Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage

introduction

I HAVE A SCULPTURE in my New York apartment called Defiance. It’s of a woman; she’s turquoise, and her hair is flying.

Being in opposition to something is to be in a position of power. It’s not simply reactionary. Defiance can be active and can be the genesis of something. You don’t want to play the victim. You want to have conviction.

Because make no mistake: we are living in a moment of crisis. Of unprecedented crises.

It seems that in every possible sphere, we are all confronting dark forces that aim to divide us as a world, as countries, as people, as artists, as creators. It’s not just the political sphere—everything has become inherently political. From the Oval Office, Parliament, and the Kremlin to recording studios and the labels that staff them, to schools and conservatories, city halls and main streets, the oceans and their shores, we are seeing how those who wish to control us are all too happy to take advantage of any opportunity that would diminish our goals of liberty, freedom, artistic expression, and conservation of nature.

As someone who has been in the music industry for the better part of forty years, who has traveled to and performed for varied and diverse audiences, I have had the privilege of hearing the stories of people from all over the world, and this perspective has given me a sense of how dire things have become. But it has also given me a stronger sense of resistance, of fighting back, of how we might find deep within ourselves the capacity not just for resilience but for healing and for emerging victorious from this most trying of times. And it has illuminated to me how vital the role of the artist is within a society. It has, in a way, revealed to me how hallowed the space an artist inhabits truly is—and how crucial it is that we protect that space with intelligence and passion.

What follows in this book is my journey to engage, examine, and then reassess the artist’s role in society and, by doing so, to create a way forward for us as we commit to resist those dark forces that would wish to subjugate us instead of lifting us up and giving a voice to the best in us. It is a mission to reckon with how the current moment is truly one of Now or Never. It is a mission to recognize the power of the Muses and the strongest of our creative impulses so that we may transform this moment of crisis into a future of promise.

Join me on the path of resistance—of the art that will set us free.

GOLD DUST

Sights and Sounds

pull me back down another year

I WAS HERE

I WAS HERE

Whipping past

the reflecting pool

me and you

skipping school

and we make it up

as we go along

we make it up as we go along

You said—

you raced from Langley—

pulling me underneath

a Cherry Blossom

canopy

—DO I HAVE—

of course I have,

beneath my raincoat,

I have your photographs.

and the sun on your face

I’m freezing that frame

and somewhere Alfie cries

and says

"Enjoy his every smile

you can see in the dark

through the eyes of Laura Mars"

—How did it go so fast—

you’ll say

as we are looking back

and then we’ll

understand

we held Gold Dust in our hands

Sights and Sounds

pull me back down another year

I WAS HERE

I WAS HERE

Gaslights

glow in the street

Twilight held us

in her palm

as we walked along

and we make it up

as we go along

we make it up as we go along

letting names

hang in the air

what color hair

Autumn knowingly

stared

and the day that

she came

I’m freezing that frame

I’m freezing

that frame

and somewhere Alfie smiles

and says

"Enjoy her every cry

you can see in the dark

through the eyes of Laura Mars"

—how did it go so fast—

You’ll say

as we are looking back

and then we’ll understand

we held Gold Dust

in our hands

in our hands

in our hands

GOLD DUST USUALLY TRANSPORTS me to Washington, D.C. The song references different decades:

The ’60s, when Alfie the film was released; the decade I was born in.

The ’70s, when I was skipping school and playing piano in D.C. bars and congressional parties during a Democratic administration.

The ’80s, when I was still playing piano bars but now three blocks from the White House during a Republican administration.

The ’90s through to the present, with the song revealing different snapshots of time as I played concerts in D.C. through two administrations, during peacetime and wartime.

Gold Dust began when I was pregnant with my daughter, Tash, in the year 2000. The song was written about twenty years after I was in my teens, a time when I was evolving from a girl into a young woman playing hotel lounges a few blocks from the White House. But it took eighteen years after the song was written, on Tash’s eighteenth birthday, for me to really see the many snapshots tethered to it—and what they want to activate in my life right now.

Before my eyes in real time, as I watched Tash emerge as a young woman, the memories of the day eighteen years before became very clear. It had been a tough couple of months leading up to that day in September 2000. Because of medical issues I was having, we were advised to leave our home in Florida and relocate to D.C. for a few months. As I had a high-risk pregnancy, I had to respect the doctor’s opinion. So the seeds for Gold Dust were planted before Tash and I had even left our home. To get us from Florida to D.C., the song acted as a portal, and my teenage self became my guide.

She took my hand, and as we walked through the streets of Georgetown by the Potomac River, as we passed the Lincoln Memorial on our way to see the doctors, she said, We were here.… You might not remember all that happened here, all that we heard and all that we observed. And that’s okay. You are worried about the birth of your daughter. I can’t imagine. But this place will feel more familiar once I’ve reminded you of that time.

Over the years I have run into my teenage guide—usually when there is a How did we get here? moment—and the answer from the Muses is always the same: Follow the threads that are woven within the Song Beings. They will get you to where you need to go. And be receptive to which Song Beings are coming to you, not just the ones you personally favor.

Gold Dust is taking me back in time again, my teenage self guiding me as I write this.

1977

When I was thirteen, a couple of months shy of my fourteenth birthday, my father took me to Georgetown to get a professional job playing piano and singing. It’s a fact that my father, the Reverend Edison McKinley Amos, soon to be the Rev. Dr. E. M. Amos, had more than a dose of Mama Rose (the most infamous stage mother of all time) pulsing through his veins.

