September Productions Blog

“Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead” - Phil 3:11-13

“Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” - Maurice Chevalier

I turned 60 this year. I was from the generation that said you couldn’t trust anyone over 30, I have moved that up a few years now. “Hope I die before I get old” carries a different melody now. The reality for me is that this has become the best time of my life, getting closer to figuring it all out, realizing that life is found in the simplicity of every day things, having a committed marriage, letting go of the self-imposed stress of always having to be ’someone’. I still love the martial arts, I still love traveling to distant lands, but I’m just as content to go to Kansas………………

Les Paul 94
Little Richard 76
Floyd Cramer 75
Roy Clark 75
Barry McGuire 73
Jerry Lee Lewis 72
Glen Campbell 72
Roger Miller 72
Tina Turner 69
Cliff Richards 69
Neil Diamond 68
Ringo Starr 68
Dionne Warwick 68
Ronald Isley 67
Charlie Watts 67
Bob Dylan 67
David Crosby 67
Roger McGuinn 67
Eric Burdon 67
Paul McCartney 66
Aretha Franklin 66
Keith Richards 66
Mark Linday 66
Leon Russell 66
Johnny Rivers 66
Barbara Streisand 66
Steve Miller 65
Andy Summers 65
Roger Daltrey 64
Ray Davies 64
Mick Jagger 64
Jimmy Page 64
Jeff Beck 64
Diana Ross 64
Rod Stewart 63
Pete Townshend 63
Eric Clapton 63
Steven Stills 63
Neil Young 63
Richie Blackmore 63
Mitch Ryder 63
Linda Ronstadt 62
John Paul Jones 62
Dolly Parton 62
Ron Wood 61
Carlos Santana 61
Mick Fleetwood 61
Robert Plant 60
Alice Cooper 60

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“Let each one remain in the same calling in which he was called. Were you called while a slave? Do not be concerned about it; but if you can be made free, rather use it.” - 1 Cor. 7:20-21

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ~Mark Twain

After traveling around the world this summer w/ the Osmonds, my wife and I thought we would take a few weeks off and see the a Midwest and the Western US. It’s funny, just can’t get away from the calling of the road. I am always getting e-mails from people who want to run away and join the “circus”, they have no idea of what that entails, you are up at 6am each morning starting your day and rarely hit the bed before 2 or 3am, traveling at night on a tour bus or plane criss-crossing different continents, and always juggling at least 10 balls in the air, it is not for the faint of heart. But it is where I live and am happiest, it fits like a glove. I remember as a very young boy riding along on a country road in Kansas w/ my father and running into our neighbor. He was just getting back from a tour w/ the rodeo circuit, he was a little war-torn from riding bulls and being out on the road for several months but you could see that he lived for the adventure, I loved to listen to his stories of always seeing another town and the thrill of the next rodeo. For me the music business took the place of my early rodeo career, now “career” would be a stretch, as much as I am a cowboy at heart, I just couldn’t make the grade as a bull and bronc rider, 8 seconds on those animals seemed like an eternity. Touring still holds the same fascination for me as it did when I first started out in the biz as a guitar player w/ the Common Ground. My “family” has always been made up of artists and road crew, I have hundreds of families that I am close to, each one created by whatever tour I was on. They run from rap groups to country. One thing I have gleaned from being on the road all these years is that regardless of the language or culture, we are pretty much the same. We have the same need for love, we bleed the same color of blood…….. Although the road can be tuff, I can’t think of anything else I would rather do. I really like seeing anyone who is content in what they do and have found their calling in life, whether it be a rock ‘n’ roll star or a shoe salesman. What I try to avoid, if at all possible, are the whiners and complainers, you know the “half empty” crowd.

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“Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” - 2nd Tim. 6-7

“If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, know that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” - GK Chesterton

Associations between madness and art are as old as western culture. Aristotle identified a tendency to melancholia in the artistic temperament; Shakespeare produced multiple variations on the theme of lunatics and poets being “of imagination all compact”; and Dryden coined the notion of a “thin partition” between wit and insanity.

Research in the area, though piecemeal, reveals distinctly higher rates of psychiatric conditions - most particularly mood disorders - among artists and writers. In her 1993 study Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness And The Artistic Temperament, Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, concluded that among distinguished artists she investigated, the rate of affective disorders was 10-30 times more prevalent than in the general population.

Nancy Andreasen, chair of psychiatry at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine, studied 30 authors from the university’s famous writers’ workshop and discerned that artists, though prone to emotional disorders, do not have high rates of schizophrenia - but their families do. The suggestion is that some features associated with schizophrenia, which haven’t developed into a psychosis, may confer some kind of creative originality. Hypomania (moderate levels of manic experience) can produce extraordinary periods of energy and concentration, followed by a plunge into depression. It may, in some people, confer benefits as well as deficits.

Most of us will either experience, or come close to, a mental illness, be it basic depression or a dementia preceding death. The fact that we shun it does not make it any the less a human universal. And it would be odd if such elemental experiences were not connected to creative urges. As Wittgenstein said, reflecting on his own trials with mental illness: “If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.”

I have worked for many high profile artists both “insane” and as “normal” as the farmer in Kansas. From my perspective, there is always something interesting about their personalities, but the thing most common is their constant drive to exercise their gift, sometimes at the expense of themselves and those closest to them, and sometimes to the benefit of all. Wish they were all the latter, but also wish that life was closer to the fairy tales where the heroes were always extremely sane………

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