Patron Saint of Mid-Life - part 3

Part 3 – RTS-VP

And, yes, there was the fact that he was single again, but he wasn’t thinking what it was natural to think. Sure, it looked as if Lucy was still using her maiden name (for email at least), but an academic is likely to do that, his experience. Plus, one of Ronnie’s ex-wives had used her dog’s name for email rather than use his or her dad’s. That was a short relationship.

Ronnie had walked away from school when he was just 18, didn’t take any exams, sold the computer his parents had bought him a year before in order buy a Telecaster (an unfashionable guitar at the time), and went off to sleep on people’s floors for a few years. He was planning to call this period The Years of Hygiene in his autobiography, because there wasn’t much of it. Then he met Annie, who became his first wife and first top 40 record. Annie was the first in a string of red heads Ronnie hooked up with, and took over the management of his band, in classic Spinal Tap fashion.

Having signed a record contract and made a critically successful first release, the band he was in fell apart in what must have been record time (i.e. it happened in between recording the record, and releasing it). So he toured with a pickup band, which didn’t go too well, then recorded solo, which was (if anything) a slightly better record than the first one had been.

Ronnie always said that the whole sorry affair would have made a good documentary, but didn’t make for very good music.

Then Annie and he got divorced, she took the master tapes when she left, and he spent a couple of years in LA not getting into films and playing the odd bit of guitar on other peoples’ records, sometimes as Ronnie, sometimes as Simon Collins, and sometimes as Colin Simons. And he did a soundtrack, which didn’t win any awards and wasn’t adopted by an premiership football clubs.

Then, by chance, he met Dale Duff, a country singer who was living and recording in LA – in exile from Nashville because he’d said, “Kiss my ass,” on the radio or something. Dale was looking to record with some “rock” musicians, and in Ronnie found a sympathetic spirit. This was in the early 90s, just after the boom in “New Country” and just before the short boom in “Female New Country” which commenced about the same time Ronnie started writing songs with his second wife, Dale’s sister Marianne. They met on the sessions for Dale’s soon-to-be-flop “rock” album.
Marianne was a redhead with a beautiful voice and an attitude to match her brother’s. Together they wrote 15 top ten country hits between 1992 and 1997. Then they got divorced, and (business being business) wrote 3 more, before Marianne finally hit the top with her own release, the Divorce Record, the one they wrote together when they couldn’t stand to be in the same room and couldn’t say a civil word.

Between them they had managed to pick up 3 CMA awards over the years, and now they won another. She was the one went on the stage in a designer frock and gave the speeches, which was the kind of thing she enjoyed. There was a perception in the industry that Marianne wrote all the words and Ronnie did the music, but it wasn’t like that. She wrote on the piano and he wrote on the guitar. The way they worked best was, usually, to find a way of finishing each other’s songs, often by saying the one thing the other person was trying to avoid.

Marianne and Ronnie jointly wrote around 300 songs over the years, most of which were only ever recorded as demos, many others stuffed onto albums by artists major and minor (all of them generating royalties, which is what paid the rent). Marianne even made a couple of albums herself, but the record companies were never behind them, and she never wanted to tour with them, “for health reasons.” Which is the reason usually given for not touring. Ronnie continued to play guitar a few times, he was known for his 12-string work, and produced a couple of albums for other people, neither of which were very big. A bit like the film soundtrack, it was enjoyable but not lucrative. The soundtrack wasn’t a big hit, though he got more letters about that than anything else he ever did, usually from students on college courses entitled Scoring for Picture or similar.
Along the way, Ronnie realised that being a jobbing musician and songwriter was more rewarding and less exhausting than any attempt he’d made to be a star, which is possibly why Marianne’s huge success stressed their marriage to breaking point. Suddenly, she wanted to do all the things that Ronnie had begun to enjoy not doing, and the differences drove them apart.

Somewhere in between the time Marianne moved to Switzerland to be a Tax Exile, and Ronnie moved back to England, he got married for a third time. He didn’t remember too much about it, but she was the one didn’t want Ronnie’s name on her emails, or her headed notepaper, or her utility bills. There were no kids, so it wasn’t messy, though he still had to make the occasional trip over to Swissland for “business meetings” with Spouse number 2. Marianne had recently proposed they work together again to write songs for her next album, and Ronnie had promised to think about it.

He had two vague plans, now he was on his own and back home. Plan A was to try to write some songs on his own, after having collaborated for so long. He suspected he’d end up sending them over to Marianne to finish, and receiving a bunch of hers in return. Plan B was to track down Annie, wife number one, and see if he couldn’t recover his lost master tapes without getting lawyers involved.

And now Lucy. If there was a plan above A, then Lucy was it…