New Tune, “High Finance”

“High Finance,” from “Garageband Demos 2009-2010.”

Sometimes I feel the need to fall down from high finance
I call sick and start driving until I hit Baton Rouge
Where the hotels are cheap and the liquor is cheaper
I’ve never been a sound sleeper so I might as well cut loose

I got a pint of rye through my arteries pulsing
Soon my stomach’s convulsing in the bushes outside
I hit it again and that seller keeps selling
There’s no telling how many that stream down my throat

I’m gonna burn through every one of my father’s connections
And I’ll burn through my subordinates on call
As no prep school could hold me
There’s no point should one scold me
I’ll have it my way or no way at all

The parking lot’s all but empty and the insects are singing
With the moonlight ringing as it lights up the clouds
But I’m too drunk to deal.  I put my head on the wheel.
I’m surrounded by steel and the radio‘s too loud

Someday I’ll get transferred back to New York City
And when that call comes I don’t know what I will do
I might accept it politely or I might lose it completely
And cash out my trust fund until my trust fund runs through

I’m gonna burn through every one of my father’s connections
And I’ll burn through my subordinates on call
As no prep school could hold me
There’s no point should one scold me
I’ll have it my way or no way at all

I put on my rubber gloves and I light me a cigarette
I flick the butt on the bedsheets and I whisper my name
I burn down the highway.  There’s the radio reporting:
Half a city block in Baton Rouge gone this morning in flames.

This is one of four tunes I wrote in Autichamp, France, in draft form, in Summer 2008.  I then let them all sit on the shelf for a year as I worked on Adieu, False, Heart in 2009.  Following that, I began revisions as the spirit moved me, which as it turned out was nearly two years later.

This is probably the least sympathetic protagonist I’ve had in a tune for some time, which all the more necessitates the need for a sweet melody in a tune, which this one has.  One of the advantages of song is that a writer works with two media rather than one, which for example a prose writer works with.  Instrumental music operates, because it is non-verbal, at a deep level with people.  I play instrumental music in my classroom when I am not directly teaching (exclusively good jazz from Ellington and Basie at the earliest through Dexter Gordon‘s Blue Note recordings from the 1960′s–basically, if Rudy Van Gelder engineered it, I want to play it) and despite the number of students who scream that they want a song with words, the music does the trick.

The fundamental experience a listerner has to a song comes from the instrumental music.  Indeed, as many people have observed, at some basic level what the lyrics themselves are saying doesn’t matter: people respond the the sound of the words rather than their literal meaning.  This leads to an obvious problem: because people can have a wonderful musical experience listening to a song with words that are of little literary value but which are unobtrusive, writers don’t invest much attention in writing their words well.

I would qualify the observation above that other people have made (I can’t remember where most recently I read someone who made the point) that the actual meaning of words doesn’t matter in song, but rather the musicality of the words.  What I would say is that the meaning doesn’t immediately matter.  This is the trick.  In an industry that wants to sell a lot of stuff and quickly, the goal of the product is immediate impact.  Immediately, the words don’t matter, as long as you have them so people don’t confuse your product for something like, God forbid, instrumental jazz.  What happens, though, is that at some point, if you have words, people are going to start to think about them.  At that point, if they mean something, it gives another layer of meaning to the song, people stick with the song, and the song in its turn sticks with people.  Writing good lyrics is an investment in a song’s future rather than its immediate present.

As usual, I don’t make any particular claims about this particular tune at this point.  It’s still fresh.  That said, I’m pretty pleased about it.  Any tune that deals with the fundamental anti-social criminality of financial capitalism is OK in my book, even for just trying.

A note on my musical progress as I close: I’m off today (in three hours’ time) to Riverside for over a month.  I’m bringing my guitar, mandola, and laptop on which I record demos.  I expect to have few distractions and am cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to devote some serious time to writing.  I haven’t made any decisions about a next record, but depending on circumstances it will be either recorded in a semi-live setting with other musicians (that is to say, we’ll record basic live tracks to ProTools and then overdub) or I’ll do the one-man-band thing.  The tunes I have so far seem pretty good so I’m optimistic.

