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Farewell, y'all, I will miss the music, the words, the love

BY JIM WALSH
St. Paul Pioneer Press

Sunday morning, my two brothers, nephew and I are climbing into a rental van and going west. I'm leaving my beloved lifelong home of Minnesota and moving to California for a year, then coming back.

I'll be studying whatever I want at Stanford University, which awarded me a fellowship, which feels weird and wonderful. But I also feel the way a friend of mine who also recently moved to California ended his going-away e-mail: I miss you guys already.

I started at the Pioneer Press nine years ago. All the while, I've tried my best to follow the wisest writers' advice I've heard: Write about what you love. That's what every good writing coach says, but no one ever told me why. Now, I know.

If you write about what you love, you might get one of the best jobs in the world: writing about music for a newspaper. They actually will pay you to listen to music, and you will find yourself at all hours of the day and night trying to give them their money's worth, trying to put into words what you think and feel about something that makes you think and feel like nothing else.

Then, those words will be made to sing by some very talented editors, and they will be printed. While the city sleeps, they will come rolling off big conveyor belts just like in the movies. Then they'll go out the door and onto trucks and into people's lives.

Some mornings, when you've written something that says exactly what you mean to say about something you love, you'll find yourself in the laps of friends, families and complete strangers, engaged in that intimate reader-writer connection that is unique to hold-it-in-your-hands newspapers.

On those mornings, the air changes. On those mornings, your out-of-body floats over the Midway to Minneapolis, the West Side to West Bloomington. On those mornings, you can imagine bus stops and doctors' offices and lake cabins and homeless shelters and Prince's boudoir and Jessica Lange's reading room and the YMCA sauna and the Clown Lounge, and you can actually feel people — the smart ones, anyway, the hometown newspaper readers — pausing, snickering and grousing in all the right places.

On those mornings, it can feel like you've got a hit record playing on the radio and the whole town is singing along.

If you write about what you love, one day you might find yourself at a paper like this paper, which, as your old friend Jim told you when you started, "has a great reputation as a writers' newspaper."

You didn't know what that meant at the time, but after having worked with some great newspaper writers at this great writers' newspaper, now you do. They know as well as you do that if you write about what you love, you will, from time to time, be inspired and bored and wise and wimpy. At the very least, at the end of every day, you will hit your pillow knowing you've been true to the Emily Dickinson poem a reader sent you years ago:

If you pay attention to that — if you write about what you love and keep the clatter of the way others do it at bay — you will find yourself with a key to a secret world where race, class and age sparkle and fade.

You will get letters and phone calls from teachers, ministers, painters, nurses, students, cops. They will speak to you in the language of real people, and most of them will tell you they're a lot like you: They love music and words, and they don't like having their news dumbed-down or sanitized for them.

If you write about what you love, you will get correspondence that will make you feel like a bartender at closing time or a priest in a confessional. The letters will tell you about the music they're listening to, which will lead them to telling you about their lives. They will thank you for writing about their band, favorite song, dead son, daughter, husband, wife, brother, sister or friend, and you will be welcome.

You will feel like you owe them something, and you will. You will owe them to continue writing about what you love, to do whatever it takes to stay connected with what it is that first made you want to write about what you love.

In the end, if you write about what you love, you might get the opportunity to tell your loved ones how much you love them. You might get a chance to have some heart-to-hearts and kisses and goodbyes. And if you're really lucky, you might get the chance to take a road trip with your brothers, during which time you plan to discuss that kick-ass band you've been talking about forming together or at least make up idiotic names for it.

But before you go, you might find yourself thanking everyone who has read this far and telling them that you don't take for granted this thing you've shared, this thing that goes beyond "coverage" and "content" and "customer" and telling them that it has been a pleasure beyond words, so you'll end this one with a song.

The last time you heard it was the other night at Liquor Lyle's with you and your old friend Craig. You ran into your old friend Kate and her old friend Suzanne. The four of you grabbed a table by the pool tables, and you and Kate went to the jukebox and put on some Bowie and Stones and Jane's Addiction.

Craig got out his credit card and bought Leinies and Cuervo. You talked about Sept. 11, heroes, firemen, marriage, media, music. Then, you started singing.

You'd just discovered your mutual love for "Harold and Maude," and Cat Stevens' words started trickling out of all of you, clumsily at first, a barbershop karaoke quartet without the TelePrompTer:

"Well, if you want to sing out, sing out./And if you want to be free, be free./'Cause there's a million things to be./You know that there are."

You stumbled, but then Craig picked you up, as he often has; Kate inspired you, as she often does; Suzanne took a drag off her cigarette and smiled at the three of you, and in your minds you all plucked banjos and did Harold's jig on the cliff and danced Maude's nose-thumbing, hand-clapping shimmy.

You were flush in the moment, eyes locked in on each other's, but you took a second to look up to see that the pool players had stopped their games and were watching, listening.

"If you want to be me, be me," you sang, at the top of your beery lungs, drowning out the jukebox, spreading the gospel. "And if you want to be you, be you/'Cause there's a million things to be/You know that there are./It's easy, ah ah ah."

For a minute or longer, you sang, volume increasing with courage. From the front bar, hard faces turned soft and beamed your way. A couple of pool players rested their chins on their sticks and grinned. An ecstatic woman from the next table joined in.

You will never forget it. Any of it.

Posted on Sat, Aug. 17, 2002 on www.pioneerpress.com (a Twin Cities newspaper)---

--Hardly a Prince article, but Jim's been a huge supporter of our favorite musical wizard, so i thought it fitting to add this piece. I'm sure JM has visited the Org once or twice in his day(he'd fit right in, wouldn't he?)
peace, MrC.

This article was worth posting if only for the Liquor Lyle's reference.



Modernaires to the modernmobile (aka the mini-van).

Wow...
Music journalism has been one of the careers I've been considering over and over in my head and so this was a great article 4 me 2 read. Best thread in a while...*ahem*...

(Lovemachine--orgnote me )

Jim's been one of my most favorite writer's in the Twin Cities. Thanks for posting, I didn't catch this one. He will be missed!!

lovemachine said:

I was going to say the same thing.

i like how thots of prince's boudoir is somehow part of the minneapolis scenery.