SAWeekend: Musician Tom West’s touching tribute after his father succumbed to motor neurone disease
When Adelaide singer-songwriter Tom West lost his father to motor neurone disease he tried to escape the grief by fleeing to America. What followed was two-and-a-half years searching for gigs … and answers.
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‘Nothing you do next will be as hard as this.”
This is what I told myself in the weeks and months after dad died.
Recently, my life has been long and lonely nights on the road; overnight buses between gigs, sleeping in train stations or airports; hauling my guitar, a backpack and suitcase up and down subways through the grumpy crowds; existing on a diet of alcohol, pizzas, gas station coffee and burgers; finishing and then shelving an album, starting work on another; putting on a brave face for the bartenders at dead gigs … and finding out all your current shows, future shows and potential shows are cancelled due to a deadly global virus outbreak.
However, nothing will be as hard as finding, in the week after dad’s funeral, the list of songs he’d wanted played at it that we didn’t. Or unzipping his pants and pulling out his penis so he could wee. Or watching, helpless, as he grew frustrated and depressed at having to communicate via a poorly functioning device that read the movement of his eyes. Or finding him wailing and abandoned, bed wet with urine, in a neon-lit beige hospital room begging for water through a voice utterly mangled and essentially indecipherable by the disease.
Or holding him up on the side of the bed, crying, dribbling mucus, feebly pounding into an iPad screen with curled up hands to slowly type with his knuckle “I still have months to live” – the night before he ended up in palliative care. Or realising that a huge chunk of the family you once knew had cleaved off like an iceberg into frigid waters. Or forgetting the sound of his voice and being too afraid of grief to find a recording of it and listen.
My old man, Gary West, died from Motor Neurone Disease in August 2017, aged 57.
Running from the grief, even though I maybe didn’t fully realise it at the time, I set off on a two-and-a-half year journey to the USA to try my luck as a singer, a songwriter and a guitar player.
It started with me showing up curious, eager and naive in Nashville and ended with me, hilariously, getting bitten by a husky, stitched up to play my show that night before only days later fleeing back to Australia from New York City at the start of March, just as the pandemic was breaking with a record almost finished.
At the end of 2017 I didn’t set out with a plan of attack, much of a purpose, or even a guitar, initially, but I did resolve to try and take every opportunity, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, to meet people or find chances to perform.
If anything felt like it would be hard, out of my comfort zone or challenging, it probably meant that I should do it. This tactic, as well as some connections from Australia, eventually led me to perform at the ramshackle, eccentric conglomeration of folk and traditional musicians, The Folk Alliance, in Kansas City, which, I think, proved to be somewhat of a turning point for me.
It was the first time I performed a song called Carlton Won By 7, in which I recalled two games of footy that took place in the last week of Dad’s life.
That week started with me sobbing watching Carlton versus West Coast with dad in his electric wheelchair. It was August so it was cold and blustery outside and the fire was lit.
He had obviously noticed that I was upset – the week earlier he had choked on a piece of sausage and food matter had finally entered his lungs, which heralded the beginning of the end – and offered me a cheeky look as mum slowly poured a beer, dark and viscous Coopers stout, into the valve and pushed it into the feeding tube that went through the skin of his chest, directly to his stomach.
Speech was not possible at this point. Carlton, Dad’s team, lost that game in typical fashion. One week later we were in the hospice, he was unresponsive, but still alive, the footy was on: in that game Carlton beat Hawthorn by seven points. Not long after that, Dad was dead.
It was an extremely raw song. When I played it that time, on an impromptu stage in a small hotel room in Kansas City in February 2018, it certainly felt raw. Evidently people cried in the room. I was crying, I think. I’d never had a reaction like that to my music before.
At that moment I didn’t realise that I had inadvertently taken the songwriters’ equivalent of the nuclear option in that room. I was still recovering from the extremely sad events of the year before, plus music business showcase conferences are intense experiences for performers at the best of times. I do feel bad looking back: it wasn’t very fair of me, I don’t think, to perform that song on an “in the round” stage (where songwriters perform one song each, one after the other, usually) like I did at that time, and a few times after.
