the blog quebecois

090. Building A Wall
089. Meth (2)
088. Just So You Know
087. Money, Guns, and Blood(2)
086. Truth (2)
085. Who Do You Know (2)
084. The Troubles (2)
083. just like a woman(3
082. Come A Day (3)
081. Untitled In F Sharp
080. Walkaway (3)
079. Head For The Hills
078. Con Game (2)
077. Terrorist In The Kitchen
076. Rich Girl
075. Tell Me The Time (2)
074. The In Crowd
073. I Loved Only You (2)
072. Fire In The Waxworks (2)
071. Rock Justice (2)
070. Come A Day (2)
069 .Video Ace (2)
068. You (2)
067. She Ain't No Human (New World)
066. Stories
065. Telephone Sex (2)
064. The Chase
063. I Am The Leopard
062. I Loved Only You
061. Walkaway (2)
060. HUAC
059. Fight
058. Caught By Computer
057. Dirty Little Secret
056. Fire In The Waxworks
055. You
054. Con Game
053. Tell Me The Time
052. By The Lake (3)
051. Me & J.B.
050. Things We Said Today
49. Video Ace
48. Rock Justice
47. By The Lake (2)
46. Meth
45. Walkaway
44. Dirty Little Secret
43. By The Lake
42. Flatfoot
41. Save It For Later
40. Lech!
39. Who Do You Know?
38. Money, Guns And Blood
37. Warning Shots
36. Telephone Sex
35. Problems
34. Glide Path
33. Come A Day
32. Sylvie Pts. 3&4
31. Thicker Than Water
30. Bitter Soup
29. The Alcoholic
028. Won't Get Fooled Again
027. Teacher, Teacher
026. Just Like A Woman (2)
025. Just You And Me
024. She Ain't No Human
023. Centre Of The Storm
022. Have You, Hold You
021. Just Like A Woman
020. I Got A Girl
019. Truth
018. Singing Into A Silver Bowl
017. Haunted House
016. Bored
015. I'm Getting Tired
014. Come Together
013. The Troubles
012. Pets
011. No One Will Ever Know
010. Backs Of Heads
009. Building A Wall
008. Amy
007. Poor Boy
006. Macavity The Mystery Cat
005. Truly Blue
004. Sidewinder
003. Monica
002. Love Song
001. Classic Touches

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Joe Strummer of The Clash died a couple of days ago. I was greatly saddened -- I was a big fan of the band and saw them in 1982, on their "Combat Rock" tour, which remains for me the highlight of my concert-going days.

Perusing the Internet, I came across some old interviews Strummer had given. One was with Vic Garbarini of Musician magazine in June 1981, along with Robert Fripp (King Crimson, etc.). [The full interview is here.]

This caught my eye (and ear):

Garbarini: Speaking of evolving musical norms and working in different style, I got the new Ellen Foley record recently and I noticed that you and Mick [Jones] wrote most of the tunes, and that you all (the Clash) back her up on the record. I played it for a few people and asked "now, who do you think this is?" Most people thought it was Abba...

Strummer: They hardly ever lay a turkey on you. They've kind of hit a rut these days, but they were in there just blammin' 'em onto the charts for ages, which is admirable . . . also the girls are nice looking!

Now I must unburden myself of a shameful secret I have borne lo these many years. I am a deeply closeted ABBA fan.

At the time, I would have rather slashed my throat than admit it, let alone bought one of their albums.

Still, my toes uncontrollably twitched when "Waterloo" or "Take A Chance On Me" came on the radio. (I claimed it was a particularly vicious foot fungus if anyone noticed.)

I sensed my affliction wasn't unique when it turned out that the over-medicated, suicidal grungemeister Kurt Cobain was also an ABBAnut.

But this clinches it. Joe Strummer, the punk avatar, the standard-bearer for integrity and rock 'n' roll bona fides, was humming along with me to "SOS" or "Does Your Mother Know?"?

I can stand tall now, yes, knowing that an unhealthy lust for "Mamma Mia" or "Fernando" is something out of my control. I was born that way.

I still hate "Dancing Queen," though, so maybe I'm not completely abnormal.

Rest in peace, Joe.

I'm presently copying old cassette tapes of my "band" -- mainly me, later on with my cousin -- to my computer.

About forty or fifty C-90 cassettes. I'm going through them chronologically, and I'm up to about the fourth.

Aiiee! Fatboy Slim hisself could not pull music out of these tracks.

In fairness, the early ones date back to the late Seventies, when I was a clumsy guitarist and a worse vocalist.

I'm still both, but more discreet these days. Or at least not as loud. I was a good lyric writer, though I wince today at some of my oh-so-clever couplets.

So most of what I've heard so far is a lot of banging around on an acoustic guitar, with some horribly off-key (but oh-so-clever) singing somewhere in the hissing background.

My cousin came along in . . . 1983? and rekindled my interest in music. He was (is) a crackerjack guitarist who could play anything and sounded at times like Jimi Hendrix screaming out of the sky. Come to think of it, he sounded like Jimi throughout each and every song, which made the ballads problematic.

Eventually we hammered out a rough agreement: Verse/Verse/Chorus/Verse/Screaming Guitar Solo/Chorus...etc., and eventually improved to the point where we actually resembled a good garage band on occasion.

I switched to bass guitar (which sounds great no matter how you abuse it); we added some effects pedals and a cheapo Radio Shack mixer; got a better drum machine; learned to multitrack; got a four-voice keyboard; learned how to manage my limited vocal gifts.

But still, this old stuff is so bad, it's funny.

One effort I'll relate. I had read somewhere that Hollywood extras simulating an angry mob were told to mumble "Rhubarb! Rhubarb!" You get a couple hundred people together doing this, and it sounds like an ominous, threatening murmur. Or so they say.

Now I had an idea for a slow tone poem, set to jazz guitar, played in a nightclub. Very atmospheric, smoky, cabaret-ish. So I thought that we could get some of the background texture with the "Rhubarb" chorus. (I don't know precisely why I wanted to mimic an angry mob in a nightclub -- although, if they'd paid any sort of cover charge, I could understand the reaction.)

We copied that several times over. And then, what's a nightclub without tinkling glasses?

Didn't have any of those, but there were a couple of cases of empty beer bottles conveniently at hand (there usually were), so we shook those around for another few overlays. Then we dropped in the guitar and vocal.

Put all together, it was eerie -- it sounded exactly like a couple of losers chanting "Rhubarb! Rhubarb!" while clanking beer bottles together, with the added bonus of an exceedingly lame Beatnik poetry reading.

Sad to say, it never made it on to the album we never made. Maybe I should release it on KaZaA as some rare Allen Ginsburg bootleg?

Woke up this morning to my clock radio blaring out some insipid rock tune that sounds like every other insipid rock tune made in what seems the last ten years. It's like they were all carved off the same slab of donair meat or something.

I'm sure someone out there is making good music, but you'd never know it from the two main rock stations in town.

It's no wonder that filesharing has taken off like it has. If that's the best you can offer, guys, then vivent la révolution!

Maybe the best song I've come across in the last year was The Hives' Hate To Say I Told You So. It's kick-ass rock and roll with energy and sass like I haven't heard since The Clash and Sex Pistols. A swirling guitar attack, snotty lyrics,

Do what I please
Gonna spread the disease
Because I wanna
Gonna call all the shots
All the no's and the not's
Because I wanna

And where did I hear it first? Not on radio. I still haven't heard it on radio.

On TV, hockey games to be specific, when they fill in between faceoffs. It's a sad commentary when your average arena music director is hipper than the sausage pushers on FM radio.

Oh, yeah, there's a campus radio station in town which occasionally plays some interesting stuff. But they're just as likely to broadcast a 3-hour Peruvian nose-flautist hootenanny.

Multiculturalism is fine, but I draw the line somewhere just past Swedish punk bands.

I give you the UN, which is as about as multicultural as it gets, and you don't want to listen to that Musak, either.

Radiohead publisher blinks
Warner/Chappell backs down from demands that fan sites pull material

J. Kelly Nestruck
National Post

Radiohead for the Pianoforte: www.littlerowboat.net; At Ease: www.ateaseweb.com

Well, yeah.

Some people are finally getting it. The whole notion of copyright is exploded and drifting down like spent fireworks.

The dummies are whining and threatening to call the police and the smarties are running around with baskets gathering up the pieces and trying to figure out how to reconstruct them in a workable sense.

My utter disdain for record companies predates Napster and Kazaa.

Prior to those networks (and the proliferation of broadband which made them feasible) about the only source of music on the Net was MIDI files.

These were tunes played with the synthesized sounds built into sound cards. Some people used keyboards, others laboriously picked out songs note-by-note with music-editing software.

The results varied enormously. I've heard almost perfect renditions of Dire Straits' "Sultans Of Swing" or U2's "Angels of Harlem." I've heard good-to-awful versions of the same, and I've heard songs that were so badly done that I had to recheck the title to figure out what it was.

All of a sudden, though, in about 1997 or '98, most of the popular MIDI sites abruptly shut down, in response to very threatening letters sent out by the legal departments of Sony, MCI, et al.

Keep in mind that nobody was making money off this; nor were the record companies or artists losing money from it. This was true amateurism -- people spending untold hours transcribing their favorite songs for nothing more than their love of the material and the praise of their peers.

Radiohead is to me an acquired taste -- I've only heard a couple of their songs, off the impenetrable Kid A album. I'm not inclined to rush out and buy their latest effort.

I'll bet, though, that the 20,000 fans who daily frequent their fan boards have bought legitimate copies of every thing they've done, every T-shirt and coffee mug they've released.

And I'll bet they'd go out and buy them all over again for the chance of an Internet chat with one of the band members, or an autographed CD.

Smart bands like Radiohead are picking up on this. Dumb bands like Metallica aren't.

A nice piece on Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

This is kind of cute. Type in whatever you like and it "sings" to you, using a library of sound clips. (If it doesn't recognize a word, it'll substitute a tone instead.)

You could have a lot of fun with this.

OK, some fun.

Canadian arena-rockers Nickelback wax nostalgic on the glories of love in, er, a ditch?

I like your pants around your feet
And I like the dirt that's on your knees
And I like the way you still say please
While you're looking up at me
You're like my favorite damn disease

Frontman Chad Kroeger: "I used to view songwriting as masturbation - you don't really want anybody watching."

Indeed. And yet they say that romance is dead.

Via Ghost of a Flea

Oh here's to my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan. He'll give you give you 666, there was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan

I never paid much mind to the whole "Satanic message backward-masking" controversy. First, there's no evidence that people comprehend, or are impelled to act on, "subliminal messages."

Second, there's no shortage of overtly Satanic lyrics in some genres of rock music.

Third, it's not true that if you play "Revolution 9" off the Beatles' White Album backwards, it sounds like the car crash that Paul McCartney supposedly died in.

It sounds like a car crash if you play it forwards, which was the usual case when Yoko got her sticky little fingers on things.

But this really is kind of spooky. It's taken from Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" and you can listen to it here.

The Junos are on tonight. These are Canada's version of the Grammy Awards, and I care about them every bit as much, which is to say not at all.

However, this gives me the annual occasion to boast that Canada leads the world in the production of horse-faced female vocalists.

Celine Dion. Alanis Morissette. Avril Lavigne. Anne Murray. Diana Krall. Sarah McLachlan. Not to forget . . . Joni Mitchell.

Read 'em and weep, boys, read 'em and weep.

i've found a reason for me
to change who I used to be
a reason to start over new

-- hoobastank

You might start with your name, which is, with all due respect, the stupidest name for a band since Hootie and the Blowfish.

In fact, it ties in neatly with my thesis -- my Grand Unifying Theory, if you will -- that bands that start their names with the letters H-O-O are pretty much doomed to the K-Tel One Hit Wonder category.

Of course there are exceptions. Hooey Lewis and the News had a tidy little career. And we mustn't forget that seminal 60's English band, The Hoo.

Okay, so maybe my theory isn't completely airtight.

Still, "Hoobastank" stinks.

why don’t we do it in the road?
why don’t we do it in the road?
no one will be watching us

-- the beatles

This webcam at Abbey Road Studios points at the crosswalk that the Beatles made famous.

Via Steel White Table

bigmouth, oh
bigmouth, la
bigmouth strikes again
and I've got no right to take my place
with the human race oh

-- the smiths

LONDON—Morrissey, outspoken lead singer of '80s rockers The Smiths, has sparked an Internet storm with reported comments about U.S. President George W. Bush.

The Manchester Evening News said yesterday it received a record number of hits after reporting on its Web site that Morrissey, 45, had interrupted a Dublin concert Saturday with news of former president Reagan's death, adding that he wished Bush had died instead.

I must confess I recently had the same ignoble thought, and I'm not proud about it.

When I heard of Ray Charles' death, I wailed, "Why, oh why couldn't it have been Morrissey instead?"

We knew stealing that music was wrong. Stealing is never OK. But, it was just too easy. So we told ourselves we were just "sharing" the music, because everyone knows that sharing is a good thing.

But then we learned what we were really doing. We heard our favorite recording artists telling us that our "sharing" is really shoplifting and piracy. We were stealing from the musicians and singers we love!

What to do? What to do? It's never too late to make amends.

Via Steel White Table

This should touch off a few arguments. I'd vote for anything on the Woodstock album, myself.

Via Steel White Table

so she tells him she must go out for the evening
to comfort an old friend who's feeling down
but he knows where she's going as she's leaving
she’s headed for the cheating side of town

-- the eagles

To which, Ben Kepple asks:

Our question: what in hell is the cheating side of town? We mean, come on. Are we to believe some sort of weird socio-economic divide separated a municipality into sections for its respective adulterous and non-adulterous residents?

Indeed. We need to know this sort of stuff, if only for future reference.

promises mean everything when you're little
and the world is so big
i just don't understand how
you can smile with all those tears in your eyes
when you tell me everything is wonderful now

-- everclear

If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music — the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before — is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers.

A very good and provocative essay, "Eminem Is Right," by Mary Eberstadt in Policy Review. It's long, but well worth reading.

Guess who? Three guesses, then you can click here (scroll down about half the page) to find out.

The page is in Portugese, but the names are highlighted and will be familiar.

within the message in blood
marks the years of pain
and your godforsaken ending to life

-- pantera

I was never much of a metal fan, so I'd barely heard of the band Pantera and not at all of guitarist Darrell "Dimebag" Abbott, recently slain in an Ohio nightclub by some deranged moron.

Ace of Spades adds an interesting detail:

"He was a hick with an attitude, and I say that respectfully," said neighbor Jim Evans, 63, a retired computer executive who said he frequently walked dogs with Abbott. "We'd talk conservative politics. He was a big, big supporter of George Bush."

I wonder if this kind of sentiment isn't more common with musicians who actually have to work for their living. Yeah, I'm not talking about you, Bruce. *

(*By "Bruce" I of course mean Springsteen, not Bruce of Autonomous Source, who is not, as far as I know, a musician.

Though I'm sure he would be a fine one if he put his mind to it.)

take a load off, fanny
take a load for free
take a load off, fanny

the band

Ewww.

I don't watch shows like American Idol because I can only stomach so much Celine Dion-Eurovision-MOR-AOR crap until I explode.

Nevertheless I found myself trapped! Trapped, I tell you, watching the pale Canadian imitation, named imitatively enough, Canadian Idol.

Watching the cast absolutely massacre The Band's The Weight, though, is more than I can stand.

So I shall not post on the matter.

Ewww.

Just . . . ewww.

well since she put me down
i've been out doin' in my head

beach boys

Which in its own right is weird enough. Dave Barry, in a column some years ago, heard it this way:

well since she put me down
there's been owls puking in my bed

I'll bet Brian Wilson wishes he wrote that instead. How better to describe romantic angst than the old reliable puking owls metaphor?

For reasons I've since forgotten, I wound up on this website recently. It has a section devoted to misheard lyrics in popular songs. Barry's interpretation of "Help Me, Rhonda" is there, and in glancing at a few other Beach Boys tunes, even something as straightforward (or so I thought) as "Fun Fun Fun"

and she'll have fun fun fun
'til her daddy takes the t-bird away

gets some rather strange turns of phrase:

and she'll have fun, fun, fun
'til her daddy takes the teabag away

and she'll have fun, fun, fun
'til her daddy takes the tv away

and she'll have fun, fun, fun
'til her daddy takes the t-shirt away

and she'll have fun fun fun
'til her daddy takes her t-bone away

And she'll have fun fun fun
'Til her daddy takes her tuba away

and she'll have fun, fun, fun
'til her daddy takes her to her wake

The last one must have been overdosing on Tragic Teenage Death songs at the time.

Surprisingly, they don't have a lot of songs from the champion syllable-manglers of all time, the Rolling Stones. It took me all of five minutes to figure out the chords to "Honky Tonk Women," and about five years to figure out just what the hell Jagger was singing about.

"I met a ginnoooakedbawomkeeninn Memphis," indeed.

P.S. The first lyrics site I looked at for HTW had this

strollin' on the boulevards of paris
as naked as the day that i will die
the sailors they're so charming there in paris
but they just don't seem to sail you off my mind

for the second verse, and I thought: I've really got to get my ears checked, because I sure don't remember that being in it. It might have been from a U.K./European release, or some version they did live in concert.

come on and hear
come on and hear
it’s the best band in the land!

irving berlin

Well, not really. But they do work for cheap.

The guy blowing on beer bottles is a nice touch. Create your own band here.

ooh my little pretty one, my pretty one
when you gonna give me some time, sharona?
ooh you make my motor run, my motor run
gun it comin' off of the line, sharona

the knack

17-year-old Sharona Alperin was the Muse for The Knack's 1979 hit, "My Sharona." Now she's an upmarket real estate agent in Los Angeles.

No points for guessing what song plays when you load her website.

Bonus fun fax: Doug Fieger, The Knack's lead vocalist/rhythm guitarist, is the brother of Geoffrey Fieger, Dr. Jack Kevorkian's attorney. You'd have to say that Doug definitely got the better of that deal.

down at the radio shack
we're turning shit into solid gold, solid gold
dirty enough i got me a love
and it's so bad, it's so bad

matthew good

Musician (and sanctimonious lefty blögger) Matthew Good is releasing a greatest hits compilation, titled In A Coma 1995-2005. Sometimes the jokes just write themselves, y'know?

I had thought that having actual hits was sort of a prerequisite for that sort of thing, but to each his own. I can think of maybe two songs of his that I've heard, and neither one registered strongly enough that I can recall the melody. Check out the innavigable promo page for it here.

I plucked a computer game out of a discount bin some years ago. The game -- a simulation of the Le Mans road race -- was a dud, but I really liked the song that kicked off the opening title sequence, "Bohemian Like You," by The Dandy Warhols. (Crappy "3-D" website here.)

Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought so: the song was soon featured in Vodafone ads in Europe and no less than three automobile (Chrysler, I think) ad campaigns in North America. Which is kind of ironic (the Le Mans/Chrysler angle, at least) in that the first verse of the song goes thus:

you`ve got a great car
yeah, what`s wrong with it today?
i used to have one too
maybe i'll come and have a look

They didn't highlight that part of it, needless to say, preferring to focus on the bouncy "IlikeyouIlikeyouIlikeyou whoo-hoo!" chorus.

I didn't think there was a video of the song, but it turns out they did do one, a rather ahem! frugal affair (approx. budget = $14.92, plus probably some free drinks for the folks in the karaoke bar). Witness.

Warning: Nudity, albeit with most of the interesting bits pixelated out.

Warning: People in karaoke bar.

and there's nothing wrong with me
this is how i'm supposed to be
in a land of make believe
that don't believe in me

green day

What is it about rock operas? Think of Tommy. A vaguely Christ-like figure who struggles through tribulations and eventually inspires the adoring throngs. Think of Jesus Christ Superstar. A vaguely Christ-like figure who struggles through tribulations and eventually inspires the adoring throngs. Think of Quadrophenia. A vaguely . . . Christ, I'll bet even Pete Townshend himself couldn't tell you what that was all about. Think of Kilroy Was Here, by Styx.

Check that. We won't think of Kilroy Was Here, by Styx. Thank you. Domo arigato. (Nooooooooooooooooo!)

Which brings us to Green Day's American Idiot. A vaguely Christ-like (albeit with more drugs and swearing) figure who struggles against anything you got. He doesn't like war, or Dubya, or consumerism, or the media, or time-share condo deals. (OK, I made that last one up, but he'd probably be against 'em, too.) For those interested in more description than I'm willing to come up with, Wikipedia fleshes it out somewhat. Here's my favorite part: (Emphasis mine.)

Homecoming: Eventually Jesus decides to abandon his St. Jimmy identity, which he had been using as a crutch. In order to abandon his title, Jesus symbolically "kills" St. Jimmy in a personal kind of suicide. (I)

Following St. Jimmy's death, Jesus gets arrested on East 12th St. (II) (East 12th Street is a real location of a police station in Oakland, California, where Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong had to fill out paperwork for his DUI in 2002) . . .

All grist for the mill, eh, Billie?

So the plot's basically an incoherent mess, but that's not a dealbreaker for me. People don't go to traditional opera to mock the often-goofy libretto -- they go for the singing and music.

And musically speaking, Green Day's at the top of its game here, writing tuneful, punchy anthems with more hooks than a fisherman's tackle box.

"Jesus of Suburbia," the second track on the album, is actually a five-song suite. It's quite big, so I've included a low res link for dial-up users. Broadband here.

Warning: Cigarette smoking! By young people! Also: partial nudity in the service of meaningless, joyless sex; alcohol and drug-related references; violence. But priorities, people, priorities -- cigarettes!

Colby Cosh is out of the country on the Western Standard cruise, so I've taken the liberty of pillaging his archives. Don't anyone tell him.