Claremont, CA – 06/11/10

By its Very Nature Fleeting

“By its Very Nature Fleeting,” from Begging Bowl (2007).

In a cold, concrete cave
In the mists of the city
In the skeletal form of a dorm room
Lit by shooting, blue electricity
There’s a sharp, tearing wail
Like a wounded ass braying
Hello Nancy!—she’s sweet, but she’s antsy
And this is what she’s saying:

“Gone, gone away.
I’m a wild wind retreating
And the blueness of the firmament
Is by its very nature fleeting.
When my mind will finally fade
There won’t be a pause for grieving
Because the whole damn planet
Is hurtling through infinity
Through this vacuous vicinity
Through a mind of raving lunacy.”

Now a bursting voice chimes.
It’s the young convert, Felix.
“There’s a place out in space where the towers climb
Like the spiraling double-helix.
In the wide, distant sky,
See the flaming sign shining.
Without it, our lives would be bestial,
Our words, a hollow whining.

Gone, gone away.
Your whole life is time retreating.
And there’s no-one beneath the terrestrial sun
Who’ll hear your heart stop beating.
When this mundane shell decays,
You better know what you’re believing
Because the whole damn planet
Is hurtling through infinity
On a crash-course with the trinity.
It’s en route to Judgement City.”

A new voice softly breathes.
It’s the usually silent Valerie
With her words wafting down from the top bunk
Like a sweet breeze from the peanut gallery.
“You can hear what I say.
You can just as well ignore me.
But the thoughts jetting out from your synapses
Are as real as your body before me.

Gone, gone away.
You see the shining sky retreating
While some unnamed, unknown part of the globe
Feels the burning dawn light heating.
Though your shifting form will fade,
It’s no real cause for grieving
Because the entire, spinning planet
Is hurtling through infinity
Through our molecular vicinity
Through the streets of New York City
Through a tiny probability
Through the grossly disfigured and the pretty
Through a mind of bright simplicity
Through a mind of shining simplicity

I’ve always had a soft spot for this tune, since I first wrote it in 1997, right before I began the stretch of tunes that would become The Duck Hunter.  I had been toying with the riff, in which I play a D minor chord in a D major tune for two or three years by the time I really sat down to write the thing, and I felt at the time that I was writing the poppiest thing I’d written in a while.  Certainly, it was the pop-rockiest thing I’d done since the Little Band.  I wrote it moderately quickly, but well, and it shows.  It feels fresh, even after all these years, and the words do not seem labored in the least.

I imagined, for some reason, a friend’s suite at Pitzer, in Mead Dorm, as the setting.  I can’t for the life of me remember the guy’s name now, though I imagine it will come back to me at some point.  I remember, distinctly, getting together and playing some tunes informally one evening, including Bob Dylan‘s “The Man in the Long Black Coat,” which was at the time brand new and certainly the best tune on Oh Mercy, correctly considered a return to form.  My friend wasn’t the best player in the world but he was great company.  For some reason, when imagining where this tune takes place, I see the same room, with, of course, different people in it.  I would add that nearly everything I’ve ever written takes place in a very specific place I’ve been, most often with no connection whatsoever with the subject matter of the tune.

I won’t spend too much time on the lyrics, because I’ve commented on them before, but I will note that the basic form, in three parts, is more or less my most common organizational scheme and certainly one of my most effective.  It is very easy to write a compelling lyric if one takes whatever one is imagining and views it from three perspectives.  You can’t go wrong.  In this case, it’s death, but it could be absolutely anything.

This tune popped into my mind as something to write about–getting to the recording of it–because I was driving last week and it came on my radio, with my iPod on shuffle.  I was immediately struck with how much I missed my Rhodes.  I got the thing for a birthday present, cheap, right after college in the Summer of 1991 and I sold it, cheap, in 2005 before leaving for Senegal.  There was no real way I could keep it, and we don’t have space in our current digs–pretty spacious for San Francisco, to be sure–for a Rhodes.  I got a lot of mileage out of it and while I’m not much of a pianist I can’t recall a recording on which I used it to better effect than this one.

