Bill Foreman, musician.

San Francisco, CA – 01/16/10

The Rich Part of Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

San Francisco, CA – 10/10/09

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

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Cheap Liquor

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

“Cheap Liquor (demo),” from Adieu, False Heart Demos.

You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me
I got a bad song coming and I’ll sing it from the witness tree
And they’re saying this time I took it too far
I got a set of bloody knuckes and a dented car
You got a lotta nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me

You got a mean mind to keep running my good name down
When you were robbing me blind and you took off out of town
And when I hear any telephone calling
I’m bawling and shouting your name at the walls
You got a mean mind to keep running my good name down

You got a lot of gall to be bringing up charges on me
When you call up the constable, threatening lock and key
But you can serve up your subpoena papers
I’ll still be be escaping to the street below
You got a lot of gall to be bringing up charges on me

You give a lot of grief when you’re leaving your letters behind
I can hear the clock ticking and I’m gone out of a healthy mind
I could torch this one-room apartment then watch
The whole block steal away in smoke
You give a lot of grief when you’re leaving your locket behind

You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me
Tell me who does it serve when we’re dishing up misery
Yes if you’re thinking of drinking two-fisted
You’re sinking down in the same hole I’m in
You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me

Yes, this tune was available on the last post.  That was, however, a note that “Adieu, False Heart” was available.  This is the commentary.

The demo above, which is available for listening but not to download, was recorded about two hours after I’d started writing the tune, the quickest thing I’ve written, conception to execution, probably since I was in college, and this of a much better quality (the other one was a tune called “Potato Truck Headlights,” which I wrote to prove to Colin Epstein I could write a tune in one hour, and the carelessness showed in the piece).

At that point–this is sort of how I felt about myself, and I’m curious if anyone else felt this about where I was at that time–I was a bit stuck in my musical production.  Not as bad as I’d been in 2004 or 2005, when I’d just finished Chevy w/Balding Tires, a record of which I was enormously proud and which seemed to me impossible to follow–and of course anything like that is impossible to follow if one attempts to replicate it.  Chevy was a dense piece of work, and up until that point, possibly in an attempt to compensate for a lack of record sales, my work had become increasingly literary, for lack of a better word, and probably for that reason increasingly exclusive, in a literal sense, as in keeping out.  My music I felt then and feel now was completely successful, but successful on terms which, very simply, kept people out.

All kinds of people harbor grandiose ambitions, and this kind of thing is normal and healthy.  Mine at the time was to write the best songs of anyone working remotely in my medium in my generation.  Very particularly I wanted to outclass everyone else my age lyrically while at the same time having better melodies, bearing in mind a more-or-less folk-derived base of source material, than all comers.

These kinds of ambitions are juvenile, but useful.  For starters, I made a lot of good music.  A person needs a measure of ambition, even small ambition, to do anything, and looking back between 1988, when I wrote “Full Tank of Gas,” my first decent song (commentary coming relatively soon) and 2003, when I’d completed Chevy, I wrote 60 or 70 keeper tunes, with probably that many that I put aside but which were nonetheless finished products.  More importantly to me, I put out a number of albums, all homemade affairs but very real nonetheless, and these gave and give me a sense of some accomplishment.

I don’t think I started writing tunes trying to write “literate,” let alone “literary” lyrics: I wanted at all times to write excellent lyrics to tunes, largely because I was and continue to be very easily embarrassed by bad lyrics.  I always wanted my words to actually make some sort of a point, which meant that it was never acceptable to me to be obtuse or incomprehensible.  At the same time, the ideas I tried to express became over time more complex and specific.  Details became more numerous, and the relationships between them more complex.

I have no idea how I compare to other writers my age, but I am sure that if one takes my best tunes and puts them next to others striving for a similar type and level of quality, mine at the very least hold their own with anyone else’s best.  I really felt I nailed this level of quality on Chevy’s best tunes, above all, to me, “When My Wife Takes Me By My Hand,” which was my favorite among them–commentary on that one forthcoming as well.  You could argue with me about which tune was or is the best on that record, but that one really stuck with me.

I had two problems once I’d finished Chevy.   One, of course, was that once I’d finished the work and was proud of it, it had really tapped, at least temporarily, my imagination of what I was capable of doing.  I wrote some good tunes in 2003, but very literally only a couple, and I did not write a single song in 2004.  You can imagine how demoralizing that was for me.  I have never been particularly prolific, but I’ve usually knocked out at least two tunes a year, and often more.  It’s almost a cliche to suggest that artists often spook themselves after they finish a great work, but I suppose I really did.

A second problem was that I had absolutely no sense of what to do with my music once I’d finished it.  A lot of people heard Chevy, but it never grew legs, commercially.  I have always been from somewhat naive to exceptionally so when it comes to music appreciation.  I’ve never been able to fathom that most people do not have the same relationship to music that I do, though I have come to understand that there’s no reason that people, in this big world, ought to.  I wanted Chevy to be the best hometaper/lo-fi album of all time, and to some extent I feel like I succeeded.  However, I finished it about 5 of 6 years after lo-fi had ceased to be cool, and it had never, with a couple of exceptions, been lucrative.