I was looking for something else entirely (I forget what -- a Google search had tagged Colby's Feb. 2004 archive and I was scrolling through it) when I turned up this:

Attention, old roommates who used to bore me with old war stories of the Vancouver "indie" scene: all is forgiven, many times over. The Pornos are often described as a "power pop" group, but only here do they truly aspire to the label and play in the Weezer League. Footnote: the video is one of the twenty best ever made.

The band he's referring to is The New Pornographers, a critically-acclaimed band that I'd heard of, but never heard. Critically-acclaimed bands don't get much play on Canadian radio, and I've learned to avoid buying critically-acclaimed CDs sight unseen, as it were. I meant to download some tracks but never did get around to it.

But with a recommendation like that, I could tarry no longer. The song is called "All For Swinging You Around," and the video is here. (Second from the top on the right -- the Windows Media link is broken, and the sound on the Quick Time link is too tinny. That leaves the Real Player version.)

As for the song -- well, it's catchy enough, though not that remarkable. However, you'll note that Colby said that the video was one of the twenty best. As it features pretty girls jumping around, I cannot help but agree.

never say forever, cause nothing lasts
dancing with the bones to my buried past
nevermind, there's nothing i can do
bet your life there's something killing you

foo fighters

When Dave Grohl, Nirvana's drummer, formed the Foo Fighters after Kurt Cobain's death, I was intrigued by the name. Obviously it was inspired by what computer programmers know as metasyntactic variables like foo, bar, and not to forget, foobar.

The Jargon File defines them thus:

(1) they are variables in the meta language used to talk about programs etc; (2) they are variables whose values are often variables (as in usages like �the value of f(foo,bar) is the sum of foo and bar�).

Or to put it more simply, scratch terms that you can plug into computer code to demonstrate how it works (or doesn't). Why Grohl wanted to fight metasyntactic variables wasn't clear, but I thought it was a cool name. A bit geeky, but cool.

Imagine my surprise, then, to recently find out that the real origin of it came from WWII radar operators, who used "foo fighters" to describe mysterious traces that couldn't have come from known aircraft. In other words, UFOs. Is that a stupid thing to name a band after, or what?

Notwithstanding that misunderstanding, and Grohl's reputation (despite being a Bush-hating moonbat) as one of the nicest guys in the business, I never really warmed to the Foo Fighters. To be fair, I've haven't seen them live, and the only songs of theirs that I knew were the ones that got radio play; but they seemed almost too well made and stripped of spontaneity. Sort of formulaic, like Tom Petty's gotten to be the last few years.

I might have to rethink that with the release of DOA, the second single from the In Your Honor double album. To those who say "Enough with the crunchy guitar-driven rock already!" I reply: "You can't handle the crunchy guitar-driven rock!"

Or something like that. The video can be seen at the official site here (click on the guitar icon labeled "Foo Player" on the right; then "Video" at the bottom of the window that opens -- probably best for dial-up users); or here if you want a full-screen version. (Fourth down, on the left.)

u can look but you can�t touch it
if you touch it i'ma start some drama
you don�t want no drama
no, no drama, no, no, no, no drama

black eyed peas

I've delayed linking to this video, not the least of which is because of the vituperative reaction to it. I haven't heard such ridicule since I showed up for the high-school prom with my blow-up date.

But part of being a blogger is having the courage to defend unpopular views, or at least to ban dissenters from the comments section.

It's essentially a novelty song, the sort of thing that gets cooked up when you've got a couple of unbooked studio hours and a wee dram of Drambuie or three.

Besides, has there ever been a more perfect evocation of the sing-songy essence of female passive-aggressive behavior as in the lyrics above? I mean, since Al Gore's last speech?

Having said that -- yes, it is annoying. As a video, though, it's terrific. I was originally going to compare it to a Kabuki dance; mulling it over, I thought this was a more apt comparison:

Noh is a chanted drama, and for that reason, some people have dubbed it Japanese opera. However, the singing in Noh involves a limited tonal range, with lengthy, repetitive passages in a narrow dynamic range. Clearly, melody is not at the center of Noh singing.

That would explain the rather monochromatic focus of the song. I haven't figured out what they did with the masks, though.

Mind you, the Black Eyed Peas usually have interesting things going on musically, and can't help but invest some artistry into even this trifle. Fergie's lovely portamento slide into the male chorus "She's got me spending . . ." I can't replicate the timing in clumsy old HTML, but that slightly off beat "Oooohhh!" sends shivers up my spine. In gratitude for that, Fergie is welcome to come sit on my sofa anytime. Though I might want to lay down some towels beforehand.

Sheesh. You see what's come to pass? You see the efforts I'm going to here to attempt to give this piece of fluff some intellectual heft? Kabuki? No -- Noh! Portamento. It's starting to remind me of an infamous review done when people started to figure out that these Beatles fellows just might be for real:

In December 1963, William Mann, the regular classical music critic of the London Times, wrote Lennon�s �slow, sad song about 'This Boy'... is expressively unusual for its lugubrious music, but harmonically it is one of their most intriguing, with its chains of pandiationic clusters... But harmonic interest is typical of their quicker songs, too, and one gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural [in] the Aeolian cadence at the end of 'Not a second time' (the chord progression which ends Mahler's Song of the Earth).�

Now that's some heavy lifting.

The Beatles, when they heard about it, more or less said: "Huh?"

Any "Aeolian cadence," real or imagined, was more than likely the work of George Martin, their brilliant producer, who was well-grounded in classical theory. You don't imagine that a scrappy Liverpool bar band conjured up the string sections of "Yesterday" or the sweeping orchestration of "She's Leaving Home" out of thin air, do you? (They initially disliked Martin's arrangement of "Yesterday," McCartney in particular complaining that he didn't want it to "end up like Mantovani.")

So to sum up: You think the song sucks. I do too, but I think that the video works splendidly. (Whatever their other merits, the Black Eyed Peas are pretty good comic actors.) Let's agree to disagree and move on to focus our hatred on a band that truly deserves it: Fall Out Boy. Andrew Mathas put together an, er, interpretation of their hit, "Sugar, We're Going Down." (The actual lyrics are here.)

Warning: NSFW. And you might want to lay down a few towels beforehand.

National Review's The Corner has been a gold mine this week for kitschy music videos. Here's Bing Crosby and friends (Englebert Humperdinck, Gwen Verdon, Dick Shawn, Bobbie Gentry) crooning their way through a Beatles medley.

I have no idea who this woman is -- just sit back and let the outstanding production values wash over you.

Ditto with this guy. I think it's probably from a losing entry in the Eurovision Song Contest. Or possibly a winning entry. It's tough to tell at times.

It's not like The Corner caught all the good stuff. Look what I found here.

And Leonard Nimoy "singing" The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. I ask you, how much would you pay for entertainment like this?

Okay, that was a rhetorical question.

the voices in your head are calling
stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
only a fool would think someone could save you

the clash

Bassist Paul Simonon demonstrates why he wasn't The Clash's frontman with a rather uninspired rendition of "The Guns of Brixton," not to mention his, uh, dental work; musical (and dental, sort of) equilibrium is restored when he and Joe Strummer swap instruments and launch into "Clampdown."

This was from an 80s TV show called Fridays, a comedy-sketch/musical guest sort of thing, with a cast including Larry David and Michael Richards, later of Seinfeld fame.

I saw The Clash in the summer of '82, on their North American "Combat Rock" tour, shortly before the band broke up.

An amazing show, probably the best I've ever seen. They tore the joint up for 90 minutes, and then returned for a 3-hour encore that was still blazing along past midnight, when I had to leave due to work in the morning.

Also the LOUDEST thing I've ever heard, though that might have been due to the brutal acoustics of the site, a hot cement box of a convention centre filled with 5,000 sweaty people. I didn't check, but I'm pretty sure that most of the paint was peeled off the walls that were still standing.

I still have the ticket stub. $11.50 for general admission (you could get as close to the stage as your elbows would carry you).

Now that's what I call value for money.

Wolfmother is an Australian power trio that's just now getting some traction in this part of the world. This song, "Woman," dates back to last year.

It's an interesting video. From what I understand, they printed out every frame of a performance, and then re-filmed them in sequence, like an animation, adding effects.

The music? Tight and energetic rock. The singer/guitarist, Andrew Stockdale, sounds uncannily like a young Robert Plant. He also looks and dresses uncannily like Ronald McDonald. Unless there's some intended irony at play, he might want to get the image consultants working on that.

THE SONG: Bruce Springsteen, "Glory Days"
THE LYRIC: "He could throw that speed ball by you / make you look like a fool"
THE VERDICT: Bruce, we hate to bring this up, because we think you're great and everything, and it might sound a little nitpicky and all, but it's just that . . . um . . . well, a fastball is what Roger Clemens throws. A speedball is what John Belushi took to kill himself. Unless you were trying to make a prophetic comment about Doc Gooden's career, in which case you did a great job.

I've never been a fan of rock lyrics. Even at their most sublime, they rarely qualify as stand-alone poetry. But as Muddy Waters told Mick Jagger (I paraphrase, unable to find the quote), the lyrics and vocals are just another instrument in the mix; albeit probably the most important one. Most rock is repetitive and monotonous without it. It doesn't matter so much what someone is singing, as long as someone is singing.

Having said that, some lyrics deserve to be singled out for their consummate stupidity. A Hall of Lame, if you will. Warning: Language.

I first thought that the song was called "On Treadmills" because that's the title that comes up on the video. You know, a deeply philosophical treatise, something like John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, but with more exercise equipment.

I should have known better. The band is OK Go; the song is "Here It Goes Again"; and the treadmills are mere stage machinery.

If these guys ever decide to stop writing catchy pop music, they may have a future as a professional synchronized swimming team.

was originally composed for three violins and basso continuo (a bass-chord combination like cello and harpsichord). Jeong-Hyun Lim, who's only been playing for six years, manages to combine all of that into an electric guitar (with a bass-and-drum backing track) tour de force.

The first time I saw this I was impressed. The second time I saw it I was amazed.

You ordinarily can't get those complex syncopations without using some variant of fingerpicking, i.e., using the fingers of the strumming hand to separately pluck and chord, while the thumb hammers out an independent bass line. But look at his right hand. He's playing all of this with a pick. That's dazzling technique.

The New York Times, which tracked him down, was similarly wowed:

...it require[s] high-level mastery of a singularly demanding maneuver called sweep-picking.

Over and over the guitarist�s left hand articulated strings with barely perceptible movements, sounding and muting notes almost simultaneously, and playing complete arpeggios through a single stroke with his right hand.

The Times piece requires free registration, but it's nothing too complicated: Just your real-or-fake name, a password, and real-or-fake country, if I recall correctly.

OK, it's actually from Mozart's Symphony No. 40, but I couldn't resist.

I've never been a fan of "scratching" -- the practice of sampling beats and melodies off a manually-controlled turntable. Too often it is just this godawful skritcha-skritcha that doesn't add anything to a song. Except, well, that godawful skritcha-skritcha.

There are artists that transcend the genre, though, like Fatboy Slim (I'm not sure if he works with turntables much, but he certainly uses loops and samples) who rummage around in the old toolbox and manage to assemble something fresh and new. I was so impressed by his backing music on a Mercedes-Benz commercial that I went out of my way to find out what it was. Me praise "Praise You." Warning: Embedded video/audio.

Also these guys. I'm not sure of their name (the video is titled only Scratch masters), but they move seamlessly from jazz to Dixie to Brazilian samba to the blues, all without apparently changing records. That must be one hell of a K-Tel compilation package.

Bonus: They are (sort of) choreographed! Who says that white boys can't shuck 'n' jive like The Commodores?

Amazon allows visitors to its site to give the merchandise descriptive tags. At right, some of the ones applied to Playing With Fire, Kevin (Mr. Britney Spears) Federline's first CD. Judging by the complete list of them, it could well be his last. (The truncated one in the screencap reads in full: Music to make you long for the sweet release of death.)

Via Gadgetopia

From our collection of Dubious Hobby Themes: It's The Beatles! No, it's The Who! No, it's Led Zeppelin!

Via The Presurfer

AFP/Yahoo:

Japanese pianist Maiko Ichiyanagi poses with the world's smallest grand piano produced by Japan's toy maker Sega Toys. The "Grand Pianist," which has 88 working keys and can automatically play 100 pre-installed music songs, will go on sale 01 April 2007 with a price of 47,000 yen (400 USD).

but I'm not sure I want to find out. From a collection of truly awful album covers.

Lead singer Chad Kroeger was having trouble coming up with a name, and so approached his brother, who worked at a Starbucks. Coffee was $1.95, which meant every customer who paid two bucks got-- waiiiit for it -- a nickel back. (It was either that or We're Sorry About the Homeless Man Shooting Up in the Bathroom.)

The thrilling stories of how Nickelback (Lordy, how I hate that band) and others got their names.

Good thing Alberta doesn't have a provincial sales tax, or they might have wound up as "Hey, Wait A Bit, I Think I've Got A Couple Of Pennies."

Warning: Language.

from the depths of their long-suffering ears.

Via grow-a-brain

given that the available custom-written material is by the likes of David Hasselhoff, you can understand why the princes would prefer to light up the "Candle" one mo' time, even if Sir Elton had hitherto pledged, after the funeral, that he would never ever sing it again. You get the vague feeling he's a little embarrassed by it. After all, there's something a little weird about a bioballad being so portable it can simply be rewritten from one celebrity death to the next:

Goodbye [Your Name Here]
Though I never knew you at all
You need a fun'ral singalong
And so I got the call...

Mark Steyn's witty (you expect less?) deconstruction of Elton John's song, reworked for Princess Diana's memorial. He chips in a few interesting thoughts about lyricist Bernie Taupin, too.

I'm coming to the end of a little project, and I think it only fair to share the joy -- or pain -- of it with you, my loyal readers.

Back more years than I care to contemplate, I started a band with my cousin. To be sure, it wasn't much of a band; there was just the two of us and a drum machine. I played bass and rhythm guitar and was the main vocalist and songwriter. My cousin had to play lead guitar. (Mainly because he wouldn't let me play lead guitar, in spite of the fact that my nom de stage was "Eric Crapton.")

(Now that I've mulled it over, I'm beginning to think that that was one of those "backhanded" compliments.)

We didn't even have amps, let alone a full PA setup. I rigged up a way to play through my stereo (not recommended, if you value your speakers). Nor did we have any adequate rehearsal space, pretty much a necessity once you start adding real drums and amps into the equation.

To fatten up our sound somewhat, we'd multirecord. That is, I had two cassette decks and a cheap 4-channel mixer. So we'd record the first track with, say, bass on the left channel and guitar on the right, with the drums spread across both. Then we'd play that back and add, for example, lead guitar and vocals. Then maybe a third pass with more guitars, percussion, backing vocals, or whatever else came to mind. More layering than that became problematic, with cumulative tape hiss tending to muddy up the initial recording, especially the bass and drums.

We lasted about a year and-a-half together; the first third of which was devoted to long, noodling jam sessions that I will not further trouble you with. But like the proverbial thousand monkeys hammering on a thousand typewriters, we did eventually produce some things of interest. I wrote maybe 200 songs in that time, a handful of which today stand up (i.e. don't send me crawling under the kitchen table with embarrassment). We didn't have great ambitions of being the Next Big Thing. There never was an effort to recruit a drummer, and we knew nobody in the business. We never even discussed naming the band. (Though I finally did think of a good name, twenty years later.)

There were other distractions, like my cousin's girlfriend (or as I nicknamed her, Damn Yoko). But the biggest stumbling-block in our way would have been was a certain bass player and vocalist. I don't know if that guy had stage fright, but I had no intention of finding out.

Actually, I probably could have handled playing an instrument, and bass would have been ideal. You just stand there and plunk away, the invisible man. You could go wander off behind the Marshall stacks and do a couple of lines of coke or your new girlfriend and nobody would notice. (Well, your new girlfriend would, ideally.) John Entwhistle and Bill Wyman had the best jobs in the universe, if you ask me.

That would have been fun. But singing? Three syllables: For-get it. It took me two months to work up the courage to sing in front of my cousin, and for some time after that I could only manage it by screwing my eyes shut and pretending he wasn't there.

As you know, the lead singer has to be out in front, jumping around like a Ritalin-deprived baboon, wiggling his butt and dodging thrown gifts of panties (or beer bottles).

Well, phooey to that. I am an introspective songwriter, sort of like James Taylor, without the wimpy songs. So such antics are beneath my dignity.

That would have been a problem to most record companies, who, to my knowledge, have only ever bankrolled two bands who declined live performances: The Beatles and Steely Dan. Even at my most delusional, I doubted we were in that category.

My vocals? Meh. Nothing to write home about, but serviceable, I guess. I could sing like a choirboy in the upper register, but that's only useful if you're auditioning for castrato in the Vienna Boys' Choir. Midrange I'd usually hit the right notes, but with no real oomph behind them. So, no power ballads. Which is OK with me, 'cause I sucked at writing power ballads.

My voice is rather nasal and flat. That's the bad news. The good news is that rock vocalists depend more on timing, tone and 'tude (or was that timing, tone and 'ludes?) and that I can deliver a perfect Johnny Rotten sneer any time I want. Believe it or not, this is only a significant advantage if you intend to become a rock singer. Witness:

Boss: Is the paperwork on the Anderson leases ready?

Me: [gesticulating wildly] Right! Now? Hahaha! / I am an anti-Christ! / I am an anarc--

Boss: You are unemployed.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I've been converting the tapes to MP3s (with
Audacity, a very good open-source audio recorder). This is the first of them. There will be more, unless I get massacred in the comments. Be gentle.

To forestall the inevitable drunken arguments about whether I am including secret Satanic messages, here are the lyrics (no, I have no idea what the first verse is about either, but it sounds profound, so I'm sticking with it) (Oh, yeah: I'm aware that Bob Dylan had a song with the same title; but titles can't be copywrited, and anyway I sang it with a Dylanesque twang to pay him proper tribute. Maybe he can sue me for that.):

Yeah yeah
Life is short but love is long
And love is a tune with a fatal sound
She was perched on a rock in the middle of the sea
I loved the siren and the siren loved me

We were forty brave men, brothers all
Through tropical storms and dockside brawls
We faced unblinking the horror and noise
And we were happy to be just one of the boys

[chorus]

But then a woman
Ended the camaraderie
Just like a woman
She broke our solidarity
She won't let me drink
It's one of her whims
I can't punch her like my buddies
Get paid back with a grin
She holds me up
And says to me:
It's time to start
A new family

[rpt. chorus]

Adrift in a world
Of curses and sweat
I gotta get out
If I hafta hijack a jet

I'm tired of beerhalls
and football and the guys
I'm bored with bravado
And swaggering lies

[chorus]

But then a woman . . .

Though if you play it backwards, God knows what you'll come up with. Here's the
link. Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Update: The reviews are is in! Andrew Dodge of Dodgeblogium (where I crosspost some of these pieces), a man with a band of his own, and not inconsiderable contacts in the music industry (alas, not considerable enough to get me a recording contract), offers this:

Sounds like a pretty good demo mate. Get thee into a studio and you might be onto something. I got stuff in my review pile that is far less appealing tha[n] this track.

UpUpdate: Stupid file-sharing company has been down for the last day or so, allegedly for maintenance. Well, you get what you pay for, I guess.

However, if you've got a (free) Yahoo! account, you can upload pictures and songs to your own little piece of its giant disk drive. You're limited to 30MB, but it's a fairly good bet that it'll be working a week from now. While the above link is broken, you can play the song here.

UpUpUpdate: Now the Yahoo! link is dead. So try the stupid file-sharing company link instead.

Blaze your way through these squeezebox favorites:

Leichtensteiner Polka, Traditional
The Bowling King, Those Darn Accordions
Can't Touch This, M.C. Hammer
Ya Ya Wunderbar, Frankie Yankovic
Pictures of Matchstick Men, Status Quo
In Heaven There Is No Beer, Traditional
Ride The Lightning, Metallica

It's all a gag, of course, as you'll soon gather from some of their other offerings -- Cthulhu Karts and Grand Theft Ottoman.

The Band That Would Not Die™ is back! I've decided to feature these in more-or-less chronological order. Bonus: Because we improved markedly over the last year we played regularly, all of them will be better than this one!

I wasn't certain about including this. It's not especially notable musically, and the recording is not very good, with dropouts (I'm not sure if I had the recording levels up too high, or if the guitar pedals we were using -- some combination of flanger, chorus and distortion/fuzztone -- were interacting in some strange way) scattered throughout. (I'm not just talking about my inspired technical wizardry at the end, when I twisted the master volume control up and down, producing an effect uncannily like someone twisting the master volume control up and down.) I don't recall that we noticed it at the time, so it could also be the tape, which can (especially when it's some el-cheapo variety) undergo something known as "print- or bleedthrough" if in storage for long periods.

I never considered myself much of a musician. (we can tell! -- ed. ) However, I did consider myself a songwriter, something I'd been doing even before I learned to play (we can't tell! -- ed.) an instrument.

I only started playing bass when we formed our band. I'd heard that Sid Vicious literally hadn't played a note on the bass (he was, briefly, a drummer in another punk band) before Malcolm McLaren put together the Sex Pistols, and I figured: Hey, if that moron can learn it, I can too. (heh -- you just called yourself a moron -- ed.]

Shut up, ed. Don't make me come down there.

We needed an instrumental for the "rock opera" Don't ask! -- ed. we were working on and this piece seemed to fit the bill. I was finally starting to get comfortable with the bass, launching into descending or ascending bass lines 2! 3! 3½! measures away and miraculously hitting my target (usually). That might not mean a lot to you, but it meant a lot to me; and potentially it might have spared me some pain in the future. Bass notes are BIG notes, and you'd better hit them on time, because everybody notices them. Especially the drummer. Screw up his groove and he's likely to throw his drumsticks at you. And he usually has a lot of drumsticks.

