I Know & You Know

“I Know & You Know,” (1993) from ¡Hey Rhumbahead!

“I Know & You Know” (recorded live, with the House Carpenters, 1997) from The Long March through the Clubs, Colleges, and Cafes.

“I Know & You Know” (demo, 1992) from Bill Foreman’s Bill & Pete/House Carpenters 4-track Demos in the General Ludd Music Archive.

I see you walking with Mister So-and-So
And baby, it just breaks my heart
I never thought you’d sink so low
That this would be the way we’d part
We used to talk on the telephone
And all the guys would envy the way you were mine
But these days you pretend you’re not at home
And you leave me dangling on that telephone line
There’s no way that I can take it
I can’t roll on over and try to fake it
I’ll make it plain so you can’t mistake it
That I know and you know
That you keep yourself looking so very fine
But there’s only one place you’ll go
And you won’t catch me walking that crooked line

It’s a flying fluke, a freak of fate
That we ended up opposing factions
But baby, it’s grown too late
To blame your life’s story on chemical reactions
I used to run around and say
About how it was that you really knew the score
But things are different today, baby
Your old tricks just can’t cut it any more
There’s no way that I can take it
I won’t make like one of your leaves and let you rake it
I’ll make it plain so you can’t mistake it
That I know and you know
That your kisses are tasting sweet like wine
But there’s only one place you’ll go
And you won’t catch me walking that crooked line

Understand, I got a right to share
All these points I keep pounding into the ground
But how can you compare me, baby,
To all those other boys with whom you run around?
You used to show me your fancy clothes
And the way that they clung to your physique
But these days you just turn up your nose
And you expect me to just sit here and turn my cheek
There’s no way that I can take it
I can’t roll on over and watch you break it
I’ll make it plain so you can’t mistake it
That I know and you know
I could invent a reason to keep on trying
But there’s only one place you’ll go
And you won’t catch me walking that crooked line

“I Know & You Know” has always been one of my favorite tunes to play, and one of those I’m most proudest for having written.  I’m well aware that it’s by no means one of my most ambitious or artsy tunes, and I’d not pretend it would be in my top five or even ten.  I have a fantasy, though, that I wrote this in 1962 rather than 1992, in a climate that actually liked music like this–though maybe I would have held on to it for two or three years.  1965 would be just about right.

I’ve always had a good ear to mimic styles, and this is as good an example of it as any.  At one point in my life I could mimic accents and voices, and would even do imitations of teachers and celebrities at little shows my old high school put on.  Musically, I mimic, but I always still sound like myself.  That’s probably my secret, though I don’t know that I could teach or communicate it.  This tune was stolen in almost every way from any number of sources–George Harrison‘s guitar sound from “Taxman,” for example, the structure from any number of great Stax or Motown tunes, the background vocals an obvious and admittedly thin appropriation of the kind of vocal arrangements that were fairly standard in the ’60′s–but try as I might, which I didn’t, I sound like me.

Above all, and again, this could be taken as a somewhat general rule with me, one reason that I never can quite truly mimic a style is that my lyrics, which tend to be relatively verbose for the form, require a vocal cadence that is very different from all but a few musicians.  From my sound, one would think it would be folk musicians who inspired me to cram a bunch of syllables, like Tom Lehrer pointed out, into a line.  In reality, however, it was Chuck D more than anyone else who was then and is now my lyrical-structural source.  It’s worth noting that, if one excepts “Full Tank of Gas,” which I’d written in the summer of 1988 before I heard It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, all of the songs I’ve ever written that sound like me come from a post-Public Enemy Bill.

I can’t overstate how much I listened to that album in late 1988 and 1989.  I wasn’t so hip that I was aware of Rakim at that point, outside of having heard the name.  Though a common love for PE gave me a connection to the hip-hoppers at Pitzer College–they were definitely there, and we went to see PE a bit before they released Fear of a Black Planet, at a show in LA–I wasn’t that deeply into the music, much like I never really have gotten that deeply into any one genre.  While it’s true that folkies will cram a bunch of syllables into a line, they usually lengthen the line itself in time, meaning the actual form of the tune changes to accomodate the words.  I never do that, one will note, and neither does my model, Chuck D.

The lyrics of this tune follow the cadence of hip-hop, in 3, but follow the melody, if at times embellishing it to accomodate the words.  That’s my trick, and if one bears that in mind any number of my tunes make sense.  It works because I never set out to do it.  I just listened to a lot of Public Enemy while trying to write tunes that would have fit in the mid-to-late 1960′s.  Words just got piled in at a density that they wouldn’t have forty years ago.

The collection this came from, ¡Hey Rhumbahead!, was, I think, the recording Peter Giuliano felt we did best.  We cut it at Jack Devine’s house in the Valley–Los Angeles–with him at the controls, cut four songs, two each.  For both of us, they were a big leap forward artistically, and the sessions were remarkably fun and stress free.  We cut basic tracks live with me on drums–this incidentally, always makes for a great, live-feeling recording, no matter how many tracks you pile on top of the basics–and then added instrument after instrument.  I don’t think my drums have ever been recorded more beautifully than this set, to be sure, in terms of the actual quality of the sound.  As an additional treat, Alex Kimmel, with whom I’ve had a running correspondence in brief messages in the last few months, helped on the backing vocals.  I think we will record something at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Tomorrow is labor day and I hope to cut a demo to Garageband, which is much easier to deal with than Protools for a demo.  I’m at the point where my last project is basically out of my system and I’m looking forward to my next.  The tune I plan on cutting is one that I wrote a year ago, in Autichamp, the Drome, in France.  It’s the last tune I wrote.  The year passed quickly and my focus was on Adieu, False Heart, which basically took up the extra time I had that would have gone toward writing.  Fair enough.  I’ve been knocking around on my guitar recently and I’m cautiously optimistic that one of my things that I’ve been playing around with will come to fruition soon enough.