Bill Foreman, musician.

“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.

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.

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.

Adieu, False Heart available

“Cheap Liquor,” from Adieu, False Heart (2009)

Quickly:

My newest album, Adieu, False Heart, is now available at General Ludd Music. Download is free.  One song, “Cheap Liquor,” is publicly available without registration.  It is included in this post, though I will write about it later as well at greater length.

Years ago I blogged a bit about my music, posting music files with commentary, and in hindsight it was good for me personally as well as for a number of other people who in year since have told me they enjoyed what I wrote.  I’ll re-start that process here.

I’ve made music for well over 20 years and good music (as far as I’m concerned) since at least my Junior year in college, and I haven’t done anything better than this, though I’ve done plenty of things that are wonderful and different.  It’s just me and a guitar, cut in a studio, with an emphasis on concision and clarity.  It sounds exactly like I sound when I sit with a guitar and play well.  I haven’t made a record like this before, in that sense.  As far as the tunes are concerned, they are certainly the most directly accessible tunes I’ve written in years–like since 1993 or 1994–but they reflect all the development in my work up through Begging Bowl a couple of years ago.

Enjoy the tunes, and be in touch.