I Want to Tell You (2/18/2009)....is the name of a song by George Harrison that appeared on the Beatles' 1966 album, Revolver. In it, Harrison wanted to capture the frustration of trying to express an "avalanche of thoughts" clearly, with one part going: But if I seem to act unkind It's only me, it's not my mind That is confusing things..
When Harrison later collected and published his lyrics in the book I Me Mine, he wrote that the opposite sentiment now felt more true to him: It's not me, it is my mind That is confusing things...
I recall being surprised at the urge to revisit and change a lyric from over a decade earlier--even though I think he's right about the changed version.
In my own songwriting, when a lyric is done, it's done. I rarely revisit lyrics. I often recycle old tunes, creating new lyrics around them, but old lyrics are either used or discarded. Once or twice I've tinkered with songs over a course of years, but I was aware that the lyric didn't feel finished. A finished lyric was a complete statement of what I felt at the time, and to change it was . . I don't know, wrong to tamper with that, somehow.
A side note: I attended a songwriting conference in California (1998 or so) where us songwriters would play recordings of our songs to 'music professionals,' who would then give feedback (or pronounce sentence). It was a lot like a friendlier American Idol.
In one session I presented a song called "Public Faces," and the 'judge' honed in on a particular line, saying the imagery was too strong. When I replied that the line in question was the first line I came up with, he turned to a colleague and dreamily said, "remember all the times we had to throw away our favorite lines in a song we were writing?"
Well that bent my nose the wrong way! First, because I thought he was plain wrong. The song was about an abusive father, and I wanted strong imagery. Second, the fellow's tone smelled a bit superior: "ah yes, us REAL songwriters know ALL about dealing with THAT situation, don't we, Remington?" This sealed my decision to leave the line in, and strengthened my never-change policy.
So it was in the last week or so, recording a favorite old tune I'd written in Astoria, New York, "This Day, That Day." A line in the middle of the song didn't sit as well as it used to. "Keep that roof guy in mind." For years I'd sung it happily, not caring if it made sense to anyone. It became a favorite duet for Joanne Spies and I to sing together, and always seemed to go down well.
My aim was to finally record a definitive version of the song, and I put a lot of care into it last week....and then I played the song for my girlfriend and my son. And I could see them listen, bop along to the jazzy opening part of the song, and then a pause, big anthemic chords and symbol crashes, and the words, "Keep that roof guy . . in mind." I could see their brows wrinkle in confusion, and saw them disconnect as the next section of the song picked up.
Then I did something I almost NEVER do, explained every line of the song, why I'd written them, what they meant to me. In truth, they started as fragments, bits of lyric that I jammed together. When I sang the whole thing, the 'plot' seemed pleasingly jumbled, as you'd expect, yet also to have a definite trajectory. There seemed to be a through-line, a story being told in the sum of these patched together verses!
EXCEPT for that one line, which I'd scribbled in a notebook during a Great Books class I took in college. It had seemed very enigmatic to me at the time, very mysterious, and also, it was such an odd line that it was fun to sing.
In explaining that, I found I wasn't satisfied by this explanation anymore. Why should I deliberately throw a monkey wrench in when the rest of the song seemed to hold together? Why call attention to the patchwork nature of the lyric, and throw people off? It reminded me of William Burroughs cut-up technique, literally cutting lines out of paragraphs and reassembling them randomly--which can either be interestingly quirky or bloody difficult to understand.
For a couple of days I toyed with the idea of leaving it alone, or dropping the recording entirely, or . . . well, the slightly nagging third possibility was that I finally change the line.
My old misgivings surfaced, of course, but as I sat at the computer, I came up with a solution--a slight rewording that managed to keep the original line along with 2 slight variations. Rhyming, sound-alike variations. (homonymical?)
Hurrah! It seemed so simple, so . . . elegant! . . . and why was it, exactly, that I'd avoiding doing this before?
Nice to finally try something I've been loathe to do, and to find out it felt kinda . . . right. (I still have to go in and make the substitution on the vocal tracks, along with a couple of other minor edits--will post soon!).
Excuse me, sir (1/30/09)....driving to work this morning, I slid into a turn lane and eased to a stop at a red light. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, I saw a police cruiser slip into the same lane and come to a stop behind me.
I also noticed that one of the cruiser's headlights was dead, while all the rest of the lights were shining.
