Whatever other damnations and accolades I have racked up in my life, I can say with reasonable certainty that I’m the only person you know who, while updating their planner for the coming months, uttered aloud the sentence “oh, I can’t go see Tomb Mold that night, I’ve got Al Stewart tickets!”
Yes, that Al Stewart, of “Time Passages” and “Year of the Cat” fame, and I’m really looking forward to seeing him at the same intimate venue where I caught Suzanne Vega earlier this year. (Fear not, metal brethren and sistren, my calendar also includes Metallica and Judas Priest this summer, as well as more subterranean fare from Skeletal Remains to Witch Vomit to Nervosa.)
(Also, yes, relatives and former mentors, I’m in my fifties and still paying money to listen to bands with names like Witch Vomit.)
Mr. Stewart hasn’t sat around collecting AM radio royalties since those two massive hits – he has more than ten other records out, and while I’m well versed in the deep cuts on his two biggies, I’m ignorant of the rest of his catalog. This being the streaming era, I fired up the Bluetooth speaker while making dinner tonight, thinking I’d go down the rabbit hole and check out some deep cuts.
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I typed “Al St—” and the app asked me if I meant “Al Staehely.”
No disrespect to Mr. Staehely, but I probably meant the guy with two platinum albums who’s still getting classic rock airplay half a century later, right?
Being me, though, I clicked on Al Staehely to see if it was merely a trick of the alphabet, or if, improbably, Al Stewart’s neighbor in the record bin was also a historical folk-rock icon of smoothness.
While Staehely’s decidedly an independent journeyman – he’s got about as many monthly listeners as my old-ass comedy albums do – he does have bona fides. He was in the band Spirit in the 1970s (he was actually born the same year as Al Stewart), and his songs have been recorded by Keith Moon, Marty Balin, John Cipollina and others.
He's 78 now and playing some rough-hewn Texas barroom country, and I dig it! But that’s not why I’m writing about him today.
When I looked him up, a Wikipedia entry revealed that he’d quit playing and gone back to his first vocation, law, becoming a respected entertainment lawyer in the Houston area. From the looks of things, his last effort post-Spirit was a 1982 album as the unfortunately-named “Stahaley’s Comet.” This is what he looked like in 1999.
The new record, Somewhere In West Texas, came out last year, but there’ve been others. He resurfaced in 2011 with Al Staehely and the 10K Hours, a much funnier and more spot-on band name, and followed that up in 2013 with an EP from Al Staehely and the Explosives.
What’s my point?
Al quit. He had his fun, got his jollies, presumably ate more than his share of truck stop food and drank more than his share of piss-warm backstage beers, and then he put the suit on and dusted off his law degree and he pivoted to the grown-up portion of his life.
Except he didn’t quit. Because apparently nobody ever does.
This is germane to my interests as a fan, of course, because so many of the artists I enjoy are getting up there in years. It’s one thing to see an elderly Al Stewart gently rocking at a venue full of seated baby boomers, but I’ve chronicled multiple concerts this year alone where guys nearing or past retirement age are still headbanging in clubs and sleeping on tour bus bunks. Bands I cut my teeth on, like Hellwitch and Sadus, who are decidedly not making money at this, are still doing festivals and playing technically demanding, ear-splittingly-loud and gnarly death metal in their late 50s and beyond.
More poignantly, I’m gonna think of Al Staehely now every time someone asks me about comedy and I tell them I quit, and they give me that look as if to say “sure ya did, bud.” It’s a fair response – after all, I quit and came back once since the pandemic lockdowns. I’m still clearly writing like I’m trying to bail out a sinking tugboat with words alone. And I’m relatively healthy and ripe for a midlife crisis.
There’s a pretty deep reservoir of disdain among working comics for people who quit and come back (although to be fair, if it wasn’t about that, the disdain would still be there about any of a hundred other things). I’m sure I clowned on someone for taking time off and coming back, when I had everything figured out and was sure I was gonna make it (“it” being quite a slippery and ephemeral goal, as it turns out).
I’ve touched on it here before, but to summarize, I like being quit. I like being home, and I like going places and not having to talk in basements there. Comedy was one of the most fulfilling creative pursuits I’ve ever done, but it stunted the growth of a dozen other things I want to do with my life, it enabled me to kick the can down the road indefinitely on a lot of reckoning with who I am as a person, and for chrissakes, that’s a lot of driving.
I’ve said all along that I could see myself maybe taking on some low-pressure local role, hosting and booking a showcase here in town or something, but right now I don’t even wanna do that. I want to explore the life I have now. I don’t want to come back, and more importantly, I don’t want to want to come back. Does that make sense?
I like to think my life thus far has been a master class in proving that dreams change. I can’t imagine not doing any of the things I’ve done over the years, but just as importantly, no part of me wishes I was still in the band I was in at 23 or the job I held at 35.
But there’s also no rule that a dream with a beginning and an end can’t pop back up.
It’s possible that I’ll be making breakfast one day and come up with a bit so exquisite, so desperate to be shared with the world, that my disinterest in travel and networking and booking and vomiting out constant video clips into the slobbering mouth of the algorithm gods will all fall by the wayside and I’ll slink back into a bar in Hamtramck or Lansing or Cleveland or Fort Wayne and write my name on the seventeenth spot on a beer-speckled legal pad, and the one comic in the room old enough to still remember me will snort with disdain in the mildewy shadows and go “I knew it. Nobody ever quits.”
I don’t see that happening. But if it does, and I’m afforded the privilege, I’ll play Al Staehely’s “Something Good Is Gonna Happen” as my walk-up music, just before I bomb my decrepit ass off.