13 - Sam Shepard as musical experimenter

Summary

Alternate Tracks

In 1998, when rock musician Bruce Springsteen released his boxed set, Tracks, he offered up the previously unreleased songs and recorded materials as “an alternate route to some of the destinations” his career as an artist had taken him. Springsteen's words remind one that as an artist amasses a body of work and acquires a lasting artistic identity, critics and the public may view him in an increasingly narrow light. Consequently, the artist sometimes steers, or is perceived as steering, a straighter and straighter course, ceasing to explore the side roads, the alternate tracks, of his personal and artistic interests. As the character Hoss says in Sam Shepard's Tooth of Crime: the artist becomes “stuck in [his] image” and can no longer, as Crow says in that same play, “[run] flat out to a new course.”

Gathering together some of the marginalia of playwright Sam Shepard’s career, the material that has been pushed to the perimeter of his public image to make way for “the Shepard myth,” there arises an alternate route through that career which has all but disappeared from critical perceptions of Shepard’s work as a playwright. That route includes an accomplished body of music plays and musical experimentation which, for many other dramatists, might have been a satisfying life’s work.