Afterwards we stuck the cassette in the car and went cruising downtown with it blasting away. It felt like we were on the cusp of garage-band godhood or something. Mind you, we were pretty stoned by that time, so our perceptions might have been faulty.

Anyway, so here it is. (Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.) It's over seven minutes, so consider that you'll never get that time back if you decide to listen to it. Therefore don't bother writing me and complaining. You'll just be wasting more of your time, and mine.

Previous:

Just Like A Woman

When my cousin came over to record, we'd usually have a cup of coffee (occasionally stronger refreshments were served) before heading down to the basement. In September 1983 the radio was ablaze with the news that the Soviet Union had shot down a Korean Air Lines jumbo jet that had strayed off course on a flight from Alaska.

So we were listening to some of that, when, inspired, I wrote down the first verse and pushed it across the table to my cousin, who read it and laughed.

That is the acid test of songwriting, innit? Make your cousin laugh -- next stop, The Ed Sullivan Show!

You will no doubt be amazed that the whole of it came together in twenty minutes. You're thinking: No way! That couldn't have taken more than ten, fifteen minutes, tops. Well, yeah, but we had to work out the harmonies.

Speaking of which, I never knew before that moment that my cousin could ad-lib perfectly good "Yahoooos!" The things you learn in the pressure cooker of the recording studio.

It was at times like that, with the world trembling on the brink of war, that the media (this was our theory, anyway) would turn our way and exclaim: "There's a couple of guys with guitars! They must have something intelligent to say about all this!"

As it turned out, we didn't. Like that ever stopped us.

Link Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Verse:

Cancel my trip to Korea
The skies are safe no more
First they lost my luggage
Then they lost the war

The valiant Red Air Force
Locked in mortal battle
With a deadly 747
armed with cameras

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Chorus:

Rotten stinking Commie pinkos
Dirty Soviet tricky finkos
Hear this now, you murderous lackeys
Americans on that plane, by Cracky!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Verse:

A thousand heat-seeking missiles
Fired in comradely warning
Trespassers in Soviet airspace
Will not live to see the morning

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Bridge:

Unscheduled stopover in the Sea of Okhotsk
But a Boeing makes for a lousy boat
Water rushing in, cold and green
Boeing's even worse at making submarines!
---------------------------------------------------------------------

[Rpt. 1st verse, chorus]
===================================

The Chase
Just Like A Woman

I roughly divide our recording "career" into three parts.

The first, as I've mentioned before, was mainly jam sessions. We started adding vocals near the end of this period, but mostly on jokey material like our "rock opera" and the previously-featured "Warning Shots".

Singing that kind of stuff is a lot easier on the psyche. If you blow a note -- an entire verse, for that matter -- you can claim you intended it that way all along. But it was time to get serious.

Then we focused on my big backcatalog of songs, the quality of which was uneven, to say the least. Sometimes the music was lame, the melody non-existent or the lyrics laughable. Sometimes it would all come together in a perfect trifecta of awfulness. So we futzed around with those for some months, making improvements here and there, but I eventually realized that I was going to have to write some new stuff. Enter the final -- and, I would argue, the most creative -- part of our existence.

This was one of the first of the new songs. I found it easier to start with a blank slate than go back to try and fix songs that I was heartily sick of by then. We were also finding out that we could play with some snap and precision. It would have been nice to have a real drummer to punch some of this home; but hey, you gotta work with what you got.

To that end, we deployed what I coyly describe as "additional percussion." Which was:

A marraca. Usually one refers to "marracas," as they come in pairs. But we only had one, and it wasn't even the real thing. I had some sort of gourd with a removable top that I'd brought back from Africa. I put a handful of dried beans in it and that worked okay. Except that the shaking eventually reduced the bean skins to a fine dust; and the top wasn't airtight. You might think it would be difficult to maintain one's rock and roll cool with regular gouts of white powder settling on every thing in sight. You would be correct. At least not that type of white powder;

a tambourine, with a drumhead and with the jingles (they're technically called "zils") snipped out. This became our snare drum, though it was mainly composed of duct tape by the time we were through with it;

the metal faceplate from a stolen "Exit" sign, which became a "crash" cymbal;

a real cowbell, which was kind of neat; and

um, some cardboard boxes, which weren't.

So, taken individually, not too impressive; when you put them all together, though, it provided an agreeable clatter in the backgtound. Playing with the drum machine alone always seems a bit sterile, like a metronome.

We got off to an uneven start, but soon settled into a groove that we could have played with on and on and on until the last patron staggered out of the bar and the management cut the power and helped us move our gear out: Hey! Do you mind? That doesn't go in the recycling bin -- that's our drum kit, man!

-------------------------------------------------

Verse:

A lazy flare of gas
Sickly yellow and intense
Flicked within the waxworks
Licked the long lonely faces
then retreated in the shadows

Hissing and guttering
A sculptor twice neglected
A suitor thrice rejected
Yet someday to caress...
-------------------------------------------------

Chorus:

There's a fire in the waxworks
Someone torched the paraffin
Smoke boiling from the workshops
Melting history's waxen grin

... somebody should really notify the fire department . . .
-------------------------------------------------
Chorus 2:

There's a fire in the waxworks
Police have named it arson
The destruction of the building
Cremation of the contents
-------------------------------------------------

Like many of our songs, this was a work in progress. I fed the chorus through some effects pedals to make it sound metallic and ominous (but it mainly sounds stupid), and also to distinguish it from the verses, which were musically similar, if not identical. Later, as we played through it a few more times, a new hook started to emerge in the middle of the first verses, a sort of funk improvisation on the phrase "retreated in the shadows." Alas, we never did get a good version of it down on tape.

What's it about? you ask. Never having seen a real waxworks, let alone one on fire, I think I was probably influenced by the 1953 Vincent Price movie, House of Wax, which indeed starts off with a fire in a waxworks.

Of course, I meant it as a metaphor, but I'll be damned if I can remember for what. Possibly global warming. Yeah, that was it. Al Gore, call your office. I want some of that Nobel swag.

Fire In The Waxworks. Warning: Embedded QuickTime file.

Previous:

Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

One of the benefits of writing new songs, I found, was that they tended to be more complete. Previously I would concentrate on the lyrics of the first verses and chorus -- anything beyond that was usually just filler to pad out the length.

Part of it is that I had what I would term a "romantic" idea of songwriting, where the song would appear, fully formed, from the ether. It's nice when that happens -- maybe once or twice a year -- but you shouldn't count on it on your journey to the Top Of The Pops. Like any other writing, it takes persistence and the willingness to rip up what isn't working and rewrite it until you get it right. Or at least until you can sing it without apologizing in advance.

===========================

Verse:

So you've risen to the top of the ladder
And you are the master of all you survey
But there's an itching
Like a fire in the kitchen
It's your dirty little secret
Your dirty little secret

Sure you've struggled to nail up your name
Now at the summit you collect paper scraps
But there's a swelling
Little whispets telling
Your dirty little secret
-------------------------------------------------
Chorus:

In the dark of night
You rub your dirty little secret
When no one's looking
You bite down
And the pain is sweet
In the light of day
You disguise your dirty little secret
When no one's looking
You bite down
And the pain is sweet
-------------------------------------------------
Verse:

You've got money enough to burn
You can buy all your friends wholesale
But all that cash
Won't cover the rash
Of your dirty little secret

[Rpt. second verse, chorus]
=============================

Believe it or not (my cousin certainly didn't), this wasn't about sex, at least not more than peripherally. I stole the title from an essay (I think) by D.H. Lawrence, who was talking about sex; more specifically, masturbation, the wanker. I can't find a link for it, but here Martin Amis makes mention of it (near the bottom of the page).

I was thinking more of a scene in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is haunted by a childhood memory of being in a bomb shelter with his mother and younger sister in one of Oceania's endless wars. He steals some chocolate from the crying child and he carried this pathetic image around for the rest of his life.

So, if anything, the song is a metaphor for the shabby ways we treat others.

Speaking of shabby, our playing was a bit less than optimum, with blown notes here and there, and occasionally the whole project drifted off course. Most of it works, though.

Note how my cousin attempts to sabotage my performance with four (I counted them) handclaps that I can only characterize as "insolent and sarcastic." Well, I guess you had to be there. But I soldiered on manfully. Manfully, I tell you.

Dirty Little Secret Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

This, unlike any of the other songs, has been heard by Famous Ears. Whose Famous Ears, you ask? Well, how about David Freaking Foster's Famous Ears, that's who. He was the main judge in a song contest sponsored by the local Recording Association. At least I think he heard it, though I'm betting not much more than thirty seconds worth until his oh-so-refined immune system kicked in and he collapsed into a writhing heap on the floor.

Mind you, I don't exactly regard David Freaking Foster (I have no idea if his middle name is really "Freaking." But it should be.) as the ultimate authority on rock music. He had most recently been famous for (co?) writing and producing the Canadian entry in the African-famine trilogy ("Do They Know It's Christmas"/"We Are The World"), a song so stirring and unforgettable that I've, ah, forgotten what it was called.

Apart from that, he produced and wrote for notable rockers like Barbra Streisand, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (an extensive discography here). I remember reading a magazine story about him in which he was reminiscing about, among other things, his days as a working musician, including playing keyboards in Chuck Berry's backup band. He went on and on about how sloppy and unprofessional his bandmates were, including Berry, whose guitar was constantly slipping out of tune. This was especially painful for Foster, who, as the writer pointed out (several times), was blessed with "perfect pitch." It also, as far as I was concerned, was part of the reason why he didn't really "get" rock music.

The only person I've ever known with perfect pitch -- or close enough to it -- is my cousin. Oddly enough, it didn't really help us out very much (except when tuning the guitars, heh).

Sloppy. Unprofessional. Out of tune. Could be a perfect description of half of the Rolling Stones any given night. More to the point, rock has a sort of laissez-faire attitude to imperfection: Whatever works, works. It's not exactly like improvisation in jazz, though there are some of those elements in it.

The Beatles were fond of telling the story of when they were working on a particular song (I've never found out which one) when Ringo wandered into the studio stoned out of his mind on one thing or another and tripped over a cymbal. Lesser musicians would have shrieked and started recording anew, but they were of sturdier stuff. As one of them observed, "Hey, he was on the beat, so we decided to leave it in."

Another view on the human element in recording. This is a site that obsessively lists every bad tape edit and drum-pedal squeak in Beatles' songs. You'll be amazed at how many there are.

What's it about? Nothing, actually. The title is the only real thing about it -- I was living next to one of those big artificial lakes that are built in new communities to:

a) increase property values;

b) divert water from overloaded storm drains; and

c) collect every abandoned shopping cart in the vicinity

The rest is overwrought poetic dreck.

We changed hats on this recording, with me playing most of the guitars and my cousin switching to bass. I have mixed feelings about it. I liked the Townshendesque chords I was throwing around; but I never could find a way to integrate the chorus and verses. I needed a song for the contest, though, and this was the best I had.

=========================

Verse:

This solemn vow I do undertake
Forged in sorrow and it cannot break
A purpose, a will
Too much to shake

Chorus:

I found my love
By the lake
By the lake

There was a stinging wind coaxing dirty foam afloat
And on the beach the bleached shell of a boat
A gull overhead
This song in his throat

By the lake

A desert of water crushed by clouds
An ocean of tears cried aloud
Fossils in amber sunk beneath
No swimming allowed

By the lake
==============================

(Note that the lyrics in question might have small differences from the song. Most of them went through seversl small rewrites along the way.)

However dimly David Freaking Foster viewed my entry, at least I probably beat my cousin, who wrote his first song and submitted it. We still chuckle about that one.

By The Lake. Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

One day my cousin showed up with these lyrics about DamnYoko™ and wanted some help putting them to music. So I said sure, went off somewhere and returned a few days later with the body of the song. (I believe we both worked on the bridge.)

Although my cousin was much more proficient than me in almost any aspect of music, he was just starting to write his own songs. I'd been doing it from the start. I suppose it is somewhat a matter of focus; a songwriter sees the song as the target and the music as part of the puzzle getting there; a good musician is more interested in the journey, and the nuts and bolts of the jalopy we're riding in. If I may mangle a metaphor or two.

My cousin wasn't exactly Noel Coward when it came to writing lyrics, but no nevermind. Obviously a good song with good lyrics is preferable to a good song with bad lyrics (or -- and I know, having written many examples of the genre -- a bad song with bad lyrics), but I've never considered lyrics as a pivotal element of the song; rather as a framework to hang the vocals (which I do consider essential) on.

This was the first time my cousin added backing vocals. Also a few ad-libs aimed at cracking me up.

Note: I usually keep the volume of my computer speakers low, and listen to these (or anything else) with headphones. If you can, I'd recommend doing the same for this song, at least. There's a truism that you should listen to music at around the same level that it was recorded at. As this would be inconvenient for most rock music (not to mention for your neighbors), producers use compression and equalization to make the record sound smoother at lower volumes. In part because we still hadn't figured out how to record acoustic guitars, they sound jumbled and undifferentiated unless you crank up the sound somewhat. If the boss starts bitchin', you can point out this highly scientific explanation.

Since I'll be busy for the next few days, I'll just take this occasion to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'll try to be back by next week, but I'm not promisin' nuttin'.

========================

[Verse]

Together you and me
Can reach the sky and see
The things we believe
But torment and frustration
Can break the concentration
Then we grieve
-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus ]

But it's you and me
Me and you
Just us two
Together
J.B.

[rpt.]
-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

The colors on the wall
Seem to give us the call
The forces are there
The final judgement can wait
'Til we secure our fate
The loving we share

------------------------------------------------------

[Bridge]

Forgetting the bad times we had
To make room for more of the good
Will keep us together
Forever

Will keep us together
Forever

-------------------------------------------------

[rpt. 1st verse, chorus]

========================

Me & J.B. Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, if you like laws and sausages and rock music, you should never watch them being made.

This was an older song that we'd never recorded, maybe because it had one glaring flaw. That would have been the last line of the chorus (the one I've marked with an asterisk). The original lyrics have long since vanished, but I recall announcing that I refused to sing it -- at least that particular line -- from that moment forever on. It was that bad. Not obscene-bad -- just something that was intended to be clever and wasn't, a pimple on the nose of the prom queen. Nor would it scan, no matter how I twisted the syllables.

So eventually I crossed it out and scribbled in something to remind me to replace it. We ran through the song one more time, and guess what? The line fit perfectly, so we kept it. Laws and sausages and rock music.

And now you know . . . the rest of the story.

========================

[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
I was just too erratic
And it stood out
I said it stood out
--------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

Caught by computer
Snagged and tagged
Sorted and recorded
Coded Gulag

Captured by a keyboard
Magnetic pulse mindless
This next line I gotta change *
-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
But you spat me out
It was innocent defiance
You figured it out

-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]
-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
You selected my file
Put it to the side
For a little while

-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

[Chorus]

========================

Caught By Computer Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

The Beatles, on their first tour of North America, were frequently quizzed by reporters about how they wrote their music. To which they had a set of flippant answers: "With a blue pen"; "First we sit down. Then we write the song." So, you're thinking: "Gee, were journalists as stupid back then as they are now?"

Well, yes. But it's a legitimate question from outsiders who have no idea how songs are written.

Rock is a small subset of music and fairly easy to categorize, so let's give it a whirl. It's (usually) a heavily-amplified and sped-up mix in 4/4 time combining chords and musical techniques common to the blues and to country music. Structurally it follows some arrangement of verse/chorus, sometimes with a "bridge" or "middle 8" (a contrasting or complementary musical/lyrical passage) thrown in to tie the elements together.

For example, this song. The original lyrics are long lost, so I had to transcribe them from the recording. The lyrics from the bridge do not lend themselves to easy analysis. Indeed, the only word I can make out is "telephone." The rest is, to quote a fellow countryman:

Just guitars screaming, screaming, screaming
Some guy screaming in a leather jacket

25 BonusPoints™ * go to the first person who gets the reference.

Once you have the broad outlines hammered out, you can turn your attention to details like the melody. Because the vocal drives the melody, you're bound to make changes to it once you test it out against the full instrumentation, with its often-unexpected harmonics. At least that's the way I approached things.

Now, writing a good song, that's a bit of a different beast altogether. If you want to write one of those, ignore everything I've told you.

* Void where prohibited by law. BonusPoints™ are not transferable to any known legal tender; in fact, they are useful only for bragging rights. And now that I think about it, not so much for that, either.

========================

[Verse]

Should I rent out a billboard
Put out an ad
Should I hire a skywriter
Would that make you mad?

Should I call up your girlfriend
And ask where you are
Fly down to Rio
Is that going too far?

-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]

Yeah, just so you know
I want you to know
Just so you know
I want you [rpt.]
-------------------------------------------------
[Verse]

Should I distribute handbills
With your name and your face
Paste them all over
All over the place?

Should I engage a detective
Call the police
Jump from the rooftop
And land in your tree?
-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]
-------------------------------------------------
[Bridge]

Something, something, something
Telephone. Something, something
-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]

==================

Just So You Know Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

I wrote this after watching a documentary on TV about junkies and prostitutes in Vancouver`s Downtown Eastside, a notoriously seedy area. It was just depressing, a panorama of failure and misery. It was and still is a tough place: An acquaintance from high school went out there for the party scene and was dead within the year. As are, I presume, all of the people interviewed for the documentary. Dead from overdose; dead from AIDS. And though Robert Pickton was still only a malign shimmer on the horizon, there was no shortage of his predecessors.

========================

[Verse]

Hangin' round the park
It's no place to call home
Got no place really to go
And I need to score
Hangin' round downtown
It's getting dark so fast
Summer's almost gone
Yeah, that's a fact

Hangin' round my friends
We're in it 'til the end
No future, no prospects
But we don`t care
Hangin`round the park
No place to call home
No place really to go
And I need to score
-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

I need fifty dollars
Gonna have me
Some fun tonight
My girl`s out walking
The street
Yeah, she`s all right

There`s a party down the alley
Later we`ll get a room
I know a guy who`s holdin`
I`m meeting him soon

I wanna get out
But my legs won`t move
I wanna get out
But my legs won`t move
I wanna get out
But my legs won`t move
-------------------------------------------------
[rpt. verse, chorus]
========================

The song isn't complete -- I had only the one verse and the chorus. At some point we realized it was better to go with what we had, even if it meant repeating parts of the lyrics. At least this way, we were getting experience with the song while waiting for the Muse to drop her gifts on Mr. Sensitive Songwriter.

One other thing of note: The song refers throughout to "Hangin' round" where the title (I still have the original ms. to confirm it) has it as "Hangin' in. " I think I couldn't at the time decide which sounded better; but with time I realized that my initial impulse was correct. "Hangin' in" better conveys the awful pathos of people waiting helplessly to be lynched on a gallows of their own making.

Hangin' In The Park Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

Just So You Know Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

she looks like a barracuda, frankly.

It's been widely reported that Hillary Clinton has selected a new campaign song. which, if true, would have been a decidedly odd choice.

It's called "When The Lady Smiles," and it's by the Dutch rock group Golden "Radar Love" Earring. What really raised eyebrows, though, was the video, in which a nun is raped and a dog is seen eating part of a man's brain. Apparently MTV refused to play it, forcing a reshoot or at least big edits by the band.

Alas, it all appears to be a hoax, There's no mention of it on her official website and a commenter in this BoingBoing thread points to that paragon of journalistic ethics, The Huffington Post, which seized on the fact that the song was played at one of Clinton's campaign stops and made up the rest of it . So I'm guessing that Arianna is auditioning for the role of Obama's new hatchetman.

A pity. Some of the lyrics seem quite appropriate:

My friends tell me, she's the beast inside your paradise
I guess you've heard it all before
A fallen angel, that has got you hypnotised
and that always needs some more.

This marked a turning point of sorts. I bought a small four-channel mixer and it dramatically improved our sound; making it much cleaner and.allowing us to place our instruments where we wanted them in the mix.

Second, I was more comfortable playing bass. This song was largely written around the bass riff, which itself is a variation of a "walking bass line," a musical structure commonly found in rock and blues.

Third, I was taking more chances with the vocals. Follow along as I bravely flout stale old conventions like starting the verses and chorus on the beat and with some grasp of the correct lyrics. I've helpfully indicated (with a "-->") the boo-boos, though they should be quite obvious to anyone with ears. For comparison see the second chorus, marked with "***." That's the way it was meant to sound. (In fairness, we were writing this on the spot, and this was my first attempt at it.)

And fourth, but by no means least, I was visited by the Spirit of Woo! By which I mean the apparently-spontaneous ejaculations (no, let's not go there) that rock vocalists pepper their songs with. Such as: Woo! and Woo-Hoo! and that perennial favorite [Name of city here] rocks! *

There are two reasons for this. One reason is to show that the lead singer is inspired to emit these primal yelps to demonstrate his deep communion with the music, and also that he isn't Barry Manilow.

The second reason is that the lead singer has completely lost his place in the song and is shouting out random gibberish until the music swings around to some portion he recognizes. There's a bit of both in this one.

========================

[Verse]

With a practised eye
She estimates your size
Measures the future
like some cosmic tailor

Will be the grieving widow
appraising the undertaker
-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus x 2)

--> Her banker's phone number
Right next to yours
Her broker broke her heart
But her doctor found a cure
-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

--> Something something
something something
something something
And a jeweler's loupe

She's got her eyes on dollars
But Krugerrands will do
She'll settle for a certified cheque
Money order, too
-------------------------------------------------
***
[Chorus x 1)
-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

--> Her accountant wants an audit
Her lawyer wants it signed
Her psychic is complanin'
Cannot tead my mind

She's a cold golddigger
I'd be best to drop her soon
She's got rabbit on her shoulders
She's lookin' at raccoon
-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus x 1 and adlib out]
========================

You might recall a couple of years ago Kanye West (with Jamie Foxx) had a song with the same theme and name. Video above.

