AND IT’LL PROBABLY NEVER BE ENOUGH
BEFORE THE SINGING CAB DRIVER
Anybody’s life story can be interesting if you leave out the boring parts.
The trick is to live as few boring parts as possible or else you end up with a really short story or one so long and boring even you don’t don’t want to hear it again.
Mine has kept me amused. It is clearly divided into two parts, before and since.
I have lived many lives.
You see, I wasn’t always The Singing Cab Driver.
That’s just the last 33 years, although I did spend a little time as a non-singing struggling artist cab driver in 1977-78. What did I do the rest of the time, you might wonder?
I padded my biography extensively. Among other things I have worked as a newsboy, nurse’s aid, bicycle repairman, meat packer, Army paratrooper, railroad switch man, graphic designer, retail sales clerk, adult education instructor, heating contractor, office manager, sign painter. I was personal secretary to a couple of guys who bought and sold rare violins, I was art director of a 100 page monthly magazine and a major suburban newspaper. For a few years I was even a door-to-door salesman. For seven years of my adult life I worked as a full time staff member of a religious cult.
Married and divorced three times, father of two, grandfather of six.
I have never been a cowboy, an astronaut or a movie star, but I’m working on it.
THE CRUCIBLE
I will always be thankful to to my third wife for three things: our daughter, making me watch the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense and leaving me, each of which I greatly resisted at first. “No, no, NO! We can’t be pregnant. Our wedding’s only five weeks away. Oh, well. It’ll be fine…I LOVE this little girl!” “Please don’t make me watch that punk rock crap. I’m into sixties music. Whoa. How did I not know how fun these guys are? I wish I could do that.” “Please don’t leave me. I’ll be a three time loser! Hold on. I just dodged a bullet here. I am free to start over and be the person I was born to be!”
I had time to connect with friends and a bunch of them had started an organization called Arts Alive. They were holding a monthly open mic at a church hall. It was open to anyone to perform anything. You were just encouraged to get in front of an audience and do something. If you messed up, no one minded if you started over again. The whole idea was there would no criticism or heckling. It was a safe space to create.
I had some really talented friends so the events were remarkable. You had professional rock and roll musicians playing their favorites or trying jazz or classical music they wouldn’t play with their bands. Guys who had been in national bands who were now businessmen accompanied them on bass and drums, even guys who taught themselves to play guitar and had never performed in front of an audience before. There were actors doing monologues, actresses singing show tunes, grandmas who used to be torch singers back in the day belting out the hits and teenage girls reading their poetry. Some tried standup or just told stories.
That was a once a month, Sunday evening thing. The best thing about Arts Alive, though, was that every Wednesday night, people would come to my friends’ house in a Chicago suburb to rehearse. There might be a guy with a guitar up in a bedroom, someone at the piano in the living room and a de facto trio of guitar, bass and drums in the basement. Anybody who knew about Arts Alive was welcome to show up and work out what they would perform at the monthly events. If one of these musicians didn’t already know the song you wanted to do, just bring sheet music or a cassette, they’d quickly learn it and you could try it once or twice before going in front of an audience with accompaniment,
It was an amazing weekly party of creative people. Sometimes forty or fifty would show up and you had to park a block away.
Now, I’m freshly divorced and just hanging out, looking for women and enjoying being among friends. I’m watching them do rock and roll classics and great American songbook stuff and started thinking, oh, hell, I could do this.
I’d been in theater in high school and sang to myself for fun, but had never performed with accompaniment. Finally I sang Take Me to the River like my favorite band, Talking Heads. A couple more performances and I was already thinking I might be too good to be doing this for free.
I wasn’t but I did have talent and I wasn’t too afraid to look like an idiot until it was refined.
So I used Arts Alive as my training ground. Every month I’d work out a few cover tunes, mostly Talking Heads but also The Doors, Turtles, Robert Palmer, Peter Gabriel, Oingo Boingo, Fine Young Cannibals, Tom Jones, Motown kinds of stuff. I tried to mimic some pretty complicated styles, slowly improved and after a year or so had accumulated a fair repertoire of covers. I asked my Arts Alive friends, hey, if I get a gig will you back me up?
I did and they did. I got us a good paying New Years Eve party for a church and we performed three hours of danceable music. That’s a lot of songs, and a hell of a lot of lyrics to remember. I sang lead on about half of them and backup on many of the others.
I called the band Chameleon World because we sounded exactly like whoever you thought we did.
That was New Years Eve 1990 going into ’91. In the middle of that show I decided, wow, this is a real kick! I am going to pursue a career in music as a path to get into movies and TV.
At this point of my life, however, I am almost forty. Divorced three times, owe child support to two ex-wives for two young daughters I love very much who live in two far flung suburbs from each other and where I live. I was also unemployed.
I can’t play any instruments, had never been in a band before the evening I made this decision. I’m not gay, not Jewish, not even Canadian. Success in American show business ain’t gonna happen overnight.
A MAN, a PLAN and an AWESOME BAND
Until the music took off, I figured I would need a day job with flexible hours, no career commitment, daily cash flow, opportunities to promote myself and a large insured company car to pick up the girls on Sunday. Once I started driving a taxicab, I quickly grew tired of music on the radio. It was all like, man, I could write a better song than that, or I would like to write a song like that. So I did. For a while I was coming up with a new one every week and performing a couple a month at Arts Alive.
