Neil Young :: Tell Me Why
“Everything will be asked of us, and everything will be given”
This line popped into my brain this week while I was riding the train home. Tears pounced on my eyes, a swelling inspiration moved into my chest. I couldn’t remember which book it was from, I had to look it up (The Satanic Verses), but minus the context, the sentence has hung around in the back of my brain for years. I wasn’t raised religious, I have no slot built into my brain for god or heaven or penance or prayer, but fervent devotion has always touched me. I CAN understand activity, movement, or work that express something felt internally.
When I was in India I witnessed a pilgrimage. Devotees of a local deity spend 30 days each year walking from their home villages to His main shrine. They carry their local shrines with them, and some hold a pair of sandals. The sandals symbolize a poet-saint from their area, now five hundred years dead, who had also worshiped the same deity. On foot, they enact a spiritual journey the poet-saints made in words. These poets are so well loved because they wrote in the vernacular. The oldest wrote his impressions of lofty Sanskrit texts in his native language, making religious thinking accessible to more people. Later, the devotional, action-oriented, religious movement, went further and took religious activity out of the hands of an elite caste who cultivated purity, and gave it folks who cultivated the earth. In pilgrimage, they get a direct line to god where every step is a sacrifice to Him, without the need of a Brahmin go-between. And the joy these people express as they approach the end of the pilgrimage is stunning, like you could reach into the air and squeeze it.
I’m not of sure of the exact credentials, but if we’re looking for more current poet-saints, I’ll nominate Neil Young. He’s not writing about the perfect glory of god, but lyrically and musically, his fervor can’t be denied. Amid the deluge of messages promoting material happiness, idealizing non-feeling and sameness, he harnesses the sadness and ambiguity that underlie most of our lives, and makes beautiful songs that I can understand. Now that I’ve got the heart-swelling inspiration, I’m trying to hear what’s being asked of me.
Tell Me Why (4.1MB MP3)
Neil Young (homepage)
Arlo Guthrie :: Alice’s Restaurant (The Massacree Revisted)
Winter of my sophomore year, my high school held auditions for Our Town. I knew I wanted the part of the Stage Manager, the wise, detached narrator of the play. We had a guy at Lakewood High who always got these dad type, old man parts—one of those unfortunate teens who already kind of looked 40 years old. He was a senior that year, and a shoe-in for the role.
In order to set my audition apart, I worked on a New England accent. Being from Cleveland, I had no real idea what that sounded like, apart from a sketch on SNL of a game show where people from New Hampshire give inscrutable driving directions. That was my shred of a start, but I really got there listening to Alice’s Restaurant over and over again for like two weeks straight. I’m not sure if the clipped singsong cadence I picked up from Arlo Guthrie is anywhere near what folks from the northeast actually sound like, but it got me the part.
Arlo Guthrie re-recorded the Alice’s Restaurant album in 1996, almost thirty years after the original. I know all the pauses and lilts of the 18 minute yarn he spun back in 1967, and this version, and who knows, maybe this happened every time he sang it in the intervening 30 years, is a close to perfect copy of that other version. And that makes me think, is that what performance is? Is that what a professional musician with a 30 year career has to endure? Does anyone who plays music that long expect to develop in their craft when the audience just wants the same thing out of you that they’ve heard before?
BUT BUT BUT. Arlo saves it, at least for me, at the end of this song. If you’ve heard Alice’s Restaurant before, skip straight to 17:14, where he starts on one of the thoughtful and playful storytelling tangents that have made me a real fan of his early live recordings. Yes, he’s getting old now, and punny, and cheesy in his delivery. But he KNOWS all that, he’s over it, and comes out updating the story and providing a punchline for a song that always felt like the longest joke in the world that accidentally became serious.
Alice’s Restaurant (The Massacree Revisted) (9MB MP3)
Arlo Guthrie (wikipedia)
the Microphones :: I Felt Your Shape
Recently a complete stranger said to me “When are you going to start living your life for yourself,” or something to that effect. He was a chiropractor, and I was in his office to talk about the knots in my upper back. It was quite inappropriate really; I started weeping.
I go to this song when I need to feel stronger, and I even get to do that identifying with the object, rather than the subject. (I think about objects and subjects a lot reading and writing this blog—where do we place ourselves in these songs we love?) Phil reminds me of my monumental/elemental nature. My hair is a stampede of horses, my hips are thunderheads, my breastbone is steel girders.* When you know you are tall as mountains, it feels good to take your tree size hand and brush those shoulders off.
