It's an offhand reference to a Traffic song, not an Extreme song, by the way. I'm more attuned to music that came before my time than after it, though I guess I probably wasn't the only twelve-year-old who heard Low Spark on FM radio and thought it was really cool back in the seventies. I didn't think I understood the song, back then. The funny part of it is, I actually didn't fail to understand the song -- on the surface, Low Spark is just a slightly dyspeptic estimation of the music industry. I always wondered if there wasn't more to it, but according to several articles I've read (includng the review of the song on Allmusic), it's no more than Jim Capaldi waxing bitter on the state of the music industry in the seventies.
And sometimes as Freud is (possibly apocryphally) supposed to have said, 'sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.'
It hasn't been a bad year for power pop and songs that stick in your head, actually, 2005. I could regret more still being at least quasi-interested in the movement of popular music. While I think they're possibly a wee tad overrated, I admit I rather like the White Stripes. I'm not sure there aren't plenty of people whose tastes exclude irony work like the Stripes do, though. You have to have some sense of a broad range of styles of music over a broad vista of music, or else be fairly new to music, to like them. I grew up on seventies AM radio hits, which included but was not limited to disco rock, rockabilly, slightly effete Manhattan singer/songwriter stuff, and Canadian sap pop. I also had some experience with live blues, and heard a lot of early progressive and the stuff that influenced it; folk music, from several folk traditions; church music (most of it bad).
To a degree, I see what the White Stripes are doing to/with blues rock and progressive rock what Cheap Trick did to British Invasion guitar pop -- it's pastiche mixed with equal parts reverence and irony. I don't like all the White Stripes I hear, but most of it I "get" -- Jack White loves the genres from which he borrows, but he doesn't love them so much he's afraid to have a go at their pretensions. I don't know, maybe I respect what they're doing or seem to be attempting even more than I like the songs. They don't seem to be overwhelmingly serious about themselves, either.
The comparison to Cheap Trick isn't completely empty on another level, either -- anybody who caught on to CT early on knows damned good and well they lied through their teeth for years about who any of the members of the band were, and wrote fake biographies for the album covers and journalists to use. Jack and Meg did much the same thing -- I suspect, as much to throw people off the personal information and try to "fool" them into judging the music on its own merits as anything else. Or maybe they just liked taking the piss with journalists, which Cheap Trick certainly did back in the late seventies.
I only chose the White Stripes because they're relatively ubiquitous -- should you stumble on this journal, you won't wonder "who the hell is this windbag blowing about?" in other words. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past three or four years, you know who the hell they are. If you haven't, and you don't, just move on and put on your Celine Dion disc and forget you ever stopped here, mkay? 'Cause returnin' here ain't gonna tell you nothin' you need to know.
There are other bands around right now who are doing much the same thing with other genres of music -- just heard another Grandaddy song this evening, for instance. Is it just me, or does Grandaddy sound a hell of a lot like grouchy teenagers rewriting Alan Parsons Project songs based on the premise "what if the Alan Parsons Project had Chris Squire as a bassist"? I like Grandaddy more than I liked APP, for that matter, for pure songwriting and musicianship. Hewlett's Daughter is one of the most incomprehensible songs I've ever heard -- it's like Todd Rundgren's Range War on X -- but I know, I know, Alan Parsons is a megalith in his own right, apart from the Project.
I'm not mackin' on Alan Parsons the producer/engineer. 'Abbey Road' alone gave him the right to essay a career as a writer of borderline mediocre progressive pop songs. It's just that Grandaddy took the music alone and twisted it around a Moebius train of thought that brought it out somewhere in BFEgypt. And it's pretty cool. Even if Hewlett's Daughter don't make a goddamn bit of sense to me.
I don't even want to get into the usual suspects right now -- My Chemical Romance, the Postal Service/Death Cab For Cutie conglomerate, Rilo Kiley and an unending march of power pop bands, some good, some bad, some mediocre.
Oh, yeah -- another thing. I love a good band. I can be entertained by a bad band. I hate a mediocre band, because I figure either they got their chance for the wrong reason or they're not trying hard enough. Either way, a band that can't commit either to work hard enough to be really good or give up and be entertainingly, but creatively, bad deserves nothing but a yawn.
