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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Monday, October 26, 2009
Wonders of Will
By Kathaleen Roberts
Of the Journal
That gift has both driven and saved this self-described "music lifer" who clawed back out of the black hole of brain injury through his music.
The songwriter covered by Lovett, Nanci Griffith and Little Feat will premiere his one-man play "One Man's Music: A Monologue with Song," based on his autobiography and CD of the same title ($14.95, University of North Texas Press, 2009 ) here on Wednesday. The performance will benefit the New Mexico Brain Injury Advisory Council.
Born and raised in Houston, Bell moved in a 1970s music scene ruled by Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams and Guy Clark. Van Zandt named a son after him. Lovett has recorded Bell's song "Sun & Moon & Stars" for his latest release, "Natural Forces," released this month.
In 1982, Bell was broadsided by a drunken driver after he left the studio where he and Vaughan had just recorded three of Bell's songs. The accident hurled the songwriter into a monthlong coma. The Austin American-Statesman prematurely printed his obituary.
At 32, he spent the next decade relearning how to talk, walk, write and play the guitar. His sense of taste disappeared for years. He both designed and drove most of his rehabilitation and recovery by himself, "firing" one hospital at one point and checking himself into a mental institution the next. All along, he battled the searing loneliness of brain injury, where no one –– not even another person with similar injuries –– could truly grasp what was going on in his shattered mind.
"Brain injury is never over with," the 58-year-old songwriter said. "I can look cute in front of you. But I can't wake in the middle of the night and not be brain injured."
Something to prove
A short tour of Bell's Eldorado home maps his life. There's his "Music School" room, complete with guitars and microphones and framed artifacts from his Texas heyday. There's Bell in front of Austin's Cactus Cafe with Van Zandt, Bell with Kris Kristofferson's late guitar player and vocalist Steve Bruton, Bell in the recording studio with Geoff Muldaur, Bell next to Victoria Williams. The garage houses both "Gold's Gym" –– a treadmill, weights and other exercise equipment –– and a small stage for semi-regular house parties of up to 70 people.
He reverts regularly to the pronoun "we," nearly always referring to himself in the third person. He still struggles with the ghosts of short-term memory loss and balance. The breathing tube left him with a rasp. Early on, he reverted to stream-of-consciousness rants — and sometimes violent outbursts. At least his stay in the mental hospital showed him he wasn't crazy.
His determination surfaced early.
"I was the high school quarterback, I was on the yearbook staff," he said. "I was on the high school paper. My high school had 800 people and I knew every one of them.
"I had to prove to myself I could still write those little 3-minute miracles."
He doesn't remember anything from the night of the accident. He forced his recovery through relentless exercise and drills. If he had trouble pronouncing a word –– "thousandth" proved especially tricky –– he repeated it until it carved itself into his memory. His early football training cemented that self-discipline.
He said: "I worked as hard as I could for as long as I could stand. The gain for not working enough was more work. I'm not the kind of guy that will take it lying down. It was my life."
The doctors wanted to amputate his pulverized arm because the bones had shattered up to the elbow. But a fan (Janice Rials Rogers, now living in Albuquerque) noticed the technicians rolling him by on a hospital gurney and begged them not to do it because he was a musician. They left the limb intact for later surgery.
"This is the bionic arm," he said, pointing to a white 6-inch scar along his right forearm. "This is metal from joint to joint."
He had scar tissue in his eyeballs from lying in gasoline. His lungs collapsed. The impact threw his liver from his mid-section onto the pavement.
Early on, he distanced himself from the driver who caused the accident. It would have been easy to blame someone who nearly destroyed his life but walked away with nothing but a $600 fine.
"That would have been counterproductive," he said flatly. "I had enough to wrestle with."
In the book, he said he could not afford the luxury of pessimism.
"You could tell yourself, 'I'm going to be better.' But there was nobody there to tell me it was going to be better," he said. "My recovery was too important to leave it up to the professionals. They didn't work me hard enough."
He battled the blues with brutal self-talk.
"You're a club foot now," he told himself. "You gotta get over it.
"These were all lessons I had learned from football. Sometimes, I would call up the Texas Rehabilitation Council just to cry, just to talk to someone. No one understood what was scrunched up here," he said, fist to his forehead. "Somebody had to save the day. And guess who had to do it? It was very lonely because no one could tell me it was going to be OK again."
When he was institutionalized, he remembered Sarah Wrightson, a friend from Texas. He asked another friend to tell her to come visit him. She came at least three times; his brain compressed the encounters into one. Afterward, the couple reconnected when both were living in California. They married in 1992.
Wrightson remembers a talented, charismatic, almost cocky young musician. When she saw him in the mental hospital, he was 5-foot-8 inches tall and had shriveled to 130 pounds.
"That was difficult," she said. "He didn't make a lot of sense. He really didn't follow a train of thought. It was as if he was bombarded by information.
"Vince is a very strong person," she continued. "I think if he hadn't been that way to begin with, he would not be where he is today."
Rebuilding it all
Bell resurrected the music by practicing a single "G" chord until it was wired into his twisted synapses. He forgot his own lyrics; he bought a blue notebook and began recalling fragments on the page bit by bit until he'd compiled 30 songs.
"That's what I did in the mental institution when I was staring out at the tree frogs in the window," he said. "I got a confidence boost because I saw the nutty people around me. They were nutty as loons, but they were all good people."
He enrolled in Austin Community College, where he studied commercial art. He folded clothing at Goodwill. He inventoried parked cars at the airport for minimum wage.
He played a show at the Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant in Houston on the second anniversary of the accident. His balance deserted him as his still partially paralyzed vocal cords wandered uneasily through the tunes. A double bill with old friend Joe Ely drew calls for encores. He moved to Los Angeles, where he lived on a friend's front room floor. It was then that he took control of his life; he worked on four songs at once. Then he and Wrightson re-connected.
Their relationship buoyed him; he convinced her to become his manager; they were married at Lake Tahoe. He released his debut album "Phoenix" in 1994, with background vocals by Lovett, Victoria Williams and John Cale. T-Bone Burnett penned the liner notes, calling Bell "the only writer who has ever read his own obituary." He toured Europe with the Jayhawks.
Today, his laser focus is directed toward the play. He exercises daily, works in his "Music School" and practices on his tiny stage. He aims to perform the piece "until I can get off-Broadway."
"That sounds rather lofty, but you gotta have goals."
The book reflects both his battles and his isolation as he chiseled the confused phrases back into incomparable songs.
"It's the end point for me," he said. "I'm going to do this play for a decade. I'm going to do it till I choke."
The night before the accident that shattered his brain, Vince Bell recorded three of his own songs with Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Willie Nelson and Lyle Lovett recorded his music. Townes Van Zandt gave him writing tips between beers.
The words spill from the singer/songwriter's mouth in a waterfall torrent, relentlessness fueling every sentence.
"Life after death is a terrible joke," he writes.
If you go
WHAT: "One Man's Music: A Monologue" by Vince Bell
WHEN: 6:30 p.m., Wednesday
WHERE: St. Francis Auditorium, New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave.
COST: $25; proceeds will go to the Brain Injury Association of New Mexico
CONTACT: www.ticketssantafe.org or 988-1234
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