Folk and the Road: Will the Tide Turn? Singer-Songwriter David Wilcox Keeps the Faith. As He Tours a Sometimes Indifferent Nation

ORLANDO
Why isn't David Wilcox a big star?
For more than a decade, the 39-year-old singer has toured the country solo, accompanying himself on guitar, telling stories and performing his music to adoring audiences. Rolling Stone has described his albums as "unjustly neglected." A New York Times reviewer has called him "a star still waiting to be discovered by a much larger audience." Performing Songwriter magazine says he is "a near deity in the acoustic music world."
But the era of the sensitive male singer-songwriter has passed. Although he possesses a gentle baritone as sweet as honey, most pop radio stations won't play his music, in part because it defies category by fusing elements of country, folk, jazz and Christian rock. His deal with A&M Records ended after three albums. In a business where the whims of youth prevail, Wilcox finds himself at a turning point in his career, a dilemma he underscores on his new, independently released CD, "Turning Point," and in concert appearances that will include a stop at the Birchmere in Alexandria on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Wilcox's career is an interesting case study in the quirks and injustices of the music business. It is also something of an inspiration.
An aspiring vegetarian, Wilcox is eating a banana when he says hello. He is tall and thin, with soulful brown eyes and longish brown hair that is thinning at the top; in fact, his hair is the subject of a crowd-pleasing song, "The Top of My Head," in which he likens each departing strand to a day of life to be savored.
He is standing outside his tour bus in front of a Howard Johnson motel in a run-down section of Orlando. One of the turning points in his career was his decision earlier this year to record and tour with a band for the first time. For one month, he will travel the South with four musicians and a burly road manager known only as Kong. They will sleep at cheap hotels and inside an old Eagle bus that, in its better days, transported such luminaries as Kenny Rogers, Aerosmith and Cheap Trick. This is a losing business proposition for Wilcox; anything he earns from performance dates will be spent on personnel, lodging and the bus. He has long wanted to play with a band and had always expected it would happen naturally and affordably. Finally, he decided to make it happen himself, albeit at a loss. (By the time he gets to The Birchmere, Wilcox will be solo again.)
The band was headed to Cocoa Beach, Fla., for a 75-minute afternoon gig in the middle of a three-day festival called Beachfest. Wilcox predicted it would be "some dreadful `Spinal Tap' experience." Normally, he would never appear at a public event where people are not paying to see him specifically, but since there was no other booking for Saturday and the band's expenses needed to be covered, Wilcox's agent made a deal.
Wilcox and his band-mates, mellow men in their late twenties and early thirties, have fallen into a friendly rapport. They have considered a variety of names for the group, among them: the Ambassadors of Chastity, David Wilcox and the Cheese Shakers, and the Big Bang for the Buck Band. After the bus arrived at Cocoa Beach, they headed for a quick meal before the performance, settling on a restaurant called Perkins.
Over a plate of potato pancakes, Wilcox confessed, "This would be so much more depressing if I were doing this on my own." The band members shared tales of their favorite disasters, gigs no one attended because of the World Series or, in one case, a series of tornadoes. Wilcox recalled a 1987 booking in Bar Harbor, Maine, where, after agreeing to play all night for $50, he was confronted by the manager of the club, who grabbed the strings of his guitar and asked him to stop in the middle of a song. It was late and the manager wanted to close.
"Those are the kind of gigs where they're asking you to fill up space," said Ric Hordinski, a guitarist and co-producer of the "Turning Point" album.
Beachfest turned out to be as horrible as expected. The band was sandwiched between a heavy-metal cover group and a bikini contest. Before going onstage, Wilcox told his band-mates he was willing to sing alone and spare them the indignity of the performance; in a twist worthy of O. Henry, they had decided to make the same offer to him.
Ultimately, they agreed to go on together, playing about a dozen songs. Among them was a regular crowd-pleaser, "What the Lonely Is For," which Wilcox said he was inspired to write after reading the work of Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. In the song, Wilcox compares the human heart to an empty mansion and suggests that we occasionally need to feel emptiness to spur ourselves on to fuller emotions. Those musings and their theological underpinnings were lost on the crowd, which concerned itself mostly with volleyball and tanning. Only about a dozen onlookers watched Wilcox and the band.
