Dreams

        

 

          "You can't campaign with a machine gun."
          I'm not sure what that means, but apparently I said it in a dream one night last week. A couple of nights later, a guy came up to me in another dream and said "You can't campaign with a machine gun. I heard you say that the other day. That was so cool!" It got me to thinking about dreams...mine, and dreams in general.
          I'd be willing to bet that I'm not the only person who dreams about being able to fly. I have had dreams about flying at least since I was eleven or twelve years old, if not earlier that that.  In my dreams, flight is so easy. It's almost like treading water. I wave my hands back and forth in the direction of the ground and I rise right up. Sometimes I fly horizontally and parallel to the ground, but as often as not, the sensation is more like being in deep water (that I can breathe in, and not feel any more than I would feel the air) and moving at will, untethered from the ground. I have them fairly often, and I probably don't have to tell you what a disappointment it is to wake up and not be able to fly.
          I wrote a song one time from a dream I had about being in a wheelchair. Twenty years ago, we were living in eastern North Carolina, in a two-story house with a woodstove for heat. In the winter time, we would get a good fire going right before bedtime and then close the dampers down and go to bed. About an hour or so before it was time for everyone to get up, I would head downstairs and open the dampers, add a few logs, and then go back to bed. The living room would be nice and toasty in the morning. Around this same time period, I was playing music at a lot of biker bars and functions. If you hang around enough bikers, you'll start seeing folks on crutches and in wheelchairs. I guess it's only natural that those images would infiltrate my dreams.
         One night, I had a particularly vivid dream about being in a wheelchair. I was hanging out in a house with a bunch of other "wheelies". Somewhere (not anywhere nearby) there was a guy who had a motorcycle rigged so that he could ride it in spite of the handicap that had kept him chair-bound. We couldn't see him since he was way down the road somewhere, but we were somehow psychically connected to him. We he fired up his bike, we knew it, and we all went nuts. We rolled out into the front yard, hooting and hollering, because not only was he doing it, he was doing it for all of us.
        Then I woke up.
         I was halfway down the stairs to put some wood in the stove when it hit me. I was walking! Just a few minutes earlier, I had been stuck in a chair, but now I was on two feet and walking down a flight of stairs. It shook me up a little. Then I started thinking "What if it was the other way around?" What if I could walk and/or ride a motorcycle in my dreams, but woke up to life in a wheelchair? That day I wrote a song called "Morning Rolls Around". Within a week, I had recorded it with some of my picker buddies, and included it on a cassette that I put out.

          Another kind of dream is the waking one of "What do I want to do with my life?". They are actually aspirations, but we often refer to them as dreams. A dear old friend of mine contacted me the other day wanting to know how to purchase a copy of my "What's Not To Love About That?" CD to give to her elderly country music loving cousins. She told me that she thought "What's Not to Love" was the most beautiful song she'd heard in a long time. "Truly, truly lovely." She added that it made her glad to know that I was living my dream.
          I guess if my dream is to write songs that touch people emotionally, then yes, I'm living my dream. Now, if only I could fly....

The Heart Of a Hobo

                                  THE HEART OF A HOBO

          My late friend Billy Phillips once told me that he had

originally moved to Nashville to be a Gospel singer. Billy had Muscular Dystrophy, and by the time I first met him at Bobby’s Idle Hour Tavern, he was pretty much confined to a wheelchair. He told me that at one time earlier in life he had been able to walk, and even though he was a “wheelie”, he felt certain that he would walk again one day.

          Billy also had a great love of classic country music, and after a few of my songs caught his ear (and his heart) we started having conversations about songs, songwriters, songwriting, and life in general. We became pretty good friends.

          Billy used to sing at a soup kitchen that operated on Mondays at a church in Madison. It was a regular thing for him and he loved sharing songs with the folks who came in for what might have been their only good meal of the week. He called me up one day and invited me over there to play.
          While we were on the phone, he told me that he had a soft spot for homeless folks, and that his father had been a hobo. Billy grew up around traveling folks, and their family home was often populated with transient types that needed a place to lay their burdens down for a spell. One family had stayed with them awhile and left owing Billy’s family some money. They left behind the only thing they had of value, which was a box full of classic country record albums. That’s where Billy got his first taste of what eventually brought us into each other’s lives.

          While we were having this conversation, Billy said “I guess God gave me a heart for the hobo.”  My immediate response was “That sounds like a great hook for a song”. We had never written anything together and decided that it was past time for us to remedy that fact. A few days later I went over to the house he shared with his girlfriend around the corner from the church with the soup kitchen.

          Billy was laid up on the couch. I pulled up a chair and we started discussing where this hook would take us. After a little discussion, we came to the conclusion that the hook was a little clunky and would be awkward to sing, so we changed it to “God gave him the heart of a hobo”, which seemed like a better alternative. We talked about it a little bit, tossing ideas back and forth, when suddenly I had a thought. I said “What if God literally did give him the heart of a hobo…as in a transplant from a dead homeless guy?” Billy’s eyes got real big and he stared at me for a minute before asking “Can we say that in a country song?” I told him we could say whatever we wanted to because we were the ones writing the song. Furthermore, if he didn’t want to write songs like that, he shouldn’t call me up, because I was prone to write things from a different angle than most folks.  He was good with that.

          It took us a while, but we finally came up with the song “The Heart Of A Hobo”.

                 R.I.P. Billy...and teach them angels this song.