I'll go back for Cheap Trick, Todd Rundgren (and Utopia, in the power pop phase), Sloan, any of a score or more genuinely good, or at least innovative, power pop writers every time. But midnight is coming for the new year, and one hopes things will improve. Too much about our world is mediocre or worse, right now. We can do better -- we can be kinder, waste less, destroy fewer things that aren't replaceable, foster less hate and intolerance, listen to better music and expect better of our leaders. Good luck with that, but really -- we can do this. Call, write, or just refuse to support mediocrity of thought, deed and expectation. Expect better, and let the bastards know when they don't deliver. It's our duty.
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Friday, December 23, 2005
Auf Wiedersehen ...?
Well, it looks like at least for the time being, when I post here it's going to be grand exegesis on popular music. It is what it is -- I've been listening to the stuff since I was a larva, so it's woven into my life like religion or crappy reality shows are woven into some lives ... perhaps yours?
Well, then. If you don't like popular music, I don’t care if you read this, but it ain’t gonna mean much to you if you love Jesus or TV very much, or (most importantly) if popular music is and always has amounted to wallpaper for you. I can’t stop you from reading, and wouldn’t if I could, but it ain’t my problem if you’re offended or bored (or baffled).
I read a recent interview with Elton John in Mojo Magazine. Mojo is a British publication that really has no direct USAmerican analogue – you’d have to combine Rolling Stone, Spin and Magnet, then sift out any content that wasn’t music-related, and even then you’d only have something not quite unlike it. As best I can remember, there hasn’t ever been a USAmerican publication so information-dense about music, and covering such a broad variety of it so well, in my somewhat extended lifetime.
Back to the subject. The Mojo interviewer had asked Elton about the recording of Someone Saved My Life Tonight – the conventional wisdom was that Gus Dudgeon, who produced a lot of early EJ work, had given him a lot of grief over the fact he seemed to be backing off the emotional content of the song as he was recording it. The interviewer was angling for – and got – an admission that indeed, the song had been at least loosely autobiographical. There's more story to it than that, but it's not germane to this, so I won't go into it ...
Now, if you are not as dumb as a sack of hammers or totally sociopathic, you had likely come to the conclusion Someone Saved My Life Tonight was about a suicide attempt. It would be a little bit of an invitation to misjudgment or misinterpretation to name a song Someone Saved My Life Tonight that wasn’t, at least metaphorically, about death. I’d always kind of assumed it was, at least loosely, autobiographical; I certainly wasn’t surprised to see that it was.
What kind of had me going ‘wha?’ for several days after I read the interview was the next thing ol’ Reg said. I’ll paraphrase (because I’m too lazy to go look for the magazine, and this isn’t exactly an official publication); he said people will pretty much interpret songs you perform (as was usually the case, Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to the song and was there on the night of the incident that inspired it), so you might as well be candid ... and that he also thought the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows was a similar case.
I knew Brian Wilson had some emotional and psychological problems around the time he quit touring with the Beach Boys in the late sixties – it’s in his autobiography – and still, apparently, has some of what we USAmericans (sometimes ironically) call ‘issues.’ I know that one of the reasons SMiLE wasn’t released for decades was that he spent some portion of the years since he started it off the rails, and the recording and post-production work didn’t get finished (not to mention, once he’d left the Beach Boys for good, he must have anticipated that some not-entirely-random litigious thug of a former bandmate would sue, and he didn’t disappoint).
There are pictures of Brian Wilson in that autobiography I mentioned (Wouldn't It Be Nice), in which he weighed well north of three-hundred pounds, and walked around on the beach where he lived in a bathrobe and slippers in broad daylight. He was clearly off the bead, spinning out of true, you name the euphemism for not quite compos mentis.
I won’t even get into the whole Dr. Landy thing.
All that considered, I still have a hard time processing God Only Knows as a suicide note. Maybe it’s because Wilson was almost pitifully sincere so much of the time, when he wrote songs. I always read that song as more of a passive-aggressive threat to a woman who was backing off and whom the narrator suspected would soon be attempting to leave his life. A direct suicide threat would have seemed more blatant than I thought he was, back then.
I don’t know – I guess it’s like ol’ Reg said, though. We read into songs what we want to hear. I don’t tend to believe the Badfinger song (most famously recorded by Harry Nilsson), Without You is necessarily a suicide note, either (though two of Badfinger's members did commit suicide). In fact, I kinda’ think the two songs are similar in intent, if not in tone. I think they’re both hyperbolic, eleventh-hour efforts to get ‘the girl’ to stay.
