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By Root 920 0

What’s the difference? As long as my own form of certainty stayed intact, I owed nobody nothing. I wasn’t going to go deeper into the darkness for anybody. I was already living in the darkness. My family was my light and I was going to protect that light at all cost. That was where my dedication was, first, last and everything in-between. What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Not a damn thing. The press? I figured you lie to it. For the public eye, I went into the bucolic and mundane as far as possible. In my real life I got to do the things that I loved the best and that was all that mattered — the Little League games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school, camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing, fishing…I was living on record royalties. In reality I was imperceptible, my image, that is. Sometime in the past I had written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn’t know if I ever would again and I didn’t care.

The actor Tony Curtis once told me that fame is an occupation in itself, that it is a separate thing. And Tony couldn’t be more right. The old image slowly faded and in time I found myself no longer under the canopy of some malignant influence. Eventually different anachronisms were thrust upon me — anachronisms of lesser dilemma — though they might seem bigger. Legend, Icon, Enigma (Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite) — stuff like that, but that was all right. These titles were placid and harmless, threadbare, easy to get around with them. Prophet, Messiah, Savior — those are tough ones.

Archibald MacLeish’s play Scratch had a couple of characters, one of them whose name was the title of the play. Scratch utters the lines “I know there is evil in the world — essential evil, not the opposite of good or the defective of good but something to which good itself is an irrelevance — a fantasy. No one can live as long as I have, hear what I have heard and not know that. I know too — more precisely — I am ready to believe that there may be something in the world — someone, if you prefer — that purposes evil, that intends it…powerful nations suddenly, without occasion, without apparent cause…decay. Their children turn against them. Their women lose their sense of being women. Their families disintegrate.” From there on, it only gets better. Writing songs for a play wouldn’t have been far-fetched for me and I had already composed a couple of things for him just to see if I could do it. I’d always liked the stage and even more so, the theater. It seemed like the most supreme craft of all craft. Whatever the environment, a ballroom or a sidewalk, the dirt of a country road, the action always took place in the eternal “now.”

My first appearances in a public spectacle had been on my hometown school auditorium stage, no small music box theater but a professional concert hall like Carnegie Hall built with East Coast mining money, with curtains and props, trapdoors and orchestra pit. My first performances were seen in the Black Hills Passion Play of South Dakota, a religious drama depicting the last days of Christ. This play always came to town during the Christmas season with professional actors in the leading roles, cages of pigeons, a donkey, a camel and a truck full of props. There were always parts that called for extras. One year I played a Roman soldier with a spear and helmet — breastplate, the works — a nonspeaking role, but it didn’t matter. I felt like a star. I liked the costume. It felt like a nerve tonic…as a Roman soldier I felt like a part of everything, in the center of the planet, invincible. That seemed a million years ago now, a million private struggles and difficulties ago.

I wasn’t feeling so invincible at the moment. Defiant, maybe. Anything but content. Surrounded on all sides. As far as I could see, nothing was visible. Nothing but my own kitchen. Nothing but the hot dogs with English muffins and noodles, the Cheerios and cornflakes with heavy cream — stirring flour into a large bowl for corn pudding and beating eggs, changing diapers and