Vince Bell

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Vince Bell

Background information
Birth name Vince Bell
Born September 16, 1951(1951-09-16)
Dallas, Texas
Genre(s) singer-songwriter, alternative country
Occupation(s) Solo artist, songwriter
Instrument(s) Singer, guitar
Associated acts Stephen Bruton, John Cale, Guy Clark, Steve Fromholz, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Lyle Lovett, David Mansfield, Geoff Muldaur, Bob Neuwirth, Mickey Raphael, Bill Rich, Fritz Richmond, Eric Taylor, Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams, Townes Van Zandt
Website Vince Bell official site
This article is about the Texas singer-songwriter. For the New York session guitarist Vinnie or Vincent, see Vinnie Bell.

Vince Bell is a Texas singer-songwriter who spent the mid-Seventies and early Eighties working the national coffeehouse circuit, playing “edge to edge” in his native Lone Star State, and sharing the stage with fellow travelers Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams, and Lyle Lovett, who considers Bell a significant influence on his own work. A nimble guitarist with a hoarse, one-of-a-kind voice, Bell pens country-and-folk hybrids “brimming with the man himself, a lot like Leonard Cohen’s in their hopeless romance, Randy Newmanish in their eye for detail."[1]

Bell’s star was on a rapid rise when, in December of 1982, he was broadsided by a drunk driver. Awakening from a coma a month later, Bell embarked on a courageous, decade-long journey to reclaim his identity, his music, and his career.

Bell has appeared on such nationally broadcast television and radio programs as Austin City Limits, Mountain Stage, World Café, NPR's Morning Edition, and In the Prime. His songs have been performed and recorded by such diverse talents as Little Feat, Lyle Lovett, and Nanci Griffith. A ballet, Bermuda Triangle, was set to his work.


Contents

[edit] The Accident

The night of December 21, 1982, appeared to be ending on a positive note for Bell. Driving home from the recording studio in his ‘64 Ford Fairlane, a promising future ahead of him, he pulled up to an Austin traffic light and waited for the red to drop to green, his ears still ringing with the demo he had just cut with hired guns Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson. A drunk driver traveling 65 miles per hour broadsided Bell and catapulted him over 60 feet from the wreckage.

“He was from a poor family,” Bell remembers, “and, doggone it, there wasn’t much that could be done. He didn’t have insurance, so it was a pretty fruitless, useless, bootless situation for the kid here.” Comatose through January 1983, Bell awoke to find himself with a severe traumatic head injury, broken ribs, multiple lacerations to his liver, a mangled right forearm, and a premature death notice in the Austin American Statesman.

“A head injury is a real double-edged sword. When you’re an amputee, they take your arms and legs. When you’re head-injured, they take your thoughts. One day you wake up, and some B-rate movie star is president. You can’t walk or talk or see straight.” Bell equates his experience to dying and having been brought back to life. Sounding not unlike Mary Shelley’s famous creation, Bell equates his experience with dying and having been brought back to life. “I was a child in a man’s world,” he says. He asked his neuroscientist, “W-w-w-w-will I ever w-w-w-walk a-a-again or talk?” “I don’t know, man,” the neuroscientist told him. “You’ll have to tell us.”

“Not only am I screwed up to the gills,” Bell recalls, “but nobody around can tell me if the effort is going to be worth it or not.”

The accident changed his life--and created in him a philosophy. “A head injury is a real double-edged sword. When you’re an amputee, they take your arms and legs. When you’re head-injured, they take your thoughts. One day you wake up, and some B-rate movie star is president. You can’t walk or talk or see straight.”

Six years of intensive rehab ensued. Not only did he have to learn how to play the guitar and write songs all over again, he had to relearn how to walk and talk, too. “I could see a chord, but I couldn’t tell my hand what to do anymore. My right hand had been destroyed and my left was over in the corner asleep.” Doctors utilized metal from joint to joint and rebuilt what he calls his “bionic arm.” The signature of their work is a scar the length of a steak knife that runs along the inside of his forearm.

“But a head injury is the best of teachers, as well. It showed me that my gift was relentless. It let me know that if anybody was going to get off up that mat that I’d been laid on, it was me. And so I did. I got the fuck up. That’s invaluable and actually kind of a thrill in this life to know about yourself.”

A tribute to Bell’s recovery is that much of the praise he receives these days concerns itself with his spare but evocative guitar-playing. Such plaudits make him smile. “My guitar style at large is how I play the pause. How I do nothing. What I find is, when I’m playing extremely well, the spaces between the notes are as influential as the damn melody itself. Like the best musicians will tell: it ain’t what you play, it’s what you don’t play.

“What the hell,” he says. “If I’m good at much of anything these days, it’s in not showing you or anybody else what it is that is still different about me. But it’ll never be the same,” he admits.[2]

In 2004, Bell told an interviewer: "Learning the guitar the first time was a bitch. Learning the guitar the second time was cruel."[3]


[edit] Phoenix

Early in 1993, Bell’s manager forwarded cassettes containing 59 of Bell’s songs--three hours’ worth--to Bob Neuwirth, producer and Renaissance man. Neuwirth liked what he heard. “We went into the studio and did what recording people are supposed to do,” Bell says, sounding as if he still doesn’t believe it came true. “We got us a cut, doggone it.”[4]

That cut was “Frankenstein,” a tuneful meditation on life and death sang from Frankenstein’s monster’s point of view. The only non-Bell composition on Phoenix, he avoided an easily rendered novelty song and instead emerged with a haunting three-and-a-half minute masterpiece. Written by “that lucky kid from Houston” Gary Burgess (“Anybody who gets a good song is a lucky person”), Bell rearranged the verses and refrains to his liking and changed a lyric or two.

