We could start with the monastery. “Chicks dig it,” Larry Gallagher insists. “Chicks just go crazy for monks.”
The slaughterhouse is another option. “It’s disgusting, but you get used to it,” Larry says. “You just get numb after awhile, and you just expect to see heads, you know …” He trails off.
Never mind.
McDonald’s? Should we start with McDonald’s?
“I was stoned one time up in Kodiak, Alaska, in a McDonald’s,” Larry recalls. “I was just sitting there stoned and thinking, ‘Oh my God, what if I had to work at McDonald’s? What would that experience be like?’ It was so existentially horrifying, the idea of donning a stupid uniform.”
This gave Larry the idea for a Details magazine article. Which led to a successful journalism career. Which led (“When I finished my contact with Details, and my contract with my girlfriend”) to a Buddhist Zen monastery in Southern California. Which led to another girlfriend who drew up a contract so strong she lured Larry out of sexy monkhood and up to the Bay Area, where Larry makes his living via carpentry when he’s not promoting An Endless Chain of Accidents, one of the greatest CDs of 2003, period, and certainly the best one you’ve never heard, or heard of, or probably both.
Behold Larry on the cover, dressed in a full-blown stupid McDonald’s uniform, jaunty hat sliding off his head, with a cheeseburger in his hands and a barely concealed look of animalistic rage on his face.
The key track on Accidents, “Wimpy White Guys with Guitars,” ruined my life.
And now, Larry and I sit in Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage on an idle Monday night, where I succeed in ruining his.
That’s where we’ll start.
“Wimpy white guys with guitars/Choking up the coffee houses/Bringing down the bars/Restless as the ocean/Countless as the stars/Wimpy white guys with guitars.”
That’s the chorus, chirpily delivered by two wimpy white guys with guitars, Larry in the lead. The tune is both hilarious and unbelievably horrifying, describing a world overrun by ultra-amateur folk singers — earnest dudes who compose earnestly awkward odes to ex-girlfriends, current girlfriends, dream girlfriends. Same chords, same wobbly voices, same rhymes (hole/soul, heart/apart, pants/dance).
The joke — and the horrifying part — lies in the knowledge that Larry is guilty too, and so are you, white boy. When you compose an achingly beautiful ode to your high school sweetheart on the eve of her wedding to your high school jock shithead archenemy, you’re transforming a very personal, very painful experience into a song thrown on the pile of eight billion wimpy white-guy songs just like it. Only the names and details change. The unmitigating sheen of Suck remains.
That realization has ruined my life.
“What you feel is really real,” Larry says. “The hard thing is really capturing it. It’s like the Chinese menu: They take a picture of a plate of food that was really good sitting there at the table, but when you put the picture on the menu, it looks disgusting. So how do you take a thing that really is real, and put it into a song and still have that energy? The feelings of the least articulate people are just as deep in a sense and real as the feelings of the most articulate people. We kind of fetishize the feelings of the articulate people somewhat: We think that their pain is more beautiful, or this or that, but I don’t know. It’s just that some people can speak about it.”
Some people can; everyone tries. Which is why we made plans to meet at the Freight & Salvage. The concept: Make Larry play an open mic among the fellow songwriters he playfully mocks. He agreed, on one condition: I had to play a wimpy-white-guy song too.
I took the bait.
“Democracy is scary,” Larry notes. “When you have an open mic and you say, ‘Hey, c’mon up and play your song,’ you really open it up. It’s like, ‘Oh, man.'”
Oh, man, this could really be a disaster.
Larry Gallagher grew up in New York State, where he picked up sax, and then guitar. Somehow he lucked into an internship at Harper’s, which led to a gig at Esquire, which led to the infamous Details series.
Concept: He spends about a month working at random jobs and chronicling his experiences. First came McDonald’s. Then the slaughterhouse in Indiana, where he worked on a carcass conveyor belt, separating the small intestine from the colon and the stomach. He studied yoga in India and manned an Alaskan fishing boat.
And finally, the Zen monastery. First he spent a month writing about it. Then he returned and spent three years living it.
So with all those hours to meditate, what do you think about? “You hear all the shitty, crazy noise that’s in your mind all the time that you don’t want to listen to,” Larry says. “I burned out on it before I got a chance to break through. But at least for a while, it was the most stunning, beautiful, powerful — physically and psychologically — experience I ever had in my life.”
Then he met a woman.
Romance at a monastery? Believe it. “Not like crazy giant pile orgies or anything like that,” Larry says, “but plenty of interpersonal, male/female — there’s plenty of sexual tension. It’s funny. No matter what you do, your mind just finds a way to use it to boost your ego. ‘Ooh, now I’m selfless, that’s cool. Now I’m egoless.'”
In fact, Larry wrote a song based on the experience entitled “I’m Deep (Will You Sleep with Me?).”
Eventually, though, the intense spirituality stopped working for him. In the fall of 1998, he finally quit the monastery. The lovebirds wound up in San Francisco, where all the wimpy-white-guy songs Larry had accumulated within finally burst out.
Now what’s bursting out, awakened by our upcoming open mic debacle, are Larry’s long-hibernating feelings of wimpy-white-guydom — memories of having thoughts like, “‘Well, maybe I could be a rock star — oh, I couldn’t, I couldn’t possibly, I’m too wimpy, and I can’t really sing, I’m not a really fast lead guitarist, my hair’s too short.'”
He adds: “I just kinda doggedly tweaked it for the next twenty years until I feel like now I’m at a point where I can produce something that has some grace to it.”
