All the while Sheldon played in bands of his own. After high school there was Bead Game, an acid jazz/rock band that snagged a record contract and earned a cult following in the Boston area. "It would do really well now," he says of its sound. But Bead Game, like the other groups he was in, eventually drifted apart.
By the time he was 21, he was in Los Angeles, trying to break in as a studio musician. Work came his way and his connections multiplied. By 1980, an old one paid off.
Kortchmar, who had recorded a solo project, Innuendo, was hired to open for Linda Ronstadt on her spring tour. He was putting together a band. Taylor recommended Sheldon. Maybe Kortchmar was remembering a kid who trailed him around, but Taylor's say-so wasn't quite good enough. Kortchmar made Sheldon audition. He ended up hiring Shelton, who then lined up the bass player and the drummer.
When the tour passed through New York City, Sheldon visited Taylor in the studio, where he was doing some recording. Taylor was looking for some musicians to back him in a half-dozen or so concerts he had planned to raise funds for independent presidential candidate John Anderson's campaign and he invited Sheldon to be part of it.
Sheldon says it felt great to get that invitation, "to know that he thought I could do it. I knew he thought of me as a guitar player."
By the time the Ronstadt tour was over, Sheldon -- who was by then living in San Francisco - figured he could probably finally make a go of it as a session player in Los Angeles. He also realized it wasn't what he wanted to do. He wanted to write.
Sheldon circa 1995
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"It always seemed that the people who made the stuff were always the ones I wanted to be like," he says. "I got tired of: 'OK, Johnny, do your stuff.' I felt like my potential wasn't being realized.
"I wanted to write a classic. I wanted to write a really great song. Little did I know that it would take 20 years of my life to do it."
Sheldon and his wife, Susan, moved back to Boston. They had a couple of daughters: Spring, now 21 and Elisabeth, 15. And he went back to school, studying music at the New England Conservatory.
"I thought I'd like to know the nuts and bolts of how these things are done, so I'm not relying completely on intuition,'' he says of the decision.
With babies and school and gigs and carpentry work to help pay the bills, it was a busy time.
He was making a living, playing weddings and dances and "hotels where people drank tea," but the work left him little energy for song writing.
"I was playing a lot and making some money but I wasn't playing my own music enough."
By 1990, he was ready to call it quits. He was about to turn 40 and was seriously thinking of taking early retirement from music. He recalls thinking: "This didn't work out the way I thought it would. I'm not making enough money playing guitar to make a go of it."
So he and his wife sold their Boston home and moved to the country, west of Boston but east of the Berkshires. The farmhouse they bought came with a horse boarding operation, which they took over. Sheldon found he was writing again, with a vengeance.
"Sometimes I've thought that cleaning horse stalls is good for song writing," he says, explaining that a couple of hours of manual labor seemed to turn on his creative tap.
"When I was working all these music jobs, I didn't have any energy left for my music."
Sheldon describes writing music in much the same way as Taylor does - as hearing something that already exists as opposed to deliberately crafting combinations of chords and lyrics. "It's like I hear something and I follow it and turns into a song." For him, the process is fairly constant. Sometimes he's working on several songs at a time, other times will be quiet and he'll be just working on one.
He estimates he's written hundreds, but says the keepers probably whittle down to about 100. (Case in point: Sheldon wrote several entirely different songs to the music of September Grass, but none seemed right until he arrived at the current union of lyrics and music.)
John Sheldon and Blue Streak playing a roadhouse bar in Western Massachusetts circa 1996.
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Sheldon put together a band -- John Sheldon and Blue Streak - and started playing dates in a corridor through western Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut. Playing original material in bars can be a pretty tough task, but his music has been well received. He says he has a small "but rabid" following. "I'm a small cult figure at this point."
The group, which has since disbanded, recorded three CDs. Taylor produced the second, Boneyard, which was released in 1994. Over the years, Phoebe Sheldon had been giving Taylor tapes of her brother's songs and making sure he listened to them. Taylor liked the collection of songs destined to be Boneyard, so he helped out with time and money and sang on one track, a duet with Sheldon called Little Things.
