Note: If you happen to have been led here from the barrage of Facebook posts memorializing Todd McBride, I should explain that I composed this when I read that he was in hospice. With that awful news came the motivation to write at once about something that has been percolating in my mind for a long time: my brother's life in music. I had wanted to take up that subject while Rob is still with us, and learning that Todd was looking at his own end increased the urgency. I hoped Todd might see what I wrote because I admire his work and I appreciate that he was such a faithful good friend to Rob. I thought I had longer than I did. Todd died hours after I posted it, and now I hope to God not a second of his final hours was wasted on my blatherings. Because of who I am what I've written here necessarily emphasizes my brother, but I do not mean for it to turn grief over the loss of Todd in another direction. Far from it. Look at the tributes to Todd on Facebook and I think you'll agree that what I say about friends and fans in the final paragraph is true. RIP Todd.
A few months back the Social Security Administration determined that my brother Rob is entitled to disability payments. A medical accident in September of 2021 – one related to the Type 1 diabetes he has been living with since his early teens - left him cognitively unable to work or live by himself any longer. He’s in a spot where he’s getting good care, but the situation is sad nevertheless, of course. Rob took pride in working, no matter what kind of work it was. He treasured his independence like no one else I have ever known. What has been especially hard to see is that he no longer seems to have it in him to play music. The last time we saw him in good health, a month before his accident, he jammed for a while with his nephew, my son Ike. I wish that had been the first time of many. Instead it was the first and the last. If you have lived long enough to see a loved one cognitively wrecked, you know what it is to be with someone and miss them at the same time. That's how it is with Rob now.
Around the time the disability was awarded, Rob and I had to get on the phone with a Social Security agent who wanted to doublecheck a few things about his resources. By happenstance, he had just received his annual royalty check for music he has composed. I told the agent about it. The number was small, two digits. In the pause on the line while she recorded the number, I said, “If there was any justice this number would be huge.” Rob smiled a wan smile. But I looked at him hard, wanting him to know that I meant it. I want you to know I meant it, too.
I don’t mean this post as an appeal for money. Things are OK where that is concerned, although Rob’s situation is another illustration of the absurdity of how we administer health care in this country. But I wanted to make clear to all that whatever I post on this blog, no matter how much I aspire with these essays to be a poor man’s Sarah Vowell (or whatever it is I'm trying for with this hobby writing), everyone should know that Rob is the Veal brother whose creative output should endure. It bothers me that the royalty checks that Rob and his bandmates in the Dashboard Saviors receive will never be commensurate with the gritty brilliance of their music, but it bothers me even more that their music may fade into even more obscure obscurity than the obscurity it exists in today. The Dashboard Saviors ought to be a household name in the "Y'allternative" genre.
As I've noted elsewhere, Rob was part of the Athens music scene, not just present but in it and of it. He has done a couple of solo albums. I’m partial to his song “The Ballad of Bigfoot” because, in addition to being such a great evocation of what it is to be afraid when you’re a kid, it is a 10 out of 10 in the category of accurately describing the family camping trips of our childhood. In our house we love his song “Boss of Me” not only because it is funny but because, if you know Rob, it is the anthem of one facet of his character. I say one facet - Rob has a sweetness in him that inspires real devotion in his friends. The last time I talked to him before his accident I asked him to tell me about opening for Los Lobos. If that were my story to tell I'd just flex the hell out of it, but all he wanted to talk about was how down to earth and generous they were. My memories of Rob are full of "heart in the right place" stories like that. But he can also be a pigheaded, aggravatingly so. These lines of dialogue from "Boss of Me", between some self-appointed community standards monitor and his cussed slob of a neighbor (certainly Rob himself) may be as close as we’ll ever come to a Rob Veal mission statement:
“Hey young man won’t you pick up that trash
Sittin’ on the side of the street?
Don’t you want to have house to show
where the yard looks nice and neat?”
I said “A well-made bed looks halfway dead,
so I’m gonna let my trash run free.
Walk on by, cause you ain’t the boss of me.”
That would be Rob - nobody is going to tell him what to do, at least not without a fight or some grumbling, especially if what he is being told to do strikes him as onerous conformity. Sometimes this quality has appeared as self-destructive, pain-in-the-ass obstinacy, but other times it is authentic moxie, a disposition at the root of all of his accomplishments, everything that pours out of me after I say, "Let me tell you about my brother." He was self-taught (of course) as a musician and composer, but it is safe to say that generous support and mentoring from others in his musical tribe, some of the best who ever played at the 40 Watt or the Uptown Lounge, was huge in getting him as far as he was able to make it. He was a good friend of Vic Chesnutt, did some collaborating and performing with him. How could up close exposure to otherworldly brilliance like Vic's not catalyze your own creativity? His bandmates - Todd McBride, Mike Gibson, and John Crist - must have had a similar effect. When the Dashboard Saviors were at their height, and briefly profiled in a 1992 issue of Rolling Stone, Todd said of how he wrote lyrics, “My friends talk in poetry. I can’t help it if I’m listening.” As an English teacher I’ve always loved that line – by and large my students don’t realize that every moment of their lives they’re up to their necks in great material to write about – but I also know that it is too modest. What Todd made of the language he heard is not just an act of transcription. It is art. Consider the lyrics to his remarkable song "A Trailer's a Trailer", which has been a staple of my poetry teaching for over 20 years:
He takes one last drag off the cigarette
Drinks the last gulp of warm beer from the can.