I don't recall seeing a Negro in the basement at the time, so I'm baffled as to where he got the idea. Nevertheless, I humbly submit that my line "She's got rabbit on her shoulders/She's lookin' at raccoon" is 14.73% funnier than anything West has written **, or is likely to, in the foreseeable future.

-------------------------------------------------

* Do try to get the name of the city right. Also, even if you are of the opinion that said city in fact sucks worse than Moose Junction, Manitoba on a Saturday night. it is probably an impolitic idea to announce it from the stage. Save it for your memoirs.

** I should exempt the 1,526 (approx.) videos, interviews, etc., in which West compares himself (favorably) to Jesus Christ. That's comedy gold, man. As the prophet M.C. Hammer foretold: "U Can't Touch This."

How right you were, M.C., how right you were.

Golddigger Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

Hangin' In The Park
Just So You Know Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

This marks the addition of keyboards to our sound. To be more specific, an early-model Casio with about 3/4 of a full 88 keys and four voices (piano, organ, harpsichord and either violin or clarinet, I forget which). You'd think that I, a touch typist, would find playing keyboards a snap, but you would be wrong. I've very much in the "hunt and peck" tradition. So there's no dazzling glissandos or barrelhouse pounding going on here. I mainly used it to accentuate the chords, and stuck to the notes associated with each.

Now, the song. It's the only (as far as I can recall) excursion I made into a common theme in science fiction, namely, of being the last human in the world, most recently seen in Will Smith's I Am Legend. It follows, too, a small tradition of SF in rock, such as the Rolling Stones' "2000 Light Years From Home," Elton John's "Rocket Man," and David Bowie's "Major Tom." "Space Oddity."

That might also explain why I inexplicably started singing this (faintly at the start, more pronouncedly towards the end) with an English accent. I later looked it up, and as the examples above indicate, it is illegal to attempt SF rock without an English accent. It's not just a suggestion: It's the LAW.

Whew. I was worried I was having an aneurism or something.

========================

[Verse]

Yesterday morning the sky lit up
It shone with deadly glare
I saw the contrail
Of the last transport
I didn't mean to be
The very last man on earth

No, I didn't mean to be
The very last man on earth

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus x 2]

Men's cities sit deserted
And men's machines rusted out
Men's museums vandalized
And churches blasted down

Men's inventions inventoried
And packed away for good
Men have fled the world
And I'm the last man on earth
----------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

Tomorrow this tired old world
will crack and shudder and break
I've got a front-row seat at the Apocalypse
I didn't mean to be
The very last man on earth

No, I didn't mean to be
The very last man on earth
----------------------------------------------------

[adlib out]
==========================

The Very Last Man On Earth Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

The above link has been quite sluggish of late, so here's another. Unfortunately it isn't a streaming site, but you can click on the download link, and when the Windows or equivalent dialog box appears, you can elect to save it to disk, or (first choice) open up the song with the default media player, like iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player. The Very Last Man On Earth

Previous:

Golddigger
Hangin' In The Park
Just So You Know Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

This was an attempt to simplify my lyrics, and I think it worked. What could be more basic than a love lust song trimmed down to "she" and "me." And, um, "freckles."

It also forced me to look at the song as a whole, and reduced the danger -- in my case an all-too-common fault - of wandering off into la-la land in the later verses. It's not unlike adhering to the rhyme and metrical schemes in that it imposes an internal structure to the song.

That said, I can think of enough counter-examples to invalidate it as the only way to write a song; but it is a useful exercise to think of the lyrics as variations branching off a central unifying theme.

========================

[Verse]

I got a girl
She she she she
She's got freckles everywhere [rpt.]

Up and down her arms
Splashed across her breasts
I know this for a fact
I've seen that girl undressed

She she she she
Can squeeze so tight
Me me me me me me me
I'm doin' all right [rpt.]

Wrapped up in her arms
How could one man be so blessed?
I know this for a fact
That woman is dangerous
-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

She takes the money I make [rpt.]

-------------------------------------------------

[Instrumental]

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

--------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

I've got a girl
She she she she
She's got freckles
everywhere [rpt.]

Scattered on her back
Sprinkled on her nose
I know this for a fact
I've seen her with no clothes

Yeah, up and down her arms
Splashed across her breasts
I know that for a fact
I've seen that girl undressed

-------------------------------------------------
[instr., out]

=========================

I Got A Girl Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

For the sake of redundancy, I've uploaded to this link too.. Unfortunately it isn't a streaming site, but you can click on the download link, and when the Windows or equivalent dialog box appears, you can elect to save it to disk, or (first choice) open up the song with the default media player, like iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player. I Got A Girl

Previous:

The Very Last Man On Earth
Golddigger
Hangin' In The Park
Just So You Know Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

Cracked:

This song was written in that small window of the '80s when a blue collar steelworker from New Jersey with a terminal case of hockey hair could write songs about being a cowboy and be taken seriously. It was a very small window; it really only encased this one song. When he tried to repeat its success with "Blaze of Glory," the whole thing became laughable (when Bon Jovi insists that he is a "Colt in your stable," a lyric which may be the most unintentionally gay thing anybody ever said, ever, throughout time).

Billy Joel was once asked in an interview what the hardest thing to do onstage was, and without hesitation he replied, "whistling." There was a song on one of his early albums with a whistling intro, and he dreaded performing it for that reason.

I myself have dealt with this dilemma by never appearing on stage.

Or for that matter, ever writing a song with whistling in it. I hate songs with whistling in them.

There! Problem solved!

That left harmonies as our big stumbling block. It's hard not to feel like a complete goof doing them, especially for my cousin, who had very little experience singing.

It's a bit like a tightrope act, with Giggles the Clown constantly jiggling the wire and threatening to bring the whole thing down in a heap. (You can hear him puttering around in some of the more ragged edges.)

Or worse, one's kid sister could stick her head into the door and exclaim, "Hey, you guys sound just like a barbershop quartet!" When that chilling verdict rang out, there was nothing to do but down our tools and head for the local pub to try and drown our sorrows. (Well, we had kind of planned that anyway, but now we had an official excuse.)

========================

[Verse]

Insidious wind come creeping up
A sly typhoon stirring up the dust
Secret tornado
Imploding the house

You'll cry me a river [rpt.]

The crops you planted
Overtaken by worms
Your petri dishes
Overwhelmed by germs
Now the screws are on
And it's your turn

To cry me a river [rpt.]

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

The Mississippi or the Nile will do
I want you to hurt
Like I hurt for you

The Columbia
Or maybe the Rhine
When you fill up the oceans
You'll be done your cryin'

[ad lib]

You'll cry me a river [rpt.]

------------------------------------------------

[Verse, Instr.]

-------------------------------------------------

[rpt. 1st Chorus]

-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
Vengeance is mine
And it's the solemn truth
Back to the stone age
And the pain of youth

You'll cry me a river [rpt.]

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

The Amazon
Where it's wild and slow
The Vistula
Where the diesel boats go
The Ganges with its banks on fire
The waters are risin'
And they're gonna run higher
-------------------------------------------------

[ad. lib., out]

You're gonna cry

========================

Cry Me A River Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Alternately: Unfortunately it isn't a streaming site, but you can click on the download link, and when the Windows or equivalent dialog box appears, you can elect to save it to disk, or (first choice) open up the song with the default media player, like iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player. Cry Me A River

Previous:

I Got A Girl
The Very Last Man On Earth
Golddigger
Hangin' In The Park
Just So You Know
Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

I was somewhat perplexed by the controversy surrounding rapper Ice-T's 1992 song, "Cop Killer." If you don't recall it, there was much outrage about it from various police associations and politicians, to the point where Time-Warner, which released the album it appeared on, withheld it from subsequent pressings. (And I still haven't heard it to this day.) With all the hoo-hah about "freedom of speech" and "inciting violence" and "the nature of the black experience in America" there seemed one obvious defence that no one was making, though Ice-T later would hit on the essence of it:

"I'm singing in the first person as a character who is fed up with police brutality. I ain't never killed no cop. I felt like it a lot of times. But I never did it. If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut," in reference to Bowie's song "Space Oddity."

Or that Mick Jagger is a "Street Fighting Man," etc.

In other words, we are dealing with works of fiction here, with the singer (or by extension, the band) stepping into the equally fictitious role of the protagonist.

Now, keeping all that in mind, I present this completely fictional song, in which I attempt to imagine how it is for all those poor slobs out there stumbling through life. Because, if you must know, I am so incredibly cool that it would make you sick.

Did I mention that I MADE ALL OF THIS STUFF UP??!? Sheesh.

========================

[Verse]

I farted in church loud and clear as a bell
It rattled the preacher
From his pulpit he fell
There was no denyin'
The shame i felt
And worst of all
It really smelled

-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

The whole damn crowd turned to look at me
They was sniffin' the air like it was blasphemy
I felt like crawling
Under the pew
I mean I felt
Like, you know, that this was uncool

------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

I got real drunk and I asked a lady
I said how'd she like
To carry my baby
She slapped my face
And out I went
To nurse a hangover
and forever repent

---------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

Life's embarrassing moments
Yeah, life's embarrassing moments
These really should pass without comment
But I need a song
Won't you sing along

-------------------------------------------------
Walked into a meeting
With my fly undone
I looked like a derelict
O-on the run
My new proposals were rejected by all
They shook their heads
Said they'd give me a call
-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

-------------------------------------------------

[Bridge]

I phoned an old acquaintance
And said: Could I speak to Paul?
Unfortunately he's to be buried next week
And that was all
My condolences to his family I paid
And then I went to his funeral
and tripped over a spade

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

I had a girl
Man, she was really hot
We wrestled all evening
I pinned her to the cot
But when the chips were down
My passion fled
She cut me up with words
And kicked me out of bed

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

-------------------------------------------------

[ad. lib., out]

Yeah, life

=========================

Life's Embarrassing Moments Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Alternate: Unfortunately it isn't a streaming site, but you can click on the download link, and when the Windows or equivalent dialog box appears, you can elect to save it to disk, or (first choice) open up the song with the default media player, like iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player. Life's Embarrassing Moments

Previous:

Cry Me A River
I Got A Girl
The Very Last Man On Earth
Golddigger
Hangin' In The Park
Just So You Know
Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

When Sting wrote "Message In A Bottle" he presented it to the rest of the band with a guarantee that they had a #1 hit on their hands. Inspired by this, I made the same boast for "Fashion Patrol," but the security guards threw me out before I could properly introduce myself. Security guards, I have found, are terrible judges of music.

I was fooling around with the drum machine one day, and erased (whether deliberately or accidentally I can't remember) some of the instrumentation (you could program the bass and snare drums, and the hi-hat and ride cymbals independently) from a fairly standard rock pattern and wound up with an odd, loping beat. That immediately suggested the bass riff, and the song was built out from there. The lyrics I slapped together in about five minutes for the purpose of having something to sing, with the intention of someday rewriting them -- keeping the same theme, but smoothing out the glitches and maybe adding a new verse.

So, the premise was that we were a special unit going around arresting anyone who didn't meet our lofty sartorial standards. Given our usual get-up of jeans and T-shirts, I can only conclude we were hitting the "Irony" button pretty hard; but hey, it would have been a pretty cool job. Not unlike, um, the religious police in Saudi Arabia. But with a more highly-developed sense of irony.

=====================

[ad. lib. in]

-------------------------------------------------
[Verse]

Yeah

I said this town's all locked up
And there's nowhere to go
City's shut down
We are in control

There's a new year
No appeal to reason
Bureau of Vanity predicts
Conflict in the fall season

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

We are the fashion patrol
Armed with rock
And ready to roll

Yeah the style police
Bringing law and order
to these messy streets [2nd chor. rpt. 2nd stanza]

-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

Check out that guy
Does he have papers?
Is he a suspect
Or a perpetrator?

And then: how about that woman?
Is her apparel illegal?
Is she a conscious delinquent
Or something more lethal?

-------------------------------------------------

[ad. lib., out]

=========================

Fashion Patrol Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Alternate: Not a streaming site, but you can click on the download link; when the Windows or equivalent dialog box appears, you can elect to save it to disk, or (first choice) open up the song with the default media player, like iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player. Fashion Patrol

Previous:

Life's Embarrassing Moments
Cry Me A River
I Got A Girl
The Very Last Man On Earth
Golddigger
Hangin' In The Park
Just So You Know
Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

I only had the first two verses, so wound up repeating them. A third verse was needed, explaining that, say, while the character desperately craved his freedom, and yearned to break free, he was unable to do so; because, he was presently shackled to the furnace. For instance. This would immediately create "dramatic tension," and ignite in the mind of the listener many important (and perhaps, unsolvable) questions, such as:

a) Who chained the singer to the furnace? and,

b) Isn't that a violation of the Building Code? and,

c) How much did I pay for this album, anyway?

Having said that, this was one of the more melodious and well-crafted things we did, helped out in no small part by my cousin's very pretty and understated guitar solo. In fact we hit it nearly perfectly (never mind the two false starts), so much so that I became excited and overloaded the mike at the end. That would explain that thumping sound you hear on fade-out -- me whacking myself in the forehead with the microphone when I realized my mistake. (There's a similar "effect" in the last song, "Fashion Patrol," but it's unclear what set me off that time.).

Never let it be said that I haven't suffered for my art.

========================

[Verse]

Cant afford to leave
Nor bear to stay
Can't buy no ticket out
I gotta walk away

Walk away, walk away

-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

You don't need a plastic card
With your name stamped on it
A wallet filled with cash
You just ain't got it, no

Walk away, walk away

-------------------------------------------------

[Instrumental]

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

Because first you break your heart
Then you break your nerve
Then you break your promise
And then it gets worse
And search as you might
There's only one cure

Walk away, walk away

-------------------------------------------------

[Instrumental]

-------------------------------------------------

[Bridge]

Don't need it now
That face those habits
Your feet hit the floor
And head for the door

Walk away, walk away
-------------------------------------------------

[rpt. Verses 1 & 2]

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

-------------------------------------------------

[ad. lib., out]

Walk away, yeah

=======================

Walk Away Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

I finally found an alternate site that seems to work most of the time: Walk Away Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

Fashion Patrol
Life's Embarrassing Moments
Cry Me A River
I Got A Girl
The Very Last Man On Earth
Golddigger
Hangin' In The Park
Just So You Know
Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

One of the responsibilities of a songwriter is to note common human traits and invest them with special -- nay, profound -- importance by writing a song about them. And they are of profound importance. Otherwise, why would someone write a song about them? Q.E.D.

In this case, I had divined that people, driven by some mysterious impulse, tended to become specialized, experts in one field or another. Where did I obtain these shattering insights, you ask?

Beats me. I do sort of remember that I was myself somewhat of a "specialist" on marijuana at the time; this might explain it, among other mysteries.

I didn't have a lot of lyrics for it, but no problem. I would "improvise" the rest, a la Jim Morrison.

Do not be alarmed by the person who apparently wanders into the session, randomly intoning the word "Four." It's just me, counting out the last half of the backbeat. (Most rock music uses a heavily-inflected backbeat, viz. one-TWO-three-FOUR.)

Or possibly I was imagining that I was on a golf course, shouting "Fore!" Those years are all a blur. (See above, "marijuana.")

========================

[Verse]

Got you a problem you can't ignore?
Are you a victim
Wanna even the score?
File a class action
But your class is too poor?
You need the specialist

The specialist is a programmed man
The time/motion expert
He's got a plan

Dissect the situation
A dedicated fan
You need (yeah you need) the specialist [rpt.]

-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

Portable computer
And eyes like an eagle
Flowchart folders
And nose like a beagle
Shortcuts
And they're all sort of legal

Got an M.B.A.
A B.S.C.
A PhD
A doctorate
An L.L.D., a C.P.A.
an LTD, a monkey wrench

Designated hitter
Coming off of the bench

*************************************

[Let the improvisation commence!]

Specialist!
Expert texpert exorcist
Terrorist
Got you one kiss
For the specialist [rpt.]

[Let the improvisation cease, already!]

*************************************

[rpt. 1st Verse] ad.lib. out]

========================

I have no idea what that was about. "Got you one kiss/For the specialist"? Sounds like "Give your accountant a hug" or something.

So, that's it, then. I've got other things, but they're too weak or stupid or long (our commonest fault) to inflict on even the most patient of you. This is one of the last things we recorded, but the breakup of the band was by no means acrimonious -- my cousin was getting married to DamnYoko™ and moving to another town in a few weeks. Ah, well. Sic transit gloria and all that.

The Specialist

Alternate site: The Specialist Warning: Both links are embedded QuickTime audio.

Previous:

H.U.A.C.
Walk Away
Fashion Patrol
Life's Embarrassing Moments
Cry Me A River
I Got A Girl
The Very Last Man On Earth
Golddigger
Hangin' In The Park
Just So You Know
Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman

'Everyone on our estate had it tough. Nobody had any money. You've got to pick a pocket or two. You had to know how to make money and not get caught. And at the same time not to turn into a thief or burglar. That sort of working-class community didn't wear anyone parasiting on their own. But that kind of code of conduct doesn't exist now. England's a violent place. Too violent for me. That's why I prefer it here. For a gun-toting nation, Americans are surprisingly passive. This place suits me and the wife.'

The Telegraph with a piece on the surprisingly-reflective Johnny (Lydon) Rotten, the Sex Pistols' frontman.

If middle age hasn't completely tamed him, he seems a lot happier (and saner) than I'd have predicted. In fact, he sounds like a fascinating character to share a pint with.

He's even gently courteous to a young, awe-struck Japanese fan. It's enough to make you spit razor blades.

It's the new hit single from Fall Out Boy, exclusively on Island Records!

Harry Belafonte is still a raging moonbat, but IMO this is one of the prettiest Christmas songs ever recorded. I was curious, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.

Long time ago in Bethlehem
So the Holy Bible say
Mary's boy child, Jesus Christ
Was born on Christmas day.

Hark, now hear the angels sing
A new King born today
And man will live forever more
Because of Christmas day.

While shepherds watched their flock by night
And see a bright new shining star
And hear a choir sing
The music seem to come from afar.

Now Joseph and his wife Mary
Come to Bethlehem that night
They found no place to bear her child
Not a single room was in sight.

Hark, now hear the angels sing
A new King born today
And man will live forever more
Because of Christmas day.

By and by they find a little nook
In a stable all forlorn
And in a manger cold and dark
Mary's little boy was born.

Hark, now hear the angels sing
A new King born today
And man will live forever more
Because of Christmas day.

I've got places to go and people to see over the next few days. So I'll wish you all a Merry Christmas and I'll see you in the (Happy?) New Year.

The latest craze is using Microsoft's Songsmith (download a trial version here) to remix famous songs. Basically you sing into it and the software builds the chord progressions to match the melody and the rhythm to fit the style (rock, blues, jazz, etc.)

In the example below, someone isolated Sting's vocal track from the song "Roxanne" and set it to what sounds like . . . cruise ship calypso? That's not as much of a musical stretch as it initially might seem. Most people would describe the original as "reggae," and it does have some similarities to that style, notably Andy Summers' choppy guitar chords. But Sting originally wrote the song to a bossa nova beat and changed it to a tango at drummer Stewart Copeland's suggestion. Wikipedia.

It just fits with my theory that, given sufficient amplification, all musical genres approach cosmic oneness and/or cause the (real) police to be summoned.

Pitchfork has some other examples from the likes of Radiohead, Van Halen and The Doobie Brothers. Or if you have the time (and stomach) for it, here are numerous other examples on YouTube.

I think I'll pick up a copy of the software -- it's only 30 bucks and I've spent a lot more for things that aren't half the fun.

Via Neatorama

Associated Press:

WEEHAWKEN, N.J. - After five years fielding thousands of calls to one of rock 'n' roll's most celebrated phone numbers, disc jockey Spencer Potter is hanging up on Jenny.

Her seven digits are familiar to anyone who paid attention to pop music in the early 1980s: 867-5309, immortalized by the band Tommy Tutone.

Potter and his roommates requested the number on a lark for their home phone in northern New Jersey.

They got it, along with about 30 to 40 calls a day.

The 28-year-old Potter says he's selling his business, A Blast Entertainment, and moving to New York.

The business and the phone number are for sale on eBay, where the high bid was about $1,000 by Sunday morning.

Because answering the phone 30 to 40 times a day with "There isn't any Jenny here" never gets old. You can't buy entertainment like that.

No, wait, you can. For only a grand on eBay.

It is a bit of a dump though. No, check that. More like a toxic waste site waiting for Superfund cleanup.

View from the stage at CBGB, the legendary New York punk/New Wave club that served as the launching pad for acts like the Ramones, Blondie and the Talking Heads.

Virtual tour starts in the women's bathroom. Use the buttons at the bottom or click on the purple arrows to navigate. Or take a trip down Memory Lane with the MeFi gang, a surprising number of whom have been there as patrons or performers.

Holy Taco:

While off-roading, the Man in Black sparked a forest fire that burnt down 508 acres of the Los Padres National Forest in California. The U.S. government sued him and settled for $82,001 making him the first person ever successfully sued for starting a forest fire. When told that the inferno killed 49 of the area’s 53 endangered condors, Cash replied, “I don’t care about your damn yellow buzzards.”

As you can see above I bought myself a new guitar, a for-real Fender Stratocaster (albeit one on the lower end of the price scale -- but it's still cheaper than a Ferrari). It's a beautiful instrument all the same, with a maple neck and a Tobacco Sunburst body. It sounds terrific too even with my clumsy strumming. Alas, there will be no more singing. My vocal cords were damaged -- probably permanently -- in an operation about a year ago. So now I speak (and sing) in a hoarse whisper.

That by itself isn't an insuperable flaw. Think of Tom Waits; or in more of a rock context, Rod Stewart or Joe Cocker. But there are other problems. I can't hold a note with any sureness -- my voice wobbles and cracks unpredictably. It's sort of like going through puberty again, without the side effect of developing uncontrollable boners in math class. Ah, youth!