One of them was Michael Dugan, a local guitarist and songwriter who marvels at Wilcox's musicianship and songwriting. "I don't think a lot of people know who he is," Dugan said. "He's got a cult following among acoustic guitarists and anybody who uses altered tunings." Wilcox is a virtuoso with the capo -- the clamp on the guitar's neck that changes the key of the instrument.
Even Dugan, who understands these nuances, acknowledged that this performance was less than thrilling. "The music's too cerebral for those beach idiots who were here to hear `My Sharona.' The mix was too cluttered. It's unfortunate because the music is good."
After the show, Wilcox was philosophical, invoking the teachings of Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who taught actors to perform from within rather than focus on the audience. "Why not imagine you're singing to the angels or the sailors who sailed out to sea?" Wilcox said. "I had more fun on this gig than any other gig. I was translating for the impaired. It was a great experience. I'm finally understanding the anger thing." To Wilcox, anger is a necessary part of the creative process, "the thing that defines you against the onslaught of conformity."
Hordinski put it another way: "This trip has been like a visit to the Not Like Us People Zoo."
Music vs. Beer
Wilcox speaks often about conformity, which he associates with the evils of the music business. "My music is anti-demographic and anti-style. This whole thing about fashion, about style, is about conforming. If people really got my music, they would not buy as much junk. I was at a marketing meeting at AandM and they wanted to dress me up for a photo shoot and they were talking about `the demographic' that listens to me. And to me it was hysterical that people were taking that seriously. People are insecure and they want to be in a group and they want to be included, and that's what the music business sells to people."
Wilcox wants a deeper connection with audiences. "That's what Woody Guthrie was doing and what Springsteen was doing when he talked about Woody Guthrie. It's tough to write about music. It's like pulling film out of a camera. What does unexposed film look like? Fresh music, real music, is music in that precious time between when it sprouts up between the cracks of the sidewalk and when the music industry takes it and reproduces it. I love the whole process and yet to write about it is difficult because what I love most about music is the essence of the human spirit reinventing itself in a new way. It's not just `We're all doing this, come along.' "
On "Turning Point," two songs are about Wilcox's experience in the music business, although the references are so heavily veiled that listeners would only know this from hearing his introductions in concert. In one, "Human Cannonball," Wilcox likens the life of a recording artist to that of a circus performer being blasted into the air. "It's really a song about being ammunition for the company gun. That feels really good when you're flying high in the air, but they don't care where you land." The other, "Western Ridge," is about adventurers who yearn to reach the top of a mountain but die in their quest. "It's about people who get their wish, but the wish extracts a price -- and the price is the rest of their lives." Wilcox, who enjoys speaking metaphorically, says, "We don't need a place in the sky," he says. "We need a place on earth."
He doesn't listen to the radio often. It bores him. He's never heard of Jewel. At a diner one day, "MMMBop," the most popular song in the country, was on the radio. Wilcox greeted it with obliviousness and then indifference. "It sounds like the product of a corporation."
Yes, he is told, but it's undeniably catchy. You can't help noticing it.
"Many millions were spent so you'd notice it." Later, he remarks: "I don't think it's a great thing if everybody listens to the same thing. It's possible to market music as fashion, but it shouldn't be. It's sacred ground."
Wilcox grew up in suburban Cleveland and says he spent a good part of his childhood riding his bicycle. He dropped out of Antioch College after one year, at about the same time he fell under Joni Mitchell's spell and began playing the guitar seriously. "I was just learning about music and sex, and I realized I didn't have to pay tuition for that."
For four years he traveled, supporting himself by leading bicycle trips. Then, in 1981, he enrolled at Warren Wilson College near Asheville, N.C., and began performing at McDibb's, a local music club. He would play four sets a night, charging an unusually small cover fee, which he hoped would encourage people to keep coming back to see him while also giving him the freedom to experiment and become relaxed onstage. Before long, crowds were lining up outside.
"Music was the only place that my heart felt right," he says. He has also played on the street and at a health food restaurant. "Music was the only place that I felt comfortable being extroverted. I dressed in this suburban camouflage so I was totally unnoticeable. That's been my whole strategy since high school. I have a real hard time carrying on a normal conversation unless I can hide behind the music." Wilcox is not exaggerating; when he isn't onstage, he is elusive -- detached, ethereal, laughing unexpectedly in a high-pitched cackle. It's as if he is saving all of his best observations and most direct emotions for the audience.
