Bill Foreman, musician.

San Francisco, CA – 01/16/10

The Rich Part of Town

“The Rich Part of Town,” from Adieu, False Heart (2009).

“The Rich Part of Town (demo),” from Adieu, False Heart Demos (2009).

Every town has a rich part of town
But I sure won’t be living in it
They can slaughter me with a shiv
But I won’t jump up on their bandwagon
And if it seems it’s dragging me down
You’d better check your misapprehension
I don’t need that social tension around me
And burdening my head

If those bastards should beg forgiveness of sin
I’ll deny it with vigor
My heart’s bigger than a basketball
But it’s pumping out venom this afternoon
And as sure as those swirling vultures above
Got their eyes on those stock brokers
Those jokers won’t look me straight in the face
When they discreetly avoid me

Every town has a rich part of town
But I sure won’t be living in it
They can slaughter me with a shiv
But I won’t jump up on their bandwagon
And if it seems it’s dragging me down
You’d better check your misapprehension
I don’t need that social tension around me
And burdening my head

And I’ll dispose of those sage opinions
That litter the opinion pages
Burn that kindling into a blaze
Because I’m not biting that bait
My gait’s out of place on those sidewalks
I stroll in intimidation
My presence calls up any number of feelings
That deal indirectly

Every town has a rich part of town
But I sure won’t be living in it
They can slaughter me with a shiv
But I won’t jump up on their bandwagon
And if it seems it’s dragging me down
You’d better check your misapprehension
I don’t need that social tension around me
And burdening my head

I’ve got half a mind to retreat
On some path through some forest flowers
But the hour’s too late and I’d hate it
If I didn’t leave a fresh mark here
But I know when I stroll these gallery streets
Leaving lines and fluorescent colors
When I sign my name it’ll stick
In the head of each passing policeman

Every town has a rich part of town
But I sure won’t be living in it
They can slaughter me with a shiv
But I won’t jump up on their bandwagon
And if it seems it’s dragging me down
You’d better check your misapprehension
I don’t need that social tension around me
And burdening my head

At some level, there’s no real reason I can see that I have problems with rich neighborhoods.  I’m comfortable enough now financially, live in expensive San Francisco (though not in one of the posh neighborhoods) and the town I grew up in, Del Mar, CA, is definitely a rich neighborhood now and to some extent was when I was a kid, though I grew up in some new tract houses that were affordable to middle class folk but which now run for well over a million dollars a pop.  I haven’t been back there in years, and to be honest I have no desire to go.  From what I’ve been told, what had been a very mellow beach town has become, and probably already was by the time I left, an absolute cesspool of privilege, the kind of place respectable revolutions wipe off the map.  Strong words, I know, but they’re from the heart.

It’s very problematic, I’m well aware, to write in someone else’s voice, and particularly, in a class society, in the voice of someone with less privilege than oneself.  One can and should satirize one’s social superiors, but when representing those beneath oneself in the social hierarchy, it’s easy to miss the mark.  This is because of the way privilege functions.  It allows people to see upward very clearly, but hides things when one looks below.  The order of things, to those above, is natural, while to those below it’s social.  White privilege is all about not seeing white privilege, but anyone who’s not white develops a clear understanding of how it functions simply because it’s necessary to navigate the society with any success and avoid problems.  So too with any type of privilege.

It bears mentioning that the key here is that the language is “above” and “below,” rather than “top” and “bottom.”  Everyone sees clearly looking up, no matter how many people you have beneath you.  What is necessary if one wishes to represent someone beneath oneself in the pecking order it go through a number of mental steps to transpose one’s own subordination to that of the person beneath oneself.  You need to remember what it feels like to be looked down upon.

Indeed, I know what it’s looked like to be looked down upon, and I’m sensitive enough that a) I’ve never forgotten it, and b) when it happens today I immediately become disgusted.  When you’re a middle class kid at a rich kid’s school, which I was, you know what it means to be below, even if you’re objectively partaking of enormous privilege, which I was.  But I didn’t go all Stockholm Syndrome and want to be someone I’m not.  I am not, I can safely say, a social climber.

I don’t know why I’ve had something of a fascination with taggers, which I exhibit in this tune and which I exhibited as well in “Target Practice,” on Chevy w/Balding Tires:

I put a club to his hands and a kick to his glands
By a blank University wall
With his tag half begun and a limp for a run
In the distance he shuffles and falls
I shut off my lights.   I’m overcome by the night.
I picture phrases of fluorescent green
So I finish his part with some words from my heart
A good many degrees past obscene

I feel bad for taggers.  As criminals go, they’re kind of pathetic, in a value-neutral way, as in, they inspire pathos.  Their crime is non-violent, though in many areas it carries its own, specific and harsher punishment for “gang” associations than the same action would have when I was a kid.  If young people of color do it, we understand, it’s worse.  Don’t misunderstand me: I’ve had to deal with all kinds of tagger nonsense in my classroom and in general the people in question are a pain in the ass when confronted with evidence.  That said, it’s certainly more of a victimless crime than punching someone, and at some level it’s an attempt to be heard.  I can relate to that.

None of the tunes on Adieu, False Heart were as difficult to arrange–and, by all means, cutting something solo on acoustic guitar well definitely requires arrangement–as this one. I wrote all the tunes for the record in about a 9-month period, but recorded the collection a little over a year later.  I felt a bit frustrated with the wait, but it was worth it.  Comparing the demo version to that released on the record doesn’t quite do the process justice, as the demo here isn’t the first one I cut, only the best, one of a group I recorded to send out to friends to get their opinions on the tunes.