But Sheldon wanted to get his music out to a wider audience than he and Blue Streak could reach. He knew that required persuading a bigger name to record some of his songs. But that was proving to be no easy task.
"There's just so much unsolicited work out there. You don't get anywhere unless you have a relationship with someone. People would say: `Why don't you get James to do one of your songs? Get James to do a song and then we can talk.' "
Sheldon would point out Taylor makes an album every five years or so at this point in his career and each only features one or two songs by other writers. "It's great that I know him but...."
In fact, Taylor had been talking about recording one of Sheldon's songs, a tune called Georgia's Valley, on his 1991 release, New Moon Shine. "He told me that he'd worked it up," Sheldon says. But the song didn't make the final cut.
Still, Sheldon had the sense that Taylor was interested in his work. "He always would ask for more," Sheldon says.
For his part, Taylor has high praise for Sheldon's music. "This is a song of his, out of dozens of songs, really wonderful songs, that I resonated with, " he said recently when asked about September Grass.
The song may have resonated for Taylor, but he sat with it for quite awhile, "reconstituting it," as he puts it, into his own guitar and voice style. Sheldon got the song to Taylor shortly after Hourglass was released in May of 1997. Sometime later, Taylor sent Sheldon a cryptic message through his sister: "It would be nice if John didn't record September Grass."
It was a positive sign, but nothing Sheldon could take to the bank -- especially after the disappointment of Georgia's Valley. "How could I?"
Two years ago this month, Sheldon finally heard Taylor was planning on recording September Grass. Again, the route the news took was circuitous. "This is how I get communication: He called Phoebe's house and talked to my niece, Meredith," Sheldon says with a laugh. Taylor's message: "Tell John that the song sounds great."
Sheldon was incredulous. "They're working on it in the studio?"
A little while later, he and Phoebe travelled to Great Barrington, Ma. to hear Taylor's daughter, Sally, play a gig. Taylor was there and the three old friends met for supper. Taylor filled them in on his plan to use the song. "It's like: 'Steve Gadd played drums on my song? Unbelievable!' "
Still, Sheldon didn't allow himself to get his hopes up. September Grass could have been another Georgia's Valley. "There was a part of me that wasn't going to know it till the record came out," he says.
"I was sweating bullets the day before the CD came out, wondering if there was any way they could shave the outside of the disk off at the last minute. Especially when I found out that it was the first track. Wouldn't that be easy?"
September Grass did make the final cut. In fact, it is being widely praised as one of the standout tracks on a standout album. From the sounds of it, Sheldon's feet have barely touched the ground since mid-August when October Road was released.
"It's still amazing to me and I think it will be for some time. That I was able to write a song that matched him so perfectly.''
To date, September Grass hasn't been released as a single. And Taylor didn't include the song on the set list during his recent short swing through Europe. Sheldon is quietly confident in the staying power of September Grass. "I have faith that song is going to be heard."
In fact, Sheldon has had faith in his song-writing future all along. "I've always had a feeling that there's something I'm supposed to make," he says. "What kept me going was that I knew I had a job to do."
That job's not over. "I don't think I'm finished. I definitely feel like there's more to do. Even if September Grass becomes a classic, it's still not finished for me."
In the short term, more to do means giving some interviews, registering his Web site (www.johnsheldon.com) with search engines like Google and finishing up a new CD. It, like Sheldon's other CDs, can be ordered from his Web site.
The new release will be called Sometimes You Get Lucky, after the aptly named title track he wrote about two months ago. Sheldon's version of September Grass, which he recorded with Blue Streak, will be on the new release as well. "I can't sing like James, so I made the track more lively," he says. ``It's a little more raw."
So will September Grass open doors for Sheldon as a songwriter? He can't be sure, but he's choosing to be optimistic. "I'm going to act like it is going to open doors.
"I know I've got a lot of really good songs that I've written and I want to get them heard. I've got a bunch of people to call -- and of course, more songs to write."
