Songwriter Spotlight: Dennis de Castro, Music Lessons and the Lessons of Music

My mother muttered, “Oh my God” as we turned on to our suburban street in Southern California after she picked me up from baseball practice. I was 14 years old.

This was the day I mentioned in RIP Jerry Jeff Walker or How I Fell in Love with the Guitar. My “cool new guitar teacher” was parked in our driveway, leaning on his decrepit Carmengia, smoking a cigarette. He was a large man with even larger hair that fell in curls to the middle of his back. My mother pulled into the garage and we got out to introduce ourselves.

“Hey, really sorry about parking in the driveway but I have to pop the clutch to start my car so I try to park on a slope whenever I can.” In a daze, my mother wandered inside. This was not the way things worked in suburbia. That was the first day of what continues to be a long friendship between Dennis de Castro and me (and, eventually, between my mother and Dennis as well).

I knew from my friends who were taking lessons from Dennis’ brother that he was not going to start me on “Twinkle, Twinkle” or “Bill Bailey” or give me scales to learn. He would teach me what I wanted to learn. Now it was Dennis’ turn to be shocked. I proudly told him I wanted to learn Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and Tom T. Hall’s “Ballad of Forty Dollars.” To his credit, he didn’t say “Really?” but I was friends with some of his other students and I knew they were not asking to learn songs by 40-something-year-old country music artists. After a few minutes to get his bearings, he listened to the songs, figured them out quickly and then said, “Well, all right. These aren’t bad.” The next week I asked to learn “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor which I think struck him as a little more sane. It was also a bit more complex so he was able to challenge me in the process. 

For the next four years, that is how I learned the guitar. Dennis would occasionally slip a little theory or some scales in to show how the song I was wanting to learn came to be. I never picked enough of that up to be considered a musician but, by letting me roam the world of music in the places that I wanted to hang out, Dennis gave me the freedom to become a very content guitar player with just enough skill to be able to play with and for others without embarrassment, figure out songs on my own and comfort myself with music when the need arose.

After a couple years, I told Dennis I wanted to learn how to write songs. I don’t remember what he said in response to encourage me to give it a try, but I do remember that he played one of his songs. He said it was one he wrote when he was having some rough times and it just sort of poured out. It was written in about 20 minutes. His point was that that was how songwriting could be sometimes and you just have to go with it. I’ve probably written about 100 songs since then, most of them pretty bad. But I probably have about a half dozen or so that “just poured out” and they are the ones that I tend to play the most.

By our last year, Dennis and I were usually just swapping songs for our lessons. It became clear that I had reached a point roughly equal to my ambition as a guitar player. We concluded that it was silly for two friends to get together every couple weeks, play music, talk about our favorite new albums, baseball and the other things we had in common…and then for me to pay him.

Time, distance, family, jobs and myriad other distractions have interceded over the last 40+ years but Dennis and I still see each other from time to time. We play our latest songs for each other, talk about family, baseball and, most importantly, God. Without Him, I don’t think a clean cut kid from classic suburbia and a hippie rock and roller could have found and learned so much from each other. 

That first song Dennis played for me is still one of my favorite songs. It’s called “A Mountain and a Tree.” On a recent visit I asked Dennis to play it so I could share it with you. 

By the way, Dennis has been a big fan of country music for a long time now…

A Mountain and a Tree

Words and Music by Dennis de Castro

I hear you are a lonely man and you don’t know which way to go,

The blues are all around you and all you want to be is home,

Tell me what you’re thinking about, tell me what I really want to know,

It’s so hard to see inside you, you don’t have to hide yourself no more.

And it’s a long way to go when you don’t have yourself a home,

You’re thinking about your young years when all you did was roam,

You keep looking for an answer without using your eyes,

And listening to someone who keeps telling you lies,

Where are you going, what have you done?

Why are you walking, you should be learning to run.

Take a look inside your eyes, tell me everything you see,

Who are you now, who are you going to be?

The colors of your dreams they all have scattered to the corners of your mind,

Get rid of the separation, fulfill your destination and mine.

I am a mountain top touching the sky,

You are a redwood that’s grown so very high,

So plant yourself upon myself and feel our strength combined,

The colors of your dreams they now have definite design,

You lost yourself and found yourself by looking through at me,

I am the man inside you, the man you want to be,

So now we are together, our minds they now are free,

Together with the unity of a mountain and a tree.

RIP Jerry Jeff Walker or How I Fell in Love With the Guitar

This is about Jerry Jeff Walker who passed away recently. But, I start with Willie Nelson because the two names are never very far apart for me.

Growing up in Southern California I was the only Willie Nelson fanatic at Torrance High School. I was 14 years old when Willie’s Red Headed Stranger album came out. As Nashville haplessly tried to emulate disco (but with a twang), out of nowhere a 42 year old hippie-looking-guy from Texas comes out with a sparse concept album filled with western ballads and swing tunes. The first time I heard “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” on AM Radio (remember that?) I was riding in my Mom’s car on the way home from Lucky Supermarket. I was in my early days of buying my own music but I knew I had to have that record. I bought it and played it until the vinyl crackled with evidence of my love.