I struggled finding the right key to sing in on this tune, because my vocal range is relatively limited and the melody is really quite complex in the verse, by my standards.  I made a great attempt on the record to minimize strain on my voice, because the sound is off-putting, aesthetically, and for a few months I thought that I would have to drop this tune because I was having trouble finding, so to speak, a sweet spot to sing it in.  It barely fits my range now, though it works.

Also, this is one of a few tunes that probably would do well with a band backing it up, and I had more or less decided by late 2008 that I would cut the record live and solo.  I really don’t like it when musicians, who usually play with a band, use more or less the same arrangment they use in the band in a solo guitar performance.  It’s tricky to avoid, though, with certain tunes that one hears, after having written it, with drums behind it, and on an electric guitar.  One has to find an acoustic arrangement that stays true to both the song and the musical setting.

In my head, when I approached the record, I thought of Monk, and in particular Thelonious Himself, which was one of the records of his I’ve had since I was a kid.  Monk, to me, is the ideal solo performer.  His approach solo is completely different than what he does with a band, and at the same time totally identifiable as monk and totally attuned to the demands of solo performance and the song itself.  This is what someone has to do, in whatever is their own way, if a person is going to take a guitar, by oneself, and sing.

Imagine You’re Flying

“Imagine You’re Flying,” 4-track version, from Poison Against Poison (recorded 1991, released 2005).

“Imagine You’re Flying,” from The Little Band (recorded 1992, released 1997).

“Imagine You’re Flying/September,” performed by the Little Band, from The Long March through the Clubs, Colleges, and Cafes (recorded 1993, released 1997).

Late at night, when the sun goes down
And the evening spreads its wings,
I’m sitting down upon the shoreline
Just a-changin’ my guitar strings.
I play, oh I play to the seagulls
Though they can’t know what I say.
It does not begin to bother me.
It doesn’t really matter anyway.
I left from the place where I came from
And I settled in the West.
It just happened like an accident.
It ain’t the worst and it ain’t the best.
The world, oh the world is a wheel
And it spun me ’round and ’round.
When I returned into my senses,
This was the place that I had found.

Back at home, I’m a poor, poor boy
And I play for all the passers by.
When they tossed to me their empty pennies
I didn’t stop to even blink an eye.
My heart, oh my heart’s now a window,
My mind a hall of crystal mirrors
Because I live among the reeds and rushes
Where the city disappears.
I left from the place where I came from.
I try to tear it from my mind.
Today, nobody tosses me pennies.
It always seemed to me a bit unkind.
My name, oh my name is now useless.
For it is just another sound
Like my hand across my instrument,
Like the rain that falls upon the ground.

This tune, when I wrote it, seemed like a really big deal to me, and in hindsight I think it actually was.  I was a senior at Pitzer, and by this point I’d actually written a fair number of good tunes, having even cut my first serious demo, which I was sure would have publishing execs clamoring to sign this brave new songwriter, at the end of my junior year.  Obviously, that didn’t happen.  What did happen was that I wrote a bunch of mediocre tunes in the fall of my senior year, trying hard to “progress,” as I conceived it at the time, beyond where I was with those first five good tunes I’d written.  To qualify that last sentence, I’d actually come up with a decent tune in the summer prior to that year, called “I Travel Alone,” which I’ve never included on an album but which is something of which I’m not embarrassed.

It wasn’t a good year for me, that senior year, writing, now that I look back.  I probably would have felt better about myself if I were drinking a lot, but truth be told I’d gotten pretty sick of the college party atmosphere and though I did have a fair amount of Guinness with my friends I really wasn’t overdoing it in the least.  I was gaining weight—20 pounds—but that was because I’d grown so sick of dorm food that I was eating at In-‘n’-Out Burger at least three times a week, and EZ-Out at least once in the same time.

Peter Giuliano and I had a discussion at one point fairly late in our collaboration that our rate of growth as we got along in things slowed as writers.  We’d done La Petite Orange in 1992, after a couple years working together on stuff that in hindsight was crap (at least, I’ll say that my stuff was crap), even though it was the best we could do at the time.  Going from utter crap in my case to really good stuff was the biggest leap.  La Petite Orange still stands up, excepting I think my closing tune.  Hey Rhumbahead! was a huge leap up, though, which at the same time was sufficiently less developed than In the Choir of Primates that the leap to the House Carpenters record would have been unpredictable to anyone not actually in the band.  We felt we had great things in us but you wouldn’t know it from hearing the two Bill and Pete recordings.  That said, the difference between Hey Rhumbahead! and In the Choir of Primates wasn’t nearly as big as the crap I was producing before La Petite Orange and La Petite Orange itself.  Had the House Carpenters made it through our second record, it would have definitely been better than In the Choir of Primates.  All of our new tunes were better than all our tunes on Choir—and I included all but one of the ones I had for that second record on mostly The Bathroom Mirror, with one ending up on The Duck Hunter.