I won’t even get into what suicide threats accomplish in this situation – having had some experience with it, I can honestly say it ain’t the most effective emotional device any human being has in his/her trick bag. If you feel compelled to use it, I'd advise you find another one – if it works, you’re involved with a doormat, and you're a button-pusher. Unless you really mean it, and even that isn't going to accomplish anything much that you want to accomplish. Trust me on this one.
Well, then. If you don't like popular music, I don’t care if you read this, but it ain’t gonna mean much to you if you love Jesus or TV very much, or (most importantly) if popular music is and always has amounted to wallpaper for you. I can’t stop you from reading, and wouldn’t if I could, but it ain’t my problem if you’re offended or bored (or baffled).
I read a recent interview with Elton John in Mojo Magazine. Mojo is a British publication that really has no direct USAmerican analogue – you’d have to combine Rolling Stone, Spin and Magnet, then sift out any content that wasn’t music-related, and even then you’d only have something not quite unlike it. As best I can remember, there hasn’t ever been a USAmerican publication so information-dense about music, and covering such a broad variety of it so well, in my somewhat extended lifetime.
Back to the subject. The Mojo interviewer had asked Elton about the recording of Someone Saved My Life Tonight – the conventional wisdom was that Gus Dudgeon, who produced a lot of early EJ work, had given him a lot of grief over the fact he seemed to be backing off the emotional content of the song as he was recording it. The interviewer was angling for – and got – an admission that indeed, the song had been at least loosely autobiographical. There's more story to it than that, but it's not germane to this, so I won't go into it ...
Now, if you are not as dumb as a sack of hammers or totally sociopathic, you had likely come to the conclusion Someone Saved My Life Tonight was about a suicide attempt. It would be a little bit of an invitation to misjudgment or misinterpretation to name a song Someone Saved My Life Tonight that wasn’t, at least metaphorically, about death. I’d always kind of assumed it was, at least loosely, autobiographical; I certainly wasn’t surprised to see that it was.
What kind of had me going ‘wha?’ for several days after I read the interview was the next thing ol’ Reg said. I’ll paraphrase (because I’m too lazy to go look for the magazine, and this isn’t exactly an official publication); he said people will pretty much interpret songs you perform (as was usually the case, Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to the song and was there on the night of the incident that inspired it), so you might as well be candid ... and that he also thought the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows was a similar case.
I knew Brian Wilson had some emotional and psychological problems around the time he quit touring with the Beach Boys in the late sixties – it’s in his autobiography – and still, apparently, has some of what we USAmericans (sometimes ironically) call ‘issues.’ I know that one of the reasons SMiLE wasn’t released for decades was that he spent some portion of the years since he started it off the rails, and the recording and post-production work didn’t get finished (not to mention, once he’d left the Beach Boys for good, he must have anticipated that some not-entirely-random litigious thug of a former bandmate would sue, and he didn’t disappoint).
There are pictures of Brian Wilson in that autobiography I mentioned (Wouldn't It Be Nice), in which he weighed well north of three-hundred pounds, and walked around on the beach where he lived in a bathrobe and slippers in broad daylight. He was clearly off the bead, spinning out of true, you name the euphemism for not quite compos mentis.
I won’t even get into the whole Dr. Landy thing.
All that considered, I still have a hard time processing God Only Knows as a suicide note. Maybe it’s because Wilson was almost pitifully sincere so much of the time, when he wrote songs. I always read that song as more of a passive-aggressive threat to a woman who was backing off and whom the narrator suspected would soon be attempting to leave his life. A direct suicide threat would have seemed more blatant than I thought he was, back then.
I don’t know – I guess it’s like ol’ Reg said, though. We read into songs what we want to hear. I don’t tend to believe the Badfinger song (most famously recorded by Harry Nilsson), Without You is necessarily a suicide note, either (though two of Badfinger's members did commit suicide). In fact, I kinda’ think the two songs are similar in intent, if not in tone. I think they’re both hyperbolic, eleventh-hour efforts to get ‘the girl’ to stay.
I won’t even get into what suicide threats accomplish in this situation – having had some experience with it, I can honestly say it ain’t the most effective emotional device any human being has in his/her trick bag. If you feel compelled to use it, I'd advise you find another one – if it works, you’re involved with a doormat, and you're a button-pusher. Unless you really mean it, and even that isn't going to accomplish anything much that you want to accomplish. Trust me on this one.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Here is something irrelevant you don't know about me.
