The Story Behind “The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon”

Not long after No Applause came out, a successful and well-known Broadway songwriter (the author of several hit shows that you’ve either heard of or seen)  got in touch with me with an idea he had for a possible collaboration, based on a true story, one of the most bizarre stories you’ll ever hear, about Elmer McCurdy a ne-er-do-well bank robber who ruined everything he touched, until after he died, when his petrified mummy became a star in carnivals. The songwriter’s instinct in approaching me was correct; the material itself was just my cup of tea. Him,it turned out, not so much.

We met and had several preliminary bull sessions where we hashed out what form the thing could take. The story we wanted to tell was a kind of epic, with labarynthine twists and turns, countless phases and countless hooks. He had made no decisions about which path to take; we talked through them all and went ’round and ’round and ’round.

Here, it occurs to me, is one of the ironies of how different theatrical working methods are percieved. He, the big Broadway and Hollywood industry professional, was the poster boy for inefficiency, an artistic Hamlet. With so much financial security and resources at his disposal, he seemed able to accomplish very little of any worth. It was all talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Me…I know half a dozen playwrights to whom I can say: write me a football story in the style of Preston Sturges, in which half the characters are trolls and the other half are martians. And they will be able to get me an extremely plausible script in about a week — unhampered by their 40-hour-a-week day jobs. In addition to this half dozen who will get me decent scripts, I know a HUNDRED playwrights who can get me SOME kind of a script in that time. This is the indie theatre way of working. Is it more Roger Corman than Ron Howard? Yes, and I would rather watch any ten Roger Corman movies than any one Ron Howard movie.

Ironically, this made my time more valuable than the songwriter’s. Though he was constantly taking cell phone calls in my presence where he complained to somebody on the other end about “measly” ten thousand dollar honorariums, I was earning $300 a week as a development director at an off-off-Broadway theatre company (with no savings, investments, trust fund, or relatives,  in short ONLY that $300 a week)…with two kids, an ex-wife, a girlfriend, and a missing front tooth that made me look like a character from Deliverance. Therefore I counted every minute of my time wasted as a tragedy; while at $10,000 a minute or whatever the hell he earns, he can waste all the time he wants. And that is the irony — that this is the industry’s “safe” way of working. And somehow it’s supposed to be more businesslike and professional to work in that inefficent manner.

Accustomed to achieving results, and chomping at the bit to make some kind of progress (knowing how relatively easy it is to do that),on my own initiative I finally churned out a draft. I’m a writer, this is my way of working. I write drafts. Here on my planet, you present a draft, get comments, fix what’s wrong, keep refining, and launch ’er when she’s seaworthy. And since the songwriter professed to be a fan of my book, so much so that he actually did detective work to track me down and collaborate with me, I made the logical assumption that it was me he wanted to work with. But he respresented the industry (and I’ve certainly encounted this before in my handful of brushes with that many-headed monster) and there what you seem to do when you don’t like a draft is you throw out the writer. Things cooled off mighty quick after my draft. He still took my calls but the project was on indefinite hiatus.

But, like I said, my time is valuable. All things being relative, mine is more valuable than his, since at the time I was living literally hand to mouth. Hours of my life could literally mean the difference between eating and not eating. To put this succinctly: a wealthy man had called a starving man out of the blue, felt free to use up a lot of his time, and then blithely blow him off. No big deal; happens all the time in this “business”, right?

It’s like I always say: when life hands you lemons, pick up those lemons and hurl them like hardballs at the object of your scorn until his presumptious face is covered in juice, rind and pulp (metaphorically speaking, of course). As a result, you will have gotten some excercise and also put on an entertaining show for the other folks on the fairgrounds, so you will have accomplished something constructive.

I’d put in a bunch of sweat equity on this project — an investment for which I now presumably would never see a dime. And yet…it wasn’t a total loss. After all, the work I’d done, I felt was mine. It must have been. It can’t have been his – he didn’t like it. And though he’d brought me the idea, the idea was already out there. This true story has already been turned into books, movies and songs.  So after a time, I had no compunctions about making use of the material I’d developed on my own, taking great care not to use any of the songwriter’s ideas. (Aside from the idea to do this story in the first place. If he wants “story suggested by” credit and a percentage in the unlikely event that my product catches on like wildfire, he is more than welcome to it.)

As for his other ideas, they were terrible so not using them was a no-brainer. One of his “brilliant” insights was that we couldn’t give the show the aesthetic approach virtually dictated by the nature of the material. It’s a story about outlaws set largely in Kansas and Oklahama during the early 20th century. And yet his instinct was that he didn’t want anything to do with western folk songs: “That would be too obvious”. Well I don’t know about “too obvious”, but it seemed to me that it is the obvious choice to take, any other approach being misguided, overwrought, and too clever by half. Why the hell would you want to create an environment that intentionally doesn’t evoke the time, place, culture and feeling of the story you’re telling?  He was energetically following all of these lame paths: calypso, doo-wop, cha-cha. That may make a nice Disney audition reel, but it doesn’t serve this play. (He’s not the only theatre artist I’ve encounted who has this over-thinking  mentality, either, but I’ll never understand it)

 At any rate, to make a long story short, my aesthetic approach is to ABSOLUTELY make the artistic product formally consonant with the story it tells.  In 2007, my new draft of a full-length play version was given a public reading by one of my favorite indie theatre companies (now defunct) and directed by one of my favorite indie theatre artists. In preparing this draft, I was careful to change everything about the story, fictionalizing it into “Jasper Jaxon”, changing the structure, changing story details, and so forth. As the material began to digest in my head subsequently, though. it began to click for me where the material should go. This is a folkish story; it deserves a folkish treatment, completely. The thing to do was to make it a song — just one long epic song.  And I had always wanted to do a theatre piece with a Dustbowl milieu. It seemed a perfect match with the shows I was developing for my Tent Show Tetragrammaton…a theme of carny Americana. And so I turned it into an extended Woody Guthrie style folk song (melodically it’s like Woody’s songs, but in length more like Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant or Dylan’s Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands). The length eventually disqualified it from inclusion on the bill with the tent show when we presented it at La MaMa in March, but it can still be considered of a thematic piece with those plays. Two of the folks from that production have returned and are playing crucial roles in this “folk operetta”, Sarah Engelke and Josh Hartung. Sarah played Strega Nona back in March; in “Jasper” she’s Banjo Jane. Josh Hartung, who was the intermission singer Bobby Oahu, also plays Uke in “Jasper”, takes some of the lead vocals and has been very helpful with the vocal arrangements. Also aboard I’m proud to say is David Gochfeld (who plays beautiful mandolin) and Corey Einbinder (Short Stride Clyde) who played washboard with the Brooklyn Jugs for many years.

And I hope you’ll come out and see us this Friday, June 10, 8pm

It’s all at Dixon Place, 

161A Chrystie St (between Rivington & Delancey)

And to show just how very far away we are from the ”industry”  it’s all FREE! FREE! FREE!