It feels selfish to me now, not because I’m claiming it is a groundbreaking tune but because I was unleashing raw, untamed emotion and blasting it around wholly oblivious to my surroundings. I hope I didn’t burn any bridges with my colleagues by performing that intense song but I worry that I did. I haven’t played it since and I probably won’t again.
Nevertheless, by some cosmic quirk, a festival booker saw me play it and was impressed enough to invite me back to the US to perform later in the year, which eventually led to a visa for one year enabling me to perform and continue the journey.
Over the course of this time pounding the pavement in the USA, it began to feel increasingly surreal that I was making much better and faster progress in a “career” sense than I ever had in my many years of doing just the same thing in Australia.
Despite coming such a long way, literally to the other side of the planet, to start again from scratch, I was extremely glad for it. It was liberating to stumble into a new world where the music that I liked, music that I was good at playing, was appreciated and viable.
By the middle of 2019 I had played a lot of shows in all kinds of places. Anything to try to make something happen, to network for opportunities, to meet new fans and supporters: good shows, house shows, shit shows and everything in between. The lifestyle was pretty tough, lots of waiting and boredom, and lots of stress. It felt like I was surviving on alcohol, which has been a challenge for me for a long time but in acute situations can get out of control fast – especially when it’s cheap and you’re in bars almost every day.
My mantra of doing things that feel hard or put me way out of my comfort zone meant that I was pretty much always seeking a strong helping hand of Dutch courage. I embarrassed myself on a few occasions, which I regret, but maybe the end has been worth the means after all – too soon to say, I guess.
Smoking weed and drinking was a big crutch for me while Dad was sick and that carried through, I’m not proud to admit.
As a kid my family would take vacations to the Southern Ocean-facing coast on the Fleurieu Peninsula. This is a place with long beaches, big surf and bigger skies that fade orange, pink, lilac to deep and dark starry nights in the fresh winter evenings. Early in 2017 we went there with Dad for the last time.
At one point in the short stay there we quietly walked to the beach together. He wanted to go in the surf for what would be the last time. He was pretty weak by this stage of the fast-acting disease so I ended up holding him upright as the surf jostled us. Unable to swallow or properly clear his mouth and throat meant that falling into the water would not have been great.
It was surreal and distressing to stand there holding this guy I was born looking up to, despite all faults. Only a handful of months before, Dad seemed so athletic and tough.
Dad was always the first person I sent any new song or mix to for feedback; he inspired me to work hard, saying that extreme commitment, resilience and practise is the key to success.
He always said to never give up despite any setback, and he didn’t give up himself – even right up until the angry, bitter and traumatic end.
In that moment, while we were standing there in the afternoon sun buffeted by the cold and bustling, foamy waves looking out to the horizon, the thought crossed my mind that there is no more land out there until you reach Antarctica. This was, admittedly, an obscure thought to have at that moment but it became the image that I built a song, and later, after some twists and turns, an album, around.
After sharing this song and story, it became fairly common for people to speak to me after shows and tell me their story, their experience with grief, or about their own struggle. People who had lost loved ones, who had experience with MND or cancer, or another horrible disease, or had befallen some other tragedy.
Some people would be crying; one guy, tall and strong looking with tears wet in his eyes, just asked for a hug. It was crazy, and humbling. Reflecting on it now, I think that it must be a great privilege to have been able to tell a story of my own that inspires others to want to share a part of theirs with me.
Grief is a weird thing that everyone will eventually come to know, but you can only ever know your own, and you will know it intimately. But that knowing leads you to learn and learning leads to understanding, which is maybe something that we can communally appreciate.
Tom West will perform at The Gov on September 13. Tickets at thegov.com.au. His new album, Antarctica, is out now.