The curve described above was in full effect my senior year, but I had no idea at the time how it worked.  The tunes that ended up on that first demo were a huge leap for me, and because I wrote them within about a four-month period (if you except that a good portion of “Bad and Good” had been written my freshman year), I felt that all of a sudden I’d figured out songwriting and should have been able to keep up that pace of development indefinitely.  Much to my chagrin, that wasn’t the case.  I have a number of tunes from that fall that, I promise you, will not see a general release in my lifetime.  I do not want to hear what people say.  One, “What Your Heart Can See,” was included on Mind Monkey, the compilation of my stuff that came out on the late, lamented Duckweed records, but I defy anyone to plausibly tell me it wasn’t the weakest tune on the record.  In a pretty vain attempt to coast through my senior year, I did an independent study with a prof I really liked in “songwriting,” in which I was to journal my progress.  I ended up getting the worst grade I’d gotten in anything since my freshman year, because I was in no mood to be reflective about my process, such as it was, because everything I was writing was either mediocre or total crap.  I think I was a bit of a disappointment to the prof.

Nothing really changed for me, concretely, in the spring, but in hindsight I mellowed out a little bit which really was what was needed.  If I could point to anything that might have jogged me a bit out of my slump, it was a creative writing class I took.  The professor was interesting.  I’ve talked with other people about him and there seems to be a consensus that he really did not have much to teach: two things, to be precise.  Pretty sweet life for only having two things to teach.  He was a Joyce scholar, too, and as much as I love Joyce I also know that in academia one way a person can carve a niche if you’re not really that bright is to specialize in something that people know of or about but don’t and never will know.  God forbid you should study something people actually engage in, because that would put you in danger of having your bluff called.

That said, the two things this guy had to teach were actually worth learning, though so painfully obvious in hindsight.  Basically, he told us, as writers, to edit, and to show rather than say things.  The first should be news only to rock ‘n’ roll songwriters.  There is so much nonsense that gets tossed about to everyone’s detriment when it comes to writing songs that it can be—definitely was—difficult for a young person to use common sense.  I remember reading an article about Neil Young around this time which made the point that Neil doesn’t edit.  He wants—I can’t vouch for the veracity of this report, only that it was reported—to preserve the spontaneity of creation, apparently.  When I read that, and I can’t remember if it was before or after I took this course, I thought to myself, “well, it shows.”  Neil has indeed at times hit it well in his writing, but he’s put more crap out than anyone else I know of with his level of a reputation.  And this all before “Let’s Roll.”  It may be a goal in making art to produce something so internally coherent that it seems or feels to have simply appeared spontaneously, without effort.  Getting there, however, is the result of effort, and cutting off that effort before a piece has achieved the kind of internal coherence art demands is idiotic, as well as dishonest if one tries to pass it off as a serious attempt to communicate.  My take-away, though, from the discussion, was that there wasn’t anything wrong with me if I didn’t hit it on the first try with a tune.  On the contrary, it’s normal to need to edit.  If only rock ‘n’ rollers as a group understood this and practiced it, we’d all be better off.

The second imperative the creative writing prof presented—to show rather than tell—was, I know in hindsight, the most typical lesson one gets in an intro creative writing course anywhere.  That said, I needed the lesson.  If you listen to the words on the songs on that first demo, all good tunes some better than others, they much less than my work since make use of clear imagery.  There’s a lot of emotions bandied about, and clever lines, and even a moderate coherence, structural and thematic, in each tune, but none of them give the sense of place that were I to claim one particular virtue I would claim for my music.  In any event, it was with this tune that I really grounded the song in place—not a particular city or location of some other sort, but a sense left with the listener that actual things were happening in the tune in a particular spot.

Interestingly, the song itself, while one I’ve always liked, isn’t one of my very best.  Some of it is borrowed, lyrically: as much as I hate to admit it, I had bought Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints, understanding little at the time of how problematic his whole project was and how absurd it was for him to take it upon himself to delve into Third Worlders’ spirituality (spirituality, that is, in the abstract, which isn’t spiritual at all, but, rather, a good selling point to disaffected, college-educated white people in Manhattan and San Francisco).  Paul Simon made the biblical reference, to Little Moses, keeping things Judeo-Christian enough not to freak out his record-buying public:

Down among the reeds and rushes
A baby boy was found

Trying to come up with some sort of spiritual vibe in my tune, I cribbed his line, which of course wasn’t really his anyway:

Now I live among the reeds and rushes
Where the city disappears

The song itself was about the simplest good tune I’d yet written.  The trick to it, a simple one, is the E7sus4 chord on the vamp and then as the first chord of the verse, which itself contained only four chords, repeated four times.  Very few things are as effective as an interesting chord, repeated at length.

Newry Highwayman

“Newry Highwayman,” from Building St. Petersburg.

In Newry town, I was bread and born,
In Stephen’s Green now I die in scorn.
I served my time to the saddling trade,
But I turned out to be a roving blade.

At seventeen I took a wife,
I loved her dearer than I loved my life;
And for to keep in fine array,
I went robbing on the King’s highway.

I never robbed any poor man yet,
Nor any tradesman did I beset;
I robbed both lords and the ladies bright,
And brought their jewels to my heart’s delight.

I robbed Lord Golding I do declare,
And Lady Mansel, in Grosvenor Square;
I shut the shutters and bid them good night.
And home I went then to my heart’s delight.

To Covent Garden I made my way,
With my dear wife for to see the play;
Lord Fielding’s gang they did me pursue,
And I was taken by the cursed crew.

