sing us your favorite tune

Thinking Fellers Union Local #282 :: Hurricane

This song comes into my head whenever I look at the ocean. It’s OK, because I’ve loved the song since the first time I heard it years ago and having grown up in Kansas, my times of looking at the ocean since hearing it have been fewer than, say, the times I’ve smoked a cigarette (although more times than, say, I’ve read books by William Faulkner, which is quite a few, and some of those I’ve read more than twice). In fact, one of the beauties of this song is that it will pass before you know it; the waves of it all lumbering into the shore and rolling into your feet, the spray hitting your torso, the sun on your arms and face. Sometimes the waves are rough and sometimes they barely make it, instantaneously swallowed by another wave with more force or lazily left to roll back into the nothingness of the ocean. Sometimes the waves swirl in holes dug with a child’s foot to get sand to build an asymmetrical castle. And then, before you know it, another six minutes has passed.

When I was at the ocean a few weeks ago with my father-in-law and wife at a really nice little town on the Oregon coast that has, we were told by our hosts, the most expensive real estate value of anywhere in the northwest (or maybe it was the west coast? Who knows, really—they were nice and warm and wonderful people and prompted us for an impromptu concert when they saw there was an acoustic guitar on the wall) and for that reason the town is very quiet and quaint, I could hear the refrains again of the quietest passage of Hurricane—single notes struck like bells into the middle of a storm while Jay Paget tap-tap-tap-tap-taptiti-taptaps on the high-hat, right before the lines, “I don’t want to come up now / I just want to stay submerged / Reeling water, sinking down / I just want to let it all drift away” came into my mind as the water rolled in and out on the cold beach*. We later sat at the only restaurant in town, which doubled as the only bar, and had some pretty great oyster burgers as everyone huddled together at a booth instead of a table because the place was packed** and we talked about politics, the weather, our lives… whatever it is strangers talk about, but more often than not stared at the big screen TV as Ike was coming inland upon Texas and CNN had someone braving the rain with an umbrella and rain jacket. That’s a sight that never fails to crack me up, even if I know the impending doom.

At the end of the weekend, we slowly headed up the coast to show our visitor the beauty of it. We lazed around in Astoria awhile, stopping to look at the sea lions that like to hang out on the boat docks near the edge of town. I made it home in time to go to what was officially a business dinner with a new boss and a few coworkers, but what was really just five people having a few beers and some food and getting to know one another. It was a good ending to a tiring, although very enjoyable weekend. When I came home it was 9:26.

My wife told me that David Foster Wallace had hung himself that Friday. She told me that his father said in the New York Times that he had been on anti-depressants most of his life (like so many… too many people I know, including me for portions of my own life) and nothing was working anymore before he did it, not even shock treatment. And as the barbaric treatment sank into my own mind, I didn’t know what to say. She was visibly distraught and had been crying. It was horrible and I was crushed. He was one of our favorite writers… we’d even made light of the fact that we thought he needed an editor and one less name in a band bio I’d written years earlier. But if he couldn’t make it…. I immediately felt bad for even thinking it; for even putting that into the world. Later that night she reminded me of this passage from DFW’s essay Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise, from Harper’s, which later became the titular story of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:

There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair. The word “despair” is overused and banalized now, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. It’s close to what people call dread or angst, but it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I’m small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard….

In school I ended up writing three different papers on “The Castaway” section of Moby-Dick, the chapter in which a cabin boy falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Stephen Crane’s horrific “The Open Boat,” and I get bent out of shape when the kids think the story’s dull or just a jaunty adventure: I want them to suffer the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I’ve always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless depths inhabited by toothstudded things rising angelically toward you.

