Though Sam Shepard's other career as a film actor is probably better known, his relationship with music is more germane to his plays. Kicking a Dead Horse, like much of his work, is partly shaped by a piece of music: in this case the ballad Didn't He Ramble, which he remembers his father singing.
He was himself the drummer with the psychedelic folk band The Holy Modal Rounders, and still plays the occasional gig with them. He has written songs with Patti Smith and with Bob Dylan.
His career as a playwright was, moreover, shaped more by the freewheeling energy of the 1960s music scene than by traditional theatre. "I arrived in New York when I was about 19 and I had the notion that I wanted to do some acting. I was doing a little bit of writing, but not theatre writing. I got quickly disenchanted with the acting because of the audition process and all of that stuff. I didn't want to job myself around. And I was living with a bunch of musicians at the time and I felt more of an affinity with them. I started listening to people talking, and I started thinking, 'well, dialogue is a kind of music'. And dialogue fits theatre. These dialogues started happening and they worked their way into the shape and form of plays." He accompanied Bob Dylan on his 1975 Rolling Thunder review tour, with a view to writing a screenplay for a Dylan film (it was never used). He and Dylan co-wrote the song Brownsville Girlfor the latter's 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded. I asked him if he learned anything from working with Dylan.
"In fact I did. Bob is really interesting to work with. I find the lyric form and vertical poetry in general to be very difficult and very demanding. You have to have a precision about it. Writing horizontally across the page, I feel very comfortable with. With this other thing, I run into so many blocks. Bob has this strange and wonderful phrasing, where he can jam things, he can extend them, he can move lines around. As we were writing the thing - he already had the melody line - I said 'how are you going to fit this line into the melody?' and he said 'don't worry about it'. Of course he does it, but he does it in a way that is kinda miraculous. You don't know quite how he's squeezing things and moving things, but it's fabulous. And there are contrapuntal rhythms that are going along underneath it, with the lyric happening way up here somewhere and there's another deal going on underneath. I know he does a lot of rhyming, but he makes things happen in the line that you don't think can come out on the page. I kinda learned some stuff that way from him. And also his total disregard for whether or not it's going to fit into an existing ideas of what is a good song. He doesn't give a sh*t, he just goes to where he wants to go. The theatre that excites me is that kind of theatre, that doesn't fit into what we know. It surprises you, makes you listen in a different way."