            As I collected Willie’s records, probably the happiest product of my obsession was that Red Headed Stranger made me want to pick up the guitar that I had tried to learn to play a few times over the years. My cool new guitar teacher parked his dying Carmengia in our driveway because the only way it would start was if he rolled it downhill and popped the clutch. When he walked through our front door, he was momentarily disoriented when I told him that the first song I wanted to learn was “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Not “Stairway to Heaven” or “Smoke on the Water” or any of the usual requests from his students. He obliged and even allowed later that it was a better song than he expected at first blush (These days, I think he listens to more country music than I do. More on him in a future blog entry).

            Shortly after Red Headed Stranger, Willie, Waylon Jennings, Jessie Colter and Tompball Glaser came out with an album entitled Outlaws. The record was intended to showcase artists that bucked the “Nashville Sound” and thus were “Outlaws” within the country music genre. They did a tour to support the album. My sister took me to the Hollywood Bowl to see the show and, from the first note of “Whiskey River,” I was captivated. It was my first concert and the first of about a dozen times that I saw Willie. That concert was my first experience with country music that hinted at rock. A lot of it had to do with the raucous crowd but there was also a free-wheeling feel to the music that, as advertised, strayed liberally from Nashville’s confines.

            After that first concert, the same sister bought me Ridin’ High by Jerry Jeff Walker for my birthday. I had never heard of Jerry Jeff Walker nor did I know that he wrote “Mr. Bojangles.” Neither did my sister. But the guy she was dating at the time told her that if I liked country music, I would like Jerry Jeff.

By the standards of country music at that point in time, Ridin’ High was not country music. I quickly realized, however, that it was my music. Country music with the big sound of rock and roll (not to be confused with modern country music which is, by and large, pop with a dash of country). To be sure, there was pedal steel guitar (which I love) but also electric guitars, horns, twin drummers and vocals filled with joy, grit and pathos. Jerry Jeff delivered what Willie hinted at—music with a complete disregard for musical boundaries that, somehow, unabashedly had its roots in country music.

            I saw Jerry Jeff open for Willie several times. You never knew what you were going to get at a Jerry Jeff show. He was notoriously unreliable because he was reliably addled. But some nights were pure magic. I remember one night at the L.A. Sports Arena when the band walked off so that the pedal steel player, the late Leo Leblanc, could play a solo. As Leblanc made his way into a medley of patriotic songs culminating in “America the Beautiful” (not what the crowd was expecting!), Jerry Jeff wandered back onstage to linger just out of the spotlight and listen. It was clear he wasn’t there to rouse the crowd to a patriotic fervor but just to enjoy Leblanc’s mastery of the steel guitar. The crowd of real and fake hippies and cowboys gradually rose to their feet as one, momentarily sober with appreciation and reflection. Jerry Jeff didn’t reclaim center stage until the standing ovation for Leblanc played itself out. It was one of the most generous moments I’ve ever seen the leader of a band give another member. Then, Jerry Jeff barreled into 45 minutes of “Hill Country Rain”, “Gettin’ By”, “LA Freeway” and, of course, “Up Against the Wall Redneck.” It wasn’t 0 to 60 in record time. It was 60 to 120.

            Jerry Jeff was a nightmare for his record label because he shunned convention at every turn. With royalties still pouring in from “Mr. Bojangles,” he didn’t really need the “record company.” So, while the record company prayed for another hit, Jerry Jeff recorded songs that made him feel something. More than any other artist, when I play a Jerry Jeff song on my guitar, I feel something because his song selection was so completely detached from artifice or agenda. By “Jerry Jeff song” I mean songs that he wrote or didn’t write. He was a great interpreter of other people’s songs as well as a gifted songwriter. When I heard that Jerry Jeff died in October, I sat down in the Music Room and started playing all of his songs that I knew. It ended up being a long session.

            Both Willie and Jerry Jeff gradually drifted into being icons of the “Outlaw” music movement associated with Austin, Texas. They certainly deserved the label and did a lot to solidify the audience for that genre.  But, when an artist becomes a symbol the days of groundbreaking music are probably behind him. I think it was best captured when someone asked Willie why he didn’t write songs anymore. He answered that it was hard to write songs when you’ve got money and you’re not miserable anymore. (He was also asked around the age of 65 when he would retire. He asked in return, “All I do is sing and play golf, which one would I give up?”)  

For one mediocre guitar player, however, Willie and Jerry Jeff’s impact was profound. They gave me a body of music that I have consistently returned to over the years. Willie saved traditional country music in the nick of time. For better or worse, Jerry Jeff caused country music to loosen up. For better, some have built on that legacy. For worse some have taken the license he granted into the more synthetic aspects of pop.

  The songs on Willie’s and Jerry Jeff’s albums from the 70s and early 80s have long been my musical ground zero. Whether I have been happy or sad, renewed or exhausted, clear eyed or confused, I have turned to the guitar and, more than anything else, Jerry Jeff tunes. Back in October I relished once again losing myself in the gift of his music. It is always elastic with possibilities.

            Here’s a few videos of my sons and me playing some of my Jerry Jeff favorites. The first is a Mike Burton song about Alaska, then a Guy Clark song and, finally, my favorite Jerry Jeff song that he actually wrote.

Enjoy and, as Jerry Jeff liked to say, “Never let a day go by.”