My father cried, “my darling son.”
My wife she wept and sighed. “I am undone.”
My mother tore her white locks and cried;
Saying, “In the cradle he should have died.

And when I’m dead and in my grave
A flashy funeral pray let me have;
With six bold highwaymen to carry me.
Give them good broadswords and sweet liberty.

Six pretty maidens to bear my pall,
Give them white garlands and ribbons all.
And when I’m dead they will speak the truth,
He was a wild and a wicked youth.

I think the real trick in making good music is in cover tunes.  Since the 1960’s and the advent of singer-songwriters–that is to say, in the period that formed basically all of my assumptions about what it means to be a musician–the focus has been all on writing “original songs,” however unoriginal the actual songs may be.  I began realizing in my early 20’s when I got really into Billie Holiday, which was a bit late for me given how long I’d been into jazz at that time, that here was a craft that had basically been forgotten by people my age and, I’d add, my background.  Of course Billie was, in her way, tops, though I probably go back to Ella Fitzgerald more often than Billie.  Billie put the craft of interpretation, often radical interpretation, at the center of her work.  This is by no means an original observation but it’s critical.  What does it mean to be a singer?  It means you sing songs, and what people my age and likely younger have all but forgotten how to do is to interpret, rather than imitate, others’ music.

Coupled with what was a growing understanding of the importance of interpretation of song, not just of writing them, was a growing appreciations I developed for traditional tunes, distinct from tunes written by someone with a known identity.  Covering someone else’s tune can be a good thing, for sure, and I enjoy and feel I can do it well–witness the Floyd Westerman tune, “Quiet Desperation,” I do on Adieu, False Heart–but doing so creates in the mind of the listener, or rather the listener who knows the original version, a relationship between the cover and original.  The artistic experience of the listener, the experience that counts, in art, is that of a relationship.  That’s definitely cool, and not just in a po-mo way.

With a traditional tune, however, one creates a different set of relationships.  A listener might know any number of different versions of the tune.  No one particular version is original, and so each new version relates to the others more or less as equivalent.  Authenticity is not a consideration, or really shouldn’t be–any sense that one recording of a traditional tune is more authentic than any other is a fantasy in the mind of the listener.  The earliest version of “Newry Highwayman” comes from an 1830 broadside, which is to say, in written form rather than recorded.  The first Earl of Mansfield lived in the 18th century, so we would be smart to assume that the tune had existed likely for decades before its first, written appearance.

No sense, then, worrying about authenticity with traditional tunes.  All that counts is quality and applicability to one’s present.  The latter is the real trick, I suppose.  Obviously, we can discard all museum-piece arrangements, all attempts to recreate things “as they were.”  The quickest way to irrelevance is to try to repeat the past.  Hence, the bankruptcy of Conservatism, unless one approaches Burke as a theoretician of change rather than stasis–which I wouldn’t necessarily do, myself.  A better bet is someone like Richard Thompson, possibly an obvious choice but nonetheless the musician more than any other I know of who consistently performs traditional music in a relevant way, even more so than the clearly more famous Bob Dylan.

I recently have been listening, over and over, to a recording he’s released of “Willy O’ Winsbury”, the Child Ballad, off RT: The Life and Music of Richard Thompson. Thompson plays it absolutely straight, performing the song on guitar, singing without any tricks.  This is the secret.  There is no need to make a traditional tune anything other than precisely what it feels like to a performer

“Newry Highwayman,” of all the traditional tunes I’ve recorded, is probably the least “traditional” sounding of the recordings.  This is primarily because of the electric guitar, recorded with fairly heavy vibrato.  I’d used this trick before, on “I’ve Maintained My Advantage,” above all.  I learned it, I swear–I’m not just trying to sound legit–from Bo Diddley, and particularly like how much it reminds me of some of My Bloody Valentine’s stuff.  The song itself I heard on a live recording posted to Bob Dylan’s website.  I’ve since become much more widely versed in sources for traditional song, though by no means as studied as a real afficionado.  At the time, though, I basically got traditional tunes from Dylan, the Pogues, and the Dubliners.  Dylan’s version is good, though not great.  That said, it really stuck in my head, so I cut a version of it.  I’m pretty convinced it’s one of the better things on the album.

“Body & Soul”

“Body & Soul” (1997) from The Bathroom Mirror.

“Body & Soul (live)” (2005) from Live at Keith Danner’s House.

I smell my pillow and I hear a sound.
My eyelids open and I’m earthward bound.
Pretty soon the sisters wheel me around.
“Body & Soul.”

It’s Tuesday morning so they wash my hair.
The interns greet me as I pass the stair.
I start to mumble and the sisters hear a prayer.
“Body & Soul.”

I hear the Father’s footsteps up and down the hall.
He’ll take all morning but he’ll see us all.
I hear him whisper and I hear him call.
“Body & Soul.”

The dishes break and then a rolling train goes by.
My head jerks backward and I shut my eye.
My head sees Heaven and the swirling angels sigh.
“Body & Soul.”

The sunburnt courtyard.  The dusty hill.
The metal grating on my windowsill.
The wooden beads and all these crushed-up pills.
“Body & Soul.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this tune lately, as I’m going to perform it in a couple weeks and I believe I will be able to convince my harmonica-playing pal, Colin, to up and join me on this one and likely a few others.  He and I played for the first time in 20 years last spring, noted in a previous post on “Full Tank of Gas,” and when I went to his pad one afternoon about a month later this was one of the things we did.  Predictably, it worked well.