One night at McDibb's, Wilcox was the opening act for folk singer Livingston Taylor. "The reality," says Taylor, "is that he really did blow me off the stage. . . . What I saw in David is what I always look for in a player. He had a connection with an audience."
Taylor encouraged Wilcox to go to Nashville to perform at the Bluebird Cafe, which has a regular open-mike night for writers. In 1988, Wilcox, who by then had graduated from college and was working at a bicycle shop repairing motorcycles, made the journey and performed before owner Amy Kurland, who was instrumental in the discovery of Garth Brooks, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Kathy Mattea. "I just happened to be in the room that night," Kurland said. "I can't tell you what songs he did, but it was like a breath of fresh air. It was like something just fell over the whole room, the combination of voice and guitar-playing, plus the songs." Kurland asked Wilcox to come back and play again. He did, and he received a standing ovation.
Kurland ultimately became such a believer in Wilcox's talent that she offered to manage him, something she had never done before. She contacted a talent scout for AandM, Patrick Clifford, who signed Wilcox to the company's new Americana label. Wilcox's first recording, "How Did You Find Me Here?" was a sleeper success, selling more than 100,000 copies. AandM sales representatives noticed that wherever Wilcox performed, his records sold. Soon, AandM had Wilcox performing in record stores.
Pop radio, however, wasn't playing his music, and without a hit song, Wilcox was never able to transcend the 100,000-copy plateau. "After three albums, it was pretty clear that we could only take him to a certain level, even though we were very proud to have him as an artist on the label and to have his records achieve the level of success that they did," said Brad Pollak, vice president of marketing for AandM associated labels. The prevailing wisdom of the music business today is that a major record company, with its high corporate overhead for marketing, sales and promotion, cannot afford to stay with an artist who is selling only 100,000 units. A gold record, by comparison, sells 500,000 copies.
"If you don't have a hit on a major label quickly, you're out of the game," said Richard Gottehrer, who produced Wilcox's third AandM album, "Big Horizon," and has also produced Blondie, Marshall Crenshaw and Joan Armatrading. "There's no radio for him. Pop radio is based on hits. You have to be a hit before you're a hit. So unless he gets that one magic song or performance, it's almost impossible to find a venue for what he does on the radio. You'll find it on NPR or a number of stations, but it's unfortunate that it just doesn't happen that easily."
Says Pollak: "The bulk of the record-buying audience is very young people. Then you have great artists like David Wilcox, who make great records but don't necessarily appeal to that mass consumer. Sometimes it's not in the best interest of the artist to be in a machine that is geared toward getting to a much younger audience."
Wilcox does receive some airplay on a format called Triple A (Adult Album Alternative) but industry mavens don't believe the format sells records. Listeners of those stations do not frequently buy music; they rarely go to stores.
After Wilcox and AandM parted ways, the singer spent two years writing and recording before reaching a distribution agreement with Koch Records USA, an independent label. Before Wilcox signed with Koch, his manager, Tom Simonson, had sent off a tape of Wilcox's new material to contacts at major record companies. Their response, he said, was: "Come back to me when you've got a hit."
The call for a hit song is one Wilcox has heard before. On his final AandM album, he was coaxed into returning to the studio to record new material, including two covers of "radio-friendly" golden oldies (one of which, Wilcox notes ironically, was "The Same Old Song." Then, AandM flew him to Los Angeles so he could perform it on "The Tonight Show." It was, as he relates it, an empty experience. He quotes a scene from Paul Theroux's novel "The Mosquito Coast," in which protagonist Allie Fox risks his life to transport ice, only to have it melt on the journey. As Wilcox put it: "The thing that I had tried to bring them melted in transport. Television is much more into image and not message."
By his own definition, Wilcox considers himself a success. He shares his music with an increasing number of people. By playing approximately 120 tour dates a year, he is able to pay his bills and support a wife and son in the comforts of Asheville. And he recently achieved something of a breakthrough when k.d. lang included one of his songs, "My Old Addiction," on her new album, "Drag."
"There are two ways to look at how music gets out to people -- the mystical and the business way," he says."Both are true. On the mystical side, it's my experience that I often hear a song that speaks directly to me and the timing is right. The metaphor that Sting used about the message in a bottle is a great one because who gets your song and when they get it has more to do with the ocean than with you. I believe that there is choreography in the coincidence of hearing the right song at the right time for each individual.
