Monthly Archives: June 2006

Exploiting emotional investment seminar

I'm gonna write a soap opera -- you're gonna be the heroine

 

Sure… you can try to cash out your relationship to the tabloids… but the money from that is here and gone like a found bindle of… someone else’s forgotten dreams.

No… to fully exploit your investment in a relationship you’ve gotta grow it. Now, we’re pretty much talking about mushrooms on a corpse, here, of course.

But circle of life and all that… media life.

This version of Soap Opera is a bit of a reinvention, musically. It’s still a blues but I recast it into a set of mostly harmonic minor progressions that give it a mock seriousness that amused me. I like to be amused, so here it is.

January 23 version
March 18 version

I’m Gonna Write a Soap Opera

I’m gonna write a soap opera
you’re gonna be the heroine
I’m gonna show the world just how ya think
I’m gonna write a soap opera
I won’t have to make up a thing
When we get the ratings back
you know I’ll take you out for a drink

I’ll get a famous model
to play your part for you
I was gonna ask you but you’re always busy
We’ll get a famous model
I know she’ll do real good, too
When the plot gets thick
She’ll be skinny enough to wriggle through

I’m gonna sell the rights
everywhere I can
there’ll be games and dolls and underwear
I’m gonna sell the rights
I suggest you buy up while you can
I said I’d make you famous
I think by now you understand

(C)1990, TK Major

Share

You must have lied to me then — why can’t you like to them now?

... why can't you lie to them, now?
 

Well, I never actually had an ex-girlfriend turn federal witness against me. Could still happen, I suppose… I got plenty of ex-‘s.

But I always thought it was a great metaphor for a love-gone-wrong song.

As I wrote on January 6 when I posted a different version of this song from the late 70s, the song was partially inspired by stories of Bill and Emily Harris and celebrity kidnap-victim-turned-urban-terrorist Patty Hearst.

machine dog version

GOVERNMENT WITNESS

Someone’s been bleeding us
a young man wake up each day old and tired
I got my gun and my silver bullets
gonna get me a government vampire

Hanging on the chain link fence
got my silver cross my Smith & Wesson .38
But when they turn on the juice
I’m crucified on the electric gate

If this is real life
I guess I’ll get used to it
I’ll be all right as
soon as I get over these electro-convulsive fits

Shackled in my place
inside rthe federal courtroom dock
Staring at your face
floating in the witness box

You’re looking right through me
just like you never heard my name
but you used to lay right next to me
in our little hideout by the lake

If this is real life
I suggest you get used to it
You’ll be all right
as soon as you find a heart to fit that hole in your chest

Governmewnt witness
who would have dreamed you’d be a government witness
Government witness
go ahead — deny you are a government witness

You must have lied to me then
Why can’t you lie to them now
Will you be lying to yourself
while I sweat it out in the death house — death house

This is real life . . .

Copyright 1980
TK Major

Share

Let’s not talk about lonely nights…

Let's not talk about girls...

 

I think of this as kind of a campfire song.

This is my way of tying it into the First Day of Summer. Which is today.

Anyhow, I used to camp a lot in the mountains of California — in the coastal ranges and in the Sierra. And I always did the campfire thing. When you’re camping the way I used to camp, the fire defines all your time after the sun goes down. You cook over it. You eat around it. Maybe you drink around it. For sure, you talk. Maybe you play guitar or tell stories around it. And when a new log doesn’t go in, the dimming fire defines the arc of the evening back into darkness and the pillowy solitude of sleep.

Ah… I kind of dozed off there for a moment.

previous AYoS version December 28

Let’s Not Talk About Girls

let’s not talk about lonely nights
or waiting for her to come home
we all know what it’s like
don’t think that your’e all alone

let’s not talk about girls
let’s not talk about broken hearts
let’s not talk about love and
how love can tear you apart

let’s not talk about togetherness
hearth home or family
let’s not talk about how it all falls apart
for all the world to see

let’s not talk about girls
let’s not talk about broken hearts
let’s not talk about love and
how love can tear you apart

(C)1980, TK Major

Share

I’ll keep it on the VCR and watch it over and over again…

... and I never went home

Passive aggressive.

I always thought that had a kind of cool sound, conjuring images of a leather jacketed hoodlum leaning against a lampost, the 24/7 tug of jaded, world-weary amusement pulling his thin lips into a tight grin.

But the guy in this song ain’t that kind of passive aggressive. He’s the real kind. In the backstory that’s evolved in my mind for this song since I wrote it in 1984, he’s drinking in the neighborhood dive, just like every night when he sees the paramedics in front of his house on the 11 o’clock news. When they haul his wife out under a sheet, followed by another body, this one with a familiar pair of worn cowboy boots he recognizes as his best friend’s, he mutters, “Damn junkies,” and keeps drinking.

Passive aggressive. I heard those words in anger a few times. I wish it could say it was a misdiagnosis.

But, like my late father, my ex-girlfriends just keep getting smarter every day.

 


[full version (c.1994) on Soundclick feat. Jeff Turmes, sax | requires Flash]
 

Someone Said Something

Someone said something
or I’d have never known
Someone said something
and I never went home

They found you In the arms of another man
the needle still in your vein
You finally transcended
Now you’re cheating on a higher plane

Someone said something . . .

What are a few bad habits
between old friends?
You were a junky and a trollop
but I loved you to the end

Someone said something . .

Policemen and photographers
and a local station’s mini-cam
I’ll keep it on the VCR
and watch it over and over again

Someone said something
or I’d have never known
Someone said something
and I never went home

(C)1984, TK Major

Share