An Endless Chain of Accidents delivers that grace: a wistful, intimate brand of gentle folk, like a less cartoonish version of Jonathan Richman. “Show Me Your Flaw” is a toe-tapping vaudeville number begging a coffeeshop dreamgirl for a reason not to fall in love with her: “Do you drive a Lexus?/Do you torture household pets?/Do you dig Geraldo?/Have you massive gambling debts?” And “Nothing Left to Pierce” completes the comedy relief cycle, asking rebellious young punks how they’ll fight the power when Sears starts selling nipple rings.
But you’ll also find plenty of lovey-doveyness: One chorus goes “Goddamn/Goddamn/You are/I am/Goddamn.” He refers to his beloved as “Squeezletoe.” Etcetera, etcetera. Larry is a forty-year-old wise-ass, dry as a cactus raised on British comedies, but he can’t conceal the ultra-romantic Zen monk lurking beneath.
All of which is to say that Larry has tons of good material for our wimpy-white-guy challenge. For my part, I whip up an awe-inspiring reimagination of White Lion’s “When the Children Cry,” a criminally overlooked hair metal ’80s power ballad that still clearly resonates today: “No more presidents/And all the wars will end/One united world/Under God.”
Tonight’s the night. This is gonna rule.
We shuffle into the Freight, where a jovial dude politely asks for our $75 membership fee to the West Coast Songwriters Association. Three twenties. One ten. One five. $75. Oh, shit.
“WCS Is an Industry Leader Dedicated to Providing the Environment, Opportunities, and Tools to Nurture, Educate and Promote Songwriters,” notes the capitalization-happy WCS Web site. Some of the benefits of membership:
* “Learn about how you can have your songs listened to by an industry guest.”
* “Perform at one of our many Open Mics.”
* “Get feedback on your songs within a peer group.”
* “Learn invaluable songcrafting tools that will make it easier for you to write impactful heartfelt songs from one of today’s hit songwriters.”
* “Get snookered for fuckin’ $75.”
Yes, I made up that last one. The WCS perhaps means well, but discovering how much it costs to play one lousy White Lion song leaves Larry and me feeling a bit crabby. We decline to enroll, and instead attend as mere spectators.
Twenty-something folks take the $75 ($80 with $5 admission) plunge. Assigned a number, they shuffle onstage and play one song apiece. Two “celebrity” judges — guitar tech magazine writers, evidently — scribble notes, suggestions, criticisms. Awards for “Best Song” and “Best Performance” will be doled out. “You got the cyanide capsules?” Larry whispers, four songs in.
It’s not the songs — or the songwriters. They’re trying really hard, and they’re awfully endearing. One guy introduces a song about “a rough day in your relationship,” but before he reaches the first verse the cell phone in his pants starts ringing: his girlfriend. Two dudes unveil the cute, self-explanatory ballad “Coffeeshop Dreamgirl.” A (wimpy white) woman sings an uplifting ditty inspired by Tina Turner’s plight in What’s Love Got to Do with It. A few piano-playing gents and one mandolin player provide variety.
Virtuosos? Hardly. But performing a song you wrote for people you’ve never met — or worse, people you have — is horrifying, and takes courage. It’s the format here that especially freaks you out: A faceless amplified voice bellows “NUMBER FOURTEEN!!!” and here comes Number Fourteen singing his song about wars where children die and mothers cry.
Will this invaluable songcrafting tool make it easier for them to write impactful, heartfelt songs? Larry doesn’t think so. As the jovial guy announces a brief intermission, Larry jerks his head toward the door and winks. Sorry, numbers 15 through 24.
“If you go down to your corner and sing your song, there’s something so beautiful about that,” Larry notes as we speed away. “But just the aspirations, paying to be part of a club — oh, you pay, and you’re judged by a professional judge and given a cassette tape of your performance and evaluated, and just, instantly the message that it sends is … you’re a loser.”
But in this game, everyone’s a loser at first — even Larry. A few days after the Freight & Salvage disaster, he forgives me and invitates me to the Hoot, a sporadic dinner party and musical potluck masterminded by his PR guy/accompanist/partner in crime Rob Riddell. Joining a host of other singer-songwriter types at a swanky SF loft, Larry settles comfortably into a crowded living room and shuffles through a few tasteful covers (“If I Only Had a Brain”) and some complicated, quietly graceful originals, including “Don’t Make Me Manipulate You.”
Larry wrote it for his girlfriend, about his habit of writing songs as a last resort to prevent her from dumping him. “My girlfriend has sort of left me a few times, which is really hard, but it was really a great boon for songwriting,” he says. “I get to write the sad song, and then she came back. And then I wrote some happy songs, and she left me again. But I got her back. The last time she left me, I wrote a song that was so sad, and I played it for her, and she was leaving — it was just my last desperate hope. She was coming to basically say goodbye, and I had been writing this song that was so, fucking, just the saddest song I’ve ever written. And it was my last-ditch hope. And I said ‘Here, I wrote this song for you.'”
And? “She’s back. She’s with me.”
The singer-songwriter’s curse. You’re lame, you’re inexperienced, you’re wimpy, you’re a loser, you serve Big Macs, you eviscerate cows, you join a monastery, you suffer. But if you hold on tight enough, all those lousy songs turn into brilliant ones, your pain into beauty, your loserdom into grace. Maybe it’ll take twenty years to get there, but at least it won’t cost you 75 bucks.