How could I resist?
Pulling a small pad and a pen out of my briefcase, I set the car in Park and opened the door, strolling back towards the cop car. Keeping my hands in plain sight, I wandered up to the driver's window, which slid down cautiously, revealing a tense face. "What?"
"Excuse me, sir," I said casually, "were you aware that your left headlamp was out?"
Luckily he was a good sport, and could see the humor in the situation. We chuckled over it for a moment, and then he shot me.
...kate smith?
Feudal Reconsiderations (1/26/2009)....Back to the High-Profile feud idea, with a couple of corrections.
Firstly, when I wrote Placido Domingo, I actually meant Luciano Pavarotti (a mnemonic slip, I always confuse those two). Further, it turns out that Pavarotti's dead, so he's out of the running. If I was going to feud with a dead person, I'd probably choose, oh...Kate Smith.
Also, putting Nelly Furtado on the list was a brazen attempt to boost the female representation on the list, and not even a particularly notable one. Will Oldham, on the other hand, was more of a pandering 'indie cred' selection. Plus he'd just gotten a big write-up in The New Yorker, and I was jealous.
Oh, and I only included Muse because it's my son's favorite band. So here's a revised, truncated list:
1) Raffi 2) the letter "H" 3) Alicia Keys 4) Trans-Siberian Orchestra 5) Dame Judy Dench! 6) the Northern Pygmy Shrimp 7) Andy Williams 8) the cast of the musical "Hairspray" (Broadway, not film version)
Let the controversy swirl!!
look ma, no hands!
What Will the Neighbors Drink? (1/23/2009)....I'm not a terribly good story teller. Enthusiastic, yes, but my stories can verge on incoherent. I have a spotty memory, so sometimes I'm forced to stop the flow andbacktrack and to tell a pertitinent detail. Tangents abound in my stories. And if the topic is something I'm genuinely excited about (like music or movies), the pace of my speech will quicken and my voice will rise in pitch. At times like that it's easy to forget I'm a baritone.
I'm about half-way through a new novel I just picked up called Beat the Reaper. The title leapt out at me because it's the name of a sketch from a long-ago Firesign Theater album, and after scanning the log-rolling quotes from other authors and reading the first couple of pages, I decided to buy it.
And lo and behold, this story of a medical doctor who has a hidden history as a mafia hitman just rambles all over the place! (while also telling a good story) The style is discursive, full of asides, jokes, and even footnotes. Reminds me of my days at Might magazine, and reading Dave Eggers' history of same. Entertaining read.
Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos
TankMan's Blues (1/16/2009)
Slow down, man Slow down Think about Why and how
We're here, man We're here Full of fear Without a doubt
In twenty years No one Will talk about us In twenty years No one Can talk about us
Not blind, man Not blind I know that I'm Scared outa my mind
We're here, man We're here I feel the tear That's in your eye
In twenty years No one Will talk about us In twenty years No one Can talk about us
They'll call me Tank Man But you're in the tank, man You need to stop and You need to think
I'm in your sight, right? We're not gonna fight, right? 'Cos I'm in the right, right? Doncha think?
The men with the orders Who draw all the borders Well they're in their corridors And we're in the sink
This is our world Let's find us a cute pearl A cute little tank girl And go get a drink
Cos in twenty years Our friends Won't talk about us In twenty years Our friends Can't talk about us
Powered Wigs a-Plenty! (1/9/2009) There once was a singer named Elk, Who found that very few useful words rhyme with "Elk" So he abandoned the limerick he'd started, moved to Perth, Australia, and went into insurance.
My posture has been terrible lately, and I've been sleeping a good deal, and watching too many DVDs. And taking naps. And just when I think I'll do some music, I think better of it and plop down on the couch.
On the plus side, I've seen some really great movies lately: Notorious, the 39 Steps, the Monolith Monsters, Zombie Strippers, and Star Trek IV: Approaching Senility.
And I think I cracked a modern mystery: the enduring charm of the so-called Worst Movie Ever: Plan 9 from Outer Space.
I tried and failed to get through this film years ago, but recently ago I watched it, and then the quirky, low-budget, movie-length documentary that accompanied it on the DVD, in which surviving actors reminisce, critics or film scholars deride, and the likeable, slightly awkward narrator navigates the story of how this very obscure film became well-known (quick answer: 60s television's vast appetite for cheap movies, and then the Golden Turkey awards).