I used a trick I’ve used a couple times, which only works as a trick when it’s not planned.  I cut two tracks for the solo sections, one with electric guitar and one with Rhodes.  I played both on both solo sections, and figured I’d keep the one and keep the other, in whichever order had the better solos.  On playback, I played both initially, and found that having both simultaneously was far and away more compelling than either one by itself.  I’m a very limited soloist, most of the time, but I can arrange things pretty well.  At least, I can spot a good arrangement when it lands in my lap.

The Dance of Electricity

“The Dance of Electricity,” from Tangerine (1997).

The hounds stopped their howling
Replaced by the wailing of machinery
The calls of the crows and the mockingbirds
Gone silent, subsiding away
The sailors now sailed to foreign places
Leave no traces, no memories behind
The urchins of alleyways
Forever now fleeting, they’re drifting away
The water of wishing wells
The dust of the dreaming that’s disappeared
The shining of sundown
Superseding’s the dance of electricity

The trace of the outline of industry
Has permanent placed itself on the old skyline
The smoke of the twilight horizon
Has, shrouding, descended and seized the day
The feeling of four-letter fingerprints
Impressed itself onto the outside.  It’s crying out,
“Wait!”  Now the whole price has pushed itself
Inside of each and of all of the hollows.
The shelter of solitude
The noise of the numbers of metal days
The brightness of moonlight
In the dark of the dance of electricity

The leaves and the laughing of lily-roses
Who now can suppose who can speak in their way?
The tempo has taken its trampling
To the tears of the hallowed of higher places
The shadows of new-orphaned faces
See the spaces of lifetimes now leaved behind
In the shaking and stealing simplicity
In the trance of the dance of electricity

I went through a period in the summer before I entered grad school where I moved from Claremont back home to San Diego and wrote a number of tunes very quickly, with little editing but with a series of what I think are pretty good melodies.  There are three or four tunes from that period that actually haven’t seen release in any form and, having heard them a few years ago as I was going through my old 4-tracks and remixing them through Pro Tools, aren’t likely to be made available any time soon.  I was working quickly and playing around, and wrote some pretty embarrassing lyrics in the process.

I got better as the summer wore on, and that August (or so) I wrote “For Good Measure,” “I Know and You Know,” and “Have You Seen My Baby?” in that order, all of which still stand up and which are here heard in the 4-track demos I cut that summer, later to be re-cut for the House Carpenters’ In the Choir of Primates in 1995 and Bill & Pete’s Hey Rhumbahead! in 1993.  It was a real streak, that August, and “For Good Measure” at the time and in hindsight really represented a jump forward for me in the way I would feel that something like “I’ve Maintained My Advantage” would later on.

“The Dance of Electricity,” on the other hand, is like all the stuff I wrote in, let’s say, June or July: cut from a different and lesser cloth than those later three.  The lyrics are a mess, if evocatively so.  I’d just read Ulysses and, while I never labored under the conceit that was a writer that sings rather than a musician, or a poet rather than a songwriter (why on earth, I think, would someone who could write songs want to be anything else?), I did like how Joyce was so willing to do unconventional or anti-conventional things with language and form.  It seemed then and in its way still seems to me a good general policy, though for years now I’ve played with form and language in a less outwardly obvious way than I do in this tune.

I became very attached to E.P. Thompson and John Ruskin‘s writing in grad school, and I thought a lot at the time about change in history, and things that are lost.  I don’t think I’m a nostalgist, but I am very skeptical about the idea of progress.  I have always lived in thoroughly modern places, be they suburbs or, as I do now, in a genuine city–and Dakar is, without question, a thoroughly modern city, if of a different side of modernity than one sees in San Francisco.  Dakar would be impossible to imagine before the creation of a global division of labor.  I say this to contextualize the fact that I spend a lot of time daydreaming about living in a quiet, rural environment and walking everywhere.  I don’t know what to make of it, but suffice to say that the imagery, drawn from 19th century reactions to industrialization, are only partially a pose on my part.

