A Musical Underground Man

I have been a musical underground man my entire adult life, writing songs for more than 50 years—following my own drummer, making music to please myself first and foremost. If anyone else likes it fine. If they don’t, that’s not going to stop me from doing what I love to do.  Truth is, I can’t imagine myself not making music. Back at the beginning, I had to support myself and a young family as an English prof at a branch campus of the University of Cincinnati. Between teaching comp and lit and journalism and grading mountains of papers, I quietly worked on writing and musicianship. Occasionally, I came out of the shadows to do public performances at campus events and for a while tried, unsuccessfully, to join up with guys in a band called, maybe appropriately, Last Ditch Effort. They were good guys and good musicians, but they just wanted to do covers, and I wanted to focus on original material, so we parted ways amicably. I went back to doing my thing solo in the basement.

By 1985 I figured my lyric writing, singing, and ear for music had improved enough to make a serious attempt at recording my first album all on my own. With a hefty loan, I purchased a Tascam 8-track reel-to-reel recorder, a 16-channel mixing board, a synthesizer, a drum machine, and some studio rack effects, and set it all up in my leaky basement under the garage. I finished it in about eight weeks.

I called the album Kangaroo, from a song about a guy  paralyzed from the neck down in an auto accident. The album is certainly a product of its time, not much like anything I’ve done since in terms of its sound and production, but I gave it all I had, like it was the last thing I might ever do. My wife had a hard time understanding what it was all about, and there might have been a bit of madness about the project. I’m sure I was not easy to live with.

The synth and drum machine dominate the sound, like it or not, but I still feel the words hold together as a song cycle on a life of the imagination, with songs like “4^th of July in the Asylum,” “Hole in My Head,” “Stay Alive,” and the aforementioned “Kangaroo.” I felt good about it, made a couple hundred vinyl copies, which eventually sold out. Look around, you might find a copy here and there in a used record store. But if not, it’s still available to stream, as is all of my music, on Apple, Spotify, Youtube, and other streaming services. 

My marriage fell apart in the late 80s, and I spent a six-month sabbatical from teaching to hawk my songs in Nashville, making weekly appearances in the clubs there. I did get a few songs picked up by a publisher, but nothing happened. The best thing from that period was being selected for a Songwriters Sunday Night Showcase at the Bluebird Café, the venue that launched many a songwriter’s career. But truly breaking into the Nashville scene requires a full-time commitment, a lot more than a six-month sabbatical, and I had too many financial obligations for that. Back to the grindstone.

So, once more in Cincinnati, I put together my second album, Songs From the Flood Wall, a more guitar based collection of demoes recorded during my time in Tennessee. Included were the violent folk tragedy of “All Along the Flood Wall,” the end-of-romance in “Cut and Dried,” a little wry social commentary in “Lonelyhearts Waltz,” and the rocking “Fuel to the Flame,” another sort of scorched-earth account of the end of a marriage.

In the 90s, I remarried on the rebound, and my music took a back seat to the writing of a novel, Fear and Desire. Early drafts, read by highly regarded published fiction writers Lee K. Abbot and Chris Noel, at the New York State Writers Institute, were well received, but, still, I couldn’t find an agent, when I reached a conclusion to it in 2002.

I was ready to do another rewrite, but then my second marriage fell apart, and serendipity led me to write a different kind of book, the true story of the 1963 Ireland Spuds. It took another ten years of hard writing, but Indiana University Press finally published the book, One Small Town, One Crazy Coach, in 2013. A creative non-fiction account of an Indiana high school basketball team’s improbable success under the leadership of a highly unconventional coach, the book received universal glowing reviews and remains in print.  Former NBA coach Del Harris championed the book, calling it a more realistic followup to the film Hoosiers.

In the gaps between writing, revising, and editing the book, I never drifted far from my love of music and songwriting, and in 2010, I released my third collection of songs, Begin 2, this time going for a completely acoustic sound, on which I played guitar, banjo, mandolin, and dobro. With some exceptions, the songs were generally less personal, venturing into alternately dark and light philosophical and spiritual waters, on “Holy Slow Train,” “Plato’s Slave Boy,” “Little Blue Ball,” and “I Like the Buddha.” The banjo blues “Blacksburg” covered the Virginia Tech massacre, “New Orleans” looked at the effects of Hurricane Katrina, and “Jesus Forgot” scoped the Iraq War.

In another bit of serendipity, I sort of happened into a late career foray into the scholarly study of Ernest Hemingway, presenting papers focusing primarily on Darwinian elements in Hemingway at conferences almost yearly and publishing most of these in The Hemingway Review and other journals or anthologies. I’ve made lots of friends in the Hemingway world, which has opened up plenty of other opportunities, for which I’m grateful. One such was being asked to complete the guidebook, Reading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, left unfinished by Robert W. Lewis at his death. I spent three years on the project, and the book was published in 2019 by Kent State University Press to excellent reviews.

I also married for the third time in 2015, to Minsun Kim, who has been my guiding light since 2003. Third time is truly the charm. She and I are true soul mates. I also retired from teaching in 2015, so I could devote myself to writing and making music. By spring 2020, I had enough new songs to release album number four, Ship of Fools, just as Covid hit. The eight songs are probably my most Dylanesque, including the philosophical odyssey of “The Edge of the Abyss,” “Dark and Scarlet Moon,” a jazzy tribute to John McCain, with a trumpet, sax, and piano combo and two Hemingway inspired songs—“Caporetto” and “Unfinished Church”—the latter performed live by request at a Hemingway Society meeting in the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 2018. I do feel that I’m a better songwriter now than ever. Hemingway songs have been an important part of the action since 2016. I’ve now written nine Hemingway inspired pieces, and I don’t think I’m finished. I plan to put them all together in an album of their own eventually. 

Other songs keep coming too, most often with social commentary, as in “Republican Sex” and  “We All Live in Ukraine.”

As I said in “Torch,” the closing tune way back on Kangaroo,  I hope to sing until I die. If you’ve read this far, maybe you’d like to ride along too. If not, the holy slow train rolls on, no matter.

MKR

Cincinnati
2 June 2025