Monthly Archives: November 2005

No Fool

I wrote this riding my motorcycle home one lunch hour in 1980. Compton to the southern tip of Long Beach in 12 minutes. It wasn’t something I did every day but, when you work in a big warehouse in Compton and you ride the bus 3 hours a day when it rains… sometimes it’s almost like magic to be able to see the ocean and make a cheese sandwich in your own kitchen on your lunch hour.

I pulled up in front of the shoebox-sized apartment I had at the time on the Alamitos Peninsula, threw the bike up on the center stand and ran upstairs and grabbed a guitar and my notebook. (That’s notebook, as in spiral-bound… this was 1980.)

Simple chords underlay the melody I’d had in my head… a modified 12 bar blues. There was another verse in between the current second and third, which I eventually dropped.

At the time, I was writing a lot of dark, cynical, and/or just plain depressing songs (imagine, if you will), many of which ended up performed by Machine Dog, the band some friends and I had formed. By contrast, this seemed almost cheerful, with its vaguely reggae feel and sappy, wait-by-the-telephone protagonist.

NO FOOL

Sitting all alone
by my telephone
Waited all day
but that’s okay
I could wait all night
and that would be all right
for a woman like you
I would wait all my life

Sometimes I pull myself together
and I go downtown
I’m all dressed up
and I wander around
and I feel like a fool
I can’t stop thinking of you
When you’re all alone
this city’s so cruel

I walk along the river
until the stars come out
I sit by myself alone in the dark
and I wonder
Oh yes I wonder
I’m just like a child
but I am no fool
I know it’s over

(C)1980, TK Major

Tell It to Me in a Language That I’ll Understand

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Tell it to me in a language that I'll understand...

Not quite written on a bet, this song was an ‘assignment’ in a songwriter’s workshop some pals and I had going for a few meetings.

And it probably shows some wrenchmarks… lacking any emotional inspiration, whatsoever, I fell back on the eternal pop music subject, lust. What I lacked in emotional investment, I probably tried to compensate for with attempted cleverness. And, as any man of the world knows, cleverness and lust are problematic collaborators.

Tell It to Me in a Language That I’ll Understand

Tell it to me baby
in a language that I’ll understand
I don’t speak french italian
hollandaise or hindustan
you look like a straight talkin’ woman
why don’t ya give it to me like a man

don’t put it between the lines
I won’t get the inference
don’t get into that dialectical material
let’s just split the difference
Why don’t ya come right out and say it
and then let’s see the evidence

I know ya got something to say to me doll
don’t bother putting it in words
I think I know what you’re thinking
only I think I thought of it first
I guess the question is
Can we fall in love right now
or do we gotta talk all night first?

2 Dazed 2 Care

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2 Dazed 2 Care

When I was writing this and when I originally recorded it, it was called “Poland” because I was so impressed with the crushing situation faced by Polish democrats in the face of the Russian-backed Polish Communist government’s repressive tactics and inability to provide food and basic necessities to the Polish people.

But that was more a distancing metaphor for my own darker feelings. The giddy euphoria I had felt getting out of the hospital after 2 months after my motorcycle wreck quickly evaporated when I hit the bricks in my walker. While I soon exchanged the walker for a pair of crutches, and six months later a single cane — I was, without my knowledge, walking on a broken leg. And from that point on, for several years, my leg didn’t improve, but rather got worse.

(Second opinion, people. Get a real one — not from the other docs in the group, no matter how “top flight” they supposedly are. I didn’t sue but, for the sake of the community, I probably should have. Several years later, my doctor, a very nice man who I suspect had serious problems reintegrating into civilian life after training as a battlefield orthopedist in Vietnam, paralyzed a young man in a “routine” vertebrae fusion. The story was that he’d wanted to make sure the young man would be able to go back to his warehouse job. Very similar to my own story with the good doc — he asked me if I wanted him to fuse my broken hip rather than reconstruct it as a functioning hip — since the fused hip would be better for carrying heavy loads — I, too, was a warehouseman at the time — of course, with a fused hip, one would never be able to walk with anything even approaching a normal gait. Psycho. But a nice guy. He let me drink in the hospital — even when I was on injections of morphine and demerol. Talk about yer warm and fuzzies. Then again, it wasn’t any fun at all when I went straight from warm and fuzzy pain meds in the hospital to beer and whatever I could find around my girlfriend’s place when I first got sprung. I kept reaching for that nurse call button…)

Anyhow, where was I… ah yeah, my leg was broken and aching all the time, almost a year and a half after the wreck. Throw that together with a stretch of destructive storms that seemed to go on all winter, compounding my physical misery, a disintegrating relationship with the girl I’d been seeing, and world political malaise — and ya get this cheery little ditty…

original 1982 dark new wave recording [soundclick page]

2 DAZED 2 CARE

Turn down this street
back down that alley
there is no escape and there is no stalling

The future is here
and it’s more of the past
All I remember
is falling and falling

Leave me alone
just let me be
with wounds this deep
they just have to bleed

Desperation is short supply
I used up my panic in the crises last year
It’s hard to worry, it’s hard to care
when you’re so tired of anger
and you’re so tired of fear

No point in crying, laughing or dreaming
no point in love, no % in fear
desperation is in short supply
so tired of anger
2 dazed 2 care

Another Dead Soldier (in My War on Alcohol)

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My war on alcohol

Okay… as promised, here’s a song that recombines verses from yesterday’s Blue Recollection with a similarly themed set of lyrics.

(And there’s yet another song that incorporates some of the lyrics from this song — but it won’t likely be in AYoS because of a significant f-word problem — it’s in the title, it’s in the chorus. Mumbling won’t help. But, anyhow, that one’s a love song.)