When Jeff Swaney was 14 years old, an insurance salesperson knocked on the door of his home in Detroit, Michigan, extolling the soundness of a dizzying policy scheme to his parents. Detecting some dubious math in the pitch, the 14-year-old Swaney stepped in to quibble with the solicitor, trying and failing to convince his parents that this was one offer they ought to steer clear of. Years later, his inklings proved valid when in a time of economic need, his parents cashed out the policy for peanuts. Some money was gone forever, but what stuck was a valuable lesson for the teenaged Swaney.
In his debut memoir, “None of the Answers: Racing Through Life in Reverse,” Swaney elaborates: “The experience verified to me once again my ability to discern truth from bullshit and really served as motivation to get to a place of self-reliance and financial stability.”
Swaney has had a home in Bend and worked from the area since 2002. Along the way, he helped launch the BendFilm Festival and worked with the board for the Tower Theatre. His resume includes titles of “entrepreneur, advisor, consultant, collaborator, coach, concierge, networker, super dad, futurist, outdoorsman and friend.” The term “adventurer” could encapsulate all of that, and Swaney’s quiver of life experiences yields some unbelievable anecdotes from his storied past, memories he needed to get down before they were lost to time. When enough of his inner circle commented to him that he needed to write a book about his life, he started with what becomes a familiar approach as you read through “None of the Answers”: by the seat of his pants.
“I started writing on the back of envelopes and napkins and throwing it into a box,” explains Swaney. “Over time, the box started getting full of stuff, and I’d keep coming up with ideas and throw them in there. I started to think, ‘There might be a book here.'”
Swaney’s insights emerge as though from, as he self-describes, a wannabe philosopher.
Throughout the book, Swaney references quotes from great thinkers like Ram Dass — whose 1971 spiritual tome, “Be Here Now,” influenced him greatly — as well as Timothy Leary — who Swaney befriended after booking him at his old club. His days as owner and operator of Club Clearview throughout the burgeoning 1980s and ’90s Dallas, Texas, underground are legendary: The club helped to revive the Deep Ellum neighborhood’s arts and music scene in a time when anything and everything was on the table for trying to get people through the doors. Club Clearview helped to launch the careers of artists like Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, as well as foster such disparate ’90s entertainment as VR machines, slam poetry (before it was fluent in the American zeitgeist) and Soundgarden, who played an early gig at the venue. Mark Cuban, the billionaire “Shark Tank” tastemaker and minority owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, is an old friend and business partner of Swaney’s.
“I kind of fell into it, and worked with what I had,” Swaney says. “It was an incredible ride. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Before his ride took him to Dallas, Swaney was raised in Detroit just as the city began its precipitous economic decline. His family practiced as Lutherans, and Swaney was chosen as head acolyte of his school as reward for the voracity of his studies. The pull to organized religion was short-lived, if ever considered seriously, and when he graduated from college at Michigan State University with an engineering degree, rather than pursue the rigors of the workforce, Swaney prioritized his wayward spirit and decided to hop on a plane bound for Hong Kong, China, backpacking across the world for what he’d planned to be up to a full year.
“We don’t know pleasure without experiencing pain,” writes Swaney in “None of the Answers,” “and at the level of my planned subsistence, there was going to be plenty of discomfort. The bonus is we find the greatest joy in life is achieved when there are no expectations, and kablam! There you have a taste of nirvana.”
Subsequent travels through Hawaii and Europe, and even a dangerous and clandestine sojourn to Moscow during the Cold War, congealed to embolden a sense that lived experience — warts and all — was the greatest teacher in life for Swaney.
“You’re young and dumb and you don’t have shit, that’s when you do stuff like that,” says Swaney. “We learn by doing. We get lucky. We do the best we can.”
That risk-taking reaped artistic and, ultimately, financial freedom with Club Clearview.
“What I did was like P.T. Barnum,” says Swaney. “Our place had so many different rooms and we had so much stuff going on, if someone wanted to come try something, it was like, ‘Let’s do it.'”
Fellow budding entrepreneurs in the Deep Ellum scene noticed that Swaney seemed to know what got people’s synapses firing, and that his gift was in giving it to them.
“I never played music, I never really wrote or did anything like that,” says Swaney. “My gift was as a facilitator. I knew all these people and I really dug all these people. I could deal with anybody from the mayor — which I did — to every starving artist, and I treated everybody the same. The janitor got treated the same as the CEO of Neiman Marcus when he came in. We didn’t do any velvet ropes.”
Beyond his salad days in Dallas and around the world, the writing of “None of the Answers” compelled Swaney to put a pin in the expanses of his liberal world views, how someone “without a pot to piss in” would one day end up a successful businessperson. His book isn’t cloying, per se — he alludes to many mistakes along the road, and focuses later chapters on the traumas of a messy divorce and custody battle of his two children. His commonsense mantras punctuate the 300-plus-page book, drawing stark contrast to the seeming confusion surrounding the center of contemporary society. “Know your stuff,” “take a chance,” “trust your gut,” “follow your heart” — each milquetoast nugget valuable signage along the roadmap of life — populate the bottom line of Swaney’s wild ride so far.
“The cool thing about my life has been that it really wasn’t planned,” reiterates Swaney. “It all kinda just happened. I made some critical errors, but I survived them.
“I’m still going. We’re still on this ride. I wanna stay on the train as long as I can.”
Book release events for Jeff Swaney’s
“None of the Answers: Racing Through Life in Reverse”
Sat., March 8, 4-6pm: Meet, greet and sign at The Commonwealth Pub
Sun., March 9, 2-3:30pm: Buy, read and sign at Dudley’s Bookshop Cafe
Sat., March 15, 2-3:30pm: Buy, read and sign at Bend Barnes & Noble
More info at jeffswaney.com
This article appears in The Source Weekly March 6, 2025.
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Really good journalism to announce 3 days of book-signing by Jeff Swaney that have already passed!! The article about him came out 3/5, but this announcement in the Source just came out today, Mar. 16. Way to go, Source!!