Sam Shepard Bio

I’ve been very selective about what I read lately but I picked this up quite spontaneously. I think I first heard of Sam Shepard when I saw Ethan Hawk and Paul Dano in True West a few years ago, which was incredible. And I’ve also been keen to learn more about the inspiration for my favorite Joni Mitchell song. And “how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes” someone can get.

The book was great but like a lot of great books it left me wanting to read more: see or read more of his plays and to read his essay collections.

A few interesting things I learned from the book.

West Village Connections

He joined a theater troupe at a young age and then while they were passing through New York, he stayed behind in the city. He eventually settled in the West Village which was an ideal place to be at the time for a budding playwright.

Shepard could not have chosen a better place to begin his career as a playwright than the Village Gate. Unlike at the Five Spot and the Half Note, many of those who worked at the Gate were also involved with theater on the Lower East Side and so provided him with a relatively easy entrance into a world about which he knew almost nothing.

Jazz Influences

Shepard went to school with Charles Mingus’s son and they reunited with each other when Shepard moved to New York. There they embedded themselves within the theater and jazz scene in the West Village.

At the Half Note, the Five Spot, and the Village Gate, Sam Shepard saw many of the greatest jazz artists of an era that was about to end. He saw Eric Dolphy, the great alto sax, bass clarinet, and flute player whose sudden death at the age of thirty-six on June 29, 1964, would reduce Charles Mingus to tears for the rest of his life.

At the Gate, Shepard saw “Thelonius Monk mauling the piano with his huge hands, doing his little shuffle-step hat dance around the stage then returning to the stool to begin the hauntingly simple melody line of ‘Round About Midnight.’ ”

Father / Family

Shepard did not have a good relationship with his father. The Sam Sr. was a WWII vet and seemed to lose his sense of purpose after returning from the war. He was a workaholic who provided well for his family but was never satisfied even when they had a relatively comfortable life. He was a raging alcoholic and by the end of his life lived an existence that brings to mind Karl Ove Knausgaard’s father’s last years. Shepard explored the difficulty of this relationship in a lot of his writing.

Movies

I only knew Shepard as a playwright going in to this book. But he eventually ventured into the movie industry as well. Not only as a screenwriter but as an actor, most notably in Days of Heaven and The Right Stuff. One of my favorite discoveries in the book was that he wrote Paris, Texas and recruited Harry Dean Stanton to play the main character after they ran into each other at a bar in New Mexico.

Philip Glass & Cape Breton

The book didn’t go into it in very much detail but I was fascinated, as an east-coast Canadian, to learn that Shepard was friends with with Philip Glass and that he shared Glass’s love of Cape Breton:

Aside from being close friends who worked together on several films, one of which they co-directed, [Rudy] Wurlitzer and Frank also shared an abiding love for Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia. After going there for the first time with his friend the composer Philip Glass, who was then also driving a cab in New York City, Wurlitzer had bought an old lodge on eighty acres of land where he and Glass built separate houses where they still spend their summers.