Tag Archives: early work

I Was Just a Kid

I Was Just a Kid

 

 

I was just a kid when I wrote this.

To the best of my ability to remember, I think it’s about my first puppy love broken heart.

The two women who would probably think they knew who it was about would be mistaken, in all likelihood, because once my brief but tragically deep bout of puppy love was over, I put Donna out of my mind as completely as I could… and, happily, in those days I had a lot of distractions.

But when I was in the middle of it… oh boy. I felt — repeat after me, kids — like someone had reached into my chest and ripped out my heart. (There must be an endocrine gland somewhere in the human body which secretes a hormone that produces that precise feeling — since that phrase pops up in every third account of a broken heart. But, cliche or not, that’s pretty well how I felt.)

Now… in the song, the kid, the protagonist, my alter ego, appears to have somehow caused some sort of blip on The Other’s emotional radar — certainly he refers to it.

But the reality was a bit different, I’m afraid. Sure, Donna made some gentle but firm noises about how breaking up with me was hard for her, too, but it was painfully clear to me that she was moving on and not looking back.

And in a few months, she was barely a blip on my emotional radar.

You couldn’t say that about the next two women in my life… they both owned me entirely — in very different ways — for many years after that… It seemed like whichever was farthest away haunted me. When one was in Morocco and the other was here… my mind was in Morocco. When the first was home and the second was in Germany… I fantasized about showing up on her doorstep in Bad Kreuznach. I obsessed.

And then they were both gone.

I didn’t really know what to do or what to think…

In time, I kind of moved on.

Kind of…

I think this is the oldest song I’ve posted here. I used to consider it the second “keeper” I’d written. I think I performed it the very first time I played in front of an audience. (It was just a lunchtime open mic at my university — but it was about five years before I should have played in front of an audience. I was pathetic. And I say that with the dispassionate distance that more than three decades of playing in front of all kinds of audiences brings. I was truly pathetic. Ya hadda be there.)

As I got a few more finished songs in my folio, this one got kicked into the needs-work file and… like so many denizens of that of that spottedly sunny but ultimately purgatorially gloomy kingdom… it never got finished. Until Now. I changed a chord (or maybe not… I barely remember) and I’m calling that done. It has almost no words? So be it.

[The photo of me in this post is actually about 15 years later, not long after I’d come out of performance retirement to begin playing again as a solo.]

Internet Archive page for this recording

I Was Just a Kid

I was just a kid who’d memorized some lines
I never dreamed I would hurt you
you said we couldn’t run from the pain that would come
now you wear that pain
and it suits you

we picked up out places in the game that went before
the path lay in lies to be burned through
if I could run back home I would lay me back down
and suckle at the breast of virtue

(C) 1972, TK Major

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I Called Your Name

I Called Your Name

The sun poked down through tall pines in a mountain canyon in early fall a long, long time ago.

The air was cool but the sun was warm on his shoulders and back as he squatted on a rock above the little creek watching insects skitter across the surface and small, silvery fish darting in and out of the shadows. A big crawdad waved its arms a bit and crawled under some rocks.

She was a little farther up the creek, her long, freckled legs draped across a sunny rock, her even-more freckled face turned, eyes closed, to the sun.

They’d talked for hours, for days, for years, for centuries, until their thoughts seemed so synchronized that speaking out loud seemed unnecessary. He could close his own eyes and feel the sun on her face as though it was his own, the rock underneath her.

But something was missing.

Some part of him that had always been there was now gone. He couldn’t find it… even though he wasn’t sure quite what it was. But it was gone. He knew that.

As the day began to fade and the canyon chill set in he began making the fire as birds darted from tree to tree or sang their evening songs.

Later they sat wordlessly staring into the fire. He glanced at her face in the flickering light… her face that was so familiar, her face that he’d traced with his fingertips and kissed a thousand times was a mysterious shroud… he could feel her thoughts like a distant storm… but all he knew was… she was going.

I Called Your Name

y’know I called your name
when I was afraid
but you were upstate
and you didn’t come
though I thought you might

there was a time when I’d play any game
just to be alive
there was a time
long enough to wait
time enough to wait
time enough to bring it back
and stash it away

a man thought you were the queen
did not mean a thing
but I thought it did
and if you were the queen
I wondered
and I wondered
how you kept it hid
and how did you steal
that shining light
how did you steal that blinding light
how did you steal that shining light from me
how did you steal that pure white light from me

(C)1972, TK Major

[This is, more or less, the third real song I ever wrote. The second (which won’t be appearing here unless I make an archaelogical dig into the darkest reaches of my garage) was a bit of an epic involving spiritual paralysis, crafted around a central metaphor of the carved ebony icons I saw being sold under the elevated railway near the Gare du Nord in Paris in 1971. I don’t even remember what the first one was about.]

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Little Blue Vacuum Cleaner

Little Blue Vacuum Cleaner
This song from 1973 used to drive one of my frequent music playing buddies absolutely nuts. It was written while I was in the grips of a fascination with what we might call “cosmic whimsy.” The simplest objects and ideas had deep metaphysical resonance for me, imbued with a sublime and reassuring humor. (Well… you know, it seemed sublime at the time.) Maybe it was the grimness of the war or the absurdity of mainstream society… maybe it was that do-it-yourself primal scream therapy program I came up with for myself.

Of course, one man’s whimsy is another’s terminal cuteness, and my pal Caz Camberline, who has over the years suffered through scores of my songs in various performance circumstances, could never swallow the cute formalism of the metaphysical central metaphor.And then there was the vacuum cleaner/highway shoes jump… I really didn’t have an answer for that one. Still don’t.

Now, that’s what A Year of Songs is all about.


Little Blue Vacuum Cleaner

Got yer little blue vaccuum cleaner
got his paregoric got his own Dust Preener
got that San Antone
Got that Dorothy Malone

Got the finity blues
Walking round the city in his highway shoes

Everything he see he suck it right up
nothing left to do he turn on himself
everything that’s outside must be in
everything is known, you just begin again

Got that Einstein Circular Space
got that black hole — he want a little taste
Got the world up inside his head
Where will it go when he finds out he’s he’s

Welcome to samsara now go home
welcome to my universe–here, God is on the phone
You’re welcome to wonder what it’s all about
But please don’t try to tell me when you find out

Got the finity blues
Walking round the city in his highway shoes

(C) 1973,1996 TK Major
(Transcribed from memory with minor revisions Jan 2 1996)

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