What makes the tune worthwhile is the mandolin riff.  I can’t remember precisely, but I’m fairly sure this was the first tune I wrote on the first mandolin I purchased, an Irish-style Flatiron I bought used and which later split in two when a bass drum rolled on top of its soft case on the way home from a gig once.  There’s not much to say about this, except that it proves you can get a lot of mileage from a good riff, even when the other parts of the song, while not totally indefensible, aren’t up to the riff’s quality.

I have made the point elsewhere, but, again, this is a good example of how a great record doesn’t need to be made up of nothing but great tunes.  Rule #1 about choosing tunes for a record is that the tunes must be good to listen to, and therefore they need to be decent tunes.  What makes a decent tune, though, is the big question.  I’d put forward that any tune needs to have something extraordinary about it.  In this case, it’s the mandolin riff.  Actually, in hindsight I would say that everything else about the tune, from the lyrics to the vocal performance, which is likely the oddest one I’ve released, are fair at best.  I have a few tunes that I have no intention of releasing that have both better lyrics and a better performance, with a melody on par with their better lyrics and performance.  “The Dance of Electricity,” however, beats out the objectively better tune, because it has one element that really is special.  It’s got a great riff, and while that doesn’t make for a great tune, it does make it work on what was a great, if unintended, record, Tangerine.

Tangerine, again as I’ve written before, consisted of a bunch of tunes I had on 4-track that either I’d never tried with a band or which had never worked with one.  I had a fairly large back catalogue by the time the House Carpenters ceased to be, and 1997, which should have been the worst year of my musical life given the band’s implosion, ended up seeing two good records come out and a new-found confidence and independence on my part.  The Bathroom Mirror, recorded to walkman in a day and released on cassette with photocopied packaging, served to prove myself that I possessed all the tools I needed to make something beautiful.  Tangerine served to show, above all to myself, that I had been doing so for years if only I had been aware of it.  Interestingly, though I would strongly disagree, there are people who think it my best record.

New Tune, “Coyote on Valencia”

“Coyote on Valencia” from Garageband Demos 2009-2010.

Lyrics, in .pdf, with chords.

My velvet blazer and my whiskers waxed
I tip my top-hat as I cross the tracks
Without copper coin or greenbacks
My paws patter on the blacktop
Leave no reflection passing window panes
Nor no impression passing peoples’ brains
I slip between the cars and bike lanes
That litter this, my creation

I’m sneaking through windows and doors
My claws click upon floors
On this howling mid-January evening
I’m seeking out scents
Coming in from the past tense
And in minutes my pack starts its quiet forming

So, if you feel like somebody’s found you
But you can’t see any people around
Then you’ll know
That you’ll never be alone in the Financial District
You’ll have company inside the station at 24th St.
And if you take in your surroundings
You’ll see fancy mirrors and hear distant tape recordings
You’ll know
That you’ll never be alone on the Big Red Bridge
You’ll see long ago footprints in Dolores Park

I catch inarticulate infants’ eyes
I read the forms in that clouded sky
I see the metal buildings gone too high
While crouching down on the pavement
Despite that history hunting on my track
I didn’t leave, so I can’t come back
The past is gone, and the present’s cracked
So I put my eyesight ahead of me

I’m sneaking through windows and doors
My claws click upon floors
On this howling mid-January evening
I’m seeking out scents
Coming in from the past tense
And in minutes my pack starts its quiet forming

So, if you feel like somebody’s found you
But you can’t see any people around
Then you’ll know
That you’ll never be alone when you’re taking the T
You’ll have so much company you won’t know what to do with it.
And if you take in your surroundings
You’ll see fancy mirrors and hear distant tape recordings
You’ll know
That you’ll never be alone when you’re cursing the Mayor’s office
You’ll see any number of brown eyes staring back at you

When the paper reads the Mission burned
White Jesus gone, Father Serra spurned
You’ll know that I took my turn
Though it was too long in coming

I feel I take a bit of a pass on writing for 2009, because I recorded Adieu, False Heart, printed it up (such as I did), and dealt with other musical things, like performance and getting my web situation to something that fits my life at this point.  I do have a number of little ideas for tunes built up from last year, but the fact remains that I completed no new tunes in 2009.  I began this one, but only got the first verse and a bit of the second last year, and a start on the second part–”Sneaking through windows and doors,” etc.  The third part, the chorus such as it is (I’m not using these terms scientifically) had been a wisp of a melody I’d had in my head for years but which connected to this tune on the last day of a meditation retreat I attended over winter break.