Our guest—my father-in-law—had talked about being set adrift, earlier that afternoon, during a hurricane on the ocean when he was a young marine and how the vomit falling into the cabin below the deck where everyone was supposed to sleep caused everyone to stay up all night play poker. He also talked about the feeling of nothingness he got when he rode in the watch tower (and wondering how many succumbed to the ocean waves then as he told us of the wonder of nothing in his own way) on a carrier bound for the [redacted] coast. And I wondered that as well, in my mind, when he talked about the disorientation of the ride in the lookout tower because as much as I love the ocean and never, ever pass up a chance to go, the ocean scares me to immobility occasionally, sometimes literally I have to force myself to walk back to the shore or some building past it in order to hold onto something while my wife runs to the shore and puts her toes in the water and sings and dances. I have to work my way up to facing the ocean. It’s the noise and vastness and the feeling that I am nothing; and the fact that I can’t see what’s coming at me because you don’t know what is in all that water***, even if you’re onshore; and the overwhelming urge to walk into the water at times while never looking back is almost surely too romantic; and the guilt for even thinking that way; and having to even think about the money it would take just to own a house near the ocean and the victims of hurricanes/tsunamis of recent past and looking at the tsunami sirens on the Oregon coast**** and, finally, knowing that David Foster Wallace had already summed my phobias up in a couple of paragraphs.

Tonight while writing this I got up to see why our cat The Big Delicious was crying (she’s always crying for no apparent reason, usually late at night, but she’s happy to see you when you look for her); and I looked at our other cat Mushi Mushi, Gila Monster, who had had his leg amputated a few months ago after he somehow broke it almost at the joint (he’s an insane inside cat) and the hospital had to wait to amputate because his heart was enlarged and we’re still not sure how to get him help or even if we need to—and how will we pay for it if he does after paying some crazy amount for the amputation?; and I looked at my wife sleeping because she’s had a horrible summer filled with the death of a very close loved one and sometimes she just can’t find sleep so I let her go; and I think about David Foster Wallace’s wife having to find him; and I think about the people of Louisiana and Texas and other Gulf Coast states and cities who may or may not have electrical power at the time I’m writing this and may or may not have loved ones who have died while I, who have a computer that mostly works, and a special full spectrum lamp my parents bought us as a gift because the NW kinda sucks in the winter; writes this; and I go to the fridge and open a beer and I know that this song isn’t about hurricanes or the ocean. Of course, as I finish my beer and walk the four blocks to the little convenience store in our neighborhood (that people would ask us, “You know, that’s the ghetto?” about our ‘hood when we got to our new hometown and we’d want to reply, “You’ve got to a fucking kidding? Have you ever seen a ghetto? Cause that ain’t it,” but instead we’d just say, “uhh, yeah, we’ve heard something like that.” And laugh) and some kid asks me for fifty cents and I know that he doesn’t want it for food, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t have any cash anyway and he gives me a “tsk” when I tell him. (This makes me a little angry, but also makes me laugh a little as I head for the crosswalk.) No, this song is a conversation between two people: one who doesn’t want to live anymore and one who (in thought: hint the weirdly disjointed lines of the verse) is so consumed by the other person and can’t do anything but be effected by the other person’s depression that they have nothing to talk about except depression… and that’s when I can’t do anything but know what I’ve always known: that’s what the song is about and hope that anyone listening to it who may be feeling despair tonight or any night will find some small piece of happiness and peace of mind soon*****.

Even if it’s just in a song******.

* If you don’t know, Oregon beaches are hardly ever warm and the water is freezing, even in the summer. It’s always slightly amusing watching men with no shirts and teenage girls in bikinis tough it out as if this is what beaches were made for and, dammit, I’m going to be half naked!

****** The antidote song for this post is What A Wonderful World, by Louis Armstong, but it’s the antidote for pretty much everything, really. I can’t explain why now, or maybe ever.

Hurricane (7.8MB MP3)
Thinking Fellers Union Local #282 (homepage)

Buck Owens :: Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass

Most people remember Buck from the hokum of Hee Haw and with good reason since he co-hosted the show from 1969 to 1986. But there’s more to Buck than yelling “sah-LUTE” for small towns on television.