I have this almost fetishistic fascination with the thirty-year-old Pilot song, Magic. It's really not much, in critical terms -- the most positive, pragmatic evaluation of it would have to be that it's a pretty solid pre-disco guitar-pop single, a midtempo Chunky bar with raisins, not too long, nothing it didn't need to be, and quite deftly produced.
The band had a history, and the players went on to other projects, but reality has nothing to do with this, so I'm not going into a breathy disquisition on Davey Paton and his impressive credits. It probably didn't necessarily have to be this particular band and this particular lineup -- the song was no masterpiece, in reality.
It's approximately the dumbest good song ever recorded, in any realistic appraisal.
The lyrics are, in the larger scheme of things, absolutely puerile. They are about nothing -- they are about a guy who doesn't feel especially guilty because he's not really accomplishing anything. They are about sleeping late, and having no goals. Kind of like the three-minute pop version of Seinfeld.
And yet, without the dumb, empty lyrics, the music (which is likely, I admit, the thing that's metastasized through my brain like a crush on a pop star) would have less impact.
I always loved power pop. I grew up on it. I always used to listen to AM radio pop when I was a kid, because it was the kind of music a kid could really grok and get into. Musically, it's not rocket science -- major open and diminished chords, the occasional minor chord or modulation to another key that builds some kind of weird new neural pathway you don't even know about at the time it's happening.
It's physics on some level, and apparently songwriters of the early seventies figured out the formula, because there's a very great honkin' lot of the stuff floating around out there. You can preview the songs on some seventies radio anthology and immediately find your brain full of songs you hadn't thought about in twenty years. Well, if you're old enough to remember the seventies, and didn't give yourself a stroke during the disco era and forget everything that had happened to you before that moment, at least.
I remember the song from when I was a kid (I'm not old enough to have heard Magic as something that was aimed at me; I was ten years old when the song was released and got played on the radio). The song didn't get any hooks in me when I was a kid, though.
I was on my way out of a moderately long marriage about a decade ago, now, and carrying on an affair of electronic letters with someone who ultimately behaved execrably (but that was months later) to me. One subject to which we invariably went was popular music. We'd been discussing power pop -- what distinguishes it, what songs were really underrated, who'd gotten the short end of which stick ... how unfair it was that DJs called Cheap Trick the Sears Beatles, for instance ... and I'd put on a radio show on an out-of-town FM station that was playing seventies stuff, including (unavoidably) a hefty serving of power pop from the era.
I was cleaning the bathroom in my small apartment, and had been required to wedge my head awkwardly around the toilet tank to retrieve a band-aid wrapper that had blown back into an inconvenient corner ... when the song came on the radio. I'd made fun of the song over the years, quoting the "wo-ho-ho, it's magic!" as a punch line to cynical jokes. I had written it off as pre-disco bubblegum shit, without having heard it since about 1976, other than in passing.
When the guitar solo hit, I jerked back up from behind the toilet so fast, I actually hit my head.
It is my firm conviction that there are strange coincidences of resonance between certain songs and certain human brains. If you throw enough stuff at a song, enough diminished chords and a certain tempo, you're likely to fascinate the brains of a significant portion of the population. I think songs like Magic are coincidences of just the right noise and rhythm and pluck just the right visceral strings in some of us that we will never quite get over them. Witness the collective insanity among vast swaths of the population over Hey Ya a few years back.
It ain't the only song that's done that to me, but it happened to come up in the rotation on ITunes, and I decided to come over here and blather about it because I set up a damn web journal because the real people in my life are freakin' sick of hearing about a thirty-one-year old song that most of them didn't really give a shit about when they heard it anyway. Maybe my small pathologies will entertain some random stranger for a few minutes. If so, hi -- I'm actually a fairly normal person with a few peculiarities. Just like everybody else.
It's not the only song that occasionaly snags me, and your mileage may vary. You may not like that song; there may be another song you obsess over. There may be people out there walking the street who will, one day, concuss themselves on a household object because after twenty-odd years, they finally actually heard a song like Modest Mouse's Float On, after having it become wallpaper when they were kids.
But I'm tellin' you this right now, Starland Vocal Band, you are on warning -- if I ever lose my ability to reason and think clearly, and go off on some kind of crazy rampage, Pilot won't have to take the blame. Eric Carmen and the Raspberries will get off absolutely scot-free.
It'll be Afternoon Delight that's the soundtrack to my undoing. Guaranteed.
