After recording my dad’s tunes, I’ve been listening to them an awful lot lately and lots of buried memories have come flooding to the surface. I’ve had a rollercoaster of emotions – I still am enduring them, probably as a result of my delicate frame of mind – and it’s been a bittersweet recollection. All of my siblings (I’ve sent them a CD each) will understand exactly the feelings and meanings behind his words. Each song was written for a person or a place or an experience, and they capture the moment like a camera. Warts and all.I grew up listening to my dad’s songs. It was listening to him play and sing that gave me my passion for music and poetry that holds even today. As soon as I was big enough to hold a guitar, and as soon as I built up dedication enough to ignore the pain and the blisters gained from sliding little hands up and down the strings, I was hooked. For many months I felt I was rubbish but I practiced and persevered. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, why I got the bug so hard. I could see my dad loved it, and I really wanted at that age to be just like him. In time, I got better than my dad, and started to teach others. And also, in time, I’ve put down my guitar so I could get on with the busy journey for me which was my life.
My dad and I got very little time together as I grew up. Mum divorced him when I was only two and kicked him out. Though I didn’t get to know till much later, he was a very bad lad in those dark times. He was always on the move, in an out of prison, always in trouble. People change, and I can accept that. But at that time, I just wanted to know why my dad never used to come and see me any more. Had I done something wrong? Kids’ minds don’t work in at all the same way as an adult’s.
On those rare occasions when he did come to visit, he’d spoil me and my younger sister as much as he could. And my mum would let him. I look back and think how hard Mum must have been then to allow that. She held down several jobs to keep us in school uniform and food, while our dad had absolutely nothing do do with us. Then he’d sometimes just waltz back into our lives, turning everything upside-down. He’d buy us presents at Christmas which we thought was brilliant. (“Why couldn’t our mum do that?”) And he could do no wrong in our eyes. And Mum would just sit back and let him have his moments. Soon enough, like last time, he’d bugger off again for months at a go, leaving her once again to the task of raising us on her own. She probably resented my dad for his manipuation of our young feelings, but she never let it show to us. It probably cost her a lot to keep it inside like that, she could have easily turned us against him, and I can never thank her enough for keeping a balanced sense of perspective and not letting her feelings rule her actions. In the long-term, we got to know the whole story and still love them both but in different ways.
His songs were just so many nice, blurry words to me while I was growing up. Yes, I could understand the emotion they were sung with, but I still didn’t have the mental framework nor the experience to see through to their real meaning. It’d been quite a few years since I’d heard his songs sung to me and, last week, it was with ears many years more experienced that I finally absorbed their true content.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling really down, I get the impression that I’m the only person who’s ever felt like this. There’s no point talking to anyone else because they couldn’t possibly help me out of my hole. But inside me I know this is just self-pity and I force myself to look out instead of in. I found the answers in some of my dad’s songs. Well, if not the answers, at least consolation and a feeling that I’m not the only one who suffers in this way. He wrote songs for other people which fit my own situation like a glove.
Like father like son, maybe.
