Hello George

Below is the opening chapter of Hello George, the story of a songwriter, a music publisher and a country music legend — and falling in love with a song demo. To hear the songs mentioned in the novella, and to read it all (ebook or chapbook), click here.

Hello George

 For Daisy Jill Steinberg

1

In 1996, George Krott, the country music legend, got pulled out of rehab and a few months later found himself with a number one country hit, “There’s a Crop Circle on My Daddy’s Land.” It was written by a young songwriter from New Jersey named Daisy Steinberg, and nobody thought a young songwriter from New Jersey named Daisy Steinberg had any business writing any country song at all, let alone a hit country song, let alone a hit country song for the mercurial star from Boaz, Alabama. But I thought it was a match made in Grand-Ole-Opry Heaven, that song and that singer, and even though I was not much more than a stamp-licker – yes there were still rolls of glue-back stamps in the late part of the last century – at one of the world’s leading music publishers, I believed in that song and its destiny and I helped make it all happen.

Not that I got much credit. I played the song for my boss, making jokes about the puns that would follow (and did follow – “There’s a Krott Circle Around Number One on the Country Music Chart” and other such awfulness) and I kept playing the song for my boss until he played it for his boss who called her counterpart in Nashville. She called the man who ran the rehab where they’d been trying off and on for a decade to dry George out and they agreed that they wouldn’t take the man out of the frying pan and put him in the fire, but they would take him out of the fire and put him in an incinerator. And that’s what they did. They got George back in the studio, back on the radio, back on the charts and back on the road, where for six months he was on the run from not one, not two, but three personal assistants in the employ of the record label whose job it was to get him through the tour sober. They did the best they could.

I got my chance to meet him when the tour went through New York – this was long before country tours ever went through Yankee territory, but George had been a legend so long he’d had the chance to go way out of favor with the country mainstream and become an icon for what we’d now call the alt-country hipster set. My career had advanced some, I was now assistant to the boss who complained that “we” had been robbed of the credit “we” deserved for “discovering” that song and realizing what a fit it could be for the impossible, pill-popping, whiskey barrel from Boaz. His boss got all the credit and “we” shared in resentment sufficient to keep him grousing about it to me the entire time I worked for him, though insufficient for him to do anything about it, like mention my name to anyone.

So I told George myself. I was one of the six lucky publishing company payrollees to get a backstage pass and the only one to speak up when we were introduced to the legend just after his sound check, during which George squinted into the lights they were also checking, and said, as the sound people rushed around and their giant speakers produced some earsplitting squeals, “Well, I’m glad y’all get feedback here in the Big Apple, too.” I don’t think I’d ever heard a voice so big, deep and crusty in my life. He was a big man, well over six feet, though not all bloated like he got later when they kept him on whatever drugs they gave him to keep him from his crazy self.

Somewhere in our little paycheck-loving hearts, everyone in the music business wants to be making music, not selling it. Playing, singing, writing, recording, producing, some or all of the above, though most of us are too shy, self-conscious or talentless to do much about it. I am talentless and often self-conscious, but when it comes to stepping up and vocalizing about music I like, particularly with musicians I like, I’m not shy at all.

After soundcheck, to the shock of everyone around me backstage, I walked right up to him, stuck out my right hand and introduced myself – to the man who, legend had it, once knocked four teeth out of the mouth of a dressing room bouncer when George sneezed, the bouncer said, “God bless you” and George misheard him. He shook my hand, not the bone-crushing grip I was expecting – maybe he was afraid I had some lawyer on me and was holding back – but he met my gaze as I told him I was the one who discovered Daisy Steinberg and brought Crop Circle to his team, though I was sure he’d never heard my name. To prove I wasn’t just there to promote myself, I immediately started name-dropping my favorite cuts from his first album, going on at particular length about his moonshine-glorious remake of Tex Ritter’s Jack O’ Diamonds, and I finished up with an apology for the schmoozing, a term I knew he knew because he’d used it in his Rolling Stone interview.

“Here’s too schmoozin’ and boozin’.” He tapped his eight-ounce soft plastic water bottle against mine. “So where’s this Daisy gal at?”

“Well, she’s not here right now, and, uh, to be honest, I don’t know where she is.”

“She wrote you a hit song and you don’t know where she is.”

“I’ve been looking.”

At that moment two of his personal assistants rushed over to whisk him away to some TV appearance and as he walked off, he said, “Well find her, dammit. You’ll get credit this time if I have anything to say about it. And I’ll have something to say about it.” He laughed, terrifying sound about an octave south of a cackle.

In fact, I had been looking. Hard. And it wasn’t on behalf of George or some other recording artist in search of a song that would light up their royalty statements for years to come. Or not only that. I’d fallen in love with her cassette. The songs, the handwriting on the label (quick cursive in slightly smudged blue ink), the sub-professional engineering (between the first two songs, there was the faint sound of a chair leg scraping, not loud enough to seem intentional), and of course the voice. Sweet, simple, with the faintest Jersey accent and no affectation of any kind: no rock and roll slurring, no bluesy belting, no country twanging, no breathy confession. She just sang the words, the melody and the heart. Like they say about country songs: three chords and the truth, though with Daisy’s songs sometimes there were just two.