I suppose I started to ask myself, in 2004, when I didn’t write a single tune, what the point was, and given the assumptions I made about how my trajectory ought to work, I couldn’t give myself an answer.  I sort of assumed that if I kept making good music, things would snowball, and increasing numbers of people would come to appreciate it. It doesn’t actually work that way for anybody, even Paul McCartney.

A few things saved, me, however.  In 2004, I changed an intellectual interest in Buddhist thought into an active meditation practice when my girlfriend (now wife) and I found a fantastic meditation group in Riverside, CA, with a top-notch Dharma teacher, Gilbert Gutierrez.  The Buddhist emphasis on practice had implications for my music, and if initial results were slow to come–I wrote only two tunes in 2005, “Open Door” and “El Chorrillo,” both collected on Begging Bowl–what I did do was decide that music was something that one does.  My wife was a huge help, too.  Above all, she likes my music, to her relief.  I had told her when we started dating I made music and when I burned a CD for her of the works-in-progress from Chevy she was apprehensive lest it not be any good.  Thank God she liked it.  Having someone believe in me, but believe in me not-uncritically is hugely important.

My wife also got me out of the United States for the first time in almost 20 years.  Staying in Dakar for eight months in our first year of marriage was great for us as a couple and for me as a human being, but as a musician it really put me in a position where I felt that, contrary to my negative feelings the year before (this was 2005 when we moved there, in October), I had new and fantastic experiences awaiting me, which inevitably would lead to new musical experiences.  I finished more songs that year in Dakar than I had for some time.  A feeling of forward momentum is essential to me as a musician.

All this put me in a position where I was ready to have breakfast with Matt Nathanson in the Spring of 2007, who as I write this has finally after so many years “broken through” to a huge extent.  Matt and I played in a band together years ago, and he’s always been one of my very best supporters, on a personal as well as a musical level.  In any event, over breakfast, he said to me that he could not accept that someone as literate as me would have trouble writing.  He suggested that I just get the hell out of the way and write.  Very concretely, knowing how I wrote, he suggested that I refrain from editing a tune until I’d completed a draft.  I had evolved an effective but horribly labor intensive writing process by that time with which I would consider a complete line a good day’s work.  Deal with the editing, he said, at the end.  I said, “OK,” that I’d give it a shot because I didn’t really have anything else working for me that well.  Indeed, I said I’d have something by that evening, to which he replied that I didn’t need to feel that much of a rush, but he wished me luck nonetheless.

I drove home from Noe Valley to Crocker-Amazon, and on the way, I started whistling a bit and got the line, “You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me.”  I understand that this might sound made up, but it really did happen like this.  I got home, got my guitar, and figured out the chords to the melody I’d been humming.  I got pen and paper, and started tossing out a number of lines.  I aimed for completion rather than perfection, and allowed myself to repeat lines, in this case to begin and end each verse with the same line.  This was incredibly liberating to me, as small as it sounds, and I felt–I remember this very clearly–a palpable sense of writing quickly when I got to the end of the fourth line of the first verse and then finished it off with the first line of the verse, already written.  Writing felt easy for the first time in years.

I ended up finishing the tune in a couple hours, as I noted above.  I focused less on an overarching coherence than on a series of lines that each were vivid and, I’d hoped, humorous in a sharp, absurd way.  This is to me a very natural way of working.  I like to say absurd things in normal conversation as people who know me will tell you.  Writing a tune this way suited my temperament.  I won’t say I didn’t edit as I wrote, but the editing was limited to cutting out or adding words to make it possible to sing, given the meter.  Some lines jam in more syllables than others, and I let this be.

I was immediately a bit dumbfounded with the results, because I hadn’t written anything so quickly in years and almost couldn’t believe that after a good three or four years of horribly labored writing I’d tossed off something in a couple hours that was objectively a better piece of work than things I’d put upwards of six months–or more–into in only the recent past.  Within a day I knew that, indeed, the tune was basically finished and good.  The only word I changed between demo and the final version on Adieu, False Heart was “locket” to “letters.”

“Cheap Liquor” had practical implications.  I was, I had thought, about half-way through my follow-up to Chevy, with a good four or five tunes plus a couple instrumentals finished, aiming for ten to call it an album.  I thought, however, that regardless of whether or not “Cheap Liquor” was better than the tunes I had, that it was different, and that I didn’t want to cram it into a group of which it wasn’t really a part, and that I didn’t want to try to force myself to write things to match the other tunes I had–that, of course, being the definition of filler, which I’ve never liked.  So rather than half-way through my next record, I had one song.  I ended up, after having written a few more tunes, taking the first three weeks of the 2007 Summer vacation to record those tunes I’d written between 2005 and late 2006 and release them as Begging Bowl, calling the group of seven tunes a “mini-album” for lack of a better word.  It felt bigger than an EP: I didn’t know what else to call it.

Comparing the demo to the final product is probably not without some interest to some people.  Both have the same instrumentation: solo acoustic guitar and vocal.  The process of production–and this was sort of my point on Adieu, False Heart–was not about making instrumentation more complex or developed, but about deepening the performance.  Both were played live, without overdubbing.  I think we tend to underestimate, given modern production capabilities, how critical it is for a singer to form a relationship with a song, and I can say for myself that in the nearly two years between writing this and cutting the final recording, I’d become very close to the tune.  The listening bears this out.

San Francisco, CA – 07/11/09