On Quitting One Passion… and Finding Another
(debut album ‘Something’s Not Right’ available now)
In the Talking Heads’ iconic Once In A Lifetime, a song so catchy it managed to be a hit at the same time as being deeply profound, David Byrne opines:
And you may find yourself
Living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself
In another part of the world
And you may find yourself
Behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?
Everyone experiences this feeling of disorientation from time to time, the sense that one’s role in one’s own life is far smaller than one would hope or expect. For me, my story begins at Belmont Park, that enormous racetrack on Long Island, home to the Belmont Stakes, the final leg of Thoroughbred horse racing’s Triple Crown. My parents took me there when I was six years old, and I was mesmerized. I loved the way the sunlight reflected off of the horses’ polished coats. I marveled at how the jockeys’ silks produced a vividness of color. I spent the ride home, red sun setting over the Cross-Island Expressway, imitating the track’s race announcer. I began telling everyone I wanted to be a horse racing announcer. A few years later, my parents bought me a plastic, battery-powered racing game which, in that 1975, pre-computer landscape, provided the unmatched excitement of watching six miniature horses shake, rattle and roll their ways down a vibrating racetrack, the outcome of the race in doubt until the final second. I announced every one of these faux races.
At eighteen, I became the youngest full-time racetrack announcer in the country, working at a charming little track named Lake Shore Meadows, near Erie, Pennsylvania. They raced for two years, no one ever showed up, and they were a money-losing venture from day one. But I announced every race they ever held and I made my first set of lifelong racing friends. Near the end of the first season, a horse I had fallen in love with named Flip Collins didn’t finish his race and came limping off the track, clearly injured. I knew an injured horse was at risk of ending up at one of the shadowy “kill sales,” where if no one bids on a horse, some agent puts up $100 and has the horse slaughtered.
I called the owner the next day. He said if I wanted him for $500, the horse was all mine. I didn’t have the money, nor did I know how to take care of a horse. But I convinced my mother to lend me the money, and the following morning I picked up Flip, clipped a leadshank to his halter, started walking him to his new stall. He took off running suddenly and with rope burns exploding on my hands, I watched him run off into the distance, turn left around a barn, and disappear. I took off at a full run and finally turned a corner to see a guy named Terry with a wide smile on his face, toking a joint with one hand and holding Flip, as calm as could be, with the other. Welcome to horse racing.
A year later, after eight months recuperating in the field, and four more training back, Flip won the final race Lake Shore Meadows ever held, and I flew down the stairs from the announcer’s booth, my feet never touching the ground. A few years later, I won my first race as a driver, and over the next twenty-five years, I had the good fortune to announce at racetracks in Pennsylvania, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Indiana, and to train two world champion horses, and I still driving horses occasionally, thirty years later. Most importantly, I had found a home in a world I loved, and it nurtured me for decades.
But you can have all the vision and focus in the world, and yet you’re no match for forces larger than you. As Mike Tyson put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get a punch in the mouth.” For me, that punch in the mouth was so gradual it was almost imperceptible, but it was inexorable. The sport of harness racing was dying.
Harness racing had burst on the scene in 1940, and by 1968, 22,000 people were coming to the races per night. Horse racing as a whole surpassed both baseball and football in total attendance.
And then the lottery became legal, and the $2 bettors disappeared, one by one, into the quest to win millions in one shot. And then casino gambling, off-track betting on the races, and slot machines. Over time, the horses were forgotten. My “career year” with my horses was 2010, when Enough Talk, my best horse, won the Breeders Crown. But that championship victory didn’t move me nearly as much as Flip Collins’ win in that race against nobodies, twenty-five years before. That same year, The Meadowlands, the track I had made my home since moving back to New York a few years before, was on the brink of closing due to declining attendance and betting. The track was sold and the new ownership closed the on-track barn area. I was now a single dad with a five-year-old son and an eight-month old daughter. I couldn’t be driving an hour and a half each way to the nearest training center to train horses. The game had lost its magic. I quit.
