PELICANS AND PLANES

I’ve been writing songs for a long time. The first one I can remember coming up with was called “Basketball Fever”, which I made up in my head when I was around 7, while I was dribbling a basketball in our basement. It was very short, and very bad, although it did feature a surprisingly syncopated horn arrangement that I probably picked up from a disco-flavored musical number on one of the innumerable celebrity-hosted variety shows that filled the prime-time programming schedules in the 70s. Since “Basketball Fever” was only about 20 seconds long, never recorded, witnessed by no one but me, and- this bears repeating- very bad, I’m relegating it to the “Flukes and Outliers” column in my body of work. 

Stung by the lack of chart success for “Basketball Fever”, I took a 13- or 14-year-long sabbatical from songwriting, content to just listen to the radio and my steadily-growing collection of cassette tapes. 

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I got my first guitar at age 15. It would be a much cooler story arc if I could tell you how I immediately started writing angsty little punk rock manifestos upon learning my first couple of chords, but I’d be lying; for the first handful of years, I devoted all my energy to learning how to play my favorite Classic Rock and Heavy Metal songs. It would be years before it even occurred to me that I could actually write my own songs and, when I did start dipping my toes in those waters, those first tentative attempts were little more than ponderous and derivative guitar riffs with lots of bent notes- more Gray Sabbath than Black, more Soundthicket than Garden, more Jane’s Bad Habit than Addiction. And they contained lyrics that were more about being clever and showing off the big words I knew than communicating any real feelings. 

It wouldn’t be until I was around 22 that I first started writing songs I was proud enough of to share in front of people more than once, and even those had their problems. Tim, the first real, steady-gigging original band I was a part of, featured a couple of those tunes, and Dan Clayton (our singer and principal songwriter, blessed with a beautiful, pure voice) encouraged me to sing lead on the songs I brought to the band. The standout in that early batch was “Bed of Rocks”, a fast bit of E minor jangle that owed more than a passing resemblance to early REM. The lyrics? I don’t know, man. Let’s just say I had recently discovered the Beat writers, and leave it at that:

Propane migraine burning fiercely 

Ears of those who’s forced to hear

Chairmen choke of suits of sticks

And stones give way to broken bricks

On my bed of rocks

On my bed of rocks

On my bed of rocks again

I know. Very edgy. 

Anyway, Dan encouraged me to sing my songs in the band. I had never really sung before and, therefore, didn’t have a clue what my voice sounded actually like. As a result, not knowing what else to do (and like many other singers at the time, much more successful than I), I threw myself headlong into my very best Eddie Vedder imitation. Hey, it was 1993. Thank God video and audio recordings of those early shows are virtually impossible to find. The memory alone makes me wince. 

That band led to other bands. That song led to other songs. Over the ensuing years, I started getting a feel for writing, and worked to constantly refine it. I gradually discovered what I sounded like. The songs began to come out more honestly, with less posturing and pretense. Nothing comes from nothing, mind you- we’re all inspired by what others have done before us. The more stuff I was exposed to, the deeper I dug for my influences and the better I got at weaving them into what I do. It’s an ongoing process, one I’ll never finish, but I’m happy and grateful to say that some of the songs I’ve written have resonated with people, which is really all I could ever hope would happen. 

As I’ve (also) mentioned before in these blog posts, my wife and I moved to California in 2019, after being lifelong Ohio residents and, for the first time in 26 years of pursuing music, I was…bandless. I had logged lots of solo sets over the decades, but moving to a new part of the world forced my hand and felt like a chance to clean the slate and finally concentrate on creating music under my own name. Any preconceived notions of what “my stuff” should sound like- be it from listeners or just in my head- were put aside, and I started cranking out new songs, inspired by my change of surroundings. Most of the new crop of tunes was a little more Soul-inspired, a bit folkier, quieter and more pensive. The quieter vibe was exacerbated by Covid Lockdown, of course, living in an apartment with neighbors in close proximity, and I’ll probably never know for sure if my music would’ve evolved that way if I hadn’t been cooped up in a tiny apartment. What I do know is that circumstances conveniently sorted my musical output into two main bins: Ohio Songs and California Songs. I keep a master list, and every time I finish a new song I add it to said list. I just checked and, according to my records, there are 93 titles in the California Songs category. Some aren’t very good. A lot are decent. Some I like quite a bit. As it should be. 