A favorite songwriter of the Beatles and John Fogerty (who name checks Owens in the tune Lookin’ Out My Backdoor), Owens and the Buckaroos moved country music back to its honky tonk past during a time when the sophisticated sound of countrypolitan was big on the charts, shooting it with the rockabilly that folks like Johnny Cash had brought before (Owens recorded a rockabilly song under the name of Corky Jones—he didn’t want the tune to hurt his country career so he used a pseudonym). As the inventor of the Bakersfield sound, Owens realized that his music was coming out of AM radios and pushed the treble on his recordings to a point that would take off your skin at the right levels. Dwight Yoakam at least did right by the person who created the sound that he used by helping out Owens with a comeback in 1988.

There’s a couple of reasons that I love this song. The first and foremost is Don Rich’s use of the Maestro fuzztone. Rich was Owens righthand man in the Buckaroos. After Rich died in 1974 in a motorcycle accident, Owens gave up music until the aforementioned Yoakam album in ‘88. The sound of the Maestro, along with the harpsichord, places the song firmly among any Nuggets-era baroque-ravaged garage rock tune and also points country music to its teenage brother rock and roll.

Second, the lyrics of the song on first blush seem a bit sexist, but before you dismissing Buck with a simple fish and bicycle argument, listen to it again. It’s a song about a man who is just about out of his lover’s door. He brings her breakfast in bed. He chops wood. He dries her crying eyes. He jumps when she says frog. Plus, for me, the double entendre of the titular line is one of the better metaphors for domesticity around. Sure beats anything that doofus Frank Zappa came up with, and you don’t even have to listen to Steve Vai wank on his guitar for 10 minutes.

Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass (4.4MB MP3)
Buck Owens (wikipedia)

the Futureheads :: First Day

I just started a new job. It’s wonderful and a job that I’ve been wanting for a long time now (or at least since graduating from library school). Anyway, I’m much less cynical than this song relates about my new job (and way less innocent about office work), but I still love it and have had it stuck in my head the last couple of weeks. First, I love songs that speed up in the middle. Second, they have great vocal melodies. Third, and most important, when Barry Hyde sings “Lucky, lucky, lucky on your first day” with his accent, I like to pretend that he’s singing it directly to me (since, in essence, he’s singing my last name). Fourth, but also important, it rocks.

I still haven’t listened to their latest, but I have a feeling I wouldn’t like it as much as this album. Oh well, I’m too busy now to care.

First Day (2.9MB MP3)
the Futureheads (homepage)

Hobart Smith :: Uncloudy Day

There’s something about death that makes me want to listen to hillbilly music and I think it might be because of my paternal grandmother. When people jokingly say that they never saw anyone in The Carter Family smile, I believe it. Hillbilly music doesn’t allow you to smile when you sing it. To do it right, you have to form a holler and yelp from the diaphragm, push it through the nose a bit, and if you hold your mouth in a stern almost-frown while opening it wide to let it all out, then you’ve just about got the sound right. It’s the sound that Vachel Lindsay, at the end of his poem The Leaden-Eyed, describes in the eyes of the poor children of the world as:

Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

Anyway, as I was saying, I’m pretty sure I’ve acquired my love for old country / bluegrass / blues / scratchy 78s from my grandmother. She didn’t really listen to music, only the AM country station in the morning until her stories (that’s soap operas) were on. She could yodel like no one’s business, but she did it rarely. She was from the Ozarks, but lived the life of a sharecropper moving from town to town in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas with her husband and eight children (two others died at birth) before I was born. She was always nice to me because she liked me, but she could be a bitter, manipulative, and angry woman who raised some wonderful people and some that aren’t really all that wonderful.