The band had a history, and the players went on to other projects, but reality has nothing to do with this, so I'm not going into a breathy disquisition on Davey Paton and his impressive credits. It probably didn't necessarily have to be this particular band and this particular lineup -- the song was no masterpiece, in reality.
It's approximately the dumbest good song ever recorded, in any realistic appraisal.
The lyrics are, in the larger scheme of things, absolutely puerile. They are about nothing -- they are about a guy who doesn't feel especially guilty because he's not really accomplishing anything. They are about sleeping late, and having no goals. Kind of like the three-minute pop version of Seinfeld.
And yet, without the dumb, empty lyrics, the music (which is likely, I admit, the thing that's metastasized through my brain like a crush on a pop star) would have less impact.
I am going to wander off the point long enough to point out a few things, such as that when I say "power pop" I describe a very specific genre of music that's been around since rock and roll has been around, but really kicked up its heels in the seventies. It was, largely, Beatles-influenced, though I think crazy old Phil Spector's Wall-o-sound gets a little cred, too, and general doo-wop and Motown ballad esthetic. If not for it all, power pop wouldn't have packed the same wallop.
By power pop I do not mean certain things. I do not mean bubblegum pop, necessarily, though some power pop bands -- most notably, the Sweet -- did occasionally verge over from power pop into bubblegum or, even more rarely, vice-versa (I don't have any examples, but I'm sure it happened).
I do not mean any band that did not have someone on board who could not play a creditable guitar fill or lead solo.
I do not mean any band playing anything other than rock and R&B-influenced mainstream pop -- this excludes disco songs and anything that could even vaguely qualify as a country song, either real country or the dreck that passes for "country" music here in the 21st century.
I do not mean Britney Spears, or Donnie and Marie Osmond, or anybody else who is a singer with a manufactured backing band composed of studio whores who don't write the songs sung by said singer(s). Power pop almost always is played by ensembles of musicians who actually work and write songs together, for whatever reason. No real explanations for that, here -- just seems like it's usually the case.
I also want to make it clear that this song has absolutely no meaning in my life, in any context, other than as the subject of an occasional obsession. My fascination with it has no connection to any real occurrence in my life. Some people get hung up on particular songs because they associate them with positive or negative things that occurred while they were listening -- I was snowed in during a blizzard with only the CDs of the first Ben Folds Five album and Soul Coughing's 'Ruby Vroom,' for instance, and both will always hold context for me. I spent two solid hours once listening to Soundgarden's song Black Hole Sun during the worst of my divorce. This is context. My fascination with Magic is devoid of this. Entirely.
I always loved power pop. I grew up on it. I always used to listen to AM radio pop when I was a kid, because it was the kind of music a kid could really grok and get into. Musically, it's not rocket science -- major open and diminished chords, the occasional minor chord or modulation to another key that builds some kind of weird new neural pathway you don't even know about at the time it's happening.
It's physics on some level, and apparently songwriters of the early seventies figured out the formula, because there's a very great honkin' lot of the stuff floating around out there. You can preview the songs on some seventies radio anthology and immediately find your brain full of songs you hadn't thought about in twenty years. Well, if you're old enough to remember the seventies, and didn't give yourself a stroke during the disco era and forget everything that had happened to you before that moment, at least.
I remember the song from when I was a kid (I'm not old enough to have heard Magic as something that was aimed at me; I was ten years old when the song was released and got played on the radio). The song didn't get any hooks in me when I was a kid, though.
I was on my way out of a moderately long marriage about a decade ago, now, and carrying on an affair of electronic letters with someone who ultimately behaved execrably (but that was months later) to me. One subject to which we invariably went was popular music. We'd been discussing power pop -- what distinguishes it, what songs were really underrated, who'd gotten the short end of which stick ... how unfair it was that DJs called Cheap Trick the Sears Beatles, for instance ... and I'd put on a radio show on an out-of-town FM station that was playing seventies stuff, including (unavoidably) a hefty serving of power pop from the era.
I was cleaning the bathroom in my small apartment, and had been required to wedge my head awkwardly around the toilet tank to retrieve a band-aid wrapper that had blown back into an inconvenient corner ... when the song came on the radio. I'd made fun of the song over the years, quoting the "wo-ho-ho, it's magic!" as a punch line to cynical jokes. I had written it off as pre-disco bubblegum shit, without having heard it since about 1976, other than in passing.
When the guitar solo hit, I jerked back up from behind the toilet so fast, I actually hit my head.