One could argue these things, but I don’t think I’ve written a better tune that would fall into the “blues” category than “’Body & Soul.’”  Interestingly, I’ve also not written a tune that I can recall that so completely resists orchestration of any sort.  The House Carpenters recorded this one evening as we taped our rehearsal, and while I was fairly pleased with the results, nobody else liked it.  Most likely, it was the tune I was happy with, not the arrangement.

More than one person, in praising my tunes, has pointed out that I give a sense of place in them, and I’ve always felt I couldn’t get a higher compliment.  I read Vine Deloria’s God is Red a couple years ago, and it really had an impact on me, aside from being a pure pleasure to read because of his prose.  Contrasting Christianity as it is practiced in North America with a generalized Indian—that is, North American Indigenous—religious practice, the fundamental distinction is that North American Christianity has totally abstracted itself from any sense of place while Indian practice is entirely predicated on the specificity of place.  I’ve thought a lot about that, and it really seems to me that things would improve a lot in this country if we (collectively) started to deal with the specificity of place as well as deal with dreams, as in dreaming consciousness.

The place in the tune is specific, if imagined.  There is not to my knowledge any Catholic hospital in Riverside, CA that offers the kind of care described in the tune.  I don’t even think there’s a Catholic hospital.  That said, the land is absolutely there.  The “dusty hills” are the same as in “The Man From Manila”:

These hills rise above me, devoid of all plant life.

The live version of the tune, above, was recorded at a house concert just below those hills as I imagine them in both of these tunes.

I have at times introduced this tune as a blues number about mind/body dualism.  I don’t actually buy into the concept, I’d state clearly, but I imagine that someone who is quadriplegic would find great meaning in it even if one rejected the idea ultimately.  It would seem to reflect one’s life.  It’s interesting to me that some people are placed by circumstance to live in a totally existential sense, certain philosophical or religious concepts that I learned about in school or read in books.  I saw this a lot in Senegal, where I knew some deeply spiritual people, in a very true sense, but also who at some level had so little materially that it seemed that they almost–I know how problematic it is putting this way, but the sense is still there–had no choice but to detach from material things.

I’d read in the few years before I wrote this tune a lot of William Blake, as well as some critical literature on him and his work alongside a biography.  So, Blake had visions.  Of interest to me was a contrast between people who placed his visions into scientific categories–he suffered from some sort of mental illness which may or may not have played a role in his economic difficulties–and those who simply reported that he had visions.  E.P. Thompson, whom I’d discovered in grad school and really liked, wrote what was for him a short book on Blake, and placed him in his very specific religious context, that of radical London religious dissent, that is to say, Protestant but not Church of England, and very much in tune with notions of individual revelation, rather than ecclesiastical authority.  Not only Blake had visions, but lots of people in the fair number or small churches he attended did.  It’s just what you did when you were a radical English religious dissenter in the eighteenth century.

It’s really troubling to me when I look, from the outside, at Christianity in the United States, though by no means is the following characterization applicable to individual Christians or all churches.  It seems as secular a phenomenon as I could dream up, because it seems more of a social network or social identity then a means to some actual, experiential spiritual or religious anything.  The social network aspect of it can manifest in very good and important ways, as in for example The Catholic Worker movement, or in the business cards I’d find on my door in Riverside for gardeners offering their services, cards with the Christian fish symbol on it.  I imagine that putting that symbol on the card actually worked to drum up business.  The social aspect of modern American Christianity can be seen of course in its most negative aspects as well in some of the hatred people spew in the name of religion, and though I’m well aware that this is a virulent minority I also know that it’s very important to pay close attention to these people.

The tune, to bring the digression above back to the song, contrasts the nuns and priest, who obviously do good work but who are going about their day in a world that seems to them to be exactly as it appears, with the main figure in the tune, who has ecstatic visions.  I suppose that in my life that the satisfactions I’ve found become fewer and fewer as I go up the chain of any hierarchy.  I appreciate Blake more than I do any Christian leaders, and I appreciate that Hui Neng was an illiterate woodcutter.  I had a professor at Pitzer who taught the Tao Te Ching, and when going over the passage that reads something like, “the Tao is like water: it seeks the low places that men disdain,” he asked, “isn’t this a loser philosophy?”  He then added, “I’m not saying it isn’t true.”

Building St. Petersburg

“Building St. Petersburg” (1999) from Building St. Petersburg.

My master sent me here
From Novgorod for half the year
I took with me some pelts and beer
When the harvest was done
All I see is wood and snow
The icebound boats shift to and fro
I work and watch the sky’s deep glow
While the monks say a prayer
The Devil’s come to walk these banks
His eyes are blind to birth and rank
My face becomes a flawless blank
When I see him pass by
How many men from Germany
Have traveled on the Baltic Sea
To vent their anger upon me
In a strange kind of language?

