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.

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.

New Tune: A Bed of Roses

“A Bed of Roses,” demo (2009).

Lyrics with chords in .pdf.

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.