Demos for Bill & Pete/House Carpenters added to Archive.

Quickly: I just posted a group of six 4-track demos to my Archive.  The tracks are as follows:

1. For Good Measure
2. I Know & You Know
3. Have You Seen My Baby
4. As the Night Goes By
5. 12 O’Clock Sharp
6. Across the Windy Distance

All of these are well-done, and the only one that isn’t a fully fleshed-out arrangement with drums is “As the Night Goes By,” though that one nonetheless is a nicely done recording, with some vocal tricks in the arrangement that are a lot different that what the House Carpenters ended up releasing on In the Choir of Primates.

Enjoy them.  I have begun a blog post about “I Know & You Know,” but as I’ve started working again it may take a little time to finish the commentary.  I am at a point where I’m getting ready to start writing and recording again.  I plan on returning, after cutting Adieu, False Heart live in studio (to great effect, I’d say), to my tried-and-true method of overdubbing the various instruments on the recording.  I expect other people will be part of it, too, as their schedules allow.

Good news is that after years teaching high school and barely surviving the round of layoffs that hit my school district like so many across California, I’ve started teaching seventh grade.  I am well aware that things always deteriorate after the first week, but for the first time in years I have a group of students who ask questions without being prompted, who want to do a good job, and who aren’t too jaded to allow themselves to have fun in class.  Of course I had students like that at the high school, but generally I had to push everything forward.  I would never have sought this change, but I’m genuinely grateful it happened, and I’m having a ball.

Making Money and Taking Life

“Making Money and Taking Life”, from Adieu, False Heart.

“Making Money and Taking Life (demo)“, from Adieu, False Heart Demos.

Making Money and Taking Life

Some days
When I look down
I feel a pulling
Draw me toward the ground
I come back
Into the present tense
Take my big tip
To devise a defense
Cutting care and cutting cost
Ensures against a quarterly loss

To shareholder’s meetings
I bring rosy tint
I hide the Devil
In the fine print
In suits unsettled
On claims denied
Smokescreens and ruses
When our witnesses lied
But I feel my weakening seams
In lost moments and fleeting dreams

Of this office
And this town
Let there be no defense
Should riots come down
And I’ll raise
My bloody hands
I’ll stumble outside
Without exit plans
The Law’s a subtle knife
Making money and taking life

I meet each gaze
And send it back
It keeps my accounts
Inside the black
But it seems
A tightening toll
To keep composure
Watching tears roll
But my money’s gone to red from green
When I look clearly at this sickening scene

Of this office
And this town
Let there be no defense
Should riots come down
And I’ll raise
My bloody hands
I’ll stumble outside
Without exit plans
The Law’s a subtle knife
Making money and taking life

Whether I lay
On some flowery deathbed
Or a victim’s pistol
Bursts the back of my head
I’ll give up the ghost
And concede defeat
Then hungrily wander
Upon Grant Street
The Law’s a subtle knife
Making money and taking life

Of this office
And this town
Let there be no defense
Should riots come down
And I’ll raise
My bloody hands
I’ll stumble outside
Without exit plans
The Law’s a subtle knife
Making money and taking life

As I wrote before, I knew I had a lead on a good direction for a new project as soon as I’d finished “Cheap Liquor.”  I then had something of a streak, ending with this tune.  It was not the last I wrote for the album, but it took me months to finish that last tune, “God Help the Passers-by,” and it was quite some time before I realized that the ten original tunes I had would, with the addition of some traditional tunes, be a record.  I ended up dropping a couple of the original tunes in the final product.

Many, many people to whom I’ve spoken have bemoaned the state of political song in the early 21st century, at the very least as far as political song from white America is concerned.  It’s hard to fathom, really.  It’s not as if white musicians can’t be genuinely helpful in a political sense.  Woody Guthrie is the obvious example, but he’s only at the top of what is a long list.

Johnny Cash might be an even better example than Woody, because he was never known primarily as a political artist.  At the same time, his music oozed political significance while not, with some exceptions, giving any sense of having been conceived with the political point first.  “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” is a case in point.  Peter LaFarge wrote the tune, and Johnny, as he would, interpreted it so well it became his own.  Johnny could write, but he was also a chooser of song of the highest order.  The key to the tune is that it’s a story, and a real one.  There really was an Ira Hayes, though his name is much less well known to people my age and younger than to my father’s generation.  This makes the point of the song, a pretty simple point but one that bears repeating to Johnny’s overwhelmingly white American audience, is that Indian people didn’t disappear with the frontier and that the United States continues to suck as much life out of them as it can.

