by telling us the story, is he really trying to understand the course of his own life?

So Long, See You Tomorrow is really a coming-of-age story. It may seem to be about betrayal, but it’s also about growing up, and the failure, regret and chance that can accompany and consume our lives. How Maxwell gets all that into 150 paperback pages is as much of a mystery as the one that beckons the reader in the opening pages of the novel.

When I started reading the yellowed pages of my paperback, I thought it might be worthwhile to see if I could track down a hard copy. The first place I checked was the Nashville Library, which only has a couple of copies in circulation. Both were checked out. I checked Davis-Kidd Booksellers and Borders and neither of them had a copy either. I would have even settled for a nicer paperback copy. I did a little research online before discovering that So Long, See You Tomorrow is out of print, which is a shame. So if you’re interested, you may have to find your copy at a used bookstore or online. You might even luck out and find a nice hardcover copy that still has a dustjacket. It’ll be worth the investment.

BMI has been my Performing Rights Organization since I knew I needed one, and I remain proud to be an affiliate. The February edition of the podcast highlights several Nashville singer-songwriters, including me and the self-titled song off my EP OTHER PEOPLE’S NEWS. You can download the podcast at http://bmi.com/podcasts or through iTunes by searching podcasts for “BMI.” You’re also encouraged to vote for your favorite artist on the podcast, so if that’s me, by all means, please vote! Winner receives a CD manufacturing package.