*For further reference, please see Ego Trip by Nikki Giovanni (performed by Blackalicious). Can anyone point me to more stuff like this? Because I think I need to up my megalomaniacal affirmation intake.
I Felt Your Shape (2.2MB MP3)
the Microphones
Max Romeo :: Chase the Devil
This is from one of my mom’s favorite records, War Ina Babylon. This song is taking it way back for me. I remember watching the island label on the record spinning around, changing, to my delight, from a lower case i to an exclamation point and back. I must have been two or three. Since she mastered that complicated leap from records to cassettes in 1986, my mother has kept a copy of this album in her car at all times. I know for a fact that it’s there right now. During my elementary school years, I learned every word to this album. I adore it. I would place it higher than Charlotte’s Web and the Care Bears Movie on my nostalgia list. And listening to it now, it’s clear why. Can’t you picture the Muppets dancing to this cute simple music?. There are definitely long legged birds with accordion necks, tropical trees and small monkeys. Perhaps a dread-locked muppet puts on a metal shirt and chases a muppet Satan to outer space?
Riding shotgun in our hatchback Buick Skylark, I would giggle to myself, imagining colorful scenes along with this album, superimposed over the dingy Cleveland highways. I’d make up meanings for the nonsensical lyrics, which sounded a little bit like my Hungarian grandmother’s odd version of English, and ask my mom to explain the more adult themes. She explained to me what a pimp is, the possible benefits of growing your own marijuana, that there are children in the world who go hungry. We were never clear on that War Ina Babylon, though. I love this song in particular, because Max is saying he is personally going to kick Satan’s ass. I appreciate the DIY attitude, and I love the little scrapey noises that punctuate the beat.
Chase the Devil (4.8MB MP3)
Max Romeo (wikipedia)
Led Zeppelin :: The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair
When we got MTV back in 1988, I gravitated immediately toward the hair metal bands of the moment. I ingested it all and had no tools to examine it, taking in the images of female hotness presented in the videos – big hair, red lips, lingerie, big tits. I look back on that 8 year old girl, trying to learn about rock n roll, and the world of adults, and feel endeared by her eagerness, and also very angry about what was available for her to take in. The source material was just shit.
Led Zeppelin came into my life when I turned thirteen. I had a sleepover birthday party, and my uncle gave me the remastered 4 disk box set as a present. I remember waking up before everyone else and listening to my new CDs. I played them quietly so I wouldn’t wake anyone up, leaning in, brushing my ear on the speaker.
Meeting Led Zeppelin then coincided with that interesting time of growth for me: changing from a child into a sexual creature. Don’t think I was making out with boys and getting into trouble, not by a long shot. But sex had been a grotesque mystery informed mostly by the sleazier side of pop culture. At thirteen, the investigation that 8 year old had begun was being stepped up and restructured. Those previously quiet regions of my body started turning up the volume — reaching out spangly, flashing connections to my brain. I was figuring out sex wasn’t just something out there in the world, but scarily, physically close to everything I considered my self.
Led Zeppelin laid out a ballsy, bluesy soundtrack for this investigation/transformation. I picked up their swagger and intensity to cast the mold for how I walk through the world, and what I look for in others.
Robert Plant’s joyful wail, Jon Bonham pounding on those drums with such force, and of course Jimmy Page’s guitar — these guys just make me fucking grin. They reinforce the fervent love I harbor for human endeavor and help me feel who I am: a woman who really really really loves men.
The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair (4.1MB MP3)
Led Zeppelin (homepage)
Lifter Puller :: 4Dix
Three things I love about Craig Finn’s songwriting:
1. a precision of metaphor so sharp it breaks the surface of your brain without your knowing it — hypodermic
2. buckets of compassion for drug users and
3. a penchant for female main characters.
Another thing I love is a biblical allusion. Right here, we get three out of four, since our female lead is kind of dropped after the intro. Let’s say 3.5 out of 4.
Katrina stumbles into the bathroom at the nightclub, cash in hand looking for a druggie treat to keep the night going. The dealers waiting there are cast as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Craig Finn pinpoints a modern occurrence of age-old desperation, slices it up with his incisive wit, and proffers his version of events to us, on a bed of straight-up rock, and topped with his totally quotable talk-singing cadence.
