Day 3: Why you should go the extra mile. And further.

This story starts in the dour Scottish new town of Glenrothes, remarkable largely for its bus station. It’s not the kind of place that features on the average artist’s itinerary, perhaps because the nearby metropolis of Dunfermline has the original Carnegie Hall, and given the choice between Carnegie Hall and the Balgeddie House Hotel, which would you pick?

Well, Tom Paxton isn’t your average artist. His resume includes songs such as “Going to the Zoo,” “The Last Thing On My Mind,” “The Marvelous Toy”, “Rambling Boy” and hundreds upon hundreds of others from a 50-year career.

He makes a point of playing out-of-the-way places, because he’s just as happy playing in front of 40 people as 400. Perhaps even happier. On this occasion – November 4th, 2001* – the tiny venue was sold out. It was less than two months after 9/11, and he played The Bravest as an encore. If you choose to listen to it, I recommend doing it somewhere that bawling your eyes out isn’t going to draw too much attention to you.

And after the gig, he walked through the audience, shaking hands, graciously accepting plaudits, and looking everybody in the eye.

It’s all in the eyes

Tom Paxton has incredible eyes. If you have access to an incurably curious, blue-eyed six-year-old boy, persuade him to wear a bushy white moustache and a beret and you’ll probably get somewhere near the experience. They sparkle with mischief and delight – and this is a man, remember, just doing his day-job: showing up in nowheresville, playing guitar for an hour or two, and saying hi to his customers afterwards. He’d roll his eyes if anyone called them customers, I’m sure.

One of my friends brightly chirruped, “We play and sing, too! And write songs!” And Tom’s eyes brightened even more. “That’s great,” he said, “if I can do it, you can do it! Keep it up!”

We beamed all the way home.

Fast forward five years, and I’m in Montana, freezing cold and going through the counselling that helped me beat depression. Part of my homework was gratitude training: to find people who had helped me in some way and to say ‘thank you’. And so I did: I got in touch with his record company and sent an embarrassingly gushy card telling part of the story I’ve just told you, and a CD of a few of my songs.

And he e-mailed back.

Not just “thanks for your message, I’ll be touring the frozen backwaters some time in 2020 if I can’t get out of it”.” He wrote, “I was right – you CAN do it.”

The man who sang the soundtrack to my childhood took the time to write me a personal message of encouragement. It still makes me grin today.

The moral of the story: if you go beyond the call of duty to make your customers feel special, they will love you back. If you go beyond that, they will honor you as a hero.

* I know this because he signed and dated my friend’s songbook (“this activates it”), which I subsequently ‘borrowed’ so long ago that it must have become ‘stolen’ at some point, and passed beyond the statute of limitations since. I hope so, because he’s not getting it back.