And although he was a man of the cloth, he was also a tenaciously pragmatic force to be reckoned with, especially if you were his teenage daughter. I’ll never forget his summation of my life as the two of us drove to Georgetown that balmy afternoon. With my mother visiting relatives in North Carolina and my two older siblings having fled the nest, it really was just the two of us on this penitent road to achieve, as the good reverend revealed, my salvation.

The sermon began as we pulled out of the parsonage’s driveway in the shadow of the Good Shepherd United Methodist Church, my father being the appointed shepherd to that flock since 1972. The personally directed sermon went something like this …

Myra Ellen, like Jonah in the Old Testament you refused to fulfill God’s divine plan which had been bestowed upon you since you were two and a half years old. You were entrusted with the gift of music before you could talk. Being the youngest musician accepted into the Peabody Conservatory at five years of age the trajectory was clear. God had shown me a vision of you playing on a concert stage by the time you were thirteen. But like Jonah you turned your back on the mission that God had assigned for you. Because of your rebelliousness toward your professors and your disrespect for classical and sacred music with that sassy attitude—you got yourself kicked out of the conservatory at eleven years of age. The way I see it you are drowning in your own self-destructive sea of mediocrity. After betraying God and drowning as well, Jonah spent three days inside of a whale. You have spent three years of ignoring your potential. So God has directed me to take you to Georgetown where he will guide us to a place for you to play music and learn your craft. It may be a smaller stage than you could have been playing, but God will provide.

Together with me dressed in my sister’s clothes and platform shoes and my father declaring his faith with his clerical collar secure above the cross pinned to his lapel, we asked to play at every restaurant and bar on M Street. Following many hours of rejections, and after the sun had set, I finally said, Look, thanks for trying, Dad, but obviously there is no room at the inn for us, so can we just go home? We don’t have to tell anybody about this. With a pained but determined look in his eyes he said, Elly, my God will not fail us. At what seemed to be the last remaining bar in Georgetown, Mr. Henry’s on Wisconsin Avenue, my father spoke with a tough-looking guy standing by the door. The guy told us to wait while he got the manager. Once my father explained that he was hoping to find a place where I could play, the manager agreed to let me try. If I was any good, I could play for tips.

The bar had only male customers. After I had played a song on the upright piano, the men started making requests and putting dollars in a brandy snifter that someone had put on the piano. The requests were for popular songs of the day, with a nod to show tunes. When I did not know a song, I would write the title down and promise that if I was invited back next weekend, I would learn it and play it for the customer if he came back to see me. After I had gotten my bearings, I glanced over at my dad. The clerical collar was an icebreaker because at first the customers assumed he was wearing a costume. Once it had rippled through the room that he was an actual preacher and I the daughter of a preacher man, curiosity about our plight and then advice to us began in earnest. Some of the customers looked like lumberjacks, others like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and then some of them looked like deacons in a church or congressmen you’d see on TV. After I had played for several hours, my dad and I were happy to be invited back to play the following Friday night.

We did not experience Mr. Henry’s as a den filled with deviants, as defined by some of my father’s parishioners. Once they found out about the gay bar that had given me a chance, some good Christians warned that we along with those homosexuals were going to burn in the fiery rivers of hell. I was quite proud of my father’s response to that rabble: There is no safer place for a thirteen-year-old-girl than in an all-gay bar. Amen, Dad.

DEVILS AND GODS

Devils and Gods

now that’s an idea

But if we believe

that it’s they who decide

that’s the ultimate

detractor of crime

’cause Devils and Gods

they are you and I

Devils and Gods

they are you and I

Devils and Gods

safe and inside

1979–1980

The clientele changed.

My role as happy hour pianist was to underscore the liquid handshake. Management made it very clear to me that my job was not to distract our working customers. The lounge was an extension of the office; it was not a place for the chanteuse to sing her evening set and help the customer feel a little less lonely. That would happen in the after-hours set list, when the volume on the small amplifier could be boosted and the job was to entertain and keep the customers company while they had their nightcap.

But at happy hour, deals were being forged, and even though I was not aware of the details, I was a witness to something dark occurring. A witness to a war of ideas being waged. Somewhere between requests for As Time Goes By and Mean to Me, a segue into Send in the Clowns, then Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina to My Way, strategic moves were being played by political operatives, by lobbyists and consultants for Big Corp and Big Oil and by bankers who expected a return on their investment in a politician.

Then, of course, there were the intellectuals, who were easy to spot. Some were being hired by the power and money behind the think tanks and foundations that were popping up faster than fire ant colonies in Florida. War rooms, disguised as offices, were being carved out on and around the K Street corridor. But the establishments for which I played forbade the staff from challenging the customers’ opinions. The maître d’s would warn us that the managers kept their eyes open for any rebels in the ranks.

No one would laugh or bat an eye when the piano piped up through billowing cigarettes and cigars with Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Don’t worry, sir: I am not saying a word about Big Oil to any of our patrons.

But teenagers will be teenagers. And during the late afternoon service, when I was required to play music that would not disturb the dealmakers, playing a variation on a theme of Last Chance Texaco by Rickie Lee Jones was irresistible. (No one was the wiser. I knew my crowd.) This was a song that might not have been reactionary when Jones released it in 1976, but songs can take on a meaning of their own, and this was my quiet protest, underscoring the champagne toasts made by the lobbyists for Big Oil.

During this time delicate political discussions were under way that involved some of the country’s most pressing cultural conflicts. By the time I was seventeen, I was playing in a hotbed of conservative thinking on its rise to power.

One of my bosses once said to me, This scene is as sexy as it gets.

But everybody just looked old to me. All I can smell is smoke, I replied.

And he said,