But tho' the gods have conspired to turn me mute, sing, sing I shall, no matter who objects (though I will probably obey a court injunction forbidding it).

I recently found some more tapes, along with the notebook I made at the time. Thus I can be more certain of the dates, instrumentation, etc. Not that they would concern you, but they can be useful for jogging my memory. What I won't be doing is an extensive commentary on them, or printing the lyrics. It just takes too much time.

I looked around for a more robust host (the one I was using, HotLinkFiles had a bad habit of "losing" files) and I found a few free sites that look good. The one I'm starting with is 4shared. Not only does it work (or appear to), it lets you embed a nifty audio player with "psychedelic" visual effects. With luck, it'll trigger one of those acid flashbacks I've been waiting for.

This is one of the earliest songs I wrote, way back in the early 70s. It was recorded in the spring of 1976. At that time I would have been in Mali, West Africa, where I lived for two years. (My dad was an accountant with CN, on loan to CIDA.) I didn't have much in the way of equipment beyond a guitar and a mono cassette recorder.

The song, "Classic Touches," is doubly clever, for it refers to both the elegiac and timeless quality of my love (to whom, exactly, I forget. Doubtless some chick, somewhere) and also the fact that -- wait for it -- I was learning to play the guitar using a book on . . . classical guitar. (If this has inspired you to take up the Segovian quest, a word of friendly advice: Try to not learn on a steel-string guitar, especially one with a lousy (high) action. Unless you want pressure blisters on all your fingers.)

Warning: Teenage boy poetry; which, unless your name is John Keats or Percy Bysshe Shelley, tends toward the awful.

Note: The volume level on the original is very low. You may need headphones to hear it properly.

One of my typical songs. First I write the opening verse and chorus. It's pretty good, so I write a second verse. It's a bit weaker, but defensible. Then for the sake of "completing" the song, I write the third verse, which is complete garbage, fully intending to fix it some day. Well, guess what? It's 30+ years later and I still haven't fixed it. I'm beginning to think it'll never happen.

Just so you don't have to strain your ears picking them out, here's the verse: I'd like to see you trapped in a cloud-chamber/Then you'd see that randomness is all a part of nature/And when you woke up/You wouldn't feel so much the stranger

To which the only rejoinder is "Huh?" Even I can't tell you what I was thinking when I wrote that (or more likely, picked words at random out of a dictionary). In later years I would just repeat one of the successful verses until I could figure out what I was meaning to say. That might be the lazy way out; it does, however, prevent you from coming across as a complete lunatic.

002 02a03 love song

Curse you, Lewinski. You and your antics have poisoned the name "Monica" for songwriters for at least the next generation. However, it became a laughingstock for us many years before, when I on a later recording foolishly added a few chords to it with a humble yet popular free-reed wind instrument. I didn't make the connection, but my cousin instantly did: The song would from that moment and forevermore become "HAR-monica." It's terribly difficult to sing when you're giggling.

This, too, was recorded in Africa in early 1976; I'm pretty sure that I wrote it some time before leaving Canada, though.

Channelling my inner Robert Johnson; or more likely, my Johnson. Yes, it's mean-spirited, violently misogynistic, etc., etc. -- but hey, it's the blues. Being sexist isn't a bug. It's a feature.

This, from the fall of 1977, is probably the worst recording I've got. The original was done on a tape recorder that was running too fast (defective or possibly voltage fluctuations in the local power supply), so it sounds low and sluggish when transferred to a normal machine.

That isn't the only thing wrong with it, though. I (unintentionally, I think) plagiarized part of it. Exactly from where I wasn't sure, but I knew I'd heard part of the chord progression in the chorus. It wasn't until I got back to Canada and my record collection that I could track it down. The Dutch rock band Golden Earring had had a major hit a few years before with "Radar Love." So naturally everyone went out and bought their second (at least their second North American released) album, Switch. It was a pretty good album as I recall, even if it didn't have "Radar Love - the Sequel" on it. It did have a song called "Ce Soir," that must have caught my attention because I'm pretty sure that it's the scene of the crime. Here's Golden Earring performing it on a TV show:

I wasn't terribly upset about it -- as far as I was concerned it just showed I had good instincts. I would later go on to steal greater songs from even greater bands. But a boy always remembers his first.

005 03b01 truly blue

I was reading a poetry compilation in 1977 and I came across this, which I immediately thought would make a great song. It was by T.S. Eliot, and according to the editor's notes, was one of several poems written for the amusement of his grandchildren, later collected for a book, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). Little did I suspect that an obscure composer named Andrew Lloyd Webber was apparently lurking outside my bedroom window (because where else would he get the idea?). He then ran off to London, where in 1981 he unveiled the trans-Atlantic blockbuster, Cats.

I am a simple man; I do not ask for much. A tasteful acknowledgement, say, a below-the-marquee credit, such as "Inspired by gnotalex" will do. Oh, and 3.72% of the T-shirt revenues. (They do sell t-shirts at the performances, yes?)

Being one of the approximately three people in Christendom who hasn't seen the stage production; or the movie; or the book; or the puppet show I was of course eager to see how much of my original song survived. Judging by this clip, not much.

Meh. I thought my take was much closer to Eliot's uncompromising rock and roll vision.

So here it is, at least the latter half of the song. (What happened to the first part I can't say. There was a complete version of it recorded around the same time; unfortunately on the defective cassette recorder I had, so it's the aural equivalent of molasses.) Lyrics are in the extended entry.

y

This is an old folk/blues song called variously "Poor Boy," "Po' Boy Blues," and "For God's Sakes, Will You Stop Playing That It's 3 O'Clock In The Morning For Crying Out Loud!" In fact, it's the earliest recording I have, with the date of 1974(?) scribbled in my notebook. (These early tapes are not in exact linear order.) The question mark could mean that I wasn't sure if I'd recorded it in 1974; or that I wasn't sure that 1974 existed at all. Indeed, I'm drawing a blank trying to remember anything of the year.

I think I did a competent enough job on it -- the vocals are somewhat ragged in spots and the guitar playing is clumsy. But when combined with the powerful technique of multirecording it is both ragged and clumsy simultaneously.

This was written in the spring of 1978 and recorded on my way back to Canada; more specifically, at the Queen Elizabeth hotel in Montreal, where I spent a few days. I don't remember much of my room, but it had hardwood floors, and very good acoustics. (I didn't even think to request the John Lennon Suite, where he and Yoko held their "bed-in" and recorded "Give Peace A Chance" some years before.)

As for the song -- typical atrocious, overwrought lyrics, but my guitar playing was improving. (Not that I had previously had set the bar very high in that regard.)

Snopes.com:

Christmas carols and other holiday songs, rife as they are with seldom-heard words and phrasings and clever wordplay, are fertile fields for the sowing of mondegreens - especially when children, with their limited vocabularies, are involved. (We note that Mondegreens are based upon a genuine misunderstanding of lyrics, a distinctly different phenomenon than the deliberate creation of parodic lyrics such as "Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg," or "We three kings of Orient are, tried to smoke a rubber cigar.")

In this (recorded in the spring of 1980) I introduced a shocking new concept, melody. That's somewhat of a Catch-22 for rookies -- melody in rock is usually driven by the vocal, so you have to be able to consistently sing a passage before you can explore it melodically. How well I succeeded here is up for argument but I was clearly looking for different ways of phrasing and tone.

There is a shocking lack of songs dedicated to the romance and mystery that is public transit. I've been through the discographies of several bands -- Ted Nugent, Bruce Springsteen and AC/DC most recently -- and I can find no references to the glories of riding the No. 6 Riverfront Express. In fact the only bus-related songs I can think of are: "Magic Bus," by The Who (all links open up YouTube videos); "Bus Rider," which was a minor hit for The Guess Who; " Bus Stop" by the Hollies (which isn't really about buses, but we'll claim it anyway); and Weird Al Yankovic's parody of "Another One Bites The Dust," " Another One Rides The Bus ." And let us not forget The Allman Brothers' " Ramblin' Man" which qualifies because of the following lyric:

My father was a gambler down in Georgia
And he wound up out in the wrong in Alabam’
I was born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus
Rollin’ down Highway 41.

So, by my count, I've written the sixth-best bus song ever. Of course, I might have missed one or two others, but even so, I'm still in the Top Ten.

Note: My apologies for the broken link, which I just discovered. You can now hear Backs Of Heads in all of its glory.

A melancholic little piece about . . . melancholy, I guess. It hangs together fairly well, save for the accidental overdub of 15 seconds of drums near the end. That certainly is a mood-breaker.

From March of 1981: This was -- believe it or not -- something of a breakthrough for my songwriting, at least as far as lyrics went. I was trying to narrow the focus, if only to prevent my too-often habit of creating The Great Cosmic Statement. What's it about? Dunno. Beastiality, probably.

But, but you protest . . . The Girlfriend makes an appearance!

Yes, and a clever bit of stage-business she is -- designed to deflect the accusations of beastiality that surely would be levelled in my direction.

And it almost worked. Save for my big mouth.

You'd never guess it from my name, but I'm 1/4 Scots and 1/4 Irish, from my mother's side. Indeed, my very nom de blog, "gnotalex," is a slight reworking of her maiden name, "O'Gnotalex," the famous Irish clan, or tribe, or swarm, or whatever it is that they call themselves. So with a rich heritage as that, I felt it was my right -- no, my duty -- to comment on the situation in Northern Ireland during the seventies and eighties, culminating with the hunger-strike death of IRA "soldier" thug (I'm also nominally Catholic, so I can name the IRA for what they were --- murderous Marxist creeps.) Bobby Sands in The Maze, a prison for paramilitary-linked criminals outside Belfast.

Certainly I had more claim to the topic than, say, Paul McCartney, who wrote what might have been his worst-ever song, "Give Ireland Back To The Irish" (link opens a terrible YouTube video of his band Wings rehearsing it.); or The Police, who turned out the better, but forgettable (I can't remember a note of it) "Invisible Sun"; or John Lennon, who confusedly offered to play benefit concerts for both the IRA and its Protestant foes.

Gratuitous literary reference: I stole the first line "Is there a family/Free from sorrow/These days?" from Tolstoy's War And Peace (second line at link). I figured the old buzzard owed me at least that much for the hundreds of hours I spent reading the bloody thing.

N.Y. Daily News:

Doug Fieger, leader of the power pop band The Knack who sang on the 1979 hit "My Sharona," died Sunday. He was 57.

Fieger, a Detroit-area native, died at his home in Woodland Hills near Los Angeles after battling cancer, according to The Knack's manager, Jake Hooker.

Fieger formed The Knack in Los Angeles 1978, and the group quickly became a staple of Sunset Strip rock clubs. A year later he co-wrote and sang lead vocals on "My Sharona."

I've written enough songs to know that they're often only tangentially connected to one's real life. Happy times can lead to sad songs and vice versa. I've written songs about real girls, imaginary girls, and girls whose sole contribution is having a name that makes for an interesting rhyme.

So I must say, I'd never given it much thought; but I was somewhat surprised a few years ago to learn that the eponymous star of "My Sharona" does in fact exist. That's the 17-or-so-year-old Sharona Alperin on the right, pictured on (I'm guessing) the 45 rpm single cover. She's gone on to a successful career as a realtor in the hi-end Los Angeles market. She was a lifelong friend of Fieger's and the band, judging by the music that comes up when you load her web page.

So R.I.P., Doug. Here's to happier days; March, 1979 at Carnegie Hall:
.

Update: Well, duh, Sherlock. This wasn't mentioned on any of the sites that I initially looked at, but according to this, she and Fieger were in fact married (just having celebrated their 30th anniversary) and were the parents of two young children. So my condolences to them as well.

UpUpdate: I give up. The BBC reports their relationship thus: "The pair broke off their engagement, but remained close. Alperin is now an estate agent specialising in celebrities' homes and spent last weekend at Fieger's deathbed."

In October of 1981 I bought my first electric guitar from a friend for the grand sum of $25. I can't quite recall the name of it -- I would later call it "a piece of crap," but I don't think that's what was engraved on the headstock. He also threw in a wah-wah/fuzztone pedal, which occasionally made me sound like I knew what I was doing.

I brought all my musical expertise to this recording; namely, a bunch of unconnected Beatles' riffs. I think I can hear "Day Tripper" briefly in this, and then a rather psychedelic take on "Come Together." And, yes, that's Fleetwood Mac dropping by at the end, not that they were invited. It was either an incompletely-erased tape -- or more likely, a byproduct of using unshielded guitar and recording cables. Especially when my cousin and I got going early on, our setup was not unlike a Giant Throbbing Antenna (which, now that I think about it, would have been A Pretty Good Name For A Rock Band), sucking in every stray signal around, from AM/FM broadcasts to taxi dispatchers to airplane chatter to police and fire communications. We used to joke that there was no way The Man could sneak up and bust us (for playing completely-innocent, completely drug-free music. I swear.) because we'd hear their radio traffic coming from ten miles away.

So I now had a new instrument to throw into the mix, and this was my first try at writing a song with it. It didn't turn out too badly, and I was pleased with the overall sound, though a bit noisy. The song's a metaphor for struggle -- I wasn't really marching around the basement at the time, though that might have explained my clumsy lead guitar work.

Too-low vocals on most of this, which some might consider a plus. I was primarily concerned with the sound of the guitars, which were clipping the red zone of the VU meters throughout. Later on, we re-recorded this with legible vocals and whatever musical skills we could muster. It's not bad, if not the best thing we've done.

I was really quite pleased with the turn of phrase I came up with for the end of the first verse. It goes:

A ratty bag of ideas
Bounces behind his eyes
But then the rats do
Chew the fabric through

It's got yer internal rhyme, it's got yer assonance -- we are in heavyweight lyric-writing form here, folks.

Unfortunately, these fine poetic subtleties didn't survive contact with my mouth, which rendered -- nay, interpreted the passage into something like "Wharrgarbl."

It sounds at some points like I'm trying to fight through a cold, but I suspect that rather it was more the way I was recording vocals while playing guitar. Because I had no proper mike stands I had to jerry-rig substitutes which rarely came to the correct height; I usually had to crouch down over my guitar to sing, not exactly the best way to maintain breath control.

I gave my cousin his first guitar. At least I hope I didn't charge any money for it. When he was fourteen or fifteen or thereabouts his mother asked me if I'd sell her one of my old guitars, to give to my cousin for a birthday present.

As a bonus, I decided to refinish it. after attacking it for a couple of days with everything in my arsenal including a power sander, I was forced to conclude that the original finish was made of material intended for the heat tiles on the space shuttle. I had it about half-sanded off when I gave up. I painted the remainder with ordinary deck stain. My God, this surely would have qualified as a war crime, if anyone cared about cheap guitars, that is. Like I said, I hope she didn't give me any money for it.

Fast forward a couple of years, and my cousin has now found himself an electric guitar. We were living on opposite ends of the city, so didn't see each other that often; but the first time I was over he treated me to a screaming heavy-metal version of the "Hockey Night In Canada" theme. That was impressive enough; but he also seemed to have mastered every guitar lick that AC/DC and Rush had ever recorded, and a few that they probably had rejected as "too difficult."

A few years later, one day I asked my cousin what had become of the guitar. "That old thing? I got into an argument with (his younger brother) Marty and smashed it over his head."

This was recorded, as best as I can place, around the beginning of 1980 (these early tapes are somewhat mixed up chronologically). I know it rekindled my interest in songwriting, because there was suddenly someone in the picture with far more musical chops than me. This song was largely improvised (ya think?) and got its title from the fact that I was, indeed, singing into a silver bowl. (Actually, a large -- about two feet in diameter -- aluminum salad bowl). I figured it'd add some resonance to my vocal (it didn't) and more importantly, it disguised the fact that I was -- so to speak -- singing in public, which kind of weirded me out at the time.

Oh, that strange young fellow at the beginning, shouting lame jokes, incomprehensible ravings and manical laughter? That would be Marty, trying to do my job before I could wrest the mike away. So you can see why he was getting occasionally clonked in the head with guitars. You never ever steal the frontman's spotlight (even if he's hiding behind a salad bowl at the time).

I bought my first drum machine a Panasonic something-or-other. It was pretty basic, with only three instruments -- the snare, bass drum and cymbal and four or six preset rhythms. You could also play it manually by tapping on three tiny buttons. If you would guess that playing the "drums" with such a setup would be difficult, you would be correct. By way of comparison, my present drum machine has some 400 preset sampled drum patterns, and another 400 slots you can add new ones to; 16 full drum kits; room to store up to 99 complete songs; and 7 large switchable force-sensitive keypads. I still wouldn't want to attempt playing real-time drums, though I imagine I could make an unholy -- if erratic -- racket with it.

I kind of liked this song -- so much so, that I restarted it a couple of minutes in, when I decided that my posture -- probably on the couch, flat on my back -- wasn't consonant with best performance standards. The verses aren't anything special, but the chorus had a nice melody.

I was kind of surprised to find the first version of this. It was recorded on May 2 of 1982, about a year before I thought I'd written it. I do regard it as one of my better songs, if for the moment beyond my musical technique.

The problems I was having at the start were due to a microphone that just wouldn't stay put. (Why, you ask, did I not secure it with duct -- or more properly, gaffers' tape? The short answer to that is that I didn't have any duct -- or more properly, gaffers' tape. Sheesh.)

Bonus points for spotting the Pee-wee Herman reference (the "Wo-OH-oh-OH" at approx. 3:40). I have no idea where that came from. I've never seen his TV show or any of his movies. He was a favorite guest of Letterman, et.al. at the time though, so I probably picked it up from there.

Another very early version of a song. Apart from a couple of minor lyric changes, it's pretty much the same as the "finished" version a couple of years later. I don't know where I recorded this, but judging by the sound, it was probably in a phone booth.

I suspect that every songwriter to some extent has one or more of these types of files. I refer to them as sketchbooks, not unlike what an artist keeps to make studies of interesting people, buildings and landscapes. A musician is of course concerned with other things -- guitar riffs; choruses, verses and fragments of same that tend to fade into oblivion unless you capture them quickly. This is especially true for melodies, which are by nature fragile and ephemeral (at least, mine were).

This is part of a chorus that I thought was pretty; though as far as I know, I never did resurrect it later for a song.

From October of 1982, this was about the death of Bill Haley, who had the 1954 hit "Rock Around The Clock." (It is often referred to as the first rock record, though most musicologists credit Ike -- later to find fame as Tina's hubby -- Turner's 1951 recording "Rocket 88" with that trophy. Ironically, Haley, with an earlier band than the Comets, recorded a cover version of it, too.) Haley had died a year and-a-half before, and it was sad to read of his last years. He had a lifelong battle with alcoholism, and his increasingly erratic behavour -- pestering people in restaurants, showing them his driver's licence, etc. -- was largely blamed on that. It later came out that he had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, so doubtless that explained part of it.

So herewith my exploration of the corrosive nature of fame and celebrity. Fortunately my steady character and unshakable principles (and, it should be noted, my completely non-existent musical career) will see to it that my death will be in utter obscurity and will be noted by only a few insignificant bloggers (assuming they have totally run out of other things to talk about), the way God intended it!

Hey, waitaminute . . .

This was a strange piece I wrote, almost from a stalker's perspective. There was something about it that I liked, though, and I extensively reworked it later, keeping this as one of the verses and adding a new chorus. It became one of my better songs (for what that's worth).

I have no idea how Steve Winwood got on this, but he flees after a few moments, no doubt intimidated by my songwriting skills.

A young Korean guitarist. He was 11 or 12 when this, an arrangement of Lalo Schifrin's "Mission: Impossible" theme was filmed. His (mostly English) website is here.

I was improving at guitar, at least the rhythm aspect of it. It also helped that I'd bought a new guitar, a very nice Yamaha steel-string for around $600. With inflation I'd probably be paying over a thousand for it today. I could bash away on it and the harder I played, the better it sounded.

My songwriting was also quite muscular during this period. And by "muscular," I mean "thick-headed." This was a fairly typical example, insipid lyrically. But at least I could now power my way through it with some degree of conviction.

Oh, no, you're thinking. He's going to make us listen to all the takes of this bloody stuff!

Relax, dear reader (and grudging listener). Just the more "successful" tracks. Though keep in mind that I have a rather elastic view of what constitutes "success."

By the time we were done, I suppose I had written 300 songs or so; of which maybe 30 or 10% were actually worth listening to. That 10:1 ratio pops up elsewhere -- both Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen, talking about upcoming albums, estimated that they had each written around one hundred songs to get the 10 or 11 that made the cut. Or as Keith Richards famously described pre-'60s LP's: "1 hit and 10 tracks of shit," though that equally fits some Stones records, especially in the late seventies (I'm looking at you, Goat Head's Soup -- if the punks and new wavers accomplished nothing else, they at least woke up the Glimmer Twins, who started turning out some of their strongest work in a decade).

Probably the difference between professionals and amateurs is that the former are far better at spotting duds and quit wasting time on them. Whereas I would do a half-dozen attempts at songs that weren't going to be very good even if I hit every note on time and in tune. It's rare, even for accomplished writers, to get everything correct on the first take; but if there's no spark, nothing special by your third or fourth try, then the song generally wasn't meant to be.

But I like the process by which songs evolve, so I'll include a few examples. I'm kinda weird that way.

Previously: Just Like A Woman

I'm a totally self-taught guitarist. I've never had a lesson; everything I'd learned was from books and trial and error.

In retrospect, that's a lousy way to try and learn to play rock and roll music. Rock, like folk or country music or the blues, is primarily a social-networking kind of thing, the Facebook of its age.

Nor did I avail myself often of the greatest teaching aid of all -- my record collection. The most famous musicians of the day were there for the asking, but I seldom called on them. The problem that arose when I tried to play along to records was that they all seemed to be playing in unconventional (and difficult, for a novice guitarist) keys, like A♭ or C♯.

