Here's Where You Belong
Gigs are what life makes them
“How can I lose twenty pounds before the gig tonight?” I asked Eric last Friday afternoon. I was trying to get ready for the first of three shows over the weekend and nothing in my closet really fit. Shirts gapped, jackets bulged. Jeans and t shirts were a little more forgiving.
He said something funny about decapitation and I laughed grimly. It had been a dark week. I wasn’t looking for phony compliments - “No, you’re perfect just as you are!” I needed a few items of clothing I could stand in front of an audience in and not be tugging, or shifting or even thinking about what I had on. It seemed like a good time to bust out the striped sneakers I fretted about. I’ve come around to loving them.
This isn’t going to be a piece on body positivity, or how I need to lose weight. I’m healthy overall and there are so many other things to struggle with these days. The loss of friends and heroes and peers just keep adding up. A particularly hard one last week was our friend Scott Schinder. I was blindsided by the news he’d passed away in Austin, a few days before his 62nd birthday, even though I’d known he wasn’t in good health for years. We expect our friends to always be there and it seems impossible when they’re not.
Scott was an esteemed, prolific music writer who became a running buddy. I know there were loads of people that he championed and went out to gigs with, but all the tributes to him I read and heard this past week confirmed that he made everyone feel like a special case. His love for music reminds me of a pueblo community I saw in New Mexico once, built into the side of a mountain. This family made pottery, another guy hammered silver, this one wove rugs. What a beautiful creative sight with parallels to the music world containing niche upon niche and each of us music folk filling a particular, unique spot there that Scott valued and fed: he gave me discs of Boyce and Hart, PF Sloan and other great pop songwriters; my daughter remembers the Kinks and Pretty Things CDs from her teen years Scott pressed into her hands. It was a copy of Wreckless Eric’s Greatest Stiffs CD that reignited my interest in a certain British pop iconoclast’s early hits and led to me covering and shortly after meeting my future husband. I don’t know if Scott meant for it to happen that way but he cheered us every step of the way. When Howard Kaylan singer of the Turtles tweeted a few months back that I was his fave songwriter in the whole world, I couldn’t wait to tell Scott. Of course he already knew; he was probably the one that put my music in Howard’s hands in the first place. When I heard Scott died I felt like I lost the angel on my shoulder, albeit a cranky angel you’d eat pancakes with at 2 AM. It’s like a piece of my soul is missing.
Is this how it feels as our dear ones get chipped away? What will be left as each person we love and who loves us disappears?
The only good thing about a heavy question like that is it puts “what will I wear?” way down on the list of things that matter. I had sweated this short run of band shows for weeks: choosing songs for the set list, rehearsing; what order to put things in. I’ve done solo shows this year but band gigs are a different mentality: easier in one way (you’re not alone); harder in another (you’re not alone). Eric and I got ourselves and the equipment together and met Doug the drummer at Avalon right here in our small town of Catskill. It’s a louche jewel box of a club, the performance space separate from the bar. Anthony Kaczynski had come over earlier in the day to run over a few songs for the show. I’ve met him at gigs in Boston and we saw him playing guitar and singing in Magnetic Fields earlier this year. It was nice to have a compadre be part of the show, my first band outing since November. The club was full and we just had the best time playing. Nothing else seemed to matter except what was happening in that little room. I had worried I’d break down thinking about Scott when we played - there really is nothing blocking the emotions when I open my mouth at a microphone. I’ve never had loads of pesky technique to get in the way of what’s inside me wanting to come out. But mostly what came out was…love. I just wanted to share the love I felt for Scott Schinder, and for everybody and everything musical in my life.
I’d rented a larger vehicle, something to fit our whole backline in for the out of town shows. The Honda CRV drove well but was still slightly too small; Eric summoned his estimable gear packing skills and managed to pack everything in there after Avalon for an early start to Northampton the next morning.
We were scheduled to go on at 3:15 PM so needed to arrive by 1 to unload and set up and do a line check. Festivals are fly by the seat of your pants affairs: we threw down some food in catering wondering whose tour bus was which. The crowd were suitably dressed for the looming rain in that kind of outdoor wear people in Western Mass are issued when they make the move here: vented hats, jackets that might even zip out into tents when needed. People came over to watch our set, there were a few sound glitches and I probably rambled incoherently for a moment or two but I saw lots of smiles and heard cheers and sold books and discs and t shirts afterwards. Once we loaded up after playing it felt like a good idea to get out before the rain came.
The next gig was at City Winery in Manhattan. Last time we played there, back in October, I’d fretted and grumbled beforehand: Who’s going to come? I don’t care about New York City! It’s too much work blah blah blah. All sheepishly forgotten when the show was a success. This time I’d heard from Mary Lee Kortes, who we were sharing the bill with, that there was a low ticket alert. Both Doug and Eric said “Ouch. Oh well don’t worry, I’m sure a few people will show up.” Their minds went exactly to where mine had, low ticket alert meant we hadn’t sold many. In fact the show was about sold out! Mary Lee was celebrating the release of a new album and maybe it helped I hadn’t played in the city since 2022, it was a lively attentive crowd and the night felt like a triumph. Mary Lee and her band sounded on top form and Eric, Doug and I had it together too. I worried I would break down about Schinder, in a room with a load of people who knew him, but all I could think was “We’re here, we’re alive and goddam it we’re lucky to be together, doing this thing we love.”
We’d had Tony Kacsynski’s help on a PF Sloan song back up in Catskill but in NYC we powered through on our own, a number I’d never played before but that Scott had pressed in my hands way back in the nineties, when I’d shared a bill with the great, kinda mad writer of Secret Agent Man, Eve of Destruction, You Baby, I Get Out Of Breath and so many pop hits. Any time I play one of his songs I feel like I wrote it myself. Sometimes his lyrics don’t exactly make sense, but that’s not the point - the giddy feeling is there that ties you to the earth and lifts you up to the stratosphere at the same time.
Like he’d done for me, Scott had told anyone who’d listen that Phil Sloan deserved attention. He’d made sure I’d seen PF Sloan at South by Southwest, brought me along to see Guided by Voices, Brian Wilson, Yo La Tengo again and again; Richard Thompson, Robyn Hitchcock, Bobby Womack, Allen Toussaint - countless gigs in parks, clubs, and fancier venues too. The week Scott died it felt fitting to be together in one more club. There was another light out in the pueblo but the rest of us needed to keep on working, weaving the cloth and hammering the silver. So what if my clothes were a little tight? I was in the right place, doing what I was supposed to be doing.
You can change the mask you wear
But not the way you feel inside
Go bury your head into the sand
But you can never hide
Your mind it is a battleground
Your brain’s a raging storm
Here’s where you belong, here’s where you belong
Don’t let reality take you away from me
Here’s where you belong
by PF Sloan
When I read your stories my writing bug starts revving its engine. 🫶
A very touching tribute to Scott, and, as always, a wonderfully written piece. On a much more trivial note...........we need a better photo of your cool new shoes.