I awoke last Sunday night
Across the sky were flashing lights
My hut came into sight
And I walked for an hour
I saw the face of old Ivan
Who drank his kvass from dusk ’til dawn
The Devil took his soul beyond
And I heard his voice calling
I recalled the lovely time
We stole a keg of Master’s wine
We went to fight after we’d dined
With the neighboring village
I further saw my Master’s face
When he first told me of this place
I can recall the awful taste
That then came from my bile

A mental picture of my wife
Brought me more of my former life
I felt my fingers touch my knife
As I thought of the Swedes
I saw the fires in the trees
I felt the earth beneath my knees
The Swedes were riding on the breeze
And they took her away
I see the pictures on these plans
How on this swamp that statue stands
The engineer barks his commands
And I hear them translated
I count the days of this long year
They say the thaw is coming near
I run my fingers through my beard
And I look toward the forest

At some point, I’ll start blogging about tunes that aren’t actually things I’m most proud of.  At some level, my second tier stuff probably could make for better commentary, as I can dwell on the flaws as well as the virtues.  I’ve only ever put one tune on a record that I’ve released that I truly think in hindsight is a bust, but I’ve always been willing to put out something that, if not perfect, has a spirit of its own and is, therefore, special in its own way.  As long as something has it’s own spirit, it’s worthwhile.

“Building St. Petersburg,” however, is not one of those pieces that’s merely interesting, or that is flawed but worthwhile nonetheless.  I wrote it during my first year teaching, and it was the second piece I properly recorded digitally to ProTools with a good mic.  Flush with cash, I thought, for the first time, I bought a $250 AKG condenser mic, still the one I use for hi-fi recording at home, and I cut this track.

It’s interesting to me, in hindsight, the tunes I’d written for both The Duck Hunter and Building St. Petersburg.  I was fresh out of grad school, studying Russian History, Soviet period, and a lot of the choices I made for settings in my tunes’ situations reflects that.  I think they end up seeming, unless you knew me at the time and knew what I was reading, like something of an exercise in exoticism, which certainly carries an appeal of some sort to a lot of folks but which strikes me as problematic.  I’m at some level guilty, because I actually have never yet made it to either Russia or anywhere else in Eastern Europe (“The Czech Philologist,” on The Duck Hunter, is more fantasy, even beyond the absurd details, than I would probably like).

My stuff at this point was very bookish, probably because I basically had in my life at the time my job and my books, which overlapped quite a bit, to boot.  This isn’t a bad thing, because what actually counts in writing tunes or, really, doing anything, is that what you write needs to be an honest reflection of where you are or where you have been, defined broadly.  Bird said, famously, that if you haven’t lived it, it won’t come out of your horn, give or take a couple words but keeping the sentiment.

I took my MA in 1995, but grad school didn’t really end for me until 2005, when I got married and left Riverside, with my wife of course, and went to Senegal for a year.  I had the good fortune to get together most fridays with some of the gang from the History Dept. at UCR for beer, and though the group dwindled over time as people moved on–my cohort in Russian History moving to LA with our advisor, who took a gig at UCLA, good for him and everyone.  I think my education on those fridays was as critical to me as any classes I’ve taken, because what you had were a lot of great people, all leaning irreverent, loosening up and talking about things of interest.  So Russia was very much on my mind even though, like I wrote above, I’d never been.

The particular idea for the tune came from a memory of a course I’d taken in my last quarter at UCR when I’d actually started the doctorate I did two quarters of before deciding to take a break and see what the world had to offer me.  It was an Imperial Russia “materials” course, meaning a book a week in a seminar discussion.  I enjoyed it, and enjoyed the prof.  He had, in the class, some themes.  Periodically, he would say things like, “and where does this extraordinary violence come from…” and get quiet for a moment, shake his head slightly and then move on.  Not the most academic point to make, but honest and therefore interesting and human to me.  He would also periodically refer to runaway peasants.  Neither of these themes–or periodic interludes I suppose you might say–showed up in his official research interests, or did so semi-tangentially.  Every so often, though, he would get this far away look and say things like, “yes, and sometimes peasants would just disappear into the forest…”

This of course showed up in the last line of the tune.  The rest of it was really something of a nostalgic catalogue, for me, of interesting memories from my grad seminars, readings, and beer drinking conversations.  There’s the obligatory Pushkin reference, noting “The Bronze Horseman.”  I don’t make as many literary references in my tunes now as I used to.  Really, it’s more important to make sure that the song offers its story and its own truth–whatever that actually means–on its own terms.  I was reading a fair amount of theory at the time, though not too much “post-modern”–curse the lips that first spoke the term itself–stuff, mostly good, honest, Marxist stuff, on up through the Frankfurt School to Habermas.  That said, as someone who went through a Joyce phase in his early 20’s and has never regretted it (I just don’t tend to reread books when there are so many as yet unread), all the hip talk about intertextuality must have sunk in at some level, because in my mid-20’s I did a lot of referencing of other texts in my tunes.  Maybe I just wanted to seem smart, but in my defense I only ever referenced things I’d actually read.  I had then always taken Bird’s admonition very seriously, and still do.

This is one of my older tunes that I still play.  On that note, those of you in the Bay Area can hear it when I do a house concert on Oct. 10, at my pad.  My wife will cook her famous tostadas, to boot, so you have no excuse but to get in touch for directions and come on over.  I will indeed play this tune.

On a related note: I’m feeling quite good about decisions I’ve made regarding my musical output in the past months, and I think after years of hemming and hawing I’ve settled on a method that suits my life.  Light on promo–really, you’re reading the promo–and taking that extra time and spending it on music.  I’d gone this way before, during our year in Senegal, when I couldn’t really do promotion if I wanted to, and in hindsight I’d hit the right note then, for me, as I seem to be doing for myself now.  Dig the tunes, and, locals, do pop in on Oct. 10.

