Cleaning the basement in the Steel house is much like an archeological adventure. I sometimes feel like a suburban Indiana Jones – only I’m not looking for a lost Ark .  It’s far more mundane.

Usually, my quest is for a lost book, a misplaced shirt or some of those old photos I’ve been meaning to show the kids.  I usually have to dig through a mound of kids’ toys, kitchen supplies or any form of rubble that has collected on the cellar floor through the years to even have a chance at discovery.

In trying to defeat the clutter leviathan, I often find things I haven’t used in years… yet somehow still need.  For instance, that old notebook filled with scribblings from yesteryear that now suddenly demands attention far more than the pile of knickknacks and litter strewn across the obscured carpet is suddenly something I need. 

Makes sense to me, anyway.

This is exactly what happened one busy afternoon in the not-too-distant past.

I found an old spiral notebook full of phrases, lyrics, half-finished poetry and journal entries.  Fascinating, amusing, nostalgic.

Amazing, really.

Now, let’s fast forward to later that week…

Andy and I were having a rehearsal at the studio. During our lunch break, I was describing my underground excavation adventures.  Enumerating all the nifty phrases, amusing song titles and song lyrics that were there (mostly juvenile, admittedly), I marveled a bit at all that “Bobby-ology” contained in its pages. I remarked, “You know, it’s amazing what you’ll find in an old spiral notebook.”

With a chuckle, a sly smile, and a gleam in his eye, Andy immediately put his guitar down, spun around, opened the bottom drawer of one his millions of storage cabinets and produced an artifact of his own….”Oh, I have one of those too…” he snickered.

It was a spiral notebook carbon-dated to 1987. 

Nineteen-Eighty-Freaking-Seven!

Wow.   I actually had a full head of hair back then! But I digress

So, as you might imagine, we started leafing through that little primordial collection of Romanisms.

Andy started reading some of his archaic lyrics aloud. Much like my notebook contents, there was much to be amused by, entertained by. After all, it’s truly an adventure to revisit the depths of the teenage mind.  “I don’t know what I was drinking when I wrote that one,”  he said, almost embarrassed, as he shook his head.

We’ve all been there.

As we plowed through for kicks, there was one set of stanzas that caught my eye and ears.  It had a title that grabbed me and drew me in immediately. It was called “Getting By.”  

There was something different about these words. They didn’t sound quite as “teen-agerish” as some of the other ones. The tone of the words, the simple yet poignant phrases, they were connecting with me somehow. As I listened, I felt the song was reading me rather than me reading it. 

Simple, heartfelt, universal.

So, the questions began.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s just something I wrote when I was a teenager.”

“Do you have music to this?”

Slight pause.

“Yes, but I haven’t played it in decades. Literally.”

That’s all that needed to be said at that point. You can guess what happened next.

In a nanosecond, the guitar was back in Andy’s hands. And somehow, this spiral-notebook relic from a century gone by started coming back to him.

The words that had been lying dormant in a lined-paper grave were coming to life.  It was rough and fragmented, but there was enough there for me to realize this was something special in the making.  Perhaps I felt it more than I knew it. 

“Do me a favor.  Record a demo of this, will you?  Just record what you have in rough form.  I want to work on this.”

“This?”

“Yes. You’ve got the pieces, the embryo of hit song here.”

“Are you kidding?”

I wasn’t kidding.

Almost immediately, I started tweaking arrangements in my head.

I knew right off the bat that the “I’m just getting by” part had to be repeated over and over–like a chorus, with slight changes in the chords.  That was the first thing that popped out at me.

A few days later, I got Andy’s demo in my email. 

I went to work.  Experimenting.  Molding. Shaping. Adding harmonies.   

One thing I immediately recognized was needed: a nice catchy riff.  It needed something that would grab the listener by the frontal cortex and reel him or her in, hook line and sinker.  Something simple, yet hypnotic.  Uplifting and hopeful, something to serve as a contrast to the pensive, plaintive and emotionally raw lyrics.

As serendipity would have it, I just happened to have a Puerto Rican instrument called a cuatro (a 10 stringed lute) leaning against the wall near the recording console.  I had bought it on Amazon (against my better judgment) some months earlier.  I had spent some time noodling and learning my way around the instrument. I really dug the pretty sound – sort of like a baby 12 string guitar. Some of the strings sets were in octaves, others were in unison. Pretty cool.

I picked it up and began instinctively playing this rising riff of notes.  It didn’t take long, but I had the main riff that would serve as an intro as well as join the space between the choruses and verses. It would also exist an outro, fading into the sonic distance.  To this day, I’m not really sure how that riff came into being, but I’m so glad it did.  It was exactly what the song needed.

I showed it to Andy, and it was love at first listen.

The solo, which is also something I created for this gem, was, in reality, an afterthought.  I thought the chord progression in the solo was intriguing enough for me to play over.  I’m not that fluid on cuatro, but I didn’t need to be.  A lovely, haunting, simple and singable solo was just what the music doctor ordered.  I decided to double the cuatro with a viola.  

Why a viola instead of, say, a violin?

A violin would have sounded too “bright and happy” for me.  The viola was more dark, somber, raspy, soulful and smokey.  The mixture of timbres, overtones and registers of the two instruments together was just scrumptious. 

We worked and tweaked out the song over the course of several sessions. We perfected harmonies and turned this notebook artifact of Andy’s – that I’m happy and proud to say I resurrected from obscurity – into one of our most popular tunes. It lives on our third album, “Rhyme and Treason.”

Perhaps, I could’ve entitled this article “Getting Getting By” or maybe “How We Got Getting By“.  But one thing’s for sure.  Once we found it, we didn’t let “Getting By” get by us.

Epilogue:

Earlier in the article I mentioned that I bought the cuatro on Amazon against my better judgement.  That instrument was a bitch to keep in tune.  It was a miracle that I managed to keep it in tune enough for the recording on the album.  I later found out that the neck was actually twisted and warped so much that the guitar tech just didn’t bother fixing it.  I was crushed.   I guess I should be grateful for the double miracle (finding that riff and keeping the thing in tune for the recording) and move on.

I decided to use a capo on the 7th fret of my guitar to play the riff for live performances.  We tried it with a mandolin once, but for some odd reason it just didn’t translate well. 

For those of you who were wondering, that’s why I play the song on guitar for live performances.  I actually think it sounds quite nice. I hope you do too.