She once pulled a gun on one of my grandfather’s associates because she thought he was trying to screw her family out of money (I probably would have as well). He was only saved by my grandfather knocking her arm up as she shot. She packed her youngest children in the car after that and left, but came back when she was about to run out of gas because she had no money and nowhere else to go. The associate didn’t bother them much after that, but they moved soon anyway. Her husband, my grandfather, died well before I was born, his body worn out from a life of manual labor and the onset of cancer. He was in his fifties.

I didn’t see my grandmother smile much until I graduated high school. That’s not because she was proud of me, although I’m sure she was, but because in the months that followed she had a massive stroke. She survived the stroke to live another 10 years or so, even though the doctors didn’t think she would. She didn’t smile because she lived though, she smiled because her brain was damaged, which completely changed her personality and gave her very strange hallucinations that she used to tell me about. She’d laugh about the things crawling on the walls. She’d laugh about the fact that she had just searched her roommate for cookies she was sure that she had smuggled into the room. She laughed when she made up stories about her children in far off countries while that child sat in the same room she was in. After suffering another stroke in 2002, her brain quickly withered. The doctor would come in every day saying she could die at any moment… and kept saying it for a week and a half, after a few days, looking increasingly guilty. In the week before she finally went, he said it almost as if he couldn’t believe it himself. My grandmother had a hard life, but if there was one thing you could say about her it’s that she didn’t let anyone tell her what she could do and if you tried, she was sure to do the opposite.

A few weeks ago as I was flying back from L.A. where I visited someone for the first time—someone that was close to me that I never knew, someone who fought for herself every minute of her life and who was tired of fighting, someone who loved art and beauty but had so very little of it in her later years, someone speeding toward death after a hard life —the song Uncloudy Day by Hobart Smith (recorded by Alan Lomax) came on my headphones. Hobart sings the lyrics written by Rev J. Alwood many years ago and unlike some treacly contemporary versions I’ve heard, Hobart sounds like he’s resigned himself to hoping there could be a better life after this one, despite what his experiences have taught him. ‘They’ keep telling him about a better land, but because he has no idea of what a land of no cares and uncloudy days is like, he hopes that he can make it on his journey. I listened to the song and turned to look down on the clouds and cried, hiding it from the couple who sat beside me reading magazines—she Glamour, he Sports Illustrated—the ones who laughed at the same jokes I hear from every airline steward during takeoff. It was strangely comforting trying to find a way to be alone on a plane because you can’t be alone on a plane. They weren’t thinking of dreamless starvation with no rewards and no god to serve. They were enjoying their flight.

I listen to hillbilly music when I’m confronted with death and I know that it’s because of my grandmother. I listen to it not in a search for authenticity, but in a search for home.

Uncloudy Day (5.2MB MP3)
Hobart Smith (wikipedia)

Fess Parker :: Goodnight Little Wrangler

The song Goodnight Little Wrangler is from the kid’s album Western Songs for Children, released in 1963. It’s one of my favorite thrift store finds of all time. It’s also one of my favorite songs of all time.

Fess Parker, the main voice in the song, was known as Davy Crockett throughout the 50s and by wearing a coonskin cap in the series of movies, single-handedly created the fad of wearing them (well, that and the company that put out the movies, which shall go unnamed, had some sort of marketing genius). He was later known as Daniel Boone to most every kid with a television set between 1964 to 1970 (and sometimes afterward with reruns—that’s how I know him).

The song seems normal enough, starting with a yawning Fess telling us, “There’s nothing I like more than sleeping. Here’s a little song I like to sing before I hit the hay.” Then the night widens and becomes more surreal as you get into bed. Stars are like ponies standing drowsy with purple eyes blinking. In “moon hay” (!?) you’ll gather dreams waiting “deep down in the pocket of your jeans” (!!??!!).