On Every Step of Our Stair

“On Every Step of Our Stair” (2004), from Poison Against Poison.

There’s glass in my hand

I’m spilling into the sand

My wife won’t understand

When she hears this

I stumble back on the street

And our eyes meet

I get weak in the feet

And I’m down

I hear the breeze sound

My hair hits the ground

It seems we’re found

From that shouting

I see your chest rise

And your beautiful thighs

My sight’s compromised

So I stop looking

I hear someone’s words

They mix with calling birds

But from what think I have heard

They’re getting distant

Now I wish I knew

If I were false or true

To whomever of you

I was meant for

In my wife’s curling hair

On every step of our stairs

I think there’s more there

Than I’d noticed

I recall that hotel

And your perfume’s smell

Could my wife tell

I’d gone missing?

My hands grab the dirt

I imagine your skirt

And I think this must hurt

But I can’t feel it

I see the world through a veil

As my eyesight fails

I feel I’m entering a jail

Without exit

I feel myself shift

And my body lifts

But I’m gone in some drift

And I’ll stay here

If I could I’d shout:

I sold everything out

I’ve got nothing but doubt

From this miserable tryst

I had had this tune in mind for some time before I finished “Chevy w/Balding Tires” in 2003.  I’d thought of it as the last tune on the record, and keeping with the Riverside County location (the album, it should be noted, consisted of songs that all took place in and around Riverside, CA: I’d for some time wanted to do for my town, Riverside, what Joyce did for Dublin), I imagined the car accident in the tune taking place on the 60 freeway heading east just before you exit on Nason St. in Moreno Valley.  Nason was the exit I took to get to the first school I worked at, so the stretch was very vivid in my mind, and still is.  Why I’d use it for this purpose I won’t try to understand too deeply, but that’s nonetheless what I’d pictured in my head.

In any event, I have a version–I would have to dig it up and I think remix it–of “The Caddy,” which currently closes the record in a solo, acoustic version, all done up with a full arrangement, including me playing my patented faux-mambo drums.  I’d intended, actually, to re-record the version I’d finished, to give the arrangement a bit more in terms of dynamics, so the thing I have is not what would have ultimately been released anyway.  The instrumental on the record, “My Favorite Recipie (for Dawn)” would not have been included, though I’d have definitely made it available at some point, and “The Caddy” would have been a strong tune somewhere in the middle of the album, probably the late middle.  “On Every Step of Our Stair” would have been a great closer, I think, in hindsight a bit predictable, as it has a sort-of-1967 climaxing arrangement, or one with my flavor in any event, but a strong one nonetheless, because the tune is quite good, to me a better tune than “The Caddy,” in fact.

My problem was that I’d started hitting something of a wall in my writing, trying to keep everything as taut as possible while at the same time fitting things in thematically to the album.  For the life of me, I couldn’t finish the tune, and for over a year it was very incomplete.  One summer, I did the one tour I’ve ever done, driving up the California coast and doing a few gigs, and playing “The Caddy,” which I’d never thought of as a solo number, felt actually quite good, and I got a good solo arrangement for it, enough so that I, very sensibly, decided that the record, without “On Every Step of Our Stair” (which at the time didn’t have a title yet), was in fact finished.  When I got home from that “tour,” I cut the version of “The Caddy” that’s on the record, inserted “My Favorite Recipe,” and declared it done.

After finishing the record, I went into something of a post-partum depression–not to make light of the real thing–because I had this great piece of work that was done on terms I didn’t really yet know how to deal with, commercially.  I spent a lot of time printing Chevy up, promoting it, etc., when really, in hindsight, my time would have been much better spent finishing this tune and recording it the weekend after I declared Chevy done.  The tune waiting a good six months or more–memory fades–before I sat to work with it.  Bear in mind, this makes it about a year and a half this tune isn’t finished.  The writing, once I got to it, took about two or three weeks of jotting down lines here and there, but fairly diligently.  The tune is quite detailed, but it had nested for so long in my head that I had a good grasp of it in its detail.

The actual recording, when I got it it, is one of the best products I think I’ve done, in terms of getting not only a good tune, but a good arrangement and performance, to a final product.  This was one of the last two tunes I recorded using Cubase, on which I recorded all of Chevy–the other is “Making the Papers,” also on Poison Against Poison–and of the two it is the better.  I never really got the hang of Cubase for whatever reason, partially because it would at times run a bit buggy on my Mac.

I have had a few blind alleys, musically, in my life, that I’ve started to creep down but didn’t travel, so to speak, fully, and this recording is the only example I have of one of them.  I have been a Brian Wilson fanatic since the big press push for his first solo album in 1988, and I fairly quickly after that discovered the whole mythology of “Smile,” which he of course has since finished, to great effect in my opinion.  This was not at all recorded like Smile, sections of tunes recorded at different times and likely different places, and then edited together to create a whole, but I got it in my head that it would be interesting to do a record where the arrangement and instrumentation of the tunes changed not tune to tune, but verse to verse.  This recording does precisely that, and while I can’t see making an entire record that way–it might be intellectually appealing and thus gain some hipster cred–none of the records I really love were ever made that way, beginning with an intellectual proposition and then fitting tunes into it.  The best ones have the intellectual proposition flow from some tunes, from a process already begun, and then in turn re-stimulate the process with the intellectual propostion.  In any event, each of the verses in this recording uses a different arrangement, to great effect.

