I always thought Franks Wild Years was very narrative an album, and now find out Tom Waits wrote the songs to accompany a play. Or as a play. A musical play, presumably. What became of that play is unknown. History has left it behind, but the music stands. Amazing how a song that clocks in at a buck fifty packs in a walloping lifetime’s worth of persona. It’s a little snatch of a song, a mere wisp, and there’s all you need to know of Tom Waits and his sentimental side. Which he has quite a bit of. He seems like someone who appreciates a good session of crying-in-your-whiskey. Such a simpatico character. Hands up if you’re excited about is upcoming new album!
Dream away the tears in your eyes
Dream away your sorrows
Dream away all your goodbyes
Dream away tomorrow
I promise when the sun comes up
I promise I’ll be true
and just like before the band starts to play
they always play your favorite tune
and dream awawy when everyone’s gone
dream away your grey skies tooo
dream away and nothing is wrong
dreams have wishes that are waiting for you
and up ahead the road is turning
turning for you and me
and just like before
the band starts to play
now there’s that twinkle in your eye
and dream away
Everything has a lighter side. And now, the lighter side of The Smiths. (If MAD was still running The Lighter Side strip, that would be a great one. Or are they? Do they still exist?) The root causes of Morrissey songs are most often debatable, but this one is pretty clearly inspired by his short-lived flirtation with gainful employment. He’d labored briefly as a clerk in a tax office, hated it and spent most of his pre-fame life mooching off the government. It’s also thought to be partly inspired by The Smiths’ by-then strained relationship with their handlers at the Rough Trade record label, a relationship that would continue, in animosity, until the band’s demise in 1987. The legend goes that label boss Geoff Travis did indeed attempt to write ‘bloody awful’ poetry, thus earning Morrissey’s eternal contempt.
All these interesting facts I got perusing my brand new Mozipedia, which I have just purchased after a lengthy search. Author Simon Goddard is widely accepted as the world’s leading expert on all things Morrissey, which isn’t yet something you can get a PhD in, but probably will be within my lifetime, if not Morrissey’s. Goddard has written the self-explanatory Mozipedia, and Songs That Saved Your Life an exhaustive compendium of the when, where, how and why behind every song The Smiths ever recorded. Therein, according to Goddard, Frankly Mr. Shankly is “The Smiths at their most vaudevillian extreme” because “The manifest music-hall wit of its lyrics transpose even to Marr’s complementary, tongue-in-cheek score…” And so on in a similar spirit. If that seems overwhelmingly academic for a pop song, it’s nothing compared to Gavin Hopps’s treatise Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, which is highfalutin to the point of being unreadable. Hopps has filled his book with mind-straining lines like (regarding Reel Around the Fountain):
“Morrissey’s use of ‘half,’ which is foregrounded by the parallelism with the previous section, quietly complicates everything and encourages speculation by tantalizingly telling us much less than it appears to [...] we remain outside the narrative, and are left to read backwards from effect to cause across a comical aporetic boundary.”
I was left in some doubt whether Hopps has in fact written an honest-to-God PhD level assessment of the works of Morrissey if read as literature, or if the whole thing is a massive joke satirizing the self-seriousness, willful obscurity and incomprehensible jargon of academic writing. For being filled with footnotes in minuscule type and the contorted, syllable-heavy vocabulary of academia, Hopps’s book is nonetheless useless as research material, for not having an index (though a ten-page bibliography is handily present.) One wonders at the inherent hilarity of treating Morrissey – in the end, a pop star, devilishly literate though he is – with such scholarly reverence. Though how can I judge poor Gavin Hopps? In my own meagre critical output, my longest rants and raves have been about ol’ Mozzer. He is, in his own sick way, one of pop’s great pied pipers. Just like Bowie has been someone to dress up for, Morrissey is someone to write for.
Suzanne Vega’s most recent album Beauty & Crime is a tribute to the glamour of old New York. Vega has paid tribute to her hometown in many songs over the years, but this is as close as she’s gotten to making a concept album. With songs like Ludlow Street and New York Is A Woman, this is Vega’s love letter to the city she’s always lived in. Nor does she abandon her other favored themes; the ups and downs of love, and of desire. The song Frank & Ava is inspired by the tumultuous relationship of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, but it speaks to any couple who find that love isn’t enough to keep them together. Passion can be destructive, passionate love is just down the road from passionate hate. Affairs that begin in passionate love will sometimes end in passionate drinking and fighting. Maybe it’s a lesson not to pursue impassioned attraction, to lead with the head and hope the hormones will follow, but that would be a cold and sad way to live. I don’t know of any way to love except through magnetic pull and electric currents, taking the gamble of a bad end.
You’re pretty foxy yourself there, Jimi. Dude had style. He played like his guitar was on fire, which it sometimes was. I once had a boss who was an old flower child and one of his favorite stories was the time he saw Jimi play. The punchline of the story was “If I didn’t have the pictures I wouldn’t know I was there. I don’t remember a thing of it.” The moral of that is; don’t get all fucked up at shows, because you might think it’s just a show but it might be an historical event and someday when your grandkids envy your luck you should be able to recall it. I think I read somewhere that Hendrix himself was of the same opinion (I could be off, here). He thought that getting high and playing music was redundant and the enjoyment of music should be its own high. Sadly though, he was ok with getting blitzed out of his gourd at other times. Although dying in his prime did inadvertently boost his popularity – there’s nothing more iconic than a premature exit from this world, it seems.
