Sheryl Crow's Lessons on Failure

If you’ve ever had a Gibson Thunderbird bass guitar swung into your head hard enough to knock you flying, then god bless you, at least there’s two of us.?

When I came to, I was no longer on stage with my band, but somehow underneath the player of that beautiful bass - clearly as confused as I about the ending of that song.

It’s a bit fuzzy, all these years later. But from my vantage point, stuck underneath a bandmate - guitars sandwiched between us - I remember two moments clearly: the first was someone walking out of the green room - backlit by dim lamps and cigarette smoke - holding a saxophone bent in one too many directions; the second was watching the other guitar player in my band get pinned to the ground by our friends, while he flailed and wailed like a rock and roll animal. What wasn't clear was how we ended up here.

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In case it needs to be said, today we’re departing from my standard newsletter format a bit to explore an idea I’ve been bouncing around called ‘Favorite Failures’’. Inspired by the folklore that lives around Sheryl Crow’s great song ‘My Favorite Mistake’, Favorite Failures is intended to celebrate the most memorable misdeeds of our past.?

Her song is written about an unfaithful lover, and - based on who she was dating at the time - most hands have pointed at a slender-fingered gunslinger by the name of Eric Clapton. Now, she could have gone all Taylor Swift on his ass and wrote a heartbreaker that foisted the blame at his feet, but she didn’t. Instead, she penned a song that looked blissfully at her bad choice in partners. She found a way to celebrate her foibles in public, and I think it’s a good lesson for all of us.?

So I’ve decided to take today and tell you one of my ‘Favorite Failures’ - the day my band broke up, on stage, in a fistfight, never to play live again. Ready? On with the show.

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We were pretty fearless innovators back in our 20’s. That night we decided to play a 30-minute version of Pink Floyd’s ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, and (because he was on tour with his other band) do it without our drummer. Admittedly it was a better idea on paper - I can see that now.

Here’s the fun part: that night went so wrong from the start, failure was our only possible outcome. My long-term girlfriend broke up with me moments before showtime, my bass player and singer arrived much too drunk to be useful, and the other guitar player - the one last seen flailing - had just bought himself a new, white, teardrop shaped guitar that he was a bit too eager to showcase. Again, with no drummer to hold us all together, at best we were gonna suck when we took the stage.?

If I remember correctly, it was the 20-minute mark when the man with the teardrop guitar unstrapped it, tossed it on the stage in disgust at our sloppy playing, and then threw a f**king haymaker into the mug of our bassman. Bassman, drunk as you’ll recall, spins and flies headlong into me (I’m sitting in a chair for reasons lost in memory), whereupon I take the swinging bass in the face - as well as his whole body’s momentum - and go crashing off the stage onto the closing bands saxophone.

The moments immediately following the event are a morass of memories best suited to Rashomon-esque analysis, but by the time we loaded up our gear outside, obvious to all was a shared truth: when you’re served up a rock and roll finale like that, you leave it alone. A better ending couldn’t be written. Plus, if we were honest, that outcome was a long time coming.

We had been like brothers for so long (non-fighting brothers, anyway), but relations were cracking under the collective strain of other adult commitments. For the first time in years, the music was coming second in our lives, and as it turns out, it was first - or bust, as the poor saxophone can attest.

20 years later, we stay in touch, but it’s not like it was. In exchange I’ve got a wonderful memory: a favorite in a pantheon of failures.

Have you got a favorite failure? PLEASE DM me or share it in the comments. I want to build an archive of favorite failures - I know there are a ton of great ones lurking out there.