The first song was Crop Circle, a rough and irresistible home recording with drum machine and rudimentary electric guitars and banjo – banjo played by someone who clearly didn’t know how to play banjo but plucked a devilishly catchy three-note riff. The whole thing shimmered with cheap, guileless magic, and it was all her: “Written, played and produced by Daisy Steinberg” in messy blue ink. The song was about a guy and girl chasing each other around a corn field on a delirious moonlit night and the next day they need an excuse for the girl’s daddy: it wasn’t them trampling the corn, it was aliens making crop circles. Easy to dismiss as a joke, and a low-fi one at that, so on my first listen, charmed as I was, I stopped the cassette maybe a minute in and went on to the next tape in my demo pile. But the chorus hook – and that banjo lick – kept coming back to me, so I dug it out and played it again. Amused, intrigued, but still not sold, I listened to the rest.

The second song was more of what I expected – acoustic guitar and voice, straight up singer-songwriter fare. With one notable difference – the guitar was in some strange tuning I didn’t recognize. It was also heart-stoppingly beautiful. Impressions of Chrysanthemums. After a hundred listens I still have no idea what it’s about – something bad happened and love may or may not be the answer. Quiet, moody, with its own odd edge, this was not a chart topper in any genre – what we used to call an album cut, one of the songs that won’t sell an album but once you buy that album, you play it over and over again and love it more than the single – and you become increasingly convinced that anyone who loves the single and doesn’t get this song is a shallow fool.

The next song took a completely unexpected turn. Cut It Loose, a funky groove like something out of the 70s, complete with cool keyboards and perfect little twangy guitar lines that had me picturing slim, graceful fingers not twirling notes but twirling hair, dark brown hair. I was sure it was dark brown hair, maybe curly, surrounding a sweet round face. Eventually, I found out I was wrong, though not entirely wrong.

And the last cut was the most inexplicable of all. Unattainable. A 20-second piece of spoken word art over what sounded like some avant garde piano and street traffic in the background.

Reaching for the unattainable

Falling for the unexplainable

Facing the unnamable

What on earth could she have been thinking, putting those four tracks on a publishing company demo? And yet it was this cassette, not the stacks and stacks of slick, shiny audio gloss, that birthed a number one country song. Which, by the way, crossed over to 88 on the pop charts. Although none of that had happened when I first started looking for her. As I kept playing the song for my boss, I never really expected anything to come of it. I just couldn’t help myself.

It was not as easy to find someone in the 20th Century, even the very late 20th Century, as it is today. No Google, no social media. Barely an internet. You started with the phone – a device that plugged into a wall – and all I had was the number on her cassette. No answer, not even an answering machine. Two dozen tries, all hours of day and night, nothing. Then it was 411. Daisy Steinbaum, of 9th Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said she’d get calls for Steinberg once in a while but had no idea who or where she was.

Next I went to the Village Voice. More likely than not she’d played out at least a little, I figured, and if she performed under her own name, maybe I’d find it in the club ads. When I finally did, my fingers dusty with old ink and fraying newsprint, I made a noise loud enough to cause other patrons of the St. Agnes Branch of the New York Public Library on Amsterdam Avenue to look up in annoyance. I found it six times, all from shows in the early 90s in the East Village: Brownies, the C-Note, CBs Gallery. Of course, a name in an ad didn’t actually help much, and the club bookers never called me back. But I did find something else. In a music feature story on something called the Sisters of Lillith Songwriters Collective, there was a small photo of eight women, seven shoulder to shoulder and one peeking out from the back: that one was Daisy Steinberg. Taken in a club, the photo was not very clear and even less my 35-cent photocopy, but this much I could see: a narrow face, a sweet, shy smile, and thick, wavy dark hair.

I clipped out the part with her face and taped it to her cassette box: album cover.

The smile that imprinted on my visual cortex was nothing, however, compared to the songs that filled my entire brain. I suppose everyone gets a song stuck in their head – background music to the daily routine, company in the dull moments. When I fall in love with a song, it’s – it’s not easy to describe. I lean toward upper case, ridiculous fonts and terms like TRUTH and BEAUTY and TRANSCENDENCE. I suppose what I don’t want to admit is that when I walk out of work late into a cool, purple dusk and a silly banjo lick begins playing in the sound system in my head, only then do I notice the air and light, only then do I feel it. Waking up blue on a Sunday, the quirky bridge of Cut It Loose is the weight in my heart.  

And sometimes it’s good for business. I was sitting in the lunchroom reading about George Krott in some trade magazine with Crop Circle circling in my head when the light went on. The first question was obvious: Could the lyrics be sung by a man? I closed my eyes and quickly sang them to myself. They could, with hardly a pronoun change. Clearly the writer had thought of that. No dummy, this innocent.

