"Peaceful Easy Feeling" by Jack Tempchin / Eagles

Knowing who you are

“I like the way your sparkling earrings lay / Against your skin, it's so brown / And I wanna sleep with you in the desert tonight / With a billion stars all around”

Really, Trev? Well why not. I’m all about playing the hits here. I used to do this tune with my wedding band at every gig. It always went over well. It has kind of a nursery rhyme simplicity, this one. It seems to have defined an era.

There’s also an undeniable saccharine quality, common to many songs of the time. Rock was drifting across the sea of Led Zeppelin towards a future archipelago of Foreigner and other hair band offspring, opening up a big, sunny opportunity for California Country Rock (the “other” CCR) to dominate the heartland. We heard a bunch of vocal harmony guys with very USA-sounding last names: Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Seals, Crofts, Loggins, Messina... Smooth was the order of the day. Gerald Ford was President. Steady as she goes.

“'Cause I got a peaceful easy feeling / And I know you won't let me down / 'Cause I'm already standing on the ground”

The Eagles are cut from solid cloth, and they were smart enough to not hog all the songwriting to themselves. “Take It Easy” is a Jackson Browne song. “Peaceful Easy Feeling” is by a guy named Jack Tempchin. Jack also gave us the Eagles’ “Already Gone” and Glenn Frey’s “You Belong To The City”. December 1st is Peaceful Easy Feeling Day in Jack’s hometown of San Diego. I can almost smell the sea salt in the air.

“And I found out a long time ago / What a woman can do to your soul / Ah, but she can't take you anyway you don't already know how to go”

But I went through a long, long period where I just could not stand mainstream USA music like this at all. I’ve talked about it here periodically: my musical alienation from my homeland took up the bulk of my teens, 20s and 30s. I look back now and see a guy who was not only stuck in his own head, but also intent on staying aloof and impoverished, willfully ignoring a goldmine hiding in plain sight.

When someone like Blake Morgan (musician and creator of the #irespectmusic hashtag) says that “music is one of the only things America makes that the world still wants”, he might not be explicitly referring to the Eagles. But he’s not not referring to the Eagles either. Songs like Peaceful Easy Feeling are core to the marketing collateral of this country. Love it or hate it.

Me? I hated it.

“And I gotta peaceful easy feeling / And I know you won't let me down / 'Cause I'm already standing on the ground”

I’ve lived abroad a fair amount: Mexico, England, Korea, Brazil, Argentina. And I’m reasonably well-traveled aside from those places, mostly for work as a musician. My touring life has taken me to many more places than my tourist life has. Across the borderline we get sensitive to how other cultures view ours from outside, especially if you’re exporting the product yourself. I try to be a good sales rep.

But I don’t like the feeling of being seen as a representative of what a lot of the world experiences as a cultural bulldozer, the swinging dick of the world economy. I have a huge amount of curiosity and enthusiasm for music in a lot of different places, and the bald commercialism of USA music creates a barrier to being able to join the larger global melting pot as a welcome participant.

The barrier is not insurmountable, but surmounting it requires the right attitude. As a youngster I may have created a shortcut for myself by simply choosing to hate my own country’s music. It was an unconscious choice that I really ended up regretting.

“I get this feeling I may know you as a lover and a friend / But this voice keeps whispering in my other ear / Tells me I may never see you again”

I remember vividly the moment when I was 20 years old and I hit bottom with my attitude (one of the times, anyway). I was adrift in the literal Amazon, having taken a 5-day riverboat trip from Porto Velho up the Madeira river to Manaus. I stayed in that town for a week, just wandering around. It was a trip in the middle of a larger trip.

Street life in Manaus gets pretty social. One day I wound up walking and talking with a woman who sold tarps to hardware stores, and she introduced me to the owner of one of these stores. The guy had a less-than-charitable disposition towards foreigners, tourists, and especially tourists from the US. He made sure I knew my place.

The man asked me what I did, I said I was a musician.

The man asked me what instrument I played, I said I played the cello. Even though I hadn’t actually put my fingers to any strings in over a month.

The man said “oh yeah, show me your left hand”. I obliged, and for a moment his callused working man’s hands inspected the tips of my fingers. Noting the distinct absence of calluses there, he looked me in the eye.

“Kid, you don’t play jack shit.” [“Moleque, você não toca porra nenhuma”]

And he was right.

“'Cause I get a peaceful easy feeling / And I know you won't let me down / 'Cause I'm already standing / I'm already standing / Yes, I'm already standing on the ground”

Here’s one thing that took me way, way too long to understand about being a musician. You have to know who you are. Like it or not.

And not only do you have to know and acknowledge who you are, you need to embrace the sound of where you come from. It’s already in your cells, it’s already coming out of you. Knowing and embracing who you are will help you put in the necessary miles on your fingers, so you don’t have to embarrass yourself like I did.

But if you try to “differentiate” yourself and you somehow, maybe inadvertently, end up hating the mainstream music of where you come from, it’s actually a powerful form of self-hatred. Poorly masked by narcissism. This will make you sound bad.

You might want to feel cool and somehow superior, but there is no musical world in which you will not be perceived as a representative of your culture, regardless of your chosen genre. And the only way for your sound to be received positively is if you represent your culture with a love for it in your heart. This might not be easy, but you have to find a way.

And it’s a process. One part of my process was to start singing songs like Peaceful Easy Feeling. My resistance was incredibly high at first. But it ain’t there anymore.

I’m finally standing on the ground:

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