I read Vine Deloria‘s God is Red a couple years ago, and it had a big impact on how I see things.  Particularly powerful was a lengthy except from a speech Chief Seattle gave in 1854 or 1855, here shortened to the relevant passage:

And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

It will be noted that eminent historians working for the National Archives have questioned the existence of the speech:

The dubious and murky origins of Chief Seattle’s alleged “Unanswered Challenge” renders it useless as supporting evidence.  The historical record suggests that the compliant and passive individual named Seattle is not recognizable in the image of the defiant and angry man whose words reverberate in our time.

I’ll go with Vine Deloria over some white hack working for the Federal Government any day of the week.  The paper is worth a gander, if only to dismiss it more specifically.  What we have here is one of a long series of examples of white academics and intellectuals trying to determine the meaning of, in this case, Indian people’s past.  Among other things, a dead giveaway for Jerry Clark’s intellectual bankruptcy: “angry man.”  Chief Seattle comes across as many things in the speech, but angry is not one of them.  If I had a dime for every time some white person called a non-angry non-white person angry…

Clark, of course, not wanting, as an employee of the Federal Government, the institution most responsible for the destruction of Indian societies in North America, and a beneficiary of that slaughter, to deal with the substance of the words.  They mean something to Deloria for a reason.  Rather than understand that reason, the argument is changed from a political to a technical one.  Clark–in Clark’s own mental world–here has the home-field advantage.  If I don’t know it, he thinks as a National Archivist, it therefore must not exist.  This is absolutely typical of white academia particularly as it examines non-white people.  We are the ones who truly know your history.

I have a pretty simple rule when looking at the past: I try to find out what peoples say about their own history as a starting point, and proceed from there.  Control of the narrative has to remain with the subjects, so to speak, of the story.  This is particularly true in North America, as in any settler colony.

There’s a litmus test to apply to any such debate about history and evidence.  When the white scholar lectures the non-white scholar or person about objectivity (broadly put), you know the white scholar is the villain, and that an attempt to maintain white control over the meaning of the past is in play.  Viz. Philip Curtain:

I note a curious anti-empiricist tone to some of the recent postings concerning the slave trade from Goree.

Where the tune differs with Chief Seattle is that it doesn’t posit the disappearance of native people:

I didn’t leave, so I can’t come back
The past is gone, and the present’s cracked
So I put my eyesight ahead of me

Credit where credit is due: our friend, Nellie, refers to the Golden Gate as “the Big Red Bridge.”  I cribbed the line for this tune.

San Diego/House Concerts

“San Diego,” from Building St. Petersburg (1999).

“San Diego,” from 1998-1999 (2005).

“San Diego,” from Live at Keith Danner’s House (2005).

A part of me has thought I’d post about tunes that are less what I’d think of as Bill classics–such as they are–than stuff I’ve done that show up rarely if ever in a live set and which never account for any of my iTunes sales–such as they are.  This, for no reason other than to vary the music I myself think about.  The classic Bill tunes–such as they are–get enough attention and end up in live sets, which is probably enough.

That said, in the many months since I’ve written posted anything at all here, I’ve played more gigs than I have in years, all in living rooms.  The short of it is that I’ve really been pleased to play house concerts for friends and acquaintances, much happier than I’ve been gigging out so to speak in cafes.  At most of these house concerts I’ve played, either by request or my own volition, “San Diego,” which is definitely not the best tune I’ve ever written but which is one of the most classically-formed and easiest to play well live.  Play well, meaning not simply in a technical sense, but emotionally.  It’s an easy song to invest with real emotion.