The sound of the baby crying
Couldn't drown out the noise from the window fan.
Rattling noise from that last-leg window fan.
Well there's soggy cornflakes on the table.
There's a broken down Dodge Dart out in the yard.
It's got a faded bumper-sticker from a Daytona beach motel.
It says, “Ain't life hard?”
A smiling shark in sunglasses, says “Ain't life hard?”
And he traded a Stratocaster
For the downpayment on a lie.
He says, “A dead end's a dead end,
A trailer's a trailer
Even if it's a double wide.”
Those lines are so of certain parts of rural Georgia (Todd is from Griffin) and so evocative of how it feels to live in the bitterness of a dream that didn’t pan out, that I've used them to demonstrate to hundreds of students what imagery can do. And yes, the words come in part from listening, but you don’t have to be a poetry scholar to see how much more Todd brought to composing those lines than just his ears.
I’ve had lyrics and Georgia on the brain lately because I’ve been reading Glenn Eskew’s excellent biography of Savannah’s Johnny Mercer, one of the all timers, a legendary lyricist. Like the musicians I've been writing of, Mercer was known for blending Southern diction and settings into popular song - its just that Mercer's is more of a flirting under a shade-tree South than a cruising down the four lane in a Camaro South. But there are more similarities than meet the eye. As Glenn writes (I’m calling him Glenn because we were neighbors and we had a shared sense of silliness about our dogs), in composing one of his best known songs, “One More for my Baby (and One More for the Road)”, Mercer endeavored to “write a new, more realistic kind of torch song, a loser’s lament that bemoans the loss of a lover to hide failure in life . . . the lyrics express a complete story that satisfies the listener on several levels.” The most memorable and affecting songs of Mercer’s fellow Georgia lyricist Todd McBride have that same quality.
Here's one that fits that bill. When I was obsessing last year about my ancestor Chester Scott, an account I read of him hiding out in the woods near his father’s house after escaping from jail put me immediately in mind of one of Todd’s greatest songs, performed by the Dashboard Saviors with accompaniment from Marlee MacLeod: "All Them Things I Did." The lyrics are in the form of one half of a conversation. A son who has always been an outlaw shows up at home in the middle of the night, on the run, wounded, needing shelter, and he tries to get caught up with his mother and explain himself to her. Below are the lyrics, in their entirety. I know this is bad form. Many times I have chewed out a student writer for quoting too much of a passage in a paper instead of picking out the most meaningful lines. If any of those unfortunate students should happen to read this, well, I’m sorry. In this instance it can’t be helped. Todd McBride writes too damn well for me to leave any of it out:
Call the dogs off Mama,
if you could please douse the lights.
I got some people a’huntin’ me,
and I’m too tired to fight ‘em.
Could I stay here a night or two,
at least until my guns get cold?
I feel a storm brewin' up
to wash my tracks right off the road
Ain’t no need to wake up Papa,
I'll just bed down out in the barn.
I know I ain't been nothin' but trouble,
It’s the way that I was born.
Mama I ain't no Jesse James
ain't no Billy the Kid.
Hope you understand I had to do
all them things I did.
Heard the preacher got struck by lighnin'.
Ain’t that a hell of a note?
If I could have laid my hands on a pencil and paper,
I swear to God I'd of wrote.
Is it true what they say about Nellie,
marryin' the Baldwin boy?
Good for him, bad for me.
You know she was my pride and joy.
See Mama there comes a time in every man's life,
when he sees he's been surrounded
Even if he fights his way free,
forever he'll be a’hounded.
Mama I ain't no Jesse James,
I ain't no Billy the Kid.
Hope you understand I had to do,
all them things I did.
Mama don't you worry about all this blood on my shirt.
It looks a lot worse than it feels.
The truth is, it's just a flesh wound,
and thems the kind that heals.
Mama I wish we could talk all night,
set on the porch and watch the sun rise.
But I’ve been a long way in a very short time,
I better close my eyes.
Mama I ain't no Jesse James,
I ain't no Billy the Kid.
Hope you understand I had to do
all them things I did.
Listening to this song today, given everything that has happened, and thinking of Todd and Rob and their talented bandmates Mike and John and their devoted friend and manager Len, the lines “I’ve been a long way in a very short time / I better close my eyes” – they get to me. That's where we are. Those fellows have friends and fans who can tell of their history and express their appreciation more intimately and perceptively and eloquently than I ever could. It may be that this is just a brother’s pride talking. But it is a brother with some discernment, I think, so the pride doesn't feel misplaced, and I would hate to leave it unexpressed.