It is my firm conviction that there are strange coincidences of resonance between certain songs and certain human brains. If you throw enough stuff at a song, enough diminished chords and a certain tempo, you're likely to fascinate the brains of a significant portion of the population. I think songs like Magic are coincidences of just the right noise and rhythm and pluck just the right visceral strings in some of us that we will never quite get over them. Witness the collective insanity among vast swaths of the population over Hey Ya a few years back.
It ain't the only song that's done that to me, but it happened to come up in the rotation on ITunes, and I decided to come over here and blather about it because I set up a damn web journal because the real people in my life are freakin' sick of hearing about a thirty-one-year old song that most of them didn't really give a shit about when they heard it anyway. Maybe my small pathologies will entertain some random stranger for a few minutes. If so, hi -- I'm actually a fairly normal person with a few peculiarities. Just like everybody else.
It's not the only song that occasionaly snags me, and your mileage may vary. You may not like that song; there may be another song you obsess over. There may be people out there walking the street who will, one day, concuss themselves on a household object because after twenty-odd years, they finally actually heard a song like Modest Mouse's Float On, after having it become wallpaper when they were kids.
But I'm tellin' you this right now, Starland Vocal Band, you are on warning -- if I ever lose my ability to reason and think clearly, and go off on some kind of crazy rampage, Pilot won't have to take the blame. Eric Carmen and the Raspberries will get off absolutely scot-free.
It'll be Afternoon Delight that's the soundtrack to my undoing. Guaranteed.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Rocklandwonderland. Well, I do wonder...
I tried to start this last weekend, and the flippin' thing wouldn't do line breaks -- it was splattering text all across the templates, and since I'm tech, but I drink a bit on occasion, I didn't have the patience to fix it all at the moment, so I saved the text and decided to try again later.
It's later.
So here I go again, on my own. Like the original version of the Whitesnake song before David Coverversion got his Chiclet teeth etc. Like a hobo I was born to walk erratically when I've had a bit of wine. And c.
Here's what I wrote last weekend, as a quasi-explanation of a song that got stuck in my head and wouldn't cut loose, and ultimately resulted in my thinking about -- and attempting -- setting up a relatively anonymous personal web journal:
Last Week's Well-oiled Bloviation
I know, I know -- I'm guessing there's a remote possibility I'll get nicked for posting the full lyrics to this song here, in which case I'll happily link to someone else who has them and include an excerpt. Frankly, if I were Kim Mitchell, I'd be happy for the promotion.
I heard this song come up in my ITunes rotation (I pwn the CD, bought it a million years or so ago, so I have the rights to burn it), and it got stuck in my head and eventually, that doppelganger of Kim in his OPD hat told me "you really ought to be puking the contents of your brain anonymously on the web once in a while, before you go off on some idiot in a convenience store or something." And who can argue with logic like that?
So since I'm moderately literate, and moderately computer-literate, and old as dirt and fairly articulate and well-educated, I decided I'd go ahead and pitch it out here, and maybe I'd just blather later on other things.
The song was recorded in 1989. Rumour has it (if you're a Kim fan, you'll get that -- if not, e-mail me and I'll explain it), Pye and Kim had some disagreement somewhere along the line and seldom if ever write together now, after decades of working together in Max Webster and on Kim's solo work. Not to cast even one aspersion on Andy Curran -- saw him open for Kim when Kim was touring on Rockland (the album on which "Expedition Sailor" was included) back around 1990, and Soho 69 was great. I just miss the compulsive introspection and sorta freakish non sequitur combination of Dubois's lyrics and Kim's melodic sense. Ah, me -- you know how old I am, if any of this makes any goddamn sense to you, but that's life, I guess. We all get old eventually. As my late father used to say, it beats the hell out of the alternative. He'd know, but he ain't around to tell me about that -- I'm happy enough to assume he was right.
Rik Emmett (from Triumph) recorded the acoustic guitar on the song; Kim did any of the other guitar, which is to say the electric solo work on it. At this long remove my memory could be faulty, but if I am not mistaken, the song was recorded by remote, with Mitchell and Emmett trading tapes back and forth to complete the work. I thought at the time -- and still think -- wow, it must really have wanted to get written, if they did it that way.
