Chapter 19 - Wallet Filled with Pictures

Lawyering works for me in part because I can use my intuition and my half-developed artistic skills.  I teach, write, draw, create visual aids and demonstrative exhibits, and make movies.  At its best, lawyering is a creative endeavor.

If I had had my druthers it would have been different.  I would have done those things for their own sake, but I never quite found the drive or focus.  I liked to fiddle with different things.   I wrote stories.  I wrote songs.  I played a little music.  I did some reporting.  I painted a few paintings.  I tried, twice, to write novels.  Maybe if I’d focused on one or the other I’d have become fair to middling, or even good, but I tended to flit, and found myself a lawyer.

I write this because my mother, as parents do, preserved some of my childhood art.  She kept a metal file box for each of her children full of stuff that we had created.  Mostly my box is filled with kindergarten art, but there are some later things, including five pencil drawings that I made in 1973 or early 1974 when I was 17.  They aren’t dated, but I can date them by their subjects.  I know the source of each one.  One is copied from the cover of a book about Delta Blues guitar.  Two come from the covers of albums I listened to frequently that year.  Another comes from the inside cover of an Elmore James record.  The last comes from the cover of another guitar book.  Each shows a blues singer/guitarist—Skip James, Elmore James, Taj Mahal, and of course, Chuck Berry.

The best drawing is of Skip James, the only one of these people I didn’t know and hadn’t heard at the time.  Lord knows why I drew him except that I must have liked the picture.  I did a good job copying it.  When I finally heard his haunting vocals, many decades later, the picture took on greater meaning for me.

My sketch of Elmore James is less successful.  I was copying from a small photograph, with less detail in the facial features.  But I got the essentials.

My drawing of Taj Mahal has good and bad parts.  It’s from the cover of the album “Oh So Good ‘n Blues,” which I listened to several hundred times when I was 17, concentrating largely on the gut-bucket despair of “Mama Don’t You Know” and a recently but ridiculously broken heart.  Taj Mahal was important to me because he provided a bridge of sorts between the music that I considered ancient and the modern present.  Almost every bit of finger picking I know is a simplified version of something Taj Mahal played.

I have a drawing of Chuck Berry taken off a collection of sheet music. He leans forward staring straight into the camera looking devilish and debonair.  I used to think the sketch failed.  It looked good on one side, but out of proportion on the other.  Then one day I saw the original photograph again and realized that there is a slight asymmetry to Chuck Berry’s face that is still there in some photographs taken 40 years later.  It turns out I got it right.  (Not long ago I arranged for Chuck Berry to sign a copy of it for a teenager in Mexico City as obsessed as I am who does great versions of Berry’s music with a band of rockers in Mexico.  So the drawing lives.)

And finally there is the sketch I made from the photograph on the cover of Chuck Berry’s 1973 album “Bio.”  I drew it with great love on a sheet of binder paper so old now that the residue of scotch tape bleeds amber through the paper.  It shows a 12 or 13 year old Chuck Berry, wise beyond his years, staring straight at the camera.  It’s the boy with the telescope, the boy with the darkroom.  He looks totally confident.  Like all boys and girls, he is going to be somebody some day.  This brown-eyed handsome kid is going to knock the game winner out of the park on a full count. He’s going to outshine Tchaikovsky and out-compose Beethoven.

Happily for us all, this brown-eyed handsome kid didn’t become a lawyer.

(This is part of a book length piece that tries to figure out why Chuck Berry became such a huge part of my life and imagination.  You can start reading the whole thing to the right in a section called "Pages" or keep reading to the end below.)

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