The video above, as the opening image notes, was shot in Pasadena a few weeks ago.  I went down to the CCSS conference to participate in a workshop and I arranged to play a house concert at the amazing Brian Forden’s pad.  I slept on Max Gerber’s couch.  Max shot video at the house concert itself which turned out nicely and which I’ll use for more videos as well in the future.  Max, whose photography is becoming fairly well known, shot this video in his living room the morning after the house concert and I felt I played the tune fairly well, particularly for never having cut a video of any sort before.  For those of you who have never seen me, I look more-or-less like I do in the video, except in color.

I’ve gotten a lot, as I noted above, playing these house concerts over the past six months or so.  We–my wife and I–have been fortunate enough to have been participating in a Marx reading group with some really heavy hitters from News and Letters, and we are now, having started with On the Jewish Question, are reading the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.  A few passages are apropos.  From the “Human Requirements and Division of Labor Under the Rule of Private Property“:

…no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver, in order to charm the golden birds, out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbours in Christ. He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses – all so that he can then demand the cash for this service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the glue-pot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man, is a bond with heaven – an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one’s neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.)

And conversely, from “The Power of Money“:

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.

As an aside, I want to repeat to everyone that that last is Karl Marx writing.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you that he was anything other than as deeply a humane human as we as a species have produced.  For me, personally, the two combined crystallized feelings I’ve had about music over the last years.  For much of my adult life, certainly since I got my first good review in 1995 or so when I sent out the House Carpenters’ record to a few places, and then especially when I got some shockingly good reviews in lo-fi/DIY ‘zines and websites, with The Bathroom Mirror, etc., I’ve chased sales as a measure of my worth, musically.  Chased sales, however, poorly, with intermittent effort at best, and a chronic hesitance to press for a sale.  I am a commercial failure, without question, and for years this wounded me at some level, despite having done everything in my power to not sell records.

At all of the house concerts I’ve played, I’ve had people I know over.  At Brian’s, I was surrounded by very old friends, mostly from Pitzer, people I’ve known upwards of 20 years now, as Brian arrived in 1989 if memory serves.  I’ve played all the concerts for free, and while I’ve made CDs available on a sliding scale–they do carry a cost–I’ve approached them as social, rather than commercial occasions.  It’s a beautiful thing, really, and I feel like I’m actually coming to a point as a person where I am accepting that in fact this is the more natural form of music: that of a social affair between people who care for each other.  I have imagined Mississippi John Hurt a lot, before these house concerts, not for his “rediscovery” but imagining what it was like for him before that.  Tom Hoskins, who tracked him down in Avalon, Mississippi, asked people in town if they’d heard of Mississippi John Hurt, and if memory serves the reply that they certainly knew a John Hurt who played at social occasions locally.  Imagining him in those situations really has been good for me.  I have to think that those were beautiful events.

In any event, whether my imagination has simply run wild or not, I have been enjoying the specificity of playing for people I know, and for playing to play rather than for any other reason.  It is very difficult in this monetized society to dissociate notions of value from money.  I feel pretty certain I’m getting closer to it.

The song is one of my most often requested, and one of which I’m most proud.  As I noted above, I don’t think it’s my best tune, but it’s certainly one of my most easy to play.  The idea is pretty simple, and I came by it honestly and truly authentically.  When I was in high school, growing up 40 minute max from the border, people I knew would go down to Tijuana and take advantage of the city: buy alcohol, act foolish, and do whatever else they didn’t brag about when they came back.  They only ever bragged about getting drunk.  It struck me then as horribly screwed up, even if I didn’t have the language to articulate it particularly well.  The tune was based on that memory.

A last point: the guitar is worth mentioning.  I bought it in 2004, a Galloup Solstice. I’d had beers with someone who had recently retired and purchased for himself a truly fine piano.  He told me that I really needed to have a great instrument, that having a merely good one was not enough.  I went to Westwood Music, tried out a number of guitars, and picked this one.  I’ve never looked back.

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.