So I would rationalize this away by saying that I wasn't interested in learning other peoples' songs anyway -- I was too focused on playing my own. True enough; but shutting out outside influences means you are essentially reinventing the wheel each time.

By now I was jamming on a somewhat regular basis with my cousin, who pointed out that my main problem was that my guitar was rarely in tune. I could never find the pitch pipe that I tuned to, so I'd estimate the low-E string and tune the rest of the strings to match. That worked great when you did, in fact, have the correct note; not so good when you were a half-tone (or worse still, a quarter-tone or other fraction) off.

Once I learned to use a reliable tone -- an electronic keyboard, which never slips out of tune -- whole new worlds opened up. Suddenly I could play along with these people, albeit clumsily, most of the time.

"Teacher, Teacher" was from Rockpile, the '80's band put together by the great Nick "Cruel To Be Kind" (YouTube link) Lowe and Dave Edmunds. I mainly just played chords on this; there's really no solos as such, just arpeggios and inversions of the major chords.

Time to put on my big boy pants and aim for the Top of the Pops. I'd eventually puzzled out the chords to this, but this was my first attempt at playing it through, on acoustic guitar. And all in all, I didn't do too bad. The rhythm guitar and short runs turned out well save for a couple of slips at the end. You might have easily thought that I was part of the band at times. (I'm on the left side, if it isn't obvious.)

Of the other guitar work, we shall not speak, save to note that it is a prime example of Insipid Noodling over Townshend's organ/synth breaks. So, you see, I really could have played (sorta) for The Who (though I might have had to flee for my life during the first rehearsal).

I just had the one verse and the chorus for this but decided to record it anyway. That's not a bad idea if you're stuck on something -- it gets the basic idea down on tape, and repeating the parts that work can lead to different ways to sing or play the song, or might trigger additional lyrics, etc.. Hypothetically, at least. I never did too much more on this one. Still, considering the subject matter, it had a perky little melody.

Warning: Language.

Upon listening to this, the reader will be obsessed with (shut up, I'll tell you what you should be obsessed with) the question: How did you get that groovy guitar sound? A '65 Fender Princeton Reverb? A digital delay fed through a Model 122 Leslie speaker?

Close. Think Stylophone. That was a late '60s--early '70s cheesy "synthesizer" that you played one note at a time by touching a stylus to a metal plate laid out like a piano keyboard. Despite being described as "the world's most annoying musical instrument," it's actually been used in some well-known songs, like David Bowie's "Space Oddity."

In practice, though, the keyboard scratched up easily, and it soon became unplayable (not that you'd really want to hear too much of it anyway). It did, however, have a vibrato switch, and I managed somehow to run my guitar through it -- a quite impressive achievement, considering it had no input jack.

The final verses: "Tiny little jewels, enameled with/corroded by hate," etc. were basically improvised, and it turned into the most melodious part of the song. Funny how that sometimes works (more often it doesn't; but on that we shan't dwell).

I don't recall what particular existential crisis brought this on. Maybe it was something so traumatic that I've blocked all memories of it.

Or maybe I was just making stuff up again. It's kind of in my DNA.

Guitar playing wasn't; but I was paying more attention to the little touches around the chords - the tone, texture, the things that take a mediocre song to the next level: A mediocre song with interesting little touches around the chords.

As I mentioned a few entries ago, my cousin and I were jamming fairly regularly by now. We were doing standard stuff like 12-bar blues, etc., just to see if we had any chemistry. We did, but I wasn't going to win any awards for my musicianship. It became clear that I was going to have to add vocals, and this was my first attempt. I've before mentioned my unease with this; so it was easier at the start to do jokey stuff. It'd be devastating to try something more ambitious only to find that you sound like the AFLAC duck-- it's a lot safer to have some ironic distance as a final defence: "Oh yeah, I know I was seriously out of key there. That's what makes it funny, man. Get a sense of humor, willya?"

And what better to experiment with than our "rock opera," Sylvie, The Water-Sprite? This had a fairly simple libretto: Sylvie (the water-sprite) is out for her morning walk when she is attacked by a fierce leopard! She runs away! A handsome woodsman comes to her rescue! They live happily ever after/are both devoured by the beast! (We weren't certain about the ending yet.)

Okay, it's not exactly The Merry Widow, but at least we dodged the hoary cliche of the lead singer/protagonist as a thinly-veiled pseudo-Christ figure (Tommy, American Idiot, Jesus Christ, Superstar, and just about every other one you can think of).

Also, I'd switched to bass guitar; I'm pretty sure this was done the same day I brought it home. Other instruments: My cousin on "drums" (more on our "drum kit" later); me on recorder (one of those -- plastic, usually -- wind instruments that looks like a half-size clarinet). I couldn't play it, of course; not that that's stopped me before. I discovered that if I waggled my fingers randomly, I could create noises that sounded vaguely Arabic. (Whether that says more about me, or Arabic music, I leave for others to decide.)

As far as the song goes . . . well, we were certainly . . . energetic. (Remember, it's supposed to be funny.) There are also more tempo shifts (some even intended) than on your average Rush album.

Other lessons learned: a) I actually could be good as a vocalist, at least in the timing and tonality (there's no real melody to speak of);

b) I was better at improvising than I expected -- I had written down a couple of verses, but much of the "Run, run, Sylvie" parts were on the spur of the moment;

c) I was not good at the typically histrionic rock vocal thingee;

d) I should probably lose the recorder from my instrumental quiver; and

e) Singing got easier the more I did it. Before long, not even semi-plausible death threats could shut me up.

Having the bass led to a greater sense of structure. I could let it and the rhythm guitar carry the song, dropping in brief splashes (with me, the briefer the better) of lead/tonally distinct guitar.

This song is somewhat schizophrenic (apologies to any whackos out there), maybe because it was pieced together from three others. In fact, it was originally called "Oh, Shut Up!" (that phrase survived, in the chorus). Musically I think it works quite well.

As far as the lyrics go, it was from the school of: "Hey, these two words sort of rhyme! In they go!"

However, I should note among them these couplets:

Imagine you had back/All the time you've wasted
Imagine you had back/Half of what you've tasted

which might not be the profoundest of observations; but in light of recent events, I find them very poignant.

This was a song about sudden death, natural catastrophe, pestilence, nuclear war and drug abuse. I then decided it was too depressing. so I turned it into a pop song. There's more to a pop song than random beeps, bops and boops, y'know. These must be administered in the correct number, and in a precise, scientifically-determined order.

That wasn't my biggest problem, though. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that there is an inflexible rule in the music industry -- and I quote in full RIAA bylaw 203.6 d) subsection iii): "All instances of songs with elements including, but not restricted to the lyrics "beep," "bop," and "boop," as well as ornamentations such as handclaps and tamborines and/or kazoo or vuvuzela playing must have those elements vocalized/performed by no less than three (3) attractive young Negresses [you'll have to forgive the archaic language here, as it was written back in the '60s] with beehive (or at least bouffant) hairdos, of no greater than 23 years of age; 'cause anyone older -- and this is especially true for you, bub -- would look kind of ridiculous in the standard uniform required of backup singers; that being miniskirts or hotpants and neon-colored blouses. Go-go boots are optional."

So, whew! Thank God I found out the rule before releasing this to the world, causing me untold shame in the general public, not to mention Motown. (I'm still open to working with the attractive young Negresses, though.)

The Sex Pistols somewhat predated my interest in playing music; they had crashed and burned by the late '70s. They had little, if any radio play in Canada -- I probably hadn't heard anything off their one and only album until I bought a copy in the early '80s.

I had no use for the fashions or the politics of the punk rock scene, but I found the music interesting. More to the point, it sounded like something we were capable of. And it inspired my move to bass: I figured that if a moron like Sid Vicious could play it, than so could I.

So without further ado, here I am on guitar with Johnny and the crew. Somebody's just a touch off tune, but I'm betting it was the Pistols. Tuning's just so bourgeois, y'know? Besides, volume masks multitudinous sins.

The lyrics to this were still in a state of flux, which occasionally led to the singer (me) and his erstwhile backup singer (also me) singing different lyrics at the same time. I have no evidence to support this, but I strongly suspect that me was doing this to me (or vice versa) deliberately, to sabotage the band. What a jerk -- or alternatively, what a jerk. (For no particular reason, I'm reminded of Rod Stewart firing his late '70s drummer, Carmine Appice. He didn't make it public at the time though; until a reporter asked him one day why he wasn't in the lineup. Stewart answered that Appice had to leave the band due to "illness." "Illness?" the reporter asked. To which Stewart replied: ""Yeah. He made me sick to my stomach." As this was in Rod's disco ("Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" which, ironically, Appice co-wrote) phase, it must have been truly disgusting behavior.)

As to the song, it was one of my better early ones. I was learning to play the bass beyond plonking away on the root of the chord, and it's actually tuneful and coherent. Well, more than usual.

Warning: Large squeals of feedback at the beginning while I switch on tape recorders and plug in cables.

Not bad, musically. Pay no attention to the lyrics -- they're juvenile Marxism at best. Which makes sense, given that I was a juvenile Marxist at the time. I would soon outgrow this phase when I looked up one day and realized I was surrounded by morons. Sadly, not everyone experiences this epiphany, which might explain the NDP caucus.

I tried to be at least even-handed in my denunciation of militarism, pointing out that the Soviets were guilty of it too (the ZiL-27 reference, near the end of the song). Unfortunately, a visit to ZiL's Wikipedia page revealed no limo or armoured car with that model number. Ah well, I tried.

Some of you might recall me posting some of this stuff about three years ago (this second onslaught was prompted by the discovery of many more tapes). At the time I wrote fairly extensively on the songs and quoted the lyrics of each (most were written down, but I had to transcribe some from the tapes). So I figured that I might as well just repost the originals, saving me bit of time in the process. Apologies if I repeat themes or explanations already covered; but, hey, lyrics!

---------------------------------------------------------------------

When my cousin came over to record, we'd usually have a cup of coffee (occasionally stronger refreshments were served) before heading down to the basement. In September 1983 the radio was ablaze with the news that the Soviet Union had shot down a Korean Air Lines jumbo jet that had strayed off course on a flight from Alaska.

So we were listening to some of that, when, inspired, I wrote down the first verse and pushed it across the table to my cousin, who read it and laughed.

That is the acid test of songwriting, innit? Make your cousin laugh -- next stop, The Ed Sullivan Show!

You will no doubt be amazed that the whole of it came together in twenty minutes. You're thinking: No way! That couldn't have taken more than ten, fifteen minutes, tops. Well, yeah, but we had to work out the harmonies.

Speaking of which, I never knew before that moment that my cousin could ad-lib perfectly good "Yahoooos!" The things you learn in the pressure cooker of the recording studio.

It was at times like that, with the world trembling on the brink of war, that the media (this was our theory, anyway) would turn our way and exclaim: "There's a couple of guys with guitars! They must have something intelligent to say about all this!"

As it turned out, we didn't. Like that ever stopped us.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Verse:

Cancel my trip to Korea
The skies are safe no more
First they lost my luggage
Then they lost the war

The valiant Red Air Force
Locked in mortal battle
With a deadly 747
armed with cameras

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Chorus:

Rotten stinking Commie pinkos
Dirty Soviet tricky finkos
Hear this now, you murderous lackeys
Americans on that plane, by Cracky!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Verse:

A thousand heat-seeking missiles
Fired in comradely warning
Trespassers in Soviet airspace
Will not live to see the morning

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Bridge:

Unscheduled stopover in the Sea of Okhotsk
But a Boeing makes for a lousy boat
Water rushing in, cold and green
Boeing's even worse at making submarines!
---------------------------------------------------------------------

[Rpt. 1st verse, chorus]
===================================

Just a short little song that didn't go too far, at least lyrically. More intriguing, at least for me, is the guitar riff I played on it. I think it's a slowed down variant of the "Call To The Post," the bugle tune played at horse races to get the jockeys to the starting gate. I'm not much of a gambler, but I did work for a couple of summers at the local racetrack as a runner (to pick up and drop off cash from the ticket booths/cashiers as required). As to why I featured it in the song . . . your guess is as good as mine.

John Denver's "Annie's Song" kept on running through my mind while contemplating the ridiculous census "controversy." That first line in particular begs to be parodied.

1st verse:

You fill up my senses like a night in the forest
Like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain
Like a storm in the desert, like a sleepy blue ocean
You fill up my senses come fill me again.

Becomes:

You fill out my census it's the right of the poorest
It's the 'crats in their glory, like Barack Hussein
The long form preserve it, like a weepy true Liberal
You fill out my census come fill it again

Don't ask me how Obama and the Democrats got in there; but being a bunch of creepy statists, I'm sure they'd be in favor of it. Ditto with Denver, who doubtless would have been an Obamabot had he lived.

I briefly considered doing the rest of the song but then came to my census (ha!) and had another beer instead.

For those of you who were too young to have heard the song or who were (blessedly) unconscious during the 70's, here's JD live in concert:

The first semi-serious song we tackled. The Lech! in question refers not to a lech(er), but to Lech Walesa, the Solidarity union leader, future President of Poland, and Nobel Peace Prize winner (when it still meant something). I really wasn't taking much of a position on the situation in Poland, other than to note that it was, uh, happening. I was more concerned with how danceable it was. So I put in handclaps.

Which, by the way, are difficult to record with only one microphone, no decent mike stands, and my flabby hands. Not to mention trying to do them while recording the vocals. Today, it'd be a snap to put them in, with a drum machine or any MIDI-compliant keyboard. Alas, such digital trickery was beyond our humble means.

As for the song, as I said, this was our first "semi-serious" attempt at one. Lyrics that weren't too goofy, and a few more radical concepts, like ending the song on approximately the same beat (openings were still sort of hit and miss). I recorded the bass too high, leading to a somewhat-muddied tone. But all in all, this was an important step for us.

Some of the references if you're not familiar with the times: The Pope refers to the newly-elected John Paul II, a key figure. He had made a triumphant return to Poland earlier that year. Wojciech Jaruzelski was a general (and controversial WWII hero) that the Communists installed to try and hold on to power. The ZOMOs were paramilitary riot police.

A mashup of the Jackson 5's "Rockin' Robin" with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Amazingly, this works on some level. In other news, Kurt Cobain just phoned to let me know that he'll be killing himself again.

Via Holy Taco

Not content with wrecking my own songs, I was determined to destroy others'.

The Beat (or as they were named in North America, The English Beat, due to an agreement with an American band that previously had The Beat as its name) was one of the finest ska or 2 Tone bands that sprang up in England in the late '70s. I don't recall them getting a lot of radio play here, apart from a couple of minor hits like "Mirror In The Bathroom" or maybe some of their (very good) covers of stuff like "Tears Of A Clown" or "Can't Get Used To Losing You."

Their third and final album, though, had a song on it I loved enough to the point that I took my guitar out and tried to learn it. So here I am on acoustic guitar and bass:

All in all, not bad; but it's such a pretty little pop song that it'd be difficult to mess it up too much. Not that I didn't try, of course: There's a second vocal on the original, contributed by Ranking Roger (the stage name of Roger Charlery). Trying to duplicate it caused me a few problems. Then there's the bass line that wanders off to la-la land before (miraculously) returning to the proper place. And the volume is too low in a couple of places. But apart from all that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

Two dozen other dirty lovers
Must be a sucker for it
Cry cry but I don't need my mother
Just hold my hand while I come to a decision on it.

Sooner or later your legs give way, you hit the ground
Save it for later don't run away and let me down.
Sooner or later you hit the deck you get found out
Save it for later don't run away and let me down, you let me down.

Black air and seven seas all rotten through
But what can you do?
I don't know how I'm meant to act with all of you lot
Sometimes I don't try
I just now now now now now now now now now now now
Now now now now now now now now now now now

Soomer or later your legs give way, you hit the ground
Save it for later don't run away and let me down.
Sooner or later you hit the deck you get found out
Save it for later don't run away and let me down
You runaway runaway and let me down.

Two dozen other stupid reasons
Why we should suffer for this
Don't bother trying to explain them
Just hold my hand while I come to a decision on it.

Sooner or later your legs give way, you hit the ground
Save it for later don't run away and let me down.
Sooner or later you'll hit the deck you'll get found out
Save it for later don't runaway and let me down, you let me down.
You run away run away runaway runaway runaway runaway
And let me down.

Actually, I had forgotten altogether recording this. It sounded pretty good, but I don't think I've heard the song for twenty years, so I did a search for it, thinking I might have missed an important part of it. Surprisingly, I turned up the original video. I say "surprisingly" because this was in late 1983, pretty well in the infancy of videos, and not every band was putting them out automatically. MTV was about two years old by then; Muchmusic wouldn't arrive for another year.

Singer-guitarist Dave Wakeling kicks things off -- RR is the black dude with the tamborine (not to mention the snappy fedora and white gloves). Fun video for a fun song.

Others have recorded it -- Pete Townshend does a version of it in his concerts, and Harvey Danger (who did the insanely-catchy "Flagpole Sitta") has a video of it too. And I've heard it on TV for about the last month, in a commercial for the upcoming (Sept. 3) release of Going The Distance with Drew Barrymore and Justin Long. Oddly, the song isn't included (yet) on the official soundtrack, but I assume it's one of those last-minute lawyer squabbles.

Dave Wakeling is living in California these days and tours as The English Beat. Seems like a genuinely nice guy, too -- I can't find anything negative written about him anywhere.

A quirky little piece. I was starting to get the knack of recording -- the sound is pretty good. Although I'll win no prizes for my guitar playing, it actually hangs together better than I thought on first listen, with only a few blown notes. Something strange is happening in the beginning, where the guitar sounds out of tune, but later seems to correct itself. I wasn't good enough to tune on the fly, and I don't seem to be bending notes, so I don't know exactly what's happening there.

What's it about? Damned if I know. "Flatfoot" was American criminal/gangster slang, dating back to the '30s (and probably earlier). It originally applied (I think) to beat cops. Pounding the pavement in cheap, government-issue shoes cannot be good for one's arches.

So that seemed like as good a reason as any to repeat the word like an incantation at the start of each verse/chorus, accompanied by the spidery guitar line, increasingly ominous bass, growing sense of dread, and whispers and groans. The rest of the song is just your standard adolescent angst:

Mysterious stuff being put in boxes, said boxes then being put in storage . . . diaries and their "dirty looks" being burnt . . . uh-oh. . . . thinking . . . thinking . . . thinking . . .

I'm trying to remember if I've possibly forgotten something incriminating of value in storage somewhere . . . thinking . . . thinking . . . thinking . . .

OK, there were three times I've had to buy storage space:

#1. Beer was involved.

#2. Actually that one was kind of funny. This guy had an acreage out of town with a bunch of sheds that he was renting out. So somebody had given me a couple of hundred pounds of moose meat that I had no room for. It was 30-below that week, so I figured I could stow it there until I could find a friend with some spare freezer space. Then I kind of forgot about it until late in August.

Needless to say the moose did not age well. You practically needed a gas mask . . . yeah, yeah, we've been over this again and again. I had utterly no idea you were storing your favorite neon-green leisure-suit there. Yes, I know that it was well-and-truly a "Chick Magnet."

I've sent it for dry-cleaning more times than I can count, and they just can't seem to get the stench of Death out of it. Must be the way it reacts with polyester.

#3. Just speaking hypothetically, what do you suppose the Statute of Limitations on something like that would be?

So! Conscience clear! Whew!

We never had this convo. Right?

You thought you were rid of me? No such luck! I was incredibly busy for most of last week and probably will be through the rest of the month and much of the next.

Late in '83 I started writing new songs, given increasing confidence that my vocals were up to the task. "By The Lake" taught me how to build a song from the ground up. It actually became good, if slightly mechanical. This is my first take on it.

I added a second vocal with the hopes that the new guy would be able to somehow tease out the melody; and it would have been a neat trick, considering it really didn't have much of one.

This was one of my better ones from this period. I had written others that were stronger musically and lyrically, but they wouldn't start to show promise until the next round of recording. This, if I recall, wasn't written all at once, but over a few days (which counts as "inspired" in my books). It's pretty well complete in this version.

And no, it isn't about what you think it's about. Get your mind out of the gutter, Doris. A later take will reveal all in the fullness of time.

I think that is supposed to be two words; but if Pete Townshend can get away with "The Kids Are Alright (sic)" then I guess anything goes.

This was my first take on what became one of my best songs, at least melodically. It's just me, my acoustic, and a horrible, consumptive cough.

I would be dead from tuberculosis in mere weeks!

But that unpleasantness aside (I struck a deal, the particulars of which need not concern you) I've returned with instructions to taunt you with more of these tunes . . . from the Beyond.

No, I've never even tried the stuff (though I've heard nothing but good things).

This came out of a jam session with my cousin. Later I wrote and added lyrics. It was probably late at night because I was definitely trying to keep the volume down, judging by the strangled scream at the end. Unfortuately (or fortunately as the case may be) my volume-suppression efforts succeded only too well in the rest of the song, rendering it largely inaudible. Based on what I can make out/remember of the lyrics, you aren't missing much.

Musically, however, we were improving, finally starting to break out of the 12-bar blues box that our jams were typically based on.

My initial take on this received, shall we say, less than rapturous reviews, such as this, from "Frank":

Sometimes when you listen to something that you personally record dozens and dozens of times, it does actually start sounding pretty good to you (from presonal experience), but please take my word for it, when you listen to that again in a couple of days you will agree (sincerly no offence here) ... it's pretty bad.. No wait, it's really bad. Again, sorry to be the one to break it to you.

Now, this would seem to be somewhat negative -- but read between the lines, and see what he is actually saying. Yes, "Get psychiatric help" would be a good guess; but dig a little deeper, and it's plainly a cry for an "Encore!" Say no more!