I borrowed that modus operandi over a decade ago for some musician characters I've been writing about for about twenty years (I call it cheap psychotherapy). I read recently Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and his Postal Service partner in crime Jimmy Tamborello recorded the Postal Service stuff that way. I guess if you want to get something done badly enough, you'll figure out a way to get it done. Kim and Rik did that before it was easy -- kudos to them. And huzzahs, too, if Jon Stewart has any spare ones rolling around the lint in his jacket pocket. I imagine there might be a few.
I'll probably just ramble here. I have no desire to be identified, and no desire to be harassed, so if you don't like what I say, just move along, mmkay? Because really, it ain't about you.
ITunes has moved on to Eels' "Novocaine For The Soul," so I'm just gonna ... sputter out.
L8R
ES
It's later.
So here I go again, on my own. Like the original version of the Whitesnake song before David Coverversion got his Chiclet teeth etc. Like a hobo I was born to walk erratically when I've had a bit of wine. And c.
Here's what I wrote last weekend, as a quasi-explanation of a song that got stuck in my head and wouldn't cut loose, and ultimately resulted in my thinking about -- and attempting -- setting up a relatively anonymous personal web journal:
Last Week's Well-oiled Bloviation
I know, I know -- I'm guessing there's a remote possibility I'll get nicked for posting the full lyrics to this song here, in which case I'll happily link to someone else who has them and include an excerpt. Frankly, if I were Kim Mitchell, I'd be happy for the promotion.
I heard this song come up in my ITunes rotation (I pwn the CD, bought it a million years or so ago, so I have the rights to burn it), and it got stuck in my head and eventually, that doppelganger of Kim in his OPD hat told me "you really ought to be puking the contents of your brain anonymously on the web once in a while, before you go off on some idiot in a convenience store or something." And who can argue with logic like that?
So since I'm moderately literate, and moderately computer-literate, and old as dirt and fairly articulate and well-educated, I decided I'd go ahead and pitch it out here, and maybe I'd just blather later on other things.
"Expedition Sailor"
Kim Mitchell(music)/Pye Dubois(lyrics)
i woke up in the middle of the atlantic
and i had a view of the whole wide world
and i was on expedition
expedition sailor
i was out to find a much better world
i'm gone away
odds are not really in
their favour
of seeing me home
i'm gone away
guess i'll lay it down on this cruise
to take me off to somewhere...
i crossed the dateline
i crossed the equator
there is no shore i can't call home
horizons in heavens
just for the sailor
i'm out to find a much better world
i was out to find a much better world
i'm gone away
guess i'll lay it down on this cruise
to take me off to somewhere
i'm gone away
odds are not really in our favour
of seeing me home
The song was recorded in 1989. Rumour has it (if you're a Kim fan, you'll get that -- if not, e-mail me and I'll explain it), Pye and Kim had some disagreement somewhere along the line and seldom if ever write together now, after decades of working together in Max Webster and on Kim's solo work. Not to cast even one aspersion on Andy Curran -- saw him open for Kim when Kim was touring on Rockland (the album on which "Expedition Sailor" was included) back around 1990, and Soho 69 was great. I just miss the compulsive introspection and sorta freakish non sequitur combination of Dubois's lyrics and Kim's melodic sense. Ah, me -- you know how old I am, if any of this makes any goddamn sense to you, but that's life, I guess. We all get old eventually. As my late father used to say, it beats the hell out of the alternative. He'd know, but he ain't around to tell me about that -- I'm happy enough to assume he was right.
Rik Emmett (from Triumph) recorded the acoustic guitar on the song; Kim did any of the other guitar, which is to say the electric solo work on it. At this long remove my memory could be faulty, but if I am not mistaken, the song was recorded by remote, with Mitchell and Emmett trading tapes back and forth to complete the work. I thought at the time -- and still think -- wow, it must really have wanted to get written, if they did it that way.
I borrowed that modus operandi over a decade ago for some musician characters I've been writing about for about twenty years (I call it cheap psychotherapy). I read recently Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and his Postal Service partner in crime Jimmy Tamborello recorded the Postal Service stuff that way. I guess if you want to get something done badly enough, you'll figure out a way to get it done. Kim and Rik did that before it was easy -- kudos to them. And huzzahs, too, if Jon Stewart has any spare ones rolling around the lint in his jacket pocket. I imagine there might be a few.
I'll probably just ramble here. I have no desire to be identified, and no desire to be harassed, so if you don't like what I say, just move along, mmkay? Because really, it ain't about you.
ITunes has moved on to Eels' "Novocaine For The Soul," so I'm just gonna ... sputter out.
L8R
ES
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