A Change of Pace: Where I've Been, a Joke, and Process Notes

Been a while, hasn't it? Before I get into explaining why, and why this newsletter is not yet a return to the format I used for the first few (the comic and Elvis pieces will return, just not today) here's a rather poor taste joke (not the most offensive joke in the world, but not for the squeamish) that I originally read in a book of shaggy dog stories credited to (and possibly actually by) the great comedian Les Dawson when I was about six This is the joke as I remember it, having not reread the book in question in something like forty years. If you don't like bad taste jokes, scroll down to the row of three asterisks after it (or at least I typed it as three asterisks – ghost's autoformatting has turned that to a page break and I'm not sure how to fix that, but the clear visible demarcation anyway):

It's the 1970s, a time of great political tumult and rising terrorist activity. In the UK, right-wing political figures like Lord Mountbatten and Ross McWhirter were getting murdered by the IRA.

So when Reginald Maudling, the Conservative Home Secretary from 1970 to 1972, someone who was particularly loathed by the IRA, disappeared, the initial inclination was to assume the worst. A massive manhunt started up to find both the terrorists and his (presumed) body.

But then the next day, a package arrived at his home. It was his feet.

The day after, his lower legs arrived.

But the criminal had made a fatal error. He had been captured going to the post box on the then-new CCTV technology. And he looked very distinctive. He was only four foot ten.

Soon the police had figured out who it was, and it was not someone anyone could have expected. The little person in question was actually a very respectable self-made millionaire. Alphonse, for that was his name, was a gentlemen's hairdresser who had made his fortune by spotting a lucrative market. He had noticed that men of the Latter Day Saints church were required to have their hair very short and neat, and reasoned that they would need more haircuts than most. He had opened a barbershop opposite an LDS Temple, and soon found business was booming.

Alphonse had always been a cheerful fellow, but clearly underneath that happy exterior something dark had been festering. Armed police surrounded Alphonse's home, but he shouted out through a megaphone:

"I have Maudling here! I have a knife to his throat! If you try to come in, he's dead!"

After hours of this standoff, Alphonse eventually agreed to let a negotiator in. By this point not only were the police there, but the massed press corps were too.

"Look, Derek," the officer in charge said to the negotiator, "Don't take any stupid risks in there. We've got one of the most important people in Britain being held hostage, and the whole of the news media is here. We cannot afford for this to go wrong. For now, all I need you to do is establish a bond with him. Get in there, talk to him, try to find out what it is he wants, what his demands are, and why he's doing this, so we can build up a strategy".

"Got it," said the negotiator, and headed towards the door, hands in the air, with that in mind. The door creaked open a crack, just enough to let him in, and he walked inside.

What he saw there would traumatise him for life. The ex-Home Secretary was still alive, strapped to a table, gagged, with blood everywhere. It was the goriest, most horrible, scene Derek had ever seen and it would haunt his nightmares. And Alphonse was walking towards the table with a chainsaw in his hands and a gleam in his eye, looking thrilled.

"Get on with it," said Alphonse. "You said you wanted to talk, so let's talk. I've not got all day."

"What... what are your demands?" Asked Derek. "What is it you want?"

"Want?" laughed the maniacal hairdresser, "I don't want anything! I don't have any demands!"

"So... why are you doing it then? If you don't have any demands? Is it some kind of political statement or..."

"Pfah!" spat the short man, and Derek the negotiator would remember for the rest of his life the stray thought that he hadn't known people actually did that in real life. "I'm not doing this for politics! That sort of thing is below me. I am an amateur in the best, truest sense of the word! I do this not for money, not for politics, not even for fame, but purely for the sport of it! Cutting this bastard down to size is the most enjoyable thing I have ever done! Now go out and tell your bosses that – I've got work to do!"

And he started up the chainsaw again.Derek staggered out, in shock. He had never seen such pure evil in his life. In later years he would say that he had met the Devil himself. And the glee in the man's eyes... the sheer joy...

Immediately he was out the door, the press surrounded him, scrambling to get close to him to find out what was going on. The first reporter to get an audible sentence out in the tumult asked the question they were all wanting an answer to. "Why is he doing this?"

And at that moment, all that Derek could say, pale-faced and trembling as he was, was a simple statement of the truth. "Mormon's little barber loves shortening Maudling. Mormon's little barber loves shortening Reg."

