There’s only one place that we are yet to make a return trip from, at least as far as we know it, beyond the veil as they once called it. And while we are six feet up instead of six feet under, everything sooner or later seems to be a round trip, in every way shape or form. We live a circular existence. And while we’re running in circles, we slowly build a duality, that at its core we haven’t seemed to fully comprehend. So the best we can do is complain. As time moves on we say to ourselves…I never thought I’d see that….but eventually you do. The Great book of life, I always like to think, will only end when every possible story has been told, everything you could possibly imagine and everything you couldn’t. In 1910, a good friend of mine, Burns Lyman Smith, invited me up to Seattle to see his father’s new building, which was under construction. It was to be Smith Tower. Smith’s father was Lyman Cornelius Smith, the world’s richest typewriter magnate. And after they hit the mother load so to speak, Burns, like his father, began to wear his wealth on his sleeve. So he told me I just had to come up and see this new tower they were building – with all that money on his sleeve, I still haven’t figured out why he couldn’t roll up that sleeve and pay for his poor actor musician friend’s train ticket – but now that’s an afterthought and somehow or other I made the trip up from Hollywood to see what he said was going to be the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Back then they were still in the process of raising the streets...

Back in the summer of 1910, I used to hang out with Tom Mix at the saddle shop down at Sunset and Cahuenga. I think there’s a Popeyes or something or other there now. But that was once where they used to pick up cowboys for gun operas as they called ’em back then. We’d all be leaned up against the store wall or sitting cross-legged like old Coyote Face. Mix and I’d been runnin’ together that summer. Hadn’t had much luck but one day some fellas from the Selig Polyscope Company picked him outta our line up and put him in Ranch Life in the Great Southwest and the rest is history for him. He died in a car crash back in ’40 at sixty years old. Before his big break though, we’d been tramping all over Hollywood Boulevard, drinking, dancing, dice, cock fights, a whore house in Pinyon Canyon. We both dreamed of makin’ it in The Gun Operas, movie stars. But then his big ship came in and mine seemed to just keep drifting off shore, barely in sight. But once you have your first real awe shucks moment in life you’re never quite the same. Hollyweird, LA, The Valley, Las Vegas, where ever you call home in this Bermuda Triangle of Excess and moral deprevity of the southwestern desert, we all come out here in all sorts of shapes and sizes and with all sorts of different kinds of substances in our bodies. But for each twenty-something, Juicy-wearing bombshell, sipping her latte through a straw as she struggles to unlock the BMW her father has sent her off in, and for every spiky haired, fist pumping, club going, Red Bull drinking, Diesel Jean and Tshirt wearing ruffian of the strip, the bright lights...

A mini-series in which D.W. Brandt writes about each song from his debut album, THE GREAT MIGRATION. It’s been over 100 years of American Music for the Great Migration and me. We’ve been grinding it out any way we can at bars, fairs, carnivals, juke joints, quinceneras, funerals, anything and everything, everywhere and nowhere you’ve heard of. But you should hear this tune. I heard some folks sayin’ somethin’ like 80 to 90 percent of all stuff in the universe we ain’t got a clue about. So for the most part we just pretend. You might even say life is kinda just a lot of pretending. And like all of us in life, I’m always waiting for that big break. But it’s always been a road of hills and valleys. I been close before. But all success is fleeting. Back In 1952 I lost the part of Bob Hayward to Robert Stack in “Bwana Devil”, the World’s first “Deepie”, which for all you newcomers is what we used to call 3D movies. But that movie flopped and within the year “Deepies” were dead. Never have guessed they’d be back. You never know what the future holds, you just have to pretend you do. When I wrote this song I was trying to make it as an actor again, living in a shoebox next to a garage in Burbank, CA, waking up every morning to the view of a three hundred pound chain-smoking woman in a moomoo outside my window, trying to pretend things were on the up and up…Although in reality I’d just had my first mainstream film, MICROMACHINES, the movie dropped in mid-production due to the news of the up and coming TRANSFORMERS. And a year earlier, my pilot, ALEXIS TEXAS, got passed on by Disney...