Some people like to look at world events and draw parallels to the descriptions in Revelations, declaring we are knee deep in the end times. Craig Finn is awesome at the inverse, peering into back alleys and rockclubs, examining small scale battles for people’s souls, the small scale damnations and salvations, to fuel his own pop music scripture.
4Dix
Lifter Puller (wikipedia)
Damien Jurado :: Like Titantic
I am in my first Chicago apartment, unpacking and finding a place for all my goddamn stuff. I tear into a housewarming package from Ladawn, and eagerly press play on the latest installment in a beautiful series of mixtapes. The second song transports be back to high school, going for muggy evening walks in Lakewood OH, ending up on the top floor of the hospital parking garage with Nate, or down by the lake.
I am driving crazily around the northside, gotta hit to Costco, pick up smokes, then back to set. I’m working the snack table for a ridiculous indie horror film. It’s December, and we are shooting outdoors for a week. There’s no place to get warm except my car, so I’m on errands all the time. I shove the gray tape labeled “Ladawn Rocks Out” into the eager mouth on my dashboard. Song two comes on, and suddenly, my heart is yanked back three years and a couple hundred miles. Cleveland 2001. Nate and I are climbing a skinny ladder to the roof of a warehouse he’s rehabbing to make it while the rising sun spills over the horizon.
I am looking through my collection of mixtapes, searching for a song for this little writing project. I want to find one that represents the pleasure packed into songs carefully selected by a friend. I listen through a few songs on the bus, feeling a few bemused glances linger on Walkman. I float back; this is now a familiar feeling. We are driving in his dad’s rickety Chevy truck, under the quintessential Cleveland overcast. The clouds are impossibly low, and reflect the city lights, glowing mauve. The street lamps give off a peachy yellow. The twinkling steel plant looms into view beyond the highway railing; a couple smokestacks are tipped with electric pink fires. Nate is commenting, isn’t strange that a city so good at being gray, burns fluorescent on certain cloudy nights.
Like Titanic
Damien Jurado (myspace)
Joni Mitchell :: Coyote
It’s great to get Joni’s take on the Coyote, a Native American version of the Trickster archetype, like Loki (Norse), or Monkey (Chinese), or even Baby Krishna (Hindu) stealing butter and hearts. These characters might play tricks on you, might mix the sacred and the vulgar, and may be a little bit dangerous. Even though he might knock you on your ass, the trickster will teach you to laugh about it, maybe give you a little perspective too. Joni doesn’t see herself as a victim; she welcomes the chance to tangle, to match him trick for trick.
In Coyote, we catch a knowing smirk, that humble and humorous nod acknowledging you’ve met your match. Joni describes the irresistible attraction an independent woman feels for a mannish man — the capable one who works with his hands, leathered by the sun, who lacks good manners, follows his instincts and his joy. Coyote is the perfect fit, both as the wild animal and the slippery mythical figure. Listen closely, and you can almost smell his musk through all the lyric chatter. You can feel her heartbeat quicken when he sets his sights on her.
Katy mentioned lists of songs a few weeks ago. I have two such lists: “Songs I wish were written about me” and “Songs wedded to an experience;” this song is on the latter. In 2005, I had my own Coyote moment, saw myself reflected on the dark strange pupil of a wild thing, cleverly disguised as a man. Even though my memories of the night have lost some clarity, when I hear the first guitar jangles of this song (they sound like bird flocks whipping over an open plain don’t they?), and Joni’s quizzical lyrics, I’m taken back to my old kitchen, decked out in winter sun. I was cleaning my apartment listening to Hejira that next morning in a post-coyotal haze. It was the first time I really heard what Joni was singing — that line about getting close to the skin and the eyes, but still feeling alone, but still feeling related. I pause in scrubbing the floor and sit back on my heels to shake my head in wry recognition.
Coyote
Joni Mitchell (homepage)
(note — on Joni’s site be sure to visit the glossary of references made in her songs, and this interview with David Crosby about recording her first album.)
(Smog) :: Say Valley Maker
Maybe it’s because all my life I’ve been encouraged to imagine my wedding or my children or my first house. While I’m preoccupied with the start of a life, a well framed death-dream fascinates me, stings me with exotic beauty.
In our one life, we may have many resurrections. We all have felt former selves fade. Old situations become frozen, while we, newly mobile step out of them in fresh shined shoes to shake off the last bits of that skin. We can learn that perfection is not the path to love. And we can be triumphant, rascally corpses who ride atop frothy drum fills into a ferocious new day.
Say Valley Maker
(Smog) (myspace page)