I'm so sorry (I'm not really sorry).

That joke sticks in my memory because being a six-year-old (or thereabouts) kid in the mid-80s it was the first time I'd ever heard of Reginald Maudling, but also because it was the first time I'd ever encountered the song "Shortenin' Bread", and so the joke required more than a little explanation from my mother. (I was, as you can probably tell from everything else about me, an extremely precocious and hyperlexic child, allowed to read pretty much everything, and so I was constantly encountering things that made very little sense to my tiny brain but were nonetheless fascinating).

Because of that, the song "Shortenin' Bread" has always had a slightly macabre tinge in my mind, so you can imagine how gleeful I was when in the course of researching the most recent episodes, I found out its origins,

By now, I imagine most of you have listened to the most recent episode of my podcast (there may be some of you who have subscribed without being listeners, but I suspect not many) and so now I can talk about why it ended up so long (though thankfully people seem to like it) and took so much longer than I thought, and why that ended up also meaning that I took an unannounced break from this newsletter, because I think people might be interested in process stuff.

The first thing to note is that for about the last three months I've been in burnout. I think, based on the last few days, I'm coming out of it.

Note that people use the word "burnout" colloquially in multiple ways, to the point that it can often be used just to mean "bored". But neurodivergent people (I'm autistic, ADHD, and dyspraxic, as I'm fairly sure most of you know by now) use the term in a fairly technical way (which might or might not have any relationship to how some neurotypical people use it). I didn't realise how literal the "burnout" metaphor was until a particularly bad bout of it in my early thirties, when literally the only way I could describe how I felt was that I was just a hollow shell and everything inside me had been burned to a tiny pile of ash. My eyes always felt charred, and I felt hollow. I was so fatigued I would often realise that at work I had been staring at my computer for an hour and literally drooling.

Burnout in this sense is a serious medical problem, not just "I'm just burned out". Many of the chronic conditions I still have in my mid-forties, conditions which in some cases if not carefully managed could end up life-threatening, were caused by that bout of burnout, which eventually left me unable to work at all. To get over it I had to quit a relatively well-paid job and spend several years in poverty.

Now the worst thing in the world to do with a bout of burnout is to push through it and work twice as hard to make up for what you've been unable to do because you're incapacitated. That is a guaranteed way to ensure permanent disability and even death – and more importantly in this case, it's a guaranteed way to make sure that the work becomes intolerable.

Other than the financial aspect, that didn't bother me too much at the job I quit with that bout of burnout – it was a job, there are other jobs, it wasn't doing anything particularly worthwhile, interesting, or fun, and didn't contribute much to my sense of self-identity or anything. It was just a thing I did in order to get money so I and my then-spouse could stay fed and housed.

But my current work is different. In many ways, important ways, my work is who I am. I have been very, very, lucky to find what is, in almost all ways, the literal perfect occupation for me. Actually recording the podcast – the speaking at the mic part – feels like work to me, but the writing part is as natural as breathing. I'm very lucky I get paid for it, but I'd be doing it if I wasn't, and probably even if I were banned from doing it. I can't imagine not writing, not trying to improve as a writer, and while I've written about other subjects, I have been obsessed with music literally all my life, and it's by far the subject I'm best qualified to write about.

And not only that, I am very lucky to be making a better income from this than from any work I've ever had.And not only that, but most importantly of all, I think my work matters. That sounds terribly arrogant – after all, it's only a podcast about old records! – but the messages I've had over the years from listeners tell me I have made, and am making, an appreciable difference, not only in entertaining and comforting people (important things to do) but in changing how people think about some subjects. There are many more important things people in general could be doing right now, things that will make far more of a difference – fighting fascism, curing diseases, protecting the environment, discovering new scientific truths – things that are so far beyond what a little podcast about music can do that any comparison is truly laughable. But there is nothing more important that I, Andrew Hickey, with my own particular combination of skills and shortcomings, could be doing.

So it is crucial to me that above all else (again, above all else that I can actually be doing) I protect my ability to continue doing this work. I intend to get to song 500 eventually, and then when that is done, to do some other work that will still be of a piece with this in some respects. What that is, I don't yet know, but it will undoubtedly be 500 Songs-esque in many ways. The only thing that can ever stop me from doing this is death or such severe disability I'm functionally no longer the same person.