Then the chorus comes in, and you hear it, “Take me by the hand along with you, long ago I lost my way.” * It’s delivered as a soliloquy almost, to be performed while facing a window and looking at the moon’s drowsy eyelids. This song is about a man who wants to be a child again.** He’s searching for a way to see those ponies with purple eyes. It’s about yearning for the romantic ideal of innocence and idyllic meadows with drowsy horses, huge skies, and probably a mountain and a creek or two. The marimba, pedal steel, and backing singers just add to the surreal beauty of the song (I really think it could pass as a Badalamenti bit in a David Lynch film). Then he gives the sleeping child a final kiss, tucks them in, maybe pulls the coonskin cap off the child, puts it on a night stand, and closes the door as the last little bit of light from the hallway diminishes to a sliver under it and the room takes on the hue of melancholy.

It’s a song yearning for the imagination of a dream-reality while the real world is filled with death (The Big Sleep as it’s sometimes called).

It’s a song that is weird and, ultimately, very lonely, but as beautiful as the sky after a midwest thunderstorm.***

Goodnight Little Wrangler (3.5mb mp3)
Fess Parker (wikipedia)

^*** I so very incredibly miss thunderstorms in Kansas in the spring.

Electric Light Orchestra :: Mr. Blue Sky

This is a love letter of sorts, so if you don’t want to deal, just skip to the last paragraph:

I spent my early childhood in the late 70s and early 80s, so my brain doesn’t really see what’s wrong with androgyny, polyester (as long as I don’t have to wear it), or overly-dramatic and completely overblown pop songs. I love Black Sabbath as much as I love ABBA. I can listen to a lot of proggy goodness in the way of Guru Guru and then turn on the sixth Beatle Jeff Lynne and his bubblegumilicous candy-prog band ELO. But it hasn’t always been that way.

You see, I have a problem with nostalgia. It’s a game for losers and advertising firms and I really had worked hard on getting rid of it in my life. Around 2002, however, I had a small change of heart. It was around then a lot of things ended for me and I was stuck in a horrible job in a three-bedroom house with holes in the floor; I couldn’t even pace back and forth because there was no room. I had begun hanging around my friend Melissa a lot more, because she saw that I wasn’t doing well at all. We watched movies together and went out to dinner. We had drinks at local bars (even though she doesn’t drink) and talked about books and music and art and our past lives. We both came to a few conclusions: H.I.‘s words in Raising Arizona, “Sometimes it’s a hard world for small things,” are some of the truest spoken by a film character in recent history; no one should read a novel by a man written from ‘65 to now in which the main character comes to terms with his father through sports/cars/art/women; love is bolder than hate; and lit degrees are kind of worthless.

I had planned a trip to New Mexico in early spring to camp by myself for a few days, but a huge snow storm was coming directly in the path of my trip, so I couldn’t go. Getting ready for the trip, I heard Mr. Blue Sky on the radio or in a shop or something and had flashbacks to my older cousins’ rooms with posters of the Bee Gees and Olivia and John in Grease and that weird flying neon ELO jukebox symbol. What was that thing? It wasn’t as cool as the spaceship on Boston albums, that’s for sure. I thought about how much I wanted a vocoder and that the song was actually really good, even if it was a complete Beatles ripoff, and then it left my head. Anyway, in lieu of New Mexico, Melissa decided that we should go a couple of hours north to Omaha and spend the weekend. I’m all like, “Omaha? Yecch!” and she said, “No, it’s great. Let’s go!” So I relented.

We get to Omaha and it is great and we have a wonderful few days. On our last day, we step into a book store with a record store in the basement and an art gallery upstairs called The Antiquarian. While walking around the art exhibit we accidentally walk into an NA meeting. Whoops. We slowly backed out as they said their prayer and we made our way to the record store downstairs. There we met the older man and twenty-something working the register (named by us Dinosaur and Dinosaur Jr. for their record store crustiness—they were nice fellas, though). We looked around and I noticed ELO’s Greatest Hits for $3, so I pick it up and debate. “I’m really not sure if I should get this,” I tell Melissa, “it’s pretty corny and it just brings back feelings of nostalgia more than anything.”

