Today I came across an old Persian proverb that I thought was appropriate for Success. It reads:
“If you want to be appreciated, die or travel.”
Not only is this proverb à propos for the play, but I find it to be especially timely, since yesterday I received my first rejection from a comic company. The really nice and incredibly talented people at Top Shelf (home of such incredible work as Box Office Poison, as well as the work of Guy Deslisle, Chris Ware, and Jeffrey Brown), while they think Success is good work, decided to pass on it. No hard feelings, of course. It was a lovely, polite email, handwritten by the head of the company. Now I have about 20 other companies I’m waiting to either not hear from, or hear from.
Anyway, we left the Success timeline off in the mid-nineties. After my trip to Europe in 1994 I didn’t pick up Success again until between 1998 and 2001, when I lived in New York. There, my first big love, the amazing actress and filmmaker (check out Future Weather) Jenny Deller, for whom I relocated, exposed me to a lot of jazz music, especially the torch songs of Ella Fitzgerald and Etta James. Her brother Michael studied jazz piano. Watching Michael progress so quickly lit a fire under me to go back to school and study music.
I had already been studying general composition privately with an old Russian composer named Michael Zeiger. He lived up on the Upper West Side not far from our apartment at 171st and St. Nicholas. He played piano for a Russian choir who sang at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on 112th and Amsterdam Ave. I went to his apartment way up in Fort George every week for ear training and composition lessons. (Along with pop songs, I was trying to write a string quartet.)
But I began to crave to write that jazzy, show-tune kind of music.
At around that time I met a girl named Paige who had written a musical about a Broadway starlet who had a singing vagina. She asked me to write the music for the play. I wrote one song during a temp job for Infogrammes. (They found my lyrics for the song saved on their corporate server, where I tried to bury it, not knowing the entire company could see it. The file name was “vagina.” Man. On my last day, you should have heard how they snickered and laughed at me on the elevator ride down to the lobby.) Anyway, Paige and I fell out of contact and the play wasn’t to be.
I conceived the the Ideal Home Music Library project, but my experiments at that time felt incomplete. Although I knew a lot of music theory, I didn’t know anything about jazz. So I decided to return to Portland to study. Portland wasn’t my first choice, but it would have been impossible for me to work and go to school in New York, (to be honest, I hated it there anyway), and other colleges were too expensive. I even did a tour of Cornish in Seattle. Anyway, some of the songs I wrote in New York became part of the Ideal home Music Library, Vol 1.
I wrote a scene from Success. It was the scene where Nicholas and Gregory (then their names were switched) hatched the plan to fake the suicide. Jenny marked up my first draft and I think I may have rewritten it one more time. After writing that scene, I again left it at that.
Another important moment for Success occurred in New York as well. I was browsing in a book store—I wish I could say it was a hip book store, but think it might have been the Barnes & Noble on 86th Street, which was close to where I worked at The Harry Fox Agency—when I came across the Dover score version of Erik Satie’s Sports & Divertissements. I fell hard for those little pieces and I learned to play them on the piano. I was touched particularly by the idea of making drawings accompanied by music. The idea of creating a musical comic came to me then, albeit ill-formed. I wasn’t sure how to put printed music and sequential comic panels together. I did a few sketches, but nothing serious. I mostly just played around with little drawings with notated music in the speech balloons. That was about it. I filed the idea away for the future.