So here's the big reveal: this movie has the charm of a true amateur production. It's success lies not in spite of its flaws, nor because of its flaws, but rather in setting the flaws aside.
Any film asks you to buy into the idea that the characters you see inhabit a world that mirrors our own in some way, right? In some cases they adopt a straight-forward narrative that depicts recognizable characters and situations (e.g., Kramer vs. Kramer), while others design worlds that only vaguely resemble our own (e.g., Pan's Labyrinth). Films use a variety of conceits that we can accept or reject: the prospect of a character bursting into song, for instance, was once commonplace.
One conceit that was very popular in the movie musicals was epitomised by the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland movie Babes in Arms, the quintessential we have a barn, let's put on a show ourselves! movie of the 1930s. The reason this conceit is laughable in practice is that most community productions don't have, for instance, a Mickey Rooney or a Judy Garland in them! (That kind of talent gets snapped up by Hollywood)
But!.....what local theater productions DO usually have is people who can carry a tune or remember their lines, with varying degrees of sincerity. The charm of a local production of Auntie Mame isn't oh boy, perhaps we'll see the next Laurence Olivier! It's the fact that your neighbors and friends put their hearts into it. No one storms out of the auditorium if the ingenue starts her big song in the wrong key, nor do they protest if the backdrop falls to the stage floor.
So it is with Plan 9 from Outer Space. You must accept the laughable dialogue, lack of continuinty, and horrible acting as a given, 'cause it's all undeniably there. The film constructs an entire plot around a couple of clips of an aged Bela Lugosi, and then is forced to employ a stand-in who covers his face with a cape. There's stock footage of planes that is obviously stock footage, and there's cardboard scenery. There's a police chief who sounds like he learned his lines phonetically, and . . . etc etc.
But ultimately, there's a show put on by a group of enthusiastic well-meaning folks who're having a great time and doing their best! Seen in that light, I think anybody could watch and enjoy this film.
Mind you, I'm not suggesting you race out and rent it, especially if you don't have an appreciation for camp. But I think the "Worst Film Ever" nickname is laughably misplaced in this case. Better to bestow that title on a film that employed real talent to produce misguided crap like Exorcist II: The Heretic . . . or Battlefield Earth . . . or Catwoman . . . or Showgirls . . . or Fight Club . . . or (name your pick).
can u see me now?
Feud for Thought (January 5, 2009)....When the smart money says "2009 is going to be a wash, economically," it's probably time to hunker down and play board games. Perhaps a bracing game of "Clue" is in order. For all of us.
My resolution? A good high-profile feud.
Yes! Just think of the many famous feuds . . . Aaron Burr versus Alexander Hamilton . . . David versus Goliath . . . Mary Wilson versus Diana Ross . . .
In ye olden dayes, feuds were serious kibble: long running cycles of retaliatory violence, to coin a phrase. In other words, people hacked each other to death because their grandfathers competed for the attention of a woman, or a piece of land, or a bigger piece of land.
But I'm not concerned with the deadly vendettas or blood feuds that litter history . . I'm talking about a celebrity feud! The kind of thing that appears fleetingly in the entertainment media, only to be replaced by celebrity baby pictures, or a fading star's courageous battle with detox.
The question is, with whom to feud?
Someone in the music field seems best, I suppose, but not someone too serious. For instance, I could start a feud with John Cale, a founding member of the Velvet Underground and wildly talented avant-rock performer, but first, he's not all that famous outside of music circles, and second . . well, he's not all that famous within music circles either.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be too smart to pick a fight with someone like, say, Eminem, who has feuded with Moby, Limp Bizkit, Britney Spears, his ex-wife, and his mom. It's just too crowded in there!
So I need someone fairly well-known who is also not currently feuding. Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head list: 1) Raffi 2) Placido Domingo 3) Alicia Keys 4) Trans-Siberian Orchestra 5) Nelly Furtado 6) Muse 7) Andy Williams 8) the cast of the musical "Hairspray" (Broadway, not film version) 9) Will Oldham 10) Daryl Hall
I think there are some real winners in there. Feel free to suggest some, tho!
And here's an alternate list of potential feuds with guys named Steve. 1) Stephen Hawking 2) Steven Spielberg 3) Steven Wright 4) Steve Reich 5) Steve Miller
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