So given that stopping is not an option while remaining me, and pushing through burnout is also not an option if I don't want to get a nice new collection of chronic illnesses and disabilities to go with the ones I've already got (and frankly I already feel like I'm hogging all the good ones and need to leave some for other people) the only way to cope with burnout is to pace myself, only working at points where I'm fully sure of my capacity, and accept that some days – many days – all I'll be capable of is staring at cartoons on the TV, but that other days I can still get a few thousand words written.

Now, starting this newsletter was in part a way of making that easier -- there are days when I can write one thing but not another, and there are also days when I can start work on one project and then switch to another -- and I'll be continuing it partly for that reason. But a few weeks ago it became clear that the Beach Boys/Manson/Ledbetter story was going to be much, much bigger than I had at first envisaged, and that the only way I would ever get it done was if it became my sole focus as far as working hours went, for a little while at least.

And here's where I get into the process stuff, and why that last episode was so much longer than the others.

I had always, right from the start of the podcast, known I was going to cover Huddie Ledbetter in the episode (at the time of course they were single episodes) on "Never Learn Not to Love", in much the same way I knew I was going to cover Robert Johnson in the episode on "Crossroads". There are a handful of key episodes which came to me basically fully-formed when I had the initial idea for the podcast, and this was one of them.

But when it came time to do what I by then had determined would be a four-part episode, the structure I had in mind was set in stone. Each episode would have a brief bit about Ledbetter's story in much the same way the "Sympathy For the Devil" episodes had a brief bit about Oscar Wilde – a bit longer though because Ledbetter was a musician (and an important one). I'd set up a whole bunch of thematic things like Manson's pretending to be a Black Panther essentially being blackface, but I also planned to look at the similarities and differences between Manson and Ledbetter. Both people with songs on 20/20 who were convicted of murder – one Black, one white, one convicted long before the album, one shortly after. Both in and out of prison until they try, much later in life than most people do, to become professional musicians after a long prison sentence. There's even a very vague similarity between the "pretty girl" intro to Manson's "Cease to Exist" demo and Ledbetter's version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" if you squint a little.

So you talk about that, and about the way both of their lives were affected by racism (Ledbetter as a victim, Manson as perpetrator) and how their lives diverge when Ledbetter becomes a success but Manson never does, and the horrific results of that. Bring in the material about songwriting credits and talk about how the theft of Black music is the original sin of the American music industry. You can see how that story goes, right? Four ten-thousand-word episodes, one every fortnight or so. Two thousand words at the beginning of each on Ledbetter, switch to four thousand words each on Manson and the Beach Boys for the rest of each episode. Nice and straightforward.

And that was still the plan after I'd released the first episode.

And then, as I said at the beginning of episode two, I read Sheila Curran Bernard's Bring Judgement Day, her biography of the relationship between Ledbetter and Lomax, and of Ledbetter's life up until their split, just to make sure I'd covered all the bases. And I was floored. Everything I had been planning on doing had to be thrown out of the window, as it was all based on the mistaken idea that there were parallels between Ledbetter and Manson, that they were both similar types of personality who kept getting into legal trouble because of their own violent actions. And Bring Judgement Day convinced me that that simply wasn't the case.

But because I had already released the first episode, I couldn't just scrap everything, find a different place to tell Ledbetter's story (maybe talking about "Cottonfields" when I get to Creedence or something) and call it good. I had to go hunting for new connecting threads between the two very different parts of the story. I already had some, like the repeated motif of songwriting credit being stolen, but I had to find a lot more, ranging from actual material connections like Alan Lomax having made the first recording of "Sloop John B" and being thanked by Bob Dylan right after Mike Love at the Rock Hall induction, to just resonant coincidences like the Two Charlies track (which had me dancing with glee like a schoolkid when I figured that one out).

So episodes two and three took longer than I would have liked, but were relatively straightforward, and even in some ways easier to do. When I'd started these episodes, they were in some ways a solved problem -- I'd done all the fun creative part of the work and just had to actually type the things I'd had planned in my head for months and years. But now I had to solve a million new problems, and it was exciting doing so.

The problem came with episode four, where I had to do the payoff. My initial expectation, when I started writing it, was that I would have to give roughly equal time to the three strands of the story -- five thousand words to Ledbetter and the blues, five thousand to the Manson murders, five thousand to the Beach Boys' post-Manson career. And when I wrote the first ten thousand words, that was pretty much spot on, and I was on track, But then I hit a snag I should have predicted, but hadn't.