The original Chameleon World was just my friends for that one gig, but one of them was a professional guitar player and said “We should do this and you should be the front man.” We recruited some committed musicians, put together a set and got an agent.
At first Chameleon World was a cover band trying to sound as close to the original artists as we could, mostly Talking Heads. We gradually became all original and played my songs at the better and worse clubs in Chicago.
The lineup was usually guitar, bass, keyboard, synth, myself as lead singer/front man and two or three female backup singers. For a while we even had a choreographer/director. Chameleon World didn’t play songs. We performed shows.
That’s a lot of pieces to divide a very small pie. When we were a cover band we were paid pretty well but once we started playing originals we were lucky to play for beer. Your friends and family will only pay to see you so many times.
Over twenty years, the band broke up a few times and one or two of us would recruit an even more awesome version.
In between I performed a one man musical called The Singing Cab Driver Show at hair salons, beer halls, little theaters and fancy nightclubs.
People often ask me, what happened to the band? Well, what happens to a lot of marriages? It’s a commitment thing. A lot of musicians say they want to be a rock star but few are willing to give up Monday night football or the other comforts of modern life to rehearse and be ready to take advantage of a break if and when one comes. Also, many of my band mates were ten or fifteen years younger than I and would eventually follow careers, get married, have children, buy houses. Nothing wrong with these things except they will inevitably take priority over dedication to showbiz.
It isn’t easy working around six or seven people’s schedules and keeping them motivated when they aren’t even getting paid. Work them too hard, it stops being fun for some and they lose interest. I also lost a number to sexual involvement with each other. When one leaves so does the other.
I tried my best to not be a dick, but I’m sure I came off like one once in a while. Those who are not committed or being paid will look for any reason to withdraw.
Around 2012 Chameleon World exploded. There were betrayals, denials and abandonments. It was like losing a whole family at one time. They were my best friends and I took it pretty hard. Years later, we rarely speak to each other, if at all. My old partners went on to live lives of their own and seem to be doing quite well. I wish them all the best and and am grateful to have enjoyed their company and talent for as long as I did.
It’s not the end of the world. It’s just the end off us.
After getting over my loss, it seemed time for a solo career. Before the band broke up I had been trying to get everyone to agree on a concept album. I decided to make that ambitious album on my own.
It would eventually become Anxiety Society: How Our Future Was Stolen.
MEANWHILE
Since 1991 I have spent my days driving a cab, writing songs and singing them to passengers for their entertainment, hopefully some enlightenment and my self-aggrandizing promotional purposes. Eventually the media discovered me, which was part of the plan although I never sought it. They just found me.
I have been featured on a lot of newspapers, magazines, radio and mostly TV, local, national and around the world. All the local stations have done features about me, NBC’s Today Show did one, CNN did two. A couple Discovery Channel Europe travel shows did episodes about Chicago, half of which were about The Singing Cab Driver because I am so Chicago, right? And years before any of the others found me I was on the BBC.
Most of that coverage was back in the nineties. None of it got me any better paid or better laid, but it makes a great story.
EPIPHANY
Early on it dawned on me that I wasn’t born to play Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls or sing Gershwin or rock and roll in smoky bars.
I’m The Singing Cab Driver!
That’s my shtick. I am a performance artist, street performer, literally a wandering troubadour who cruises Chicago seeking people to save from time and space, perhaps life itself.
My mission is to find random strangers, make their day, shamelessly promote my career agenda and deliver them to their destination in one piece, right side up.
My purpose is to entertain, provoke thought, encourage discussion, inspire solutions and stir to action.
As The Singing Cab Driver I have achieved my goals in life. They are as follows:
A. To never get a real job again. And
B. (Which should have been Plan A all along and it kinda was, but let me tell you folks, kinda don’t make it) my life’s purpose, my boyhood dream, raison de’tre, my passion, if you will: To live the life that I would want to read a book or see a movie about.
I’m living that life and it’s even a goddamn musical!
I’ve enjoyed being The Singing Cab Driver for a third of a century. That’s right. Thirty three and a half years. I have personally engaged an audience of well over a hundred thousand people, one at a time. I spend so much of my time alone in the life of the mind that I’m delighted to personally share some with others. The only vacation I’ve had was my National Lampoon Pandemic Staycation, as I called it. I spent nineteen months alone in my apartment. It was glorious. Nowadays the taxi cab business barely pays for itself but I hang in there. Like Jeff Lebowski, the Dude, himself, I abide.
I’m usually broke but happy because I’m not in it for the money. I’m in it for the glory!
Someday there will no doubt be Singing Cab Driver movies and TV shows, lunch boxes, T shirts, Broadway musicals and even revivals of those musicals. I might even still be alive to play myself.
FOR NOW IF NOT FOREVER
I’m in no hurry. Every day the right person doesn’t discover me, my price goes up. You could have literally had me for a song thirty three years ago. Now I’ve written a hundred and thirty songs,
invested three quarters of a million dollars in taxicab leases and created the legend of The Singing Cab Driver for me and my friends to cash in on.