This was the first crack at it for me and my cousin. Somewhat improved over the original, though that wasn't the greatest of accomplishments. I didn't recognize it at the time, but we were on the cusp. No longer were we a couple of losers in the basement with broken guitars and big dreams -- we would soon become a couple of losers in the basement with broken guitars and big dreams and an occasionally-recognizable song.

No, I have no idea what "Rock Justice" means, unless it was some allusion to the ironic lack of recording contract offers. In any event, the song has the common enough folk/blues theme of the wrongly condemned man. (In fact, it's an updated "Poor Boy," which was one of the first things I recorded.) The music, too, follows traditional folk/blues patterns, except for the occasional perky (if erratically-played) excursions into . . . I dunno, elevator jazz or something.

Anyway, for a song written on the spot mainly for giggles, it had its moments, though they were still few and far-between.

In the early eighties, the computer revolution was in its infancy. Video games, previously only found in arcades and bars, started appearing in home consoles like the Colecovision and Atari game systems. Computers were still on the horizon for most -- an IBM PC without even a hard drive was still a couple of thousand dollars at this point, and the more affordable entry-level stuff (like the Commodore Vic-20 and the Texas Instruments TI49a ---- my first computer) was just starting to roll out.

At any rate, I resolved to be the voice of My Generation with an updated version of "Pinball Wizard." Unfortunately when it was put to a vote, I was strongly encouraged to "fade away AND die," so that didn't work out too well.

It didn't also help that the song kinda sucked. There's no real melody to speak of, and the lyrics were sort of haphazard.

What we did spend a lot of time on, though, was the structure (granted, a lot of that was discussing precisely on what beat we would start the boom chicka-chicka guitar thingie, but still) and the sound of the song. For example, I wanted a metallic tone to the drums, so we fed the machine's output through a guitar pedal. It wasn't exactly Dark Side of the Moon, but we were experimenting to see what we could do. (And reflecting the improvements in electronics and miniaturization, the elaborate sounds that Pink Floyd, et.al. accomplished using dedicated tape recorders and the techs to run them were now available to anyone who could hand over $30 to the clerk at the local music store.)

Why I picked this particular song to cover is pretty much a mystery. It was never (as far as I know) a hit in Canada, although I'm thinking I must have heard it somewhere because I had nothing but the sheet music to go by and that wasn't always accurate. My first songbook in fact was from the Beatles' publishing company Northern Songs and was distributed by their company, Apple Corps. It was also wildly off the mark. Whoever transcribed the music must have done so from a turntable or tape recorder running at the wrong speed with the consequence that all the songs were in weird keys like A-flat or C-sharp. Now I understand that the boys probably had better things to do than supervise every facet of their existence; but you'd think that someone would have thought to shout out "Hey, did you guys really write 'She Loves You' in G-flat?" at a concert.

So I didn't really know the song. I knew it was one of their early ones, but from when? (I'm kind of hazy on their music pre Sgt. Pepper. I thought it was by John Lennon (despite their shared writing credit, Lennon and McCartney [as well as Harrison] rarely collaborated on each others' songs. The rule of thumb is that usually the song's writer took the lead vocal.) I only found out later (tks, Internet!) that it was written by Paul very early in their career and was part of the soundtrack to A Hard Day's Night, of which I have only a dim memory of, mainly The Lads fleeing mobs of shrieking girls (to be sure, that was more or less the entire plot). Here they are performing it in 1964 at the Indiana State Fair (!).

I think we did OK. The vocal was mainly accurate, if cracking a bit on the second chorus. Their take on it was more of a pure pop song, where ours was a bit blusier -- thanks mainly to my cousin, who'd never heard it before and spent the first part trying minor pentatonic riffs before settling into a groove.

For no reason whatsoever I post this classic as performed at Knoebels Grove by Rick K. and the Allnighters.

I think it's just a wee bit unfair that we couldn't find even one crazy drummer when these guys apparently had two. Ever hear of sharing the wealth, guys?

As you might guess from the sobriquet I gave to my cousin's girlfriend, I subtly resented her influence on the band. But being the true professional, I was able to put all that aside for the sake of the song. I found that not having any sort of emotional connection to the lyrics allowed me to concentrate more on the mechanics of the vocal. Here's what I wrote about it when I initially posted this:

One day my cousin showed up with these lyrics about DamnYoko™ and wanted some help putting them to music. So I said sure, went off somewhere and returned a few days later with the body of the song. (I believe we both worked on the bridge.)

Although my cousin was much more proficient than me in almost any aspect of music, he was just starting to write his own songs. I'd been doing it from the start. I suppose it is somewhat a matter of focus; a songwriter sees the song as the target and the music as part of the puzzle getting there; a good musician is more interested in the journey, and the nuts and bolts of the jalopy we're riding in. If I may mangle a metaphor or two.

My cousin wasn't exactly Noel Coward when it came to writing lyrics, but no nevermind. Obviously a good song with good lyrics is preferable to a good song with bad lyrics (or -- and I know, having written many examples of the genre -- a bad song with bad lyrics), but I've never considered lyrics as a pivotal element of the song; rather as a framework to hang the vocals (which I do consider essential) on.

This was the first time my cousin added backing vocals. Also a few ad-libs aimed at cracking me up.

Note: I usually keep the volume of my computer speakers low, and listen to these (or anything else) with headphones. If you can, I'd recommend doing the same for this song, at least. There's a truism that you should listen to music at around the same level that it was recorded at. As this would be inconvenient for most rock music (not to mention for your neighbors), producers use compression and equalization to make the record sound smoother at lower volumes. In part because we still hadn't figured out how to record acoustic guitars, they sound jumbled and undifferentiated unless you crank up the sound somewhat. If the boss starts bitchin', you can point out this highly scientific explanation.

========================

[Verse]

Together you and me
Can reach the sky and see
The things we believe
But torment and frustration
Can break the concentration
Then we grieve
-------------------------------------------------

[Chorus ]

But it's you and me
Me and you
Just us two
Together
J.B.

[rpt.]
-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

The colors on the wall
Seem to give us the call
The forces are there
The final judgement can wait
'Til we secure our fate
The loving we share

------------------------------------------------------

[Bridge]

Forgetting the bad times we had
To make room for more of the good
Will keep us together
Forever

Will keep us together
Forever

-------------------------------------------------

[rpt. 1st verse, chorus]

========================

For reasons detailed below, I really wanted this to be a good take, to the extent that we actually rehearsed it two or three times before recording. And that certainly paid off, in that we didn't flub a note, nor misplace a verse/chorus. All that planning can have its downside of course -- I find the song somewhat sterile and unspontaneous. But it was becoming clear that we could play with some degree of precision.

This, unlike any of the other songs, has been heard by Famous Ears. Whose Famous Ears, you ask? Well, how about David Freaking Foster's Famous Ears, that's who. He was the main judge in a song contest sponsored by the local Recording Association. At least I think he heard it, though I'm betting not much more than thirty seconds worth until his oh-so-refined immune system kicked in and he collapsed into a writhing heap on the floor.

Mind you, I don't exactly regard David Freaking Foster (I have no idea if his middle name is really "Freaking." But it should be.) as the ultimate authority on rock music. He had most recently been famous for (co?) writing and producing the Canadian entry in the African-famine trilogy ("Do They Know It's Christmas"/"We Are The World"), a song so stirring and unforgettable that I've, ah, forgotten what it was called.

Apart from that, he produced and wrote for notable rockers like Barbra Streisand, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (an extensive discography here). I remember reading a magazine story about him in which he was reminiscing about, among other things, his days as a working musician, including playing keyboards in Chuck Berry's backup band. He went on and on about how sloppy and unprofessional his bandmates were, including Berry, whose guitar was constantly slipping out of tune. This was especially painful for Foster, who, as the writer pointed out (several times), was blessed with "perfect pitch." It also, as far as I was concerned, was part of the reason why he didn't really "get" rock music.

[I thought it was Chuck Berry; however his Wikipedia entry doesn't list him, so I might be thinking of someone else.]

The only person I've ever known with perfect pitch -- or close enough to it -- is my cousin. Oddly enough, it didn't really help us out very much (except when tuning the guitars, heh).

Sloppy. Unprofessional. Out of tune. Could be a perfect description of half of the Rolling Stones any given night. More to the point, rock has a sort of laissez-faire attitude to imperfection: Whatever works, works. It's not exactly like improvisation in jazz, though there are some of those elements in it.

The Beatles were fond of telling the story of when they were working on a particular song (I've never found out which one) when Ringo wandered into the studio stoned out of his mind on one thing or another and tripped over a cymbal. Lesser musicians would have shrieked and started recording anew, but they were of sturdier stuff. As one of them observed, "Hey, he was on the beat, so we decided to leave it in."

Another view on the human element in recording. This is a site that obsessively lists every bad tape edit and drum-pedal squeak in Beatles' songs. You'll be amazed at how many there are.

What's it about? Nothing, actually. The title is the only real thing about it -- I was living next to one of those big artificial lakes that are built in new communities to:

a) increase property values;

b) divert water from overloaded storm drains; and

c) collect every abandoned shopping cart in the vicinity

The rest is overwrought poetic dreck.

We changed hats on this recording, with me playing most of the guitars and my cousin switching to bass. I have mixed feelings about it. I liked the Townshendesque chords I was throwing around; but I never could find a way to integrate the chorus and verses. I needed a song for the contest, though, and this was the best I had.

=========================

Verse:

This solemn vow I do undertake
Forged in sorrow and it cannot break
A purpose, a will
Too much to shake

Chorus:

I found my love
By the lake
By the lake

There was a stinging wind coaxing dirty foam afloat
And on the beach the bleached shell of a boat
A gull overhead
This song in his throat

By the lake

A desert of water crushed by clouds
An ocean of tears cried aloud
Fossils in amber sunk beneath
No swimming allowed

By the lake
==============================

Previous: By The Lake (2)

This was my cousin's first (well, the first I heard) song, for the contest as well. Still waiting to hear from Foster -- he probably just misplaced our numbers. Yeah, that must be it.

I didn't really like the song at first. The tempo changes and distorted vocal in the chorus reminded me somewhat of Jethro Tull's "Aqualung," of which I was never a fan. And I thought the opening lyrics were somewhat weak.

But my cousin aced his guitar parts, and the bass was rock-solid. All in all, I now think it's a better song than my much-laboured over "By The Lake."

A simple little tune, as befits the simpletons scrambling to plug in a vital cable at the beginning. It actually turned out well, with my cousin's swirling guitar and some nice touches on the "cymbals."

My cousin wrote the lyrics to this and as far as I can remember, we collaborated on the music. It was kind of new territory for us both -- we didn't know anything about jazz, but when I pointed out the advantages to my cousin, such as being able to play chords such as these:

he was sold on the idea. You'll notice that they set our left hands basically free to indulge in other traditional jazz activities, such as heroin addiction and wearing berets (hey, all the hep cats had 'em). Best of all it insulated us from criticism from our friends, who knew about as much about jazz as we did. No matter how ineptly we played something, no objections could be raised -- we would just slowly shake our heads and say, "Man, you just aren't hip to Coltrane, are you? sotto voce: Let's blow this Squaresville berg and go to New York where they dig The 'Trane, and we can work on the heroin thing, and, uh, some of those snappy berets too."

Musically it's not bad considering we had no idea what we were doing. Lyrically though . . . if you've ever wondered whether singers are paying attention to what they're singing, wonder no more. It only took me thirty years to spot the howler my cousin had written:

When you're in my arms / I know that I must resist

That's a genuine "Flick your Bic" moment if I've ever heard one.

I roughly divide our recording "career" into three parts.

The first, as I've mentioned before, was mainly jam sessions. We started adding vocals near the end of this period, but mostly on jokey material like our "rock opera" and the previously-featured "Warning Shots".

Singing that kind of stuff is a lot easier on the psyche. If you blow a note -- an entire verse, for that matter -- you can claim you intended it that way all along. But it was time to get serious.

Then we focused on my big backcatalog of songs, the quality of which was uneven, to say the least. Sometimes the music was lame, the melody non-existent or the lyrics laughable. Sometimes it would all come together in a perfect trifecta of awfulness. So we futzed around with those for some months, making improvements here and there, but I eventually realized that I was going to have to write some new stuff. Enter the final -- and, I would argue, the most creative -- part of our existence.

This was one of the first of the new songs. I found it easier to start with a blank slate than go back to try and fix songs that I was heartily sick of by then. We were also finding out that we could play with some snap and precision. It would have been nice to have a real drummer to punch some of this home; but hey, you gotta work with what you got.

To that end, we deployed what I coyly describe as "additional percussion." Which was:

A marraca. Usually one refers to "marracas," as they come in pairs. But we only had one, and it wasn't even the real thing, or terribly easy to shake more often than on the quarter-beat (especially while singing). I had some sort of gourd with a removable top that I'd brought back from Africa. I put a handful of dried beans in it and that worked okay. Except that the shaking eventually reduced the bean skins to a fine dust; and the top wasn't airtight. You might think it would be difficult to maintain one's rock and roll cool with regular gouts of white powder settling on every thing in sight. You would be correct. At least not that type of white powder;

a tambourine, with a drumhead and with the jingles (they're technically called "zils") snipped out. This became our snare drum, though it was mainly composed of duct tape by the time we were through with it;

the metal faceplate from a stolen "Exit" sign, which became a "crash" cymbal;

a real cowbell, which was kind of neat; and

um, some cardboard boxes, which weren't.

So, taken individually, not too impressive; when you put them all together, though, it provided an agreeable clatter in the backgtound. Playing with the drum machine alone always seems a bit sterile, like a metronome.

We got off to an uneven start, but soon settled into a groove that we could have played with on and on and on until the last patron staggered out of the bar and the management cut the power and helped us move our gear out: Hey! Do you mind? That doesn't go in the recycling bin -- that's our drum kit, man!

-------------------------------------------------

Verse:

A lazy flare of gas
Sickly yellow and intense
Flicked within the waxworks
Licked the long lonely faces
then retreated in the shadows

Hissing and guttering
A sculptor twice neglected
A suitor thrice rejected
Yet someday to caress...
-------------------------------------------------

Chorus:

There's a fire in the waxworks
Someone torched the paraffin
Smoke boiling from the workshops
Melting history's waxen grin

... somebody should really notify the fire department . . .
-------------------------------------------------
Chorus 2:

There's a fire in the waxworks
Police have named it arson
The destruction of the building
Cremation of the contents
-------------------------------------------------

Like many of our songs, this was a work in progress. I fed the chorus through some effects pedals to make it sound metallic and ominous (but it mainly sounds stupid), and also to distinguish it from the verses, which were musically similar, if not identical. Later, as we played through it a few more times, a new hook started to emerge in the middle of the first verses, a sort of funk improvisation on the phrase "retreated in the shadows." Alas, we never did get a good version of it down on tape.

What's it about? you ask. Never having seen a real waxworks, let alone one on fire, I think I was probably influenced by the 1953 Vincent Price movie, House of Wax, which indeed starts off with a fire in a waxworks.

Of course, I meant it as a metaphor, but I'll be damned if I can remember for what. Possibly global warming. Yeah, that was it. Al Gore, call your office. I want some of that Nobel swag.

I'm going to be quite busy over the next few weeks, so I'll bid you all a Merry Christmas. May Santa`s reindeer die from exhaustion delivering your booty (in the older, nautical sense of the word). How's that for a nice Christmassy image?

Assuming I live through it all, I should be back early in the New Year.

One of the benefits of writing new songs, I found, was that they tended to be more complete. Previously I would concentrate on the lyrics of the first verses and chorus -- anything beyond that was usually just filler to pad out the length.

Part of it is that I had what I would term a "romantic" idea of songwriting, where the song would appear, fully formed, from the ether. It's nice when that happens -- maybe once or twice a year -- but you shouldn't count on it on your journey to the Top Of The Pops. Like any other writing, it takes persistence and the willingness to rip up what isn't working and rewrite it until you get it right. Or at least until you can sing it without apologizing in advance.

===========================

Verse:

So you've risen to the top of the ladder
And you are the master of all you survey
But there's an itching
Like a fire in the kitchen
It's your dirty little secret
Your dirty little secret

Sure you've struggled to nail up your name
Now at the summit you collect paper scraps
But there's a swelling
Little whispers telling
Your dirty little secret
-------------------------------------------------
Chorus:

In the dark of night
You rub your dirty little secret
When no one's looking
You bite down
And the pain is sweet
In the light of day
You disguise your dirty little secret
When no one's looking
You bite down
And the pain is sweet
-------------------------------------------------
Verse:

You've got money enough to burn
You can buy all your friends wholesale
But all that cash
Won't cover the rash
Of your dirty little secret

[Rpt. second verse, chorus]
=============================

Believe it or not (my cousin certainly didn't), this wasn't about sex, at least not more than peripherally. I stole the title from an essay by D.H. Lawrence, who was talking about sex; more specifically, masturbation, the wanker. I can't find a link [and still can't -- this one now appears to be dead] for it, but here Martin Amis makes mention of it (near the bottom of the page). [Update: Here are some excerpts from it, at Google Books.]

I was thinking more of a scene in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is haunted by a childhood memory of being in a bomb shelter with his mother and younger sister in one of Oceania's endless wars. He steals some chocolate from the crying child and he

carried this pathetic image around for the rest of his life.

So, if anything, the song is a metaphor for the shabby ways we treat others.

Speaking of shabby, our playing was a bit less than optimum, with blown notes here and there, and occasionally the whole project drifted off course.

Most of it works, though.

Note how my cousin attempts to sabotage my performance with four (I counted them) handclaps that I can only characterize as "insolent and sarcastic."

Well, I guess you had to be there. But I soldiered on manfully. Manfully, I tell you.

Previous: Dirty Little Secret

Toronto Sun:

In one of the most head-slappingly moronic moves in history, the national embarrassment that is the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that Dire Straits' 1985 song Money for Nothing can no longer be played in its original form in Canada -- because one person in Newfoundland was offended over its use of a word that starts with F, rhymes with maggot and refers to gay men.

Never mind that the song is more than 25 years old and has been played countless times. Never mind that the supposedly offensive word is as old as the hills, and used regularly on TV, in books and movies, and by pretty much every kid on the planet.

And never mind that even the most cursory examination of the lyrics -- a jab at the vapidity of music videos, as seen through the eyes of a joe-sixpack character -- makes it obvious to anyone without a head injury that Mark Knopfler is using the term in question humourously and ironically.

I heard Charles Adler`s interview this afternoon with the idiot running the CBSC, Ron Cohen. Weep that we are ruled by men such as these. (Kathy Shaidle should be along shortly to confirm that Cohen is, in fact, far too stupid to be an actual Jew.)

I think what we have here is a failure to appreciate the unique culture of Newfoundland. I`ve taken the liberty of writing a lyric that our complainant might find more congenial. Take the title of this post and add these lines to it:

I's the b'y who'll blow ya
I's the b'y with the great big cock
My friends all call me "Liza"

Trouble is I can`t make it scan without sounding like Bob Dylan on Quaaludes . . . waitaminute! "Newfie" works quite well. Witness:

That little Newfie with the earring and the makeup
Yeah buddy, that's his own hair
That little Newfie's got his own jet airplane
That little Newfie he's a millionaire

Just claim it's about Danny Williams if anyone raises a fuss.

You can have this one for free; but work with me, work with me here, Mark. Together we'll have your back-catalog cleaned up to Canadian standards in no time flat.

Like "Down To The Waterline." (I think I can work the "I's the b'y" stuff into that somewhere.)

And let's face it, it's only a matter of time until Allah and the Islamists (which, now that I think about it, would be a Pretty Good Name For A Rock Band, if you're interested in getting together) discover "Sultans Of Swing" to their usual utterly predictable outrage.

To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, if you like laws and sausages and rock music, you should never watch them being made.

This was an older song that we'd never recorded, maybe because it had one glaring flaw. That would have been the last line of the chorus (the one I've marked with an asterisk). The original lyrics have long since vanished, but I recall announcing that I refused to sing it -- at least that particular line -- from that moment forever on. It was that bad. Not obscene-bad -- just something that was intended to be clever and wasn't, a pimple on the nose of the prom queen. Nor would it scan, no matter how I twisted the syllables.

So eventually I crossed it out and scribbled in something to remind me to replace it. We ran through the song one more time, and guess what? The scribbled-in line fit perfectly, so we kept it. Laws and sausages and rock music.

And now you know . . . the rest of the story.

========================

[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
I was just too erratic
And it stood out
I said it stood out
--------------------------------------------------

[Chorus]

Caught by computer
Snagged and tagged
Sorted and recorded
Coded Gulag

Captured by a keyboard
Magnetic pulse mindless
This next line I gotta change *
-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
But you spat me out
It was innocent defiance
You figured it out

-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]
-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
You selected my file
Put it to the side
For a little while

-------------------------------------------------

[Verse]

[Chorus]

========================

I found an earlier copy of the song with the offending lyric. Considering the overall prescience of the song and its take on what was then the computer revolution, I was curious about what I had written, having no memory of it beyond the fact that it was awful. Did I counsel my putative listeners to sell everything they had and invest in an obscure company named Micro-soft (as it was punctuated back then)? Predict the iPad and the move to tablet computing?

Not exactly.

It was a piece of quasi-poetic dreck that had pretensions of profundity but little, if anything, to do with the song at hand. Come to think of it, it had little to do with any song ever written or contemplated. As my cousin said after hearing it, and I quote:

"Huh?"

One of my cousin's songs. We played keyboards about the same -- poorly -- but the way the recording process usually shook out, the duty largely fell to me. I had a secret advantage, though.

In my misbegotten youth, I wasted a couple of years learning the accordion, so the right hand fingering was natural to me (the left hand, not so much). It might also explain the occasional "Lady of Spain" and "Beer-Barrel Polka" riffs that crept into my efforts.