I had always expected to cover the later years of the Beach Boys in five thousand words or so, with the story taking much the same shape it did in the final version, ending with Dennis' drowning. The actual ending-ending, in fact, is basically unchanged from what I planned from the very start.

But the problem came with those Ledbetter parallels. Because everything I'd found was essentially rooted in either the Ledbetter or Manson stories, making the connections on the Beach Boys' side meant ending up with a hideously unbalanced narrative, giving far too much weight to trivia and coincidences, at the expense of narrative coherence and a rounded view of the Beach Boys' career in those years. It is simply not the case, for example, that the most notable things about the Beach Boys' post-1970 career are Bruce Johnston co-producing a version of "Stewball" for Doris Day or Brian Wilson doing a cover version of "Goodnight Irene". Had I just covered all the connecting material, plus Dennis' drowning, that would have taken up about the five thousand words I originally planned, and it would have been a weird, disjointed, mess, and I wouldn't have been able to fit in the short post-Manson narrative I'd originally intended.

So I ended up having to write vastly more of the Beach Boys part of the story than I had intended at the start of the process of writing that episode, because that was the only way to give a balanced narrative. While my original guess had been that I would write a straight 5000/5000/5000-word split, or near as dammit, it ended up being 5000/5000/20,000.

And not only that, I had to try to make that material as gripping as the other stuff, so as far as possible the episode didn't sag and people didn't get bored. And in theory that should be easy, between the soap-operatic aspects of the group's life and the sheer quality of the best music they made in that period (and yes, everything under the Beach Boys' name after LA (Light Album) is basically worthless with the odd... not diamond, but at least cubic zirconia, in the mud, but I would argue that at least Smiley Smile, Friends, Surf's Up, Carl and the Passions, the Beach Boys Love You, Dennis' Pacific Ocean Blue, and Brian's That Lucky Old Sun and Smile albums are truly great albums, while Wild Honey, 20/20, Sunflower, Holland, LA (Light Album), Brian's eponymous solo album and Al's A Postcard From California are all at least good).

But of course, I knew that a very vocal minority of my listenership think of the Beach Boys as a joke, and find the idea that there is any reason to listen to their post-1966 music (or their music at all) almost axiomatically ridiculous.

As Tilt posted on Bluesky a few weeks back "In the Patreon bonus, Andrew quotes Mike Mills on Big Star “…even if you haven’t heard of Big Star, you owe them, because I guarantee you: Any band you like did hear of them…”.

The Beach Boys are the same, but instead of being influential despite their obscurity, it's despite their colossal fame."

And it is much more difficult to make a case for the artistic merit of someone about whom people have a preconceived and incorrect idea than to make the case for a band they've not heard of at all.

And I had to do all this, while also doing a Patreon bonus that was tough to do itself, while also trying not to let my own personal opinions of the Beach Boys' music colour the episode (I honestly think that I would have made substantially the same episode were I not a Beach Boys fan, but absent a control Andrew who hasn't been a ride-or-die fan of the band for thirty years, I can't prove that). And I had to do it while dealing with the Manson murders in a way that hopefully didn't seem too exploitative or lurid.

And I had to do all that while at roughly quarter-capacity, and monitoring my own health at all times.

Judging from the response, I seem to have largely succeeded (obviously I'm the worst possible judge of my own work so can't say for sure). It took a lot out of me – not as much as the "Dark Star" episode (even though that was much shorter than the combined length of the four parts of this story) but a lot. But I think it's good work, and I've managed to look after my health enough that I definitely feel on the mend now.

My next plan is to spend a week or so creating a bunch of actually ten-minute Patreon bonus episodes (as promised in the increasingly-inaccurate tag of the show), to use as a backlog, because I got a lot of people asking where I was because of the big gaps between episodes. If I can create a backlog of ten or so ten-minute episodes that can be released weekly in gaps between episodes (while still doing the once-a-month or so much longer Patreon bonus like I have been doing recently) that will give me a little slack in the event of something like this happening again.

Once those are done, I'll get on with the next main episode, which should be just a two-parter, on "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" by Fairport Convention, and return to doing this newsletter the way I was for a few weeks before I started dropping balls.

Until then...