“Nostalgia, shmostalgia. If you like it, get it. If you don’t get it, I will,” she said and smiled. So I walked it up to the counter with the other purchases, which D. and D. Jr. liked and commented on even as they balked and frowned at my copy of ELO’s Greatest Hits, and we walked out of the store.

Soon Melissa and I’s occasional being together became being together all the time and not wanting to spend any time without one another. I also became obsessed with the song Mr. Blue Sky, and its second-rate Beatles progressions, so much so that every day when we’d wake up together for about three months, I’d play it on the stereo. I’d play it loudly. Sometimes I wouldn’t even wait for the gratuitous ending before I would pick up the needle and start it again, dancing off to the shower. I no longer had ghosts of the late 70s drifting through my thoughts whenever I heard it, just how happy I was to have Melissa around. Now when the song comes up in a commercial or movie or on the radio, I remember how it feels to be loved enough by someone that they would offer to buy an album that I liked but was too afraid to buy because of nostalgia—to be loved by someone who knows me better than I know myself and doesn’t care—and that makes me infinitely happier than anything else in the world.

I honestly like Supertramp as well. Journey, not so much.

Mr. Blue Sky
Electric Light Orchestra (homepage)

De La Soul :: A Roller Skating Jam Named

Q-Tip cameo?
Check.

Russell Simmons as WRMS DJ?
Check.

Samples of Grease and a Chicago tune?
Check.

Jazz band Young-Holt Unlimited covering Light My Fire?
Check.

There’s not much that would make me want to skate nowadays, but Prince Paul era De La Soul almost do that for me. Instead, I take off my shoes and skate around our house. Then I put my shoes back on and head to the park.

It’s a Saturday.

A Roller Skating Jam Named “Saturdays”
De La Soul (fan site)

World of Pooh :: Scissors

I’ve had a crush on Barbara Manning since I was sixteen. I think I can admit that here.

Sixteen was the age that I first heard Manning sing as a part of the band World of Pooh. World of Pooh’s album Land of Thirst (with Jay Paget on drums and Brandan Kearney on guitar) was recorded by Greg Freeman and released in 1989. I’ve always found that the song I go back to most is Scissors. The imagery in the song is a bit violent and disarming like the best folk songs, pointing toward a life of lost connections and self doubt, all within the domestic metaphor of clashing shears and threadless needles. This version of the song is about one part indie rock jangle (less REM and more The Bats) and one part noise rock, like much of World of Pooh’s recorded output. Manning went on to rerecord the song, as well as Somewhere Soon, for her solo album Lately I Keep Scissors in a more straight forward fashion, complete with scissors-as-percussion, flattening out the jagged edges. Without the crazed drumming of Jay Paget, it falls a little flat for me (it’s still wonderful and beautiful, though, as is the whole album, so go buy the damn thing).

For those wondering and or keeping score, the other members of World of Pooh, Jay Paget and Brandan Kearney, were both stalwarts of the San Francisco scene in the 80s and 90s as well. Drummer Paget went on to become a part of the amazing and much-loved-in-our-household Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. Kearney was a part of the band Caroliner, a whacked-out art combo who usually had handmade covers and elaborate costumes (when I saw them in a small club, they had papier-mâché masks and the album I bought was wrapped in a Depends undergarment bag). He also played on some of Manning’s solo albums.

Barbara Manning is still making wonderful music, now with the Go Luckys.

Unfortunately, the album is long out of print and probably won’t be rereleased anytime soon. If you look around hard enough on the internet, you can find a copy, though. It’s completely worth your time.

Scissors
World of Pooh (Barbara Manning’s site)

(Note — Lately I Keep Scissors was rereleased in 2007 as part of the box set Super Scissors, which also includes One Perfect Green Blanket on which Manning rerecorded another one of her great World of Pooh songs called Someone Wants You Dead and some excellent demos.)