Health insurance, that’s the problem with being an unemployed poet and songwriter. No surprise there, but risks that make sense at 25 become reckless luxuries after 50. House reluctantly settled into an apartment the last week of December, in large part because he is entering an experimental program to treat Hepatitis C.
“I’m not looking forward to it at all,” he concedes. “I really like just being in a strange place every night. Because that’s what I do a lot of times. Say I’ve got a gig in Athens, Ohio, I’ll just go there and stay there for a week and just be anonymous and check out the place and do the gig. Because what I’m doing I can do anywhere. I’ve got my guitar with me, and my laptop, and my electric typewriter, so they’re all in the car. The inside of one motel room is just like the inside of another.”
But, at least for a year, he’ll stay put. “I figured I might as well settle back in here and try to get some kind of semi-job or something. As much as I hate to desert the lifestyle, the bottom line is, that $30,000 is just about gone. Plus try to get some things organized. The only drawback to this constantly having to gather all the papers up is I’m constantly looking for lyrics, or nail clippers.”
It’s the old cassettes that really need finding. Many go back to the final years of his second marriage, when his wife was spending weekends in Alabama with her sick parents. “I had total isolation and privacy. I used to write a lot like that, kind of something fun to do, smoke a joint and be drinking or something, and don’t even bother going through the writing process, just turn on the tape deck and make up songs.
“There would be a lot of good ideas, and a lot of times, of course, it would go on way too long. So you go back in there and start chopping. There’s a lot of different ways to write. But that’s why I’ve got just scads and scads of fragments. ‘Papa’s Dancing With His Daughter’ is just like that. I wrote the two verses and the chorus maybe ten or twelve years ago, and then just all the sudden found it, sat down and wrote the third verse, and now it’s on the new CD.”
No apologies for the bottle, either. It’s there, or it’s not there, but seems like it’s there often enough. And House tends to keep it near the typewriter.
“Yeah, yeah, I do that a lot. It works OK. It tends to dissolve toward the end, sometimes. But I do a lot of rewrites in the morning, first thing. I use the energy to get going sometimes but then, yeah, there’s a certain point of diminishing returns.
“But I kind of just write all the time. I write in my head when I’m walking and when I was working; that’s where I’ve got a lot of my best ideas, just doing some kind of mindless work, which is what I mainly do, climbing up and down a ladder and all the sudden there’ll be a line. I started ‘White Man’ working at Dillard’s, and had to come down off the ladder,” he laughs.
It’s about the work. Not about lightbulbs, or bottles, or hotel rooms, or lost chances, or somebody else’s easy money. Just do the work. This seems less obvious amid the golden glow of youth, for it is a hard choice and promises few immediate rewards, absent Kenny Rogers cutting one of your songs.
But good work lasts longer than money. And Tom House’s work proceeds, unabated.
“I had three or four new songs and I went on Memorial Day over to Robb [Earls], carried my lyrics over there and did those songs,” he reports happily. “I carried a little half-pint of whiskey with me, too, and I started sipping it while I was doing those. By the time I got to the end of those three or four songs, it was going so good, because the last couple times I’ve been in the studio have been like pulling teeth, it was terrible, I couldn’t get any feeling going at all.
“This was great, so I went ahead and did three or four of the old songs that I knew by heart, and then did a Ralph Stanley song, and it’s cooking, it’s just wide open, more wide open than anything I’ve done.”
The next record’s nearly done.
Tom House never heard of Steven Jesse Bernstein, but ten years almost to the day these words began to be written, Seattle’s most infamous punk poet took his own life. ND co-editor Grant Alden suspects they might have liked each other. Maybe not.