This was the last recording I made using my Fender Rhodes, which I sold when we moved to Dakar.  I miss the instrument, to be sure, and its voice is on loads of my recordings.  It’s the only instrument I’ve ever parted with that I sometimes wish I still had.  Space is an issue here, to be sure.  I’m considering a harmonium for my keyboard, as I can’t really play an accordion, depending on the cost.

I’d note, to finish, that Poison Against Poison is the only thing I’ve done that is not available to download freely under a Creative Commons license.  Yes, it must be purchased as a physical CD.  It is, as the web page will indicate, my “box set,” not in a box, but a book, assembled by hand, including everything I released on General Ludd Music between 1992 and 2005, except Chevy w/Balding Tires, which I’d thought at the time stood nicely on its own and which I wanted people to buy separately to try to get rid of a few of the CDs I’d had printed up.  It’s a very nice product, and something where actually holding it in your hand while you listen is worthwhile.  So, if you like my stuff, it’s a good way to go.  This is one of a handful of tunes on Poison that aren’t on any of my other albums, and likely I will as time passes write posts about the others and make the recordings available on this blog.  I’m not holding on to them for profiteering, but Poison was intended to be a physical product, and a physical product it will remain.

New Tune: A Bed of Roses

“A Bed of Roses,” demo (2009).

Lyrics with chords in .pdf, for all you hootenanny participants.  Print and play!

“A Bed of Roses”, Garageband file–444 mb.  Feel free to add as you see fit, but let me hear the results.

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

There’s nothing simple about the pleasures of this average working American
If you calculate the complex operations I undertake to make ends meet
Keep your observations on your person and it’ll be better for the both of us
So we can smile at each other when we’re passing upon the street

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

Late one evening as I was stumbling through a garden of well-dressed rose bushes
Traveling out of my mind as I was trying to find my homeward pathway come correct
It then occurred to me too plainly to put my finger right upon it
So I rolled up my scruples and lay me down in a bed of roses

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

Who would have thought that these daily trials would have made a man or something out of me
Sometimes I wonder if the good days are gone or just taking a long vacation
So when I ask for your black tooth smile, you’d do right to muster it up for me
And I’ll shake my eyes-closed head in crooked time to the fiddle player

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

At that time I lay down my mind and kick my shoes off
When I’ve spun my wheels one last time in that wild and great big go-round
I’ll take two portions of my daily bread in preparation for what lays ahead
And take two bottles of the finest vintage I can lay my fists upon

I like making tunes available quickly, which is not a way to monetize my art.  That said, I like it, and I’m fortunate enough to have a revenue stream that, while not a mighty Mississippi, is stable and pleasant enough so that I’d be a fool to try to make music my sole source of income.  So here we go: A Bed of Roses, cut to Garageband on Labor Day, 2009, finished less than an hour ago.

Please note–and this is worth its own paragraph–that there’s a .pdf of the lyrics to this tune, with chords.  I’d hope that any musicians who plan on making it to my house concert on October 3rd (email for directions) will be ready to play or sing along.  Music is meant to be a participatory affair.

I’d written most of this tune about a year ago but left off editing until this morning, quite literally.  I cut one couplet and replaced it, as well as tweaked a word here and there.  The addition fit in fine, actually adding to the tune, and I’ll not indicate which couplet is the new one, letting you instead enjoy it as a piece.

One of the tunes I’ve played for decades now–since I was 18, actually, 22 years and counting–is “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” a perfect, all-purpose hootenanny tune if ever there was one.  This is definitely its own tune, and the melody has been in my head incessantly in the past weeks, but it’s a singalong, which of all genres is the most beautifully Socialist.  I am not the world’s biggest Pete Seeger fan, but I also am aware that the point of Pete Seeger is socio-musical rather than strictly musical.  John Cage was similar: the point with both was the creation of social relationships in music.  Pete Seeger, by all accounts the best leader of singalongs there is (still), is all about diminishing the distance between musician and audience, which is, when one thinks of it, much too hierarchical as it stands.  Octavia Butler points out that humans have two contradictory impulses, that toward intelligence and that toward hierarchy.  The first is good, the second bad.

The recording is of decent quality but not better.  I recorded it using the built-in mic on my Mac laptop, on Garageband.  It sounds disturbingly like my old 4-tracks did.  Musicians should feel free to download the Garageband file above and add to it as you see fit.  Have fun.  None of the solos are particularly great, though the three are functional and this has the first bit of slide guitar I’ve recorded in 20 years.  All of this is made available with a Creative Commons 3.0 license, so you can modify things and add as you see fit.  As I note above, have fun, but let me know.

Enjoy it.

San Francisco, CA – 10/10/09

Who	Bill Foreman house concert
When	Saturday, October 10, 2009 8:00pm - RSVP--so attendees maximum. - All Ages
Where	Bill's Living Room (map) San Francisco, CA, USA 94112 Email billforemanmusic@gmail.com for event information and directions.
Other Info	At the very least, it will be me, Bill, my guitar and lyric book, and hopefully on a few tunes some other players as well, depending on who can make it to the performance. Should be fun, and good. No amplification, either--just real music. RSVP required, as space is limited: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=132392972961&ref=nf

« Back to the calendar

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.