But where was she?

As soon as George said yes to the song, they had to find her. When all else failed we turned to our top lawyer, hulking Sandy Bimler, whose legendary coke consumption was a match for his giant head and greying 70s mane. Sandy had no idea who I was but he took at least a cursory interest in anyone under 30 in the hopes that he might get a party invitation out of it, and he told me what happened. He went to the police and reported a missing person, and while they didn’t put him in touch with Daisy herself, he did hear from a small-time song plugger and publisher who’d gotten her to sign something and was more than pleased to sell his piece of the action. That was all Sandy needed. We’d get the publishing royalties. She’d get the writer royalties.

“You’d think the girl would change her name if she wanted a career in this business,” he said, the wall behind him filled with framed gold records. “Daisy McAllister or something.”

I asked him for the publisher’s number, telling him I was the one who discovered her – at least her song. I immediately felt bad about saying that – like I was the white guy who discovered some waterfall that indigenous populations had visited for eons and were unaware was in need of discovery. Sandy sniffed and shrugged.

I thanked him.

The publisher wouldn’t give me her number.

“Can you get her a message?”

“Sure, though she’s not returning my calls. Slippery, that one. What’s the message?”

“Never mind.”

“That’s the message? Heh heh.”

“Do you happen to know where she is?”

“Not at the moment. Songwriters can be pretty freaky, you know.”

He sniffed, making me think he’d been to plenty of parties with Sandy Bimler.

Stay hidden, girl.

Then I met Krott at the soundcheck in New York and went looking for her all over again. With no other leads, I called the publisher back, ready to beg or bribe.

“She dumped me,” he said. “No, not like that. I only met her in person once. I asked if she could at least try to write another one like Crop Circle. Wrong thing to say, I guess. Strange one. Very quiet. Little wisp of a thing. But in her own way tough.”

And that was that.

Until about a year later. My boss sent me to Nashville for a conference – maybe he felt a little guilty about “sharing” the credit for Crop Circle – and the big dinner featured a performance by none other than the celebrated George Krott celebrating his tenth or fifteenth go at sobriety. I wasn’t feeling great – maybe too many fried shrimp off the hors d'oeuvres trays – and it didn’t exactly settle my stomach when the back-up band launched into Crop Circle, repeating the intro, with the banjo riff doubled by electric guitar and fiddle, while the MC took the stage. “And what a Nashville treat we have for you lucky folks…five-time country music artist of the year…with 22 number one country hits, including his latest, which he’ll play for you now…ladies and gentlemen, Ge-oh-orge Krahhhhhhhhtt!” He stretched George into three syllables and the whole name across more than three bars.

And out of the wings rambled the man himself and started singing our song. Could’ve been a big moment for me. I just felt ill.

As the band chugged their way through it, though, and George got most of the words, I had a realization that made me sit up in my chair: there’d been a moment in the not-too-distance past, probably in his manager’s office, or maybe in the pickup truck I presumed he owned, likely a gift from one of his sponsors, when he heard the clumsy banjo picking, simple bass plunking and straight-from-the-heart singing of Daisy Steinberg, and no, he would not hear it through my ears, and yes, we all hear things in our own ways, but sound waves are sound waves and whatever it may have meant to him now to stand under the lights singing it, there’d been a moment when he’d heard what I heard. My stomach settled a bit and I decided I’d have another beer.

George was mingling after singing the one song – I could picture the contract language: perform one (1) song and mingle minimum thirty (30) minutes. The guy next to me, my counterpart from LA, said, “Hey, let’s go meet him.”

“I’ve met him,” I said, stupidly thinking that might get me out of it.

“Well, come on, introduce me.” He started walking. I followed. No problem, really. He wouldn’t remember me and I wouldn’t remind him.

We hovered maybe a minute beside three women lapping up George’s best flirtation when he turned in our direction, and before I could cough up my quickly rehearsed opening, We’re a couple of fans from your publishing company and… George pointed in my face and said, “Are you the one that knew Daisy?”

Too stunned to say yes, the correct answer, or no, which would have been the actual truth, I stared blankly.

“You find her yet?”

I shook my head no.

“Can’t you people do anything?”

Still speechless, I must have looked as pale as I felt. George laughed, reached down and squeezed my upper arm, and said, “Don’t sweat it, son. But listen to me. I want to talk to her, and I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you my number. This ain’t my manager, this is me, and you tell her that. And don’t go giving this out, or I’ll have to change it again.”

George handed me a card with a handwritten number on it, faintly smudged, like another inky number I knew well. Then he checked his watch, spun on the toe of his boot, and headed for the stage door. Thirty minutes must’ve been up.

The guy from LA was going on and on. Krott remembered me? And just gave me his number? I was speechless again. It appeared there were two of us obsessed with Daisy Steinberg.

To read the rest, click here.