I saw “Sicko” when it was in the theaters and really liked it.  I’d been a fan of National Health, British-style, ever since I was a kid and not for ideological reasons: my mom was sick while we stayed in London one summer and they took care of her quickly and without charge.  It was a pretty eye-opening experience for me and everyone in my family that I know of has always (at least since we started talking about it after that experience) harbored no illusion that the United States had a decent health care system.  What I liked about “Sicko,” one of the few things I susbstantively learned in the film (not to sound like a know-it-all, but I’ve had a genuine interest in the subject since I was 13, and I’ve read a fair amount about it) was about the former employees of the insurance industry who have turned against their former employers.  This kind of thing is always interesting to me and even moving.  Objectively, these people deserve about as much sympathy as anyone whose labor enables killing, or violence of any sort.  At the same time, as a public school teacher, I can’t help but feel for someone who realizes that they’re a cog in a terrible machine.

I read something that Theda Skocpol wrote back in my grad school days that really stuck with me.  It was in States and Social Revolutions.  She made the point that you don’t have revolutions because of the existence of a revolutionary opposition.  There’s always a revolutionary opposition.  What matters is that the regime’s defenders stop defending it.  On the one point, reading that made me feel like I wasn’t going to see revolutionary change in the United States in my lifetime.  On the other hand, she’s absolutely correct.  As I write this, we’re right in the middle of a load of nuttiness from all sides regarding health care reform.  Much more nuttiness from the right, for sure, but also a lot of concern about an apparent deal cut by the White House with the pharmaceutical industry.  Right or wrong–hey, you ask me, you ought to expropriate the pharmaceutical industry and rather than prolong miserable lives work on making what we have a little more socially meaningful–what doesn’t seem to be part of the discussion is the fact that Obama has taken a pillar of the current system and made them an advocate of reform, if in a form that will allow them continued high profits, basically guaranteed for a limited time.  You have to get the defenders of the status quo to stop defending it.

One of the problems of oppressive regimes is that there’s a bit of a gamble in terms of personnel.  Many people can very successfully dissociate their own position in the system and the consequences of their effort from their sense of self, through all kinds of mental gymnastics.  To reiterate: my job is public school teacher–I know of what I speak.  Not everyone is so tough, though, or so willing to jettison their humanity (for lack of a better word as I write briskly).  Khrushchev is not a bad example here.  To be sure, he went along with everything, but it’s clear he felt real remorse and it should be said that a) he loosened up culturally, and b) he wasn’t as sick as the Americans who really would have launched their nukes in 1963.  Basically–and I can’t imagine that most of you got this in your history class–we can thank Khrushchev that we didn’t have that nuclear war.  This kind of conscience that some people have in the corridors of power, as stunted as it is, is very important, as despicable as the people may be in their daily routines.  The narrator of the tune is one of those people.

To be sure the narrator, without gender, is of no constructive value, but this isn’t a bad thing.  Some people can be great historical actors by doing nothing.  When the shit hits the fan, let it hit.  There are a lot of very privileged people who actually feel this way.  They feel stuck in their position, for obvious reasons.  Nobody without privilege expects people with it to give up its trappings.  Yes, I could ditch my high paying job, but I would lose the few friends I have…yes, I could quit, but I have a family and they don’t understand what the job really does to me, and the kid needs to go to a serious school, etc.  I’ve never read it, but a friend told me that Richard Wright’s last novel was about a white executive, and that he beautifully showed how trapped the character was in the system, if at a different level than working class people.  Capitalism sucks all around, truly.

I first starting noticing this sense the year after I graduated college.  It was right in the middle of the uprising in LA, and I was working in a bookstore on Indian Hill Avenue in Claremont, CA.  There were “riots,” so-called, about a mile south of where I worked, on the other side of the 10 freeway.  They should have gone north, for sure, and torched a few places in Claremont for justice’s sake, but it didn’t happen that way, of course.  Nonetheless, I’d never known how skittish white people could get, even though I’d grown up among them.  I remember white person after white person coming into the bookstore like they had just gotten out of a war zone, and then proceeding to rant about how it all was happening, whatever it was.  I remember one woman going on and on about how black people didn’t really ever like “us.”  Yes, I responded, clearly, but the response was really obvious–I did have the wherewithal to say that it had nothing to do with anyone liking anyone or not.

The key, though, is that this woman clearly had had this sense of how the world worked (“they don’t like us”) that had somehow been masked for a time but which had under the current circumstances been revealed.  I had a professor who would often reference the film Colonel Redl, a scene in which various wealthy Austrians are talking to each other about their plans for after the shit hit the fan, all in comfort and at the same time certain that their comfort would endure for only a limited time.  The narrator here thinks the same thing.  A lot of people go about their existences, I’ve found, with an almost always unspoken sense that the clock is ticking and they’re living at some basic level on borrowed time.