"On the other side of this, the business side, some people would say that radio exists for selling advertising, and that the products that get sold have a use for a certain kind of music. So if a song does not sell beer, it won't be on the radio. The power of conformity is strongest when you're dealing with people who are frightened, and all the people in radio feel like they might lose their jobs if they guess wrong on a song. So they follow where the money pushes, but unfortunately the money is following the trends."
A Small Circle of Fans
The day after the debacle at Beachfest, Wilcox and his band performed at the Sapphire Supper Club in Orlando for a crowd of 145 (134 paid the $20 ticket fee, the tour manager noted). Seated near the front was Emily Zolten, a television director and longtime Wilcox admirer who recently established the official David Wilcox World Wide Web site (www.davidwilcox.com). "There's really a different level that Wilcox fans go to for him," Zolten said. "It sounds like worship and I really hate that, because it's just gratitude. He's got integrity. With so many people, you have to listen to the meanings behind the meanings. He is who he really is."
Before the performance, Wilcox was still nervous about performing with a band. "This is going to be terrible," he muttered, worrying about the quality of the sound. "I wish I could just turn around and be with everybody." As the patrons ordered dinner, Wilcox fussed onstage with his electric guitars, making sure each one was tuned correctly and plugged in. He never plans which songs to play, and he never does the same show twice. He prefers to take each performance one song at a time.
Halfway through the evening, Wilcox introduced a new song, "Glory," about living past 33, the age of Christ at the Crucifixion. It's a sophisticated musical argument about the pros and cons of dying young and the frustration of being at midlife. But Wilcox didn't settle for a standard introduction; instead, he delivered an elaborate metaphorical monologue, the story of how, riding his mountain bike through a train tunnel, he was enjoying himself until he reached the middle and found himself in total darkness, overwhelmed with fear. After pedaling anxiously, he again saw light; in retrospect the experience didn't seem as dangerous. Wilcox ended the monologue with a coda, a description of his 64-year-old father and his 4-year-old son looking at him through the window of his house. "They're laughing at me, because they know -- grandpa and grandson -- that Daddy's in the dark." It was storytelling worthy of theater. Wilcox routinely spins such tales. Sometimes they even rhyme, like his rap about the absurity of breast implants.
Near the end of the show, Wilcox performed the title song from "Turning Point." It was the last piece he wrote for the album and it came to him late at night in a moment of anxiety. "In two weeks' time, I would have spent $30,000 mixing it, and I needed to pull it together," he says. "I was terrified that the album was drifting into completion without having an emotional center." In his life, Wilcox relies on faith as a guide, but in his music career, he saw the need to assert more control rather than leave everything to nature.
He introduced the song to the audience by saying it was about his favorite topic: "You see all these lives that have run aground. There must have been a time when they changed course." Then, he sang the song differently than he recorded it, changing all the "you" pronouns to "I," thereby transforming a generalized anthem into a more personal message:
The compass is within me . . .
I'm holding out for something real . . .
Just one thing can kill this dream --
To compromise my vision.
There was no bravado or conceit as Wilcox sang this. His compass is within him. That, he says, is the real lesson he's learned from his time in the music business -- not to compromise his vision, not to chase someone else's notion of a hit song, not to leave lush terrain in a climb to the top of the mountain.
Afterward, Wilcox signed CDs and programs at the club's pool table. A radio deejay asked for a copy of the CD to play on the air. An aspiring songwriter told Wilcox what an inspiration he's been to him.
A woman asked Wilcox why his songs aren't played on Christian rock stations.
"They want sweetness and light," Wilcox said.
A woman asked when Wilcox would be back in town. A man walked by and said, "I appreciate your gift."
By 11 p.m., the band's gear was packed and Wilcox was back on the bus, headed for New Orleans, the next stop in the troubadour's yearlong journey through America.
"Every room, every night has the possibility to wake up someone's heart," he has said.
He may not be on the radio and he may not be the darling of a major record company, but for two hours, David Wilcox woke up 145 hearts -- 134 of them, paid -- and though there is no way of measuring it, it seems entirely plausible that for one night, he was the brightest star in Orlando.
Jonathan Karp is a senior editor at Random House.
Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company