Not too long after I graduated from High School, I hooked up with a band led by Dickie Grissom, Jr. The group never had a proper name...sometimes we called it The Deep Fork River Band but most of the time it was just "Dickie's Band". It was a very basic three piece, bass-guitar-drum kimd of thing and the usual fare was classic country cover songs. Dickie's voice bore a strong resemblance to Willie Nelson's, so there were always a few of his tunes on the songlist. Lots and lots of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennngs.
Dickie was one cool son-of-a-bitch. He had travelled to California in his younger days and played professionally on the circuit there. He had fairly long hair and a scraggly beard...he looked nothing like your typical small-town bumpkin, more like a true outlaw. He could swill down some hard liquor, too, let me tell ya. He smoked unfilitered Camels and always had that nasty smell on him. But it was okay with me, even though I usually would prefer not to be around anyone sporting such an odor. With Dickie I didn't seem to mind, because he was just such a laid back, fun guy to hang around with.
There were only four original songs our band played regularly. The first was one that Dickie wrote several years back, perhaps when he was playing on the west coast. "Gotta Write a Love Song" was a slow-tempo affair that Willie would have liked. It was actually quite beautiful..."Gotta write a love song/One for you, girl/One to make your heart cry/One to make you blue/One to show what I'd feel if I should lose you". Nice chorus there, with a memorable melody. There's one line, "We don't make love the way we used to/You sleep on your side and I sleep on mine." Over 25 years later I still think of this line whenever I let the sun go down on an argument.
The next original was another of Dickie's, called "Let's Stay Together". It was definately in the mold of Haggard and that pure country sound we were pretty good at. Not quite as well-crafted as "Gotta Write a Love Song", it was still a very good song. Dickie sang it well, with feeling. It could be reasonably assumed, by the subject matter of both of his songs we played, that his marital status could well have been in jeopardy. I don't know if that was the case in the days when I played with him, but he eventually did get a divorce.
"Swamp Swing" was an instrumental number that the three of us collaborated on. I always liked this one a lot, it gave me a chance to do some "octave popping"on the bass. The song had sort of a "bayou" feel to it...at least that's what I thought it sounded like the time, taking into account my limited exposure to "the bayou feel". I gave it the name "Swamp Swing" because it alternated from that pseudo-Creedence aspect into a walking-bass swing section. Clever, eh?
The fourth and last original song in the line-up was the first song I ever wrote that had both lyrics and music. The year before I had written a couple of instrumental songs for a talent show I did with my first band, The Delinquents. But "I'd Give Anything" was the first time I ever tried to merge words with music. I had the music ready when Dickie and I sat down in the studio to record a couple of our songs for a demo. He liked the music, another slow, Willie Nelson inspired number. But he insisted that I write words for it there and then, on the spot. So, for better or worse, that's what I did.
And so, with equal parts pride and emberassment (leaning more towards the latter) I present to you, for the sake of posterity, the lyrics to my first song:
It's been a long time since we went our seperate ways
The minutes seem like hours, the hours seem like days
But your memory keeps haunting me, I can't go on this way
I'd give anything to have you back today
Noone knows how much I loved you
Noone knows how much I really cared
Noone knows how much I'm hurting inside
Knowing each passing day you won't be there
But your memory keeps haunting me, I can't go on this way
I'd give anything to have you back today
Okay, I confess, it's not very good at all. But a man has to start somewhere, right? I'd like to think that I went on to write a good lot of decent songs in the following years. I have no idea what became of Dickie. I don't even know if he's still alive. One thing I do know. If not for his encouragement and inspiration I may well have given up. So I owe him a lot for that.
