✍️ What Are You Willing to Sacrifice for Your Art?

...or, All Touch, All Touch, and No Contact

Rough Trade promotional shot with Carole Pope and Kevan Staples.

I’ve mentioned in these pages, I’m sure, that I’ve been a writer since a very young age. Back then, I thought that meant books. As I got older, I realized that (a) there are other types of writing, and (b) writing books can make you rich, but more likely it will make you poor.

I’ve always been fascinated by the “poor” stories. My first novel was about that, in part. You hear about the Beatles and Taylor Swift and other rock stars who have a billion dollars or more. The only billionaire writer I know of is JK Rowling, though I suspect many like King and Baldacci and Atwood are doing very, very well. You read about the young mother in an Edinburgh café writing Harry Potter while rocking her infant in the pram turning into a literary sensation, and you think – that could be me!

What you don’t read about though are the thousands of other mothers, older now, still writing in that little corner table... (The pram, we can presume, is safely put away.)

This weekend, between cutting down trees and fixing lawn mowers, I watched a documentary about Carole Pope. If you’re a Canadian of a certain age, you’ll immediately recognize the name. She was the outspoken lead singer of Rough Trade – not the most popular band in Canada, but definitely one you heard of if you were listening to Canadian rock in the late 70s and early 80s.

Carole Pope was Madonna before Madonna was Madonna – but, if you can imagine, raunchier. Hold on – I’ll prove it to you. She was also openly gay during a time when it wasn’t common or even safe, giving her lyrics an extra edge for the time. Here are some from “High School Confidential”:

She’s a cool, blonde, steaming bitch. She make my body twitch. Walking down the corridor.

…

What’s the principal, doing with her? Who’s that guy? Is he screwing with her? What’s her perfume? Tigress by Faberge. It make me cream my jeans when she come my way.

This last line was accompanied by a two-handed crotch pull in the (ironically, hetero-normative) video and in live performances – including on live Canadian TV. Somehow, Rough Trade hit the airwaves uncensored – I suspect mostly because CRTC execs and radio programmers on both sides of the border didn’t really know what the hell she was on about.

According to the documentary though, women struggling with their own sexuality all over Canada and the US knew exactly what she was saying. And they loved it.

I always thought “High School Confidential” was Rough Trade’s most popular song, but apparently it was “All Touch”. Here’s the video to that one – a nice metaphor for this post as well, methinks.

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All Touch and No Contact

Throughout the documentary, Pope says it was “always about the art”. That’s a common, almost cliché refrain, isn’t it? But her lived experience proves it. The documentary opens in her extremely modest LA apartment. We find out later she moved to LA because it was cheaper than New York and easier to get gigs than Toronto. The fact that she still relies upon gigs to survive is telling in itself.

One line in particular caught me. Pope said:

“I’m not willing to compromise on making music the way I want to make music, or performing music the way I want to perform music.”

However, she wonders out loud how much that commitment to her art has cost her financially. Pope had all touch with her work, but no contact with listeners because she wouldn’t play along with the music industry.

There’s regret in her voice at points in the documentary. Not as in, oh, she would do things differently now if she could. More along the lines of, record companies didn’t get her, even if audiences would have, and that was a shame for so many reasons. Including her own financial stability.

I can relate to that regret. Not in an apples-to-apples way of course. But there has to be regret when you let yourself be vulnerable, put your heart and soul into your art at the risk of economic security, and feel all three get stomped with stilettos. It’s not regret over the art. It’s regret of the art not reaching as many people as you would have hoped.

I wonder what I might have done if I took my chance at novel writing instead of marketing writing. Could I have made it? There is so much luck involved. And, as I’ve mentioned before, I wasn’t ready to write a novel or anything creatively serious until later in life, anyway.

Pope keeps her platinum and gold records in a storage locker somewhere in Manhattan in the type of crate usually reserved for transporting fine art. Although she didn’t make it as far as she could or even should have, she’s got to be proud of her accomplishments.

I know I’m proud of mine. I’ve been able to support a family on my writing, and I always call that a win. I’ve hacked and cut my own path through the jungle, made my own rules for the road, pressed my own platinum records. Maybe I could have supported the family even better as a lawyer or through some other career path. But, although I haven’t said it this way before, I was never willing to compromise on being able to write my way, either. Sure, it’s not my art, but it’s work my way. No regerts!

Most of us pay a price for our art. Time and energy – those are obvious. The lucky ones are true to their art AND get paid. The rest of us balance our ledgers with our souls on one side and our business success on the other.

Have you ever thought about the price you’ve paid? That you’re willing to pay?

* * *

Here’s the documentary, if you’re interested. Fair warning: I’m not sure it will play outside of Canada. But it’s worth searching out.

Also fair warning for sexual themes, language, smoking, drugs, punk rock, Toronto in the 70s, and all the other things your mother told you not to do. (And some she’d never heard of…)

Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions

Over to You

Any sacrifices you want to open up about?

Until next time, keep writing with wild abandon!

~Graham

email me if you get lost.