“I felt like I knew the old guy that we saw in black-and-white so many years ago so much better. It was exciting for me to hear of something so difficult and so excruciating--and just like my world. I kind of felt like that monster looked an awful lot like me and acted like me, too, at the time.”

Their maiden recording session was so magical that Neuwirth agreed to produce the resultant album, Phoenix, for Bell in its entirety. They recorded the album in four scant but artistically fulfilling days in San Francisco’s tenderloin district along with a cadre of veteran session musicians: Geoff Muldaur, Fritz Richmond, David Mansfield, Mickey Raphael, Stephen Bruton, and Bill Rich. Fellow admirers Lyle Lovett, for whom Bell used to open in their early days, and Victoria Williams contributed background vocals. Avant-garde rocker John Cale threw his own brand of classicism into the already heady mix with his piano work.

Because Bell was in the wrong place at the wrong time on a wintry Texas night in 1982, Phoenix arrived on the record shelves almost twelve years late. Released in 1994, its songs are quietly revelatory, as loud and clear in their hushed messages as anything found on Hole’s Live Through This or R.E.M.’s Monster, two of that year’s more notable thunder-stealers.

[edit] Early Influences

In the mid-Seventies when he was just starting out, at a club called Anderson Fair in Houston, Texas, the young Bell encountered his mentors: late troubadour extraordinaire Townes Van Zandt (who named his son William Vincent after Bell) and singer/songwriter Guy Clark (“Desperados Waiting for a Train”). “Townes and Guy were my earliest inspirations. Townes taught me rhyme, Guy taught me to fingerpick.” About Bell, Van Zandt said: “Vince is a poet.”

Present in those days, too, was Lyle Lovett, who covered Bell’s “I’ve Had Enough” on his 1998 album Step Inside This House. “He was a great songwriter before the accident,” said Lovett, “and he has continued to be a great songwriter after the accident.” And Nanci Griffith, who sang Bell’s “Woman of the Phoenix” on her Grammy-winning Other Voices/Other Rooms, said, “From all of us who were beating the paths around Texas in the Seventies, I always felt Vince was the best of us.”


[edit] Later and Recent Recordings

Texas Plates, released by Paladin/Warner in 1999, found Bell where he should have been all along--comfortably ensconced in the upper echelon of the songwriting guild and signed to a major record label. Unfortunately, whatever marketing there was presented him as just another singer/songwriter, as if they were all cut from the same Texan cloth, and the album remains largely unheard. Taking musical matters into his own hands, Bell released the self-explanatory Live in Texas on his own label in 2001; and 2007 saw the release of the critically-praised Recado, a co-release with SteadyBoy Records and produced by Cam King. According to Bell: "Recado is a collection of messages that wind like a long dirt road through the years of my writing. There's the first song I wrote after moving to Austin, written on a whore-house piano that writer-friendly Strait Music sold me for 150 bucks--delivered. There's one about taking chances in Berkeley while I collaborated with Bob Neuwirth on my first album, Phoenix. Two are from the high desert south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where you can see for a hundred miles. I also chose a masterful one from Townes. Altogether they portray at least a couple of lifetimes of lyric like I like it, with music that says the same thing."


[edit] texas FlatLINErs

In 2005, Bell and his friends of 35 years, Steven Fromholz and Eric Taylor, formed the texas FlatLINErs. Bell's tale of having survived death and destruction was already legend, but on the night of April 18, 2003, Fromholz collapsed from a life-threatening stroke. He spent the next year relearning his guitar. The following year, on January 30th, Taylor suffered a heart attack followed by two strokes of his own. Bell credits Fromholz with the idea of the three survivors banding together to form the texas FlatLINErs, who played their first gig at Anderson Fair in Houston in January of 2005.

[edit] Books

At the encouragement of Sarah Wrightson, Bell’s wife since 1992, he wrote his autobiography, One Man’s Music, which commences the night of his accident and concludes on the June day of Phoenix’s release. The whole terrifying but ultimately uplifting saga is told with extraordinary candor and insight. If the book has a “message,” it’s that Bell wants those who have endured injuries similar to his own, whom he calls “the head-injured,” to be inspired by his work. I hope they can see my thing and go, ‘Look at that short little son of a bitch. He worked his butt off, and he sang at Carnegie Hall.’ And I did, doggone it.”

University of North Texas Press will publish Bell’s second book, ‘Sixtyeight Twentyeight: The Life and Times of a Texas Writer and a Flat Top Box Guitar, a collection of essays about his career both before and after the accident, in 2009.


[edit] Discography

[5]


[edit] References

  1. ^ "The Bionic Songman" by Kevin Avery, Gallery, April 1995.
  2. ^ "The Bionic Songman" by Kevin Avery, Gallery, April 1995.
  3. ^ Boyd, Jinelle: "Jinelle Boyd Interview with Vince Bell". MyTexasMusic.com, May 3, 2004.
  4. ^ "The Bionic Songman" by Kevin Avery, Gallery, April 1995.
  5. ^ Vince Bell albums, VH1
  6. ^ In Music We Trust review of Texas Plates
  7. ^ Blogcritics magazine review of Recado


[edit] External Links