JD SOUTHER

Note: JD does not maintain his myspace page, although he does check in from time to time.

ABOUT

When I started writing music, and later, more specifically, songs; I had been playing music for half of my twenty one years, having begun violin lessons with a beautiful old Teckman violin from my Grandma in the fourth grade, clarinet in the fifth, merging into tenor saxophone two years later, and drums the year after that. I was insatiable, but lacked discipline then, having only skirted poetry writing and had yet to learn what I would later hear from Jim Harrison quoting, I think from Faulkner, on the matter of discipline, something like "structure is proof of discipline..."
Through a list too long to ever complete, but led by Miles, Trane, Monk, Clifford Brown, Nat and Cannonball, Bill and Gil Evans, Ahmad Jamal, Roland Kirk, Wayne Shorter (still the Man), and the astonishing Dave Brubeck Quartet (I usually hear Paul Desmond in my head when I'm drifting off and Morello and Wright's groove and Morello's solo on "Take Five" is still, for me, the turning point in modern music), I had fallen hard in love with jazz. I later fell again for country music, mostly due to Hank Williams, whose voice still paralyzes me, but also by way of local influence. The great Texas rockabilly maniacs were nearby; among them Buddy Holly, Conway Twitty, Waylon Jennings, and best of all, Roy Orbison, all within a strip of West Texas that you could drive. Then, extending the poetry and narrative with his own great singing came Bob Dylan, to whom, along with Jimmy Webb, we all are permanently indebted.
I heard once that when Duke Ellington was asked what kind of music he liked he said, "There are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music...I prefer good music". That has always worked nicely for me. By 1967, I had been and gone from college where I tried to write charts and played drums in the Big Band, fobbed off piano lessons from an excellent but less than personable teacher, played clarinet in woodwind ensemble, tympani in orchestra, but largely, failed to attend. The class I never missed was that of Evan Tonsing, who taught music theory in any and every way applicable, including loaning me his beloved recording of Glenn Gould playing and groaning his way through his 1953 recording of The Goldberg Variations by JS Bach, the only man besides Albert Einstein who deserves his reputation. This may be the other turning point in music within my life; that recording. There is piano before that and after that. It's that important. One of those things like walking on the moon. No one who plays can do so as though that recording did not exist. (I still have the vinyl and if you read this, Mr. Tonsing, it is still in it's multiple protective sleeves and despite thousands of listens, in pristine condition.)
Leaving or having been asked to leave â€“ again, before finals could expose me - went to California, shining by the sea, and and stood on a jetty of rocks below Santa Monica, set to find...something. Los Angeles, which failed somehow to surprise in any way, has always been a place of discovery. Though I'm from Amarillo (and nowhere else), I was born in Detroit, had two strange childhood years in Cleveland, finished my physical growth in Texas, tried the Village (Minetta Lane), loved and raged in Kauai, Aspen, Austin, Boulder, Trancas, South Florida, London, Edinburgh, Paris (where I was set upon and then spoiled by a young unrazoured French beauty who called me 'Chien Capitalist' or some such, though I was, in fact, flat broke), Seattle, Chicago, the great swath of imagination that runs North from San Francisco to the Russian River, New Orleans, New London, New Zealand, Japan (many times but once featuring a 48 hour period in Osaka that can only be described here as dangerous but farcically epic), and dozens of other less storied locations...I have and suppose will always be referred to as an LA singer/songwriter writer.
What can I say that does not sound like protest of a good thing? I found something. First there was the cheap nylon stringed guitar that would not be tuned and so was left carelessly unattended in my apartment. Then, I spent 1969 in The Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard,watching and listening; learning to paint sunlight and darkness with words and acoustic guitars. Great friends were made, alliances formed, broken, and reformed, love mined and spent, cars and motorcycles (along with not a few of my own bones) were heedlessly broken, years passed, music was made, and a great house built. I was rescued by dogs (including the very Buddha himself or so it seemed to me then), discovered by visionaries, turned down by idiots, supported by great musicians, tallied by businessmen, saved by some, and screwed by others. I survived a white-out snow storm over the desert in a tiny plane, falling off a mountain, being clubbed with a giant beer mug, and being shot at. I filled hundreds of yellow legal pads with my fibbing, scribbled score paper with ill- remembered musical notation.
I landed, eventually, but without ceremony, in Tennessee with a dear old dog called the Babe, who carried my wild inconsolable heart for fifteen years without complaint. She died peacefully in my arms at sunset and her ashes went back into the Pacific with those of her partner, and my own little Buddah, Murphy, who had returned to the sea three years before.
Then another part of life began.