My demo of what would become one of our better -- musically, at least -- songs. I wasn't concerned about adding lead guitar, as I knew that my cousin could easily come up with better ideas than anything I could suggest or play. This freed me up to concentrate on the vocals and bass. Too bad I didn't spend some of that time on the lyrics, which were stupid and somewhat obscure.

More on them on a later take.

Another one with me alone. This was at a time when conflicting schedules/commitments meant that we couldn't get together for weeks, even months at a time. I'd keep in touch by sending tapes of what I was working on. That way my cousin would be familiar with the new material, and could start to work on his guitar contributions for the next time we sat down to record.

This one wasn't bad. I even added a coherent guitar solo, much to the surprise of all.

Previous: Walkaway

One of my rare forays into funk (or something very like it -- an abundance of minor-seventh barre chords, so I guess that qualifies.) As a skinny white boy, it was technically illegal to play this (cultural appropriation or somesuch), but the rebel in me, uh, rebelled.

The beginning is a bit trebly and I kind of blanked on the first two choruses (a mistake that Mister James Brown would never make), but once I settle into a groove, it almost sounds like I know what I'm doing.

Our "rock opera," Sylvie The Water-Sprite started as a jokey excuse to get me over the hump of singing in public (well, semi-public). As it turned out, though, we started to write some good songs for it.

"I Am The Leopard" introduces the antagonist of our little morality play. I don't remember recording it, but I'm pretty sure it started out from a jam session, with me writing the lyrics and overdubbing the vocal at a later date. I can say that because I can only hear the guitar and bass on the initial track.

I always recorded the vocals separately. We didn't have proper mike stands, for one thing; and the mikes we were using weren't exactly top-of-the-line, so it was easier to deal with their idiosyncracies in hand-held mode. Also, I hadn't learned to sing while playing bass. It's a bit different than guitar.

But there's no trace of my cousin on the second track, which would have been unusual: He was much too good a musician to sit there without making some contribution -- most likely some additional guitar, or maybe keyboards, percussion or even backing vocals.

Warning: Squeal of feedback at the beginning while I plug or unplug a cable.

I never considered myself much of a musician (stop that unseemly cheering in the back, thank you). A songwriter -- even occasionally a good one -- yes. But I wasn't sure about my musical chops. Apart from our jam sessions, I'd never attempted to write an instrumental. So this was a first for us, for the aforementioned "rock opera." The bass was a bit thin in spots, and there were a few other problems; but overall it holds up pretty well. (If you're a aficionado of 9 minute garage rock indulgence, that is.)

This one was the first that gave me some faint hope that we might be able to make a go of it. The song was good, with coherent lyrics. We played it well (you'll have to excuse the minute of badinage preceding it -- it was still an analog world, and we had to wait for tapes to play/rewind etc.). I mixed up some of the verses and forgot the first couple of lines in the second chorus; but overall we were happy with it.

I didn't like the title of it -- accurate, but kind of generic. Doesn't really capture the romance and glamour of the business.

Speaking of which, if a certain scrappy bantam rooster of the Leninist persuasion were to seek my advice, I would heartily recommend the telephonic method of seeking . . . release. Not only does it tend to be more discreet, it seriously reduces the "ick factor." At least it does from the girl's perspective.

So everybody, remember to vote tomorrow. And should some Asian-abusin' sleazeball Marxist pervo miraculously become PM, then I'll bid you all adieu, as I plan to kill myself and/or move to Antarctica. I suspect that Internet access in either case will be problematic.

Previous: Telephone Sex

This was one of my cousin's. He wasn't the best at writing lyrics (and I should know, being responsible for some real stinkers of my own) but musically he was quite clever, ending this with a lovely minor-chord coda that really wrapped up things nicely.

Having said that, I still have no idea who "the congressman and his mistress" were, or what the hell they were doing in our song. We were Canadian, dammit, and this was entirely the wrong way to go about getting some of that scrumptious government cheese.

I had written a song about a year previous titled "She Ain't No Human." There was one teensy problem with it, in that I came across as some obsessed weirdo.

Though that much is true, I didn't see much upside in proclaiming it to the world. So I set about writing a new chorus for it, and tentatively renamed the title. I was quite pleased with the rewrite, especially the line "Were she a rebel, she'd cause an uprising," which not only contained a wickedly crafted double-entendre but also the correct use of the future subjunctive mood.

So I wasn't just the creepy guy in the stockroom. I was the creepy guy with impeccable grammar in the stockroom.

This was the second iteration of You, a collaboration. Notable for my cheesy "harpsichord" playing and my cousin's truly unfortunate lyric; yet, there was a third claim to infamy, albeit one I didn't spot for a few decades.

I started giving our different takes of the same song Roman numerals "title II, title III, etc.," but that soon became confusing, especially heading into double figures (by then, it was also a sure sign that the song stunk, if we still couldn't get a handle on it). So I switched to more conventional numbers.

Neither of us spotted the obvious, but we should have -- this was in early 1984, and U2 had just a few months earlier released their first really big album, War ("Sunday Bloody Sunday," "Pride (In The Name Of Love)." Little did I suspect it then, but my musical career would last nearly as long as that of Bono and the lads. Not nearly as lucrative, mind you -- but here we are in 2011, listening (well, some of you are, I hope) to the timeless tunes of the times.

So I had this song with one terrible lyric. Being too lazy to sit down and fix it, I tried the familiar tactic of appending on fragments from other (also kinda iffy in the lyrics department) songs. Trouble with that -- like adding negative numbers together, it's hard to get to the positive side of the scale.

However, musically speaking, it wasn't bad. This demo featured my rarely-showcased (because they're mostly non-existent -- I found that it helps to have a drum machine thumping along in the background) drumming skills. I also contributed a guitar solo that contains no more than 17.5% flubbed notes. And I improvised some tasty "Woo-woos!" over the outro (a fancy word used to describe the closing chords).

Previous: Come A Day

The main lyrics were still a mess, but we had a better idea for what we wanted the guitars to do. And the chorus was pretty well locked in.

Now, I just have to figure out exactly what I meant by the title. Thirty years on, and I still have no idea.

Previous: Rock Justice

What this desperately needed was another verse, or at least a bridge of some sort. I couldn't puzzle out what the heck it should be though; so I contented myself with adding short bass runs to the end of the twelve-bar segments. The song after all, was written to fit the main bass riff, so I figured a few additions to it would surely stir the creative juices.

Nope. (Though I do like the additional phrasing.)

Previous: Fire In The Waxworks

This was our first attempt at playing this together. It had metamorphed (or possibly metastasized) from quasi-funk instrumental breaks into quasi-classical instrumental breaks with one of the guitars (probably mine) just a wee bit out of tune (I can hear my cousin desperately bending strings to try to match my pitch).

It nevertheless was perhaps the finest example of a quasi-classical instrumental break with one of the guitars just a wee bit out of tune recorded in Canada that year.

Modesty restrains me from claiming it as the finest example of a quasi-classical instrumental break with one of the guitars (probably mine) just a wee bit out of tune of all time; all the same, I can't think of another example of a fine quasi-classical instrumental break with one of the guitars (probably mine) just a wee bit out of tune. Can you?

Bonus! I remembered all the words this time!

Previous I Loved Only You

A song about cults and the psychology driving people into them, inspired by the1978 Jonestown Massacre. At the time I -- we generally -- had no idea about cults, save for a vague awareness about groups like the Hare Krishnas and the Moonies, who were looked upon as weird, but largely harmless.

Jim Jones certainly changed that. I'm not sure exactly what kind of a "Reverend" he was, but he must have had a degree from the Al Sharpton School of Theology. Of more interest to me were his extensive ties to the Democrat Party:

Unlike other figures considered as cult leaders, Jones enjoyed public support and contact with some of the highest level politicians in the United States. For example, Jones met with Vice Presidential Candidate Walter Mondale and Rosalynn Carter several times.[11] Governor Jerry Brown, Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, and Assemblyman Willie Brown, among others, attended a large testimonial dinner in honor of Jones in September 1976.[12]

Ah, yes, Democrats, in thrall as always to "human rights" fraudsters and "community organizers. "

Speaking of which, I certainly hope that Obama's got a more benign exit strategy than Jones.

Not having a girlfriend of any description -- let alone rich -- at the time, I was forced to use my powerful narrative skills to conjure one out of whole cloth, as it were. And I threw in a drug habit at no extra charge.

The song was a bit "boomy" in the opening, until I turned the volume down. I'm not sure what I was babbling on about in the chorus, though that was nothing new.

What? Too soon? I don't even get credit for my courageous self-imposed embargo on hand-job jokes? Hmph.

It's actually a Joe Jackson cover of a 1947 R&B hit by Louis Jordan. Lyrics here.

Via Everlasting Blort (who's probably never heard of Layton).

Not an obscure comment on somebody's culinary talents (or lack of same) -- these were just some nonsense verses that I had kicking around until one day we decided to turn them into a song. Not too bad, if you can overlook the fact that the lyrics are somewhat . . . silly.

My cousin said after hearing this, "Aren't you exaggerating this a bit?" I laughed and said, "Probably, but it's only rock and roll."

What "it" was was a local political matter that in retropect has faded into the obscurity that it deserves. At the time though, I was convinced that the media only served up the gospel truth; and they were unanimous in their opinions: that this represented nothing less than the bony hand of Uncle Adolf hisself reaching from the grave to defile the innocent, pure flower that was Canada. (Hey, the new Nazis wouldn't show up for a few decades.) They wouldn't lie about something like that, would they?

Warning: Language.

Just an average song, but we were by this time paying more attention to internal rhythms and accents -- the little things that take an average song and turn it into an average song with more attention paid to internal rhythms and accents.

Or something like that.

Previous: Con Game

I don't remember exactly why - one or maybe both of us were out of town for awhile -- but we were on hiatus for a few months. I spent the time writing some (pretty good, I think) new songs and reworking some older ones. This is one of the latter, one of the more melodic (albeit still sloppy) things we did.

Previous: Walkaway (3)

Nobody would have mistaken me for an actual musician; but I was becoming a competent rhythm guitarist, at least. This came from a couple of riffs I'd been fooling around with -- I recorded it with two guitars (no bass that I can hear) in the somewhat unusual key of F-sharp. Unusual, that is, for rock (or country/folk) guitarists, who like the big, open-string keys like A, D, E, or G for the sustaining quality of the notes. Also, they're easier keys to play in while indulging in typical rock-star activities, such as: a) jumping around randomly; b) ingesting random drugs; and, most importantly c) playing with your guitar slung below your hips (it's a bit of a mystery how anyone can play anything, let alone complex chords with the guitar held that awkwardly).

At any rate, we never did anything with this, but I like the way it sounds.

Question: You have a song, 3/4ths of which is kinda good; but 1/4 of the lyrics are poisonously bad. Do you: a) Stop all other work until you can hammer the offending couplets into shape; or, b) Add new lyrics, thus diluting the wretchedly bad content from 25% to only 15-or-so-%. If you have to guess which option I chose, you haven't been paying enough attention to my "career."

You can hear me laugh near the end of the first verse about how awful the line in question is. Oh, well. The music works, at least.

Previous: Come A Day (2)

We get off to a false start on this, recording over an aborted backing track. There was some dispute, too, about who was on the bloody "rock in the middle of the sea." I think I screwed up the whole Jason and the Argonauts thing.

But the sound was closer to what we were looking for. I was feeding the guitars through some cheap echo/reverb box that I bought for $20 from Radio Shack. (There's also a low, steady whistle throughout that we didn't catch until the playback; likely caused by a failing battery in one of my other guitar pedals.)

Previous: Just Like A Woman (2)

We finally got around (I had several hundred numbered chips, each corresponding to a song, that we picked from a hat most days to figure out what to record. We probably would have been better off concentrating on the handful of songs that were nearly in finished form, but it was more fun to try to breathe life into something old.) to recording an update to this. (Some background at the link.) We fattened it up somewhat, with my cousin providing additional percussion. (He got the "drummer" gene -- my contributions usually were some half-hearted handclaps on the backbeat, or some approximation thereof.)

Mark Steyn, in his numerous writings on popular music, regularly comments (or at least the songwriters he interviews do) on how much more difficult it is to write a good lyric than a good piece of music. To be sure, he's more often focused on the genres of Broadway musicals and the Tin Pan Alley classics, where the audience expected verbal sophistication and flair from the likes of Oscar Hammerstein and Sammy Cahn.

Rock is a bit more tolerant of inane lyrics -- not just the nonsense, of, say, "Louie, Louie" or "Tutti-Frutti," but stuff that was meant to be taken more seriously: like America's "Horse With No Name" or Steve Miller's "Take The Money and Run."

Sample:

Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas/You know he knows just exactly what the facts is
He ain't gonna let those two escape justice/He makes his livin' off of the people's taxes)

With me, it was all-too-often plain laziness. I thought it more important to get the basic melody down, while waiting (usually in vain) for the lyrics fairy to show up. Thus all the doubled-up and repeated verses, etc. The damn words I could fix tomorrow.

But to quote the Beatles (in a somewhat different context), "Tomorrow Never Knows."

This is my 2nd demo for the (rather pretty) "Who Do You Know?" (I don't think that we ever did a version together).

Previous: Who Do You Know?

I didn't have a proper footswitch for the drum machine, so turning it on or off mid-song could be a tricky proposition. (Changing beats was even trickier.) You would sort of stab at it with your foot or hand if available and hope for the best. Matching the downbeat to one's internal metronome could prove . . . interesting.

It's easier in some ways to play with a real live drummer, who often will provide visual cues (hand signals, the spinning drumstick) to the start and tempo. Or he could keel over as a result of a drug overdose, which would indicate that the song is probably not going to start in the near future. Either way, it puts an end to the guesswork.

Previous: Truth

One of my last (thank God) songs about politics, at least from a leftist perspective (yes, I was once young and stupid -- not as stupid as, say, an Occupy demonstrator -- but pretty dumb all the same). I was starting to realize that I wasn't likely to be the next Clash, but there was some concern that I was turning into the new Pete Seeger, that cuddly old Commie Stalinist. Fortunately I could never quite master his patented clawhammer(and sickle) banjo stylin'.

Previous: Money, Guns, and Blood

A rewrite (the original doesn't seem to be available). I came up with entirely new lyrics, though I probably should have quit before the bridge. I can't make out what I was singing, apart from the words "telephone" and "heartless," but it definitely had too many syllables.

The opening guitar lines are a bit noisy, bluesy, and sloppy (to complete the coveted "-y" trifecta).

========================

[Verse]

Should I rent out a billboard
Put out an ad
Should I hire a skywriter
Would that make you mad?

Should I call up your girlfriend
And ask where you are
Fly down to Rio
Is that going too far?

-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]

Yeah, just so you know
I want you to know
Just so you know
I want you [rpt.]
-------------------------------------------------
[Verse]

Should I distribute handbills
With your name and your face
Paste them all over
All over the place?

Should I engage a detective
Call the police
Jump from the rooftop
And land in your tree?
-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]
-------------------------------------------------
[Bridge]

Something, something, telephone
Something, something, heartless
-------------------------------------------------
[Chorus]

==================

Another one with just bass and guitar -- I must have overdubbed the vocals later. I improvised most of the chorus.

In retrospect, my inability to come up with the names of weapons, drugs and "men's magazines" (not the Playboy types; more of the paranoid/survivalist variety) should be seen as a Good Thing.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Previous: Meth

I wanted a quieter sound for this. Even with our crappy one pickup electrics, there were techniques -- varying the pick attack, chord arpeggiations, playing fingerstyle -- that could create the softer textures we were after.

Or you could just do what I apparently did and turn the line inputs WAY down.

Wallah! Genius!

I have no idea what this one's about, as evidenced by my doubling up on every single lyric, waiting for inspiration (it never does arrive). Musically, though, I like it, especially the bouncy bass line I came up with for it. (I am alerted by Twitter from the Guild of Failed Bassists ithat the adjective "bouncy" to describe a bass style is "gayer than a titmouse in pantyhose and heels," and is actually illegal in some jurisdictions. So I will abide by their preferred description, "perky.")

So, in summary: A song, titled "Style over Substance" that is indeed without substance, and all about style. A very "meta" concept, now that I think of it.

This was about a girl named Amy that I knew in Africa. A lovely girl, well worth a song or three thousand. But more importantly from a songwriter's perspective, "Amy" is much like "June" -- it rhymes with everything. As I would go on to demonstrate. Interesting historical note: I do believe I was the first to use the word "flamed" -- "Amy, you flamed me" as a verb when I wrote the song back in early 1978. (Wikipedia cites it thus:

The term "flaming" may originate from The Hacker's Dictionary[15], which in 1983 defined it as "to speak rabidly or incessantly on an uninteresting topic or with a patently ridiculous attitude". The meaning of the word has diverged from this definition since then.

I don't think I had that, or later definitions in mind. I think I intended it as "inflamed" but couldn't handle the extra syllable. I might have been hoping that the words would be synonymous, something like "flammable" and "inflammable."

At any rate, this is the demo I did of it (I don't think my cousin and I ever worked on it together). Not much of a song -- just a couple of verses and a chorus. Thinking to expand it, I came up with the idea of tacking on a fragment (with equally atrocious lyrics) written more-or-less contemporaneously. Sometimes this technique (of yoking together similar songs) works; other times it's like placing a big red clown nose on the Mona Lisa (or onto a black velvet Elvis painting if you weren't too enthralled with the original).

I might be biased, but I think it turned out well. In the second half, the guitars gradually drop away, leaving the vocals to finish a cappella. And because the tracks are quite a bit quieter, I was able to add four or five overdubs, leading to some interesting effects.

Previous: Amy

Wall Street Journal:

At the time, bossa nova wasn't exactly unknown in the U.S., as shown by the Grammy-winning success of "Desafinado" from the 1962 album "Jazz Samba" by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd. But "The Girl From Ipanema" ("Garota de Ipanema" in the original Portuguese) was something else altogether. Not only was it one of the last great gasps of pre-Beatles easy listening, it was an entire culture in miniature.

The woman, Helo Pinheiro, is now 67 and still very attractive. (Her name has some weird Portuguese accent that Wikipedia [or my browser] chokes on. You can get to her entry by searching for her anglicized name from the main page, though.)

Umphrey's McGee is a critically-acclaimed ("They're the next Phish!" For whatever that's worth.) American prog-rock band, here playing a short instrumental piece at a concert in upstate NY. They decided to strap a video camera onto drummer Kris Myers to find out exactly what it is he does back there.

As it turns out, quite a bit. Hitting the skins, obviously, but also adjusting mic stands; repairing his kit; flipping drumsticks -- and, for all I know, brushing his teeth and making sandwiches for the backstage party. (I'll need some more camera angles to be sure.) It certainly adds credence to my theory that all drummers are grown-up ADD kids.

I don't know who Mastodon is and I doubt I'll be buying their latest album (or any of them, now that I think about it), but I plan to start my own Norwegian death-metal band (tentative name: Ölaf ünd th' Ümläuts) next Thursday and I'm pleased to announe that I've already found my drummer, this chick. (Or whatever other stage name she prefers.)

So you Keith Moon wannabe losers can stop with the audition tapes already. This Chick has got the gig.

Vancouver Sun:

Justin Bieber just can't get any respect - particularly at the Grammys.

The young pop star was more than a bit petulant he wasn't nominated in any category for music's highest honour.

Well, someone who was - and snagged several top awards - has an explanation. Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney said the Canadian heartthrob shouldn't feel snubbed.

"He's rich, right?" Carney told TMZ outside the Château Marmont. "Grammys are for like music, not for money ... and he's making a lot of money. He should be happy."

"Grammys are for like music"? Phht. This is the outfit that awarded the "Hard Rock" category one infamous year to . . . Jethro Tull. Some others who've never won a regular (most went on to garner a "Lifetime Achievement" trophy) Grammy: The Who; Led Zepplin; Chuck Berry; Janis Joplin; The Beach Boys; Bob Marley; The Doors.

Of course, The Baha Men won in 2000 for "Who Let The Dogs Out." So there's that.

Carney was in the news about a year ago, slagging Nickelback. I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was something snarky. Now, I hold no brief for Nickelback or Bieber; but they're my countrymen, dammit -- attack one (or two), you attack us all. And I've always subscribed to a modified version of Ronald Reagan's credo, "Republicans shouldn't speak evil of other Republicans."

Being a musician is a precarious enough business without having to put up with snide attacks from other musicians, particularly of the pretentious hipster variety. Leave that stuff to the critics.

As I said above, I don't listen to Nickelback much, or Bieber ever. So what? I don't have a lot of time for Dixieland jazz or Peruvian nose-flautists either. It's a big wild wonderful world out there, and there's plenty of music in it that will fit your requirements exactly, if you'll take some time to look for it.

I've never really gotten The Black Keys' music anyway. It's competently enough done, I suppose, and some of it is quite tuneful, but a lot of it just comes across as guitar-heavy arena bombast (sort of like Nickelback, now that I think of it).

But that's all changed, now that I've seen this groovy picture of the groovetacular Black Keys boys. Let me tell you, they are flat out rockin' the joint with those "His-N-Her" car coats. Used to be you could only get those by mail order, but maybe there's a secret Rock Star store that they shop at.

And I'm guessing that Carney must be on the Theresa Spence Miracle Fish Broth Diet and Beauty Regime. I haven't seen that many Chins since I last looked at the Shanghai phone book.

Ya owe me one, Chad Kroeger.

Via Blazing Cat Fur

The Daily Beast:

The British broadsheets called it “the most coveted secretarial job in the world.”

In 1962 a mild-mannered Liverpudlian gal by the name of Freda Kelly was chosen by manager Brian Epstein to serve as the Beatles’ secretary. She also ran the Fab Four’s fan club, sending their rabid devotees authentic gifts from the lads—ranging from signed photos to locks of George Harrison’s hair—thereby serving as arbiter of Beatlemania.