My favorite of the California Crop is “City of San Jose”, and it was born as a direct result of Covid. When the existential despair and cabin fever built up to a boiling point, I would mask up and go for long walks to get some exercise and clear my head. One of my favorite places to do that was the Bay Trail. As the name suggests, the Bay Trail runs along large stretches of the shore of San Francisco Bay. We lived in Sunnyvale, at the southernmost end, in the shallow backwaters and marshlands where the big ships couldn’t go- the domain of pelicans and ruddy ducks and geese. Our stretch of the Bay Trail was a wide gravel and sand path that skirted the edge of Moffett Field. I’d grown up in the cornfields of Miami County, Ohio, so I was no stranger to wide open spaces, but this was a wholly different variety of nothingness: vast, sunbaked, with the foothills of the Diable Mountain Range in the distance. I would set the timer on my phone for an hour and start walking. When the timer ran out, I’d turn around and head back. After six or seven miles of encountering no more than half a dozen people, I’d usually feel better. A bunch of podcasts were listened to, as well as loads of music. I remember listening to Miles Davis’ Filles de Kilimanjaro out there one day, and finally getting it- one of those magical, rare intersections of the right music, the right time, the right place, and the right headspace. 

Often, though, I’d just walk and think. I mulled over a lot of heavy thoughts and song lyrics, with just the birds and planes for company. The jets climbing out of San Jose Airport make a sharp right turn over the South Bay after takeoff, to avoid encroaching on the airspace of SFO and the other, smaller airfields that dot the Peninsula (it’s a pretty busy piece of sky). They swing out over the water and circle back over the city, and then adjust their course to their destination. I started contemplating that steady backdrop of pelicans and Southwest 737s and, as my mind is wont to do, chiseled it into a song:

I flew in from Colorado 

I’ve been incommunicado for a while

If the last 12 months have taught you anything

It’s that talking’s not my style

But I want to send a quick “top of the morning”

From the bottom of the Bay

Where pelicans and planes fly lazy circles

‘Round the city of San Jose 

I spent so many years picking fights 

And drinking wisdom from the fountain

Imagine my surprise- the ocean didn't care

And neither did the mountains

So I shut my mouth and shut my eyes

Stepped back and let the wasteland have its say

While pelicans and planes flew lazy circles

‘Round the city of San Jose

You can beat your head against the wall 

Waiting for epiphanies and brainstorms

You can stand outside and drown yourself

In the rage and retribution of a rainstorm

As for me, I’m gonna go and see my friends

We’ll sit and wish the day away

Watchin’ pelicans and planes fly lazy circles

‘Round the city of San Jose

We’ll watch those pelicans and planes fly lazy circles 

‘Round the city of San Jose

For the music, I used my favorite alternate guitar tuning, DADGAD: bottom string down a step, from E to D, and the top two strings, B and E, both down a step, as well, to A and D. DADGAD sounds sun-dappled to me; it produces a vaguely Joni Mitchell/Led Zeppelin-y sound that I adore, and my fingers love wandering about in that tuning and finding new chord voicings. 

When the time came (thanks to the kindness and generosity of my dear friend and biggest booster, Jack Piatt) to head into the studio and record as “Tod Weidner” for the first time, “City of San Jose” was first on the list. The single we recorded that day is streamable wherever you get your music online, and it’s…fine. Really. I like it. The musicians are all great. The producer arranged it as a more upbeat, Americana kind of thing and, in my excitement to be back in the studio, I enthusiastically went along with it. But if I could do it over again, I’d record it the way I play it solo- slower, more meditative. The recorded version feels like a much different song, really. 

“CoSJ” is often my choice to open solo sets. It’s “home” to me; I’ve become familiar enough with it to explore its musical nooks and crannies, to stretch it out this way and that. It gets me warmed up, centers me, gets my head right for the set ahead. I think most singer/songwriters have a “home” song like that in their repertoire, a refuge that you can retreat to when things are falling apart in the set. I remember reading that Jimi Hendrix felt that way about “Red House”. “City of San Jose” is my refuge song.  

“Basketball Fever” is definitely not.

Here’s a link to a version of “City of San Jose” I recorded at home a while back, much closer to the way I usually approach it nowadays, if you’re interested:

https://soundcloud.com/tod-weidner/tod-weidner-city-of-san-jose