Selling off my stable, horse by horse, I embarked on a nearly two-year-long journey of learning — for its own sake, not with any aim in mind. I’d ride random subways to far flung stations like Dyre Avenue and New Lots Avenue, one book would lead to another, and then another, from economics, to the history of scurvy, to Willie Mays, to various agricultural strategies, to string theory, to discussions of resource depletion, to societal collapse. I got to see how various factions of an increasingly divided nation were seeing the same events and people through vastly differing lenses. I tried to understand why, and to appreciate all the arguments out there, even the bad ones. It seemed that there had to be some way to focus this more complete vision of things into something that mattered.
But I wasn’t working. I was living in New York City raising my kids and that was tremendously gratifying, but something was missing -- a new and creative direction. Music was something I had always liked but had never really thought I could actually do. But while shopping for Christmas presents in 2012, I left the Apple Store on 68th street and ran into a guy selling guitars in boxes on the street. At first I thought that one of them might make an interesting present for someone. But who? I bought the guitar and never managed to think whom to give it to, and there it sat. Certainly I couldn’t play it — guitar had always struck me as one of those things other people could do. Then one day I suddenly contemplated how ridiculous that way of thinking is, like my grandmother saying she could never possibly figure out how to use a computer.
So in January, out of fairness to the unappreciated guitar, I started taking lessons. I found a teacher, Matt Detro, who got me from 0 to 30 pretty quickly (I’m never going to get to 60, and that’s fine). He’s still a friend and plays guitar on many of my songs and at my gigs, and also helped me write a few of them. I decided on a whim to attend an all-day Gotham Writers’ Workshop class on songwriting, taught by Tony Conniff, a talented bass player, songwriter, teacher, and producer. He got me rolling using Apple’s easy-to-use Garage Band software, and somehow I realized that I was actually getting some satisfying songs completed.
But what really pleased me was that I was using music to reflect, in some small way, on all the bits and pieces I’d learned from the books I’d read on the subway during 2011-2012. All of these great ideas were out there, but very good books about them had already been written. But songs about these ideas hadn’t necessarily been written yet. It seemed like a possible niche —my first song (which never made my debut album) was called Traveling Blind, about a kind of everyman, a Willy Loman-type character living in Minnesota, in debt, tempted by pills, his grown son living with him, his wife in the early stages of dementia, and stuck with the chronic feeling that something just wasn’t right. That feeling is one I believe so many Americans share now, even if they completely disagree about why they’re feeling it and who’s to blame for it.
I decided to name the album Something’s Not Right because if there’s one thing I’m trying to get across, it’s that we are all bonded now by this shared, unsettled feeling. It’s a specific feeling that fits this one particular time in history, in this country, and it’s manifesting in all sorts of addictions and disorders and hatreds and quiet desperations. I see it as my role to point out that we all share a humanity, even with those we view as enemies. Will my music really make a difference in people’s perceptions of those not like them, or who disagree with them? I don’t know, but I’m trying. My aim is less to persuade or inflame than to depolarize and connect, if at all possible, because I believe that we’re all anxious, we’re all scared, and we’re all people.
After a year, I realized I had eleven decent songs. I would write the parts on Garage Band, take them in to Tony Conniff, and then, instrument by instrument, we’d replace my halfway-decent parts with professionally-played parts, using a group of session musicians that Tony knew. They are remarkable musicians, and I have incredible respect for them, because they’re not in it for anything other than the love of the music, which I think really has to be the reason to be in it. When I’m really into a song, I feel that it is asking me to write it, more than the other way around. The musicians in the band have a similar understanding — that a song becomes its own living, breathing, evolving thing.
Though I do sometimes still find myself wondering “How did I get here?” and I’m not sure where the music will take me next, I’m certainly enjoying the surprising and unexpected journey.
Peter Kleinhans is an independent musician. His debut album Something’s Not Right released earlier this year. He’s currently at work on a second album. For more information visit peterkleinhans.com, follow him on social media @pkleinhansmusic, or drop him a line pkleinhansmusic@gmail.com. (see all links below)
Links to Peter Kleinhans
Website: https://www.peterkleinhans.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pkleinhansmusic/
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