I’ve Maintained My Advantage

“I’ve Maintained My Advantage,” from Seventeen Miles Past Indio (2002).

Although I’m blissfully alone,
I’m drawn to the phone
And I can almost hear it ring.
Just behind the front door
There’s one shrill voice or more
With my name loudly echoing.
The lipstick stains and my dirty hands:
How I keep searching the sheets for hair-strands.
It won’t be long until I hear these demands
That I’m sure are there waiting.
So dress me down and classify me as vile.
Confine my dwellings to a garbage pile.
I have my prizes and my face can still smile.
I’ve maintained my advantage.

My reactions are automatic
And my expression stays static
When I’m held up to the grill.
I’m giving proof to my belief
That as I’m given this grief
I further strengthen my iron will.
There have been times that I’ve found myself caught,
But after all of these things that I’ve bought,
To bring this total to a deafening nought
Would just leave me chagrined.
So shoot my head up with your slings and your needles.
Lay my dead body on a heap of dung beetles.
I am much smarter than the average bipedal.
I’ve maintained my advantage.

I’ll surely slip through their sight
And with each passing night
Their suspicions will keep unconfirmed.
That nasty thought in their brains
Is surely sure to remain
An unreproductive, though vicious, germ.
So box my face or cut me up with your claws
And then recite that long list of your laws.
I can retort without the slightest of pause
That I’m all but immune.
So call the cops or throw me into the deep,
But don’t call me an example of sheep.
Though I have hideous dreams when I sleep,
I’ve maintained my advantage.

If I remember correctly, this was the first tune I’d finished after the House Carpenters sputtered into non-existence.  I have never believed in divine intervention into human affairs, but this might be evidence of it if you wanted to demonstrate such a thing.  It helped me immensely after losing what to this day was the most important and beloved musical collaboration of my life that I wrote what was my best tune to date nearly immediately upon said collaboration’s collapse.

I imagine that one reason the tune turned out well is because I had literally nothing in my life at that point except a job hunt, which mentally I wanted to avoid.  Focus is as much a matter of circumstance as ability, though both play a role.  I had nothing to do except pay attention to the task of the lyrics, and I’d think that their simplicity–it’s a very, very simple tune–is a result of that.

Simple does not mean static.  A tune needs some sort of movement.  That said, while one can create the illusion of movement in a song by throwing a lot of stuff into the lyric, a better approach is to create a simple structure in which the pieces affect the meaning of each other, pieces taken not necessarily as actual verses but possible as ideas or themes in the tune.  This is to say, with concrete reference to this tune: there are three basic things happening:

1. We have a philanderer driven to philander.
2. We have a philanderer trying to hide philandering in order to continue philandering.
3. We have the mental result of this conflict, itself in two parts:

• A sense of superiority because of successful hiding of philandering.
• A sense of desperation because of the constant threat of failure to hide.

It’s a very simple vulgar dialectic, vulgar, I say, because dialectic is not as formulaic in either Marx or Hegel as people often present.  That said, we have thesis, antithesis–1 and 2 above–and then a synthesis (3, above) which is itself a new conflict, as seen in the bullet points.  The tune basically presents these four ideas, and it’s compelling because they relate to each other in a way that is both abstractly logical and also true to actual, lived experience.

To be sure, I didn’t draw up an abstract structure for the tune and then start writing lyrics.  All theory must derive from actual practice if it is to be of any value.  I first, as I nearly always do, started plunking out some little thing on my guitar and as I stumbled through it a little melody caught my ear and I went with it.  I do not remember for sure but nearly always I start the lyrics by jotting down crap that sounds (sort of) good with the melody and gradually, through all the crap, stumble upon a lyric that is (semi-) intelligent.  My wife and I went through a phase a few months ago in which we watched all of the Inspector Morse episodes.  One of the points of that character is that he stumbled to his conclusions, often making a mess of things but through a combination of what gets called intuition–really more a curiosity about things one doesn’t fully understand–and rational thought about things understood Morse would get his man, or woman as the case might have been.  So it is with me and lyrics.  There’s a lot of stumbling, but I have a very good sense of when things don’t quite yet fit and require still more stumbling.  I stop when things fit, which in the case of this tune produced what is, at the end of it, a very clear and logical structure.

I pointed out above that one does not begin with an abstract structure but rather with concrete screwing around with words.  I would stress this again.  The key to this or any of my best tunes is that each line holds up extremely well on its own.  This tune is, I’d say as an aside, me at my very best.  Understand that I don’t pretend it always works this well for me.  I like abstract painting almost as much as I do non-representational art, but writing a song is a different proposal than creating a painting.  We do not need abstraction on its own in a tune.  Popular song as a form is a social development, made as a means among other things to record real life for a community.  The stuff in a song needs to fulfill this purpose, even if it is a work of fiction.

I would also note, possibly seeming to the contrary but in fact not at all so, that one need not make every line of a tune a direct reflection of some larger theme or plot.  The final four lines of each verse illustrate this:

So dress me down and classify me as vile.
Confine my dwellings to a garbage pile.
I have my prizes and my face can still smile.
I’ve maintained my advantage.

The bulk of the tune deals with the protagonist and the various women with whom he philanders.  Here, the relationship changes, to an exchange between the protagonist and listener, with references that stand on their own.  “Garbage pile,” for example.  Again:

So shoot my head up with your slings and your needles.
Lay my dead body on a heap of dung beetles.
I am much smarter than the average bipedal.
I’ve maintained my advantage.

Slings and needles, referencing Hamlet to please the white hipsters who never got past their square schooling, and dung beetles have nothing to do with the actual plot of the tune.  The Yogi Bear reference (“smarter than the average bear”), infinitely preferable to me than that to Shakespeare, certainly ties directly to the protagonists sense of superiority but it does so with a reference totally unrelated to anything actually happening in the tune.

So call the cops or throw me into the deep,
But don’t call me an example of sheep.
Though I have hideous dreams when I sleep,
I’ve maintained my advantage.

Again: no cops are actually called in the concrete action of the tune.  That said, all of these little lines relate to things of real life, assuming to take one example that one remembers Yogi Bear.  This is the key to a good tune.  Everything needs to reflect real experience, however silly, banal, or deathly important.  Life is all those things and so a tune needs to be as well.

If memory serves, I felt as soon as I wrote this that I wished that it was the mid-1960′s so I could put this out as a single.  Obviously, I could have paid the money to press this as a single and actually nearly did, though I in the end didn’t bother because I well understood that the single had ceased to be a socially (and commercially, though this never has concerned me as I’ve never made money at music) meaningful form by the late 1990′s.  That said, I actually paid to have this and three other tunes mastered in a studio in Riverside.  The EP was to be called “Purim,” after a suggestion from my friend Jordan.  Once I did the math and realized that it was a financially idiotic thing to do, I didn’t print the thing up.

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.

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.