Not exactly a ‘real’ song, but bear with me. I love Flight of the Conchords, ok. Though through some cosmic oversight still haven’t seen their second season. Besides being a crazy hilarious show, Flight of the Conchords is music. They overstep the usual rule that comedy songs are only funny once and don’t have any legitimate musical value outside the joke. Conchords songs are funny, even out of context (though more funny in it), and fun to listen to just because they’re good songs. Why they’re not on TV anymore is inexplicable and saddening.
Genius in flight. Presented (almost) without comment.
When she said
“Don’t waste your words, they’re just lies”
I cried she was deaf
And she worked on my face until breaking my eyes
Then said, “What else you got left”
It was then that I got up to leave
But she said, “Don’t forget
Everybody must give something back
For something they get”.
I stood there and hummel
I tapped on her drum and asked her how come
And she buttoned her boot
And straightened her suit
Then she said, “Don’t get cute”
So I forced my hands in my pockets
And felt with my thumbs
And gallantly handed her
My very last piece of gum.
She threw me outside
I stood in the dirt where ev’ryone walked
And after finding I’d
Forgotten my shirt
I went back and knocked
I waited in the hallway, she went to get it
And I tried to make sense
Out of that picture of you in your wheelchair
That leaned up against …
Her Jamaican rum
And when she did come, I asked her for some
She said, “No dear”
I said, “Your words aren’t clear
You’d better spit out your gum”
She screamed till her face got so red
Then she fell on the floor
And I covered her up and then
Thought I’d go look through her drawer.
And when I was through
I filled up my shoe
And brought it to you
And you, you took me in
You loved me then
You didn’t waste time
And I, I never took much
I never asked for your crutch
Now don’t ask for mine.
Conor Oberst is so self-effacing to show himself getting pelted by an unruly audience. False modesty, Conor. It’s getting a bit cliche to keep saying, but I hold that Oberst is one of the few (if not the only) brilliant lyricists today who isn’t pushing towards or past retirement age. There’s plenty enough young musicians running around who are gifted and amazing, don’t misinterpret. But there aren’t very many who squirrel into the memory by words alone. Perhaps I’m not entirely objective here, because of how many Bright Eyes songs are tied up to me emotionally, but I’ve heard others say the same thing. The phalanx of critics lining up with laurels emblazoned “New Robert Zimmerman” stretches around the block and if it weren’t for the stigma of the ‘emo’ categorization it’d be an even bigger crowd. Emo is an amorphous ‘genre’ that also includes dreck like Fall Out Boy and the insufferable Dashboard Confessional, so for casual observers it may be easy to dismiss Bright Eyes as something weepy teenage misfits listen and ascribe great importance to. It may sound belittling but it’s weepy teenage misfits who carried the torch for now canonized songwriters from Lou Reed to Morrissey. Also in regards to emo and its association with teenage weepiness, there’s a current of backlash from detractors who insinuate that Oberst gets an unfair amount of credit from critics who either are or formerly were weepy teenage girls and want to ascribe him great importance because he’s SO CUTE!! (An image problem Dylan never had to deal with.) But I’ve no doubt he will outgrow his dreamy-boy image and hold on to any and all credit on the sheer strength of his material.
Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe
There’s people always dying trying to keep them alive
There’s bodies decomposing in containers tonight
In an abandoned building where
Squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl
With fifteen cans of spray paint and a chemical swirl
She’s standing in the ashes at the end of the world
Four winds blowing through her hair
But when great Satan’s gone… the Whore of Babylon…
She just can’t sustain the pressure where it’s placed
She caves
The Bible’s blind, the Torah’s deaf, the Qur’an’s mute
If you burned them all together you’d get close to the truth still
They’re pouring over Sanskrit on the Ivy League moons
While shadows lengthen in the sun
Cast all the school and meditation built to soften the times
And hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds
It’s knocking over fences crossing property lines
Four Winds, cry until it comes
And it’s the Sum of Man slouching towards Bethlehem
A heart just can’t contain all of that empty space
It breaks. It breaks. It breaks.
Well I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet
Like a newly orphaned refugee retracing my steps
All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead
They said, “You’d better look alive”
And I was off to old Dakota where a genocide sleeps
In the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused East
I buried my ballast. I made my peace.
Heard Four Winds, leveling the pines
But when great Satan’s gone… the Whore of Babylon…
She just can’t remain with all that outer space
She breaks. She breaks. She caves. She caves.
Little-known tidbit: Page and Plant wrote this song in tribute to the standard unit of butter packaging – four sticks of, per pack. Yep. No, I just made that up. In actuality the title refers to how many drumsticks John Bonham used to beat his drums on the recording. Then the article went into in-depth detail about unusual time signatures and I clocked out. I think my interpretation’s more exciting anyway. I mean, you know they totally meant four sticks of butter in a Last Tango kind of way. And isn’t that the greatest mental image? Ok, I’ll shut up now…
I don’t have too many thoughts about this song, except that it’s chill and I like it. It’s not all unusual that that’s all the thoughts I have. I didn’t have too many thoughts yesterday either. Some groups don’t really inspire thinking in me and this one is particularly anonymous in my mind. I know that Mo Horizons is a German DJ duo who specialize in bossa nova inspired chillaxing mixes. What more do I need to know? Nothing, that’s not my world. Sometimes something comes out of that world and crosses my path and I like it, and there you go. My only thought is; these guys look exactly like my idea of two German dudes who think they’re cool. Who knows, maybe on the Continent that’s exactly what passes for coolness, and whatever, I like their music.
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