Monthly Archives: June 2007

How many times must I fall down?

How Many Times Must I Fall Down?
New song alert!

When he was a kid he’d lie on his back in the sand just above the tideline where it dropped away to the bay, listening to the murmur of his grandparents talking by the firepit, watching the stars shimmer and wave above the fire, red glowing bits tracing the undulations as they crossed the starfield.

Sometimes, if no one else was nearby to be bothered, his grandfather would turn on the Sony transistor radio quietly, tuning in KFI 130 miles to the north, the reassuringly familiar voice of Vin Scully calling a Dodger game suggesting there was continuity even in an era when you could carry a radio in your coat pocket, Russian satellites were circling the globe — and the Dodgers would move from Brooklyn to L.A.

Dedicated readers will remember I posted a link to a discussion of an earlier version of this song in the songwriter’s forum I’ve been moderating for the last few weeks. The discussion there and your comments here helped me greatly. The changes were mostly not dramatic — but the extended discussion of the how many clowns section did prove especially helpful and I think it resulted in getting a lot closer to what I was after.

I was tempted to say that I wished I could have incorporated everyone’s suggestions — but in a very real way I did.

So I thank my friends there and here for their generous and thoughtful comments and suggestions. There wasn’t a bad one in the lot.

How Many Times Must I Fall Down?

more stream & DL options

lyrics
How Many Times Must I Fall Down?

How many roads
must I walk down
before I can sleep in the sand?
How many times
must i fall down
before I can
take someone’s hand?

How many doors
must I kick in
before I find
the magic one?
How many dreams
must I tear apart
before I see how it’s all done?

How did i get here?
where have I been?
How long have
I been this way?

I remember a time
I remember a place
I just don’t
remember the way

How many clowns
does it take to screw down
a reason for a man
to exist?

How many times must
I see the light?
There must be
something I missed…

How did i get here?
where have I been?
How long have
i been this way?

I remember a time
I remember a place
I just don’t remember the way

How many roads…

(C)2007, TK Major

Those blues will sit on your head…

2 Replies

Special Feature: Feelin’ post-literate? Listen to the audio version of today’s commentary…

(music below)

LA's Not Such a Big Town

Ah…

The big kiss off… engine of ten thousand songs. A veritable cornerstone of pop music. Topic of some of the 60’s best rock and pop writers: your Dylans, your Stones, your Lennons and your McCartneys, et al.

It was a time when everyone seemed to be telling someone (and sometimes everyone) else to just go… jump in a lake.

My lost generation was telling our parents — who we now revere and lionize as the Heroic World War II Generation — to take their repressive social mores and rigid caste and racial divisions — and their “ugly little war” in Vietnam — and… take a hike.

Workers were questioning the advantage of the yoke. Foremen and bosses were telling their bosses to shove it up the executive elevator shaft. And the rich were ignoring the pleadings of their brokers and legal staffs to join monasteries and ashrams.

But me… I was trying to make my relationship with my GF of the moment work…

I can hear the eyeballs rolling up across cyberspace… but, honestly… oh, never mind…

Let’s say that I thought, then, that I was trying to make it work.

At any rate, I wrote this while I was still involved with my GF of the moment… and would be, on and off, for a couple more years, give or take…

And I told her it wasn’t about her or directed to her… but she was a very smart young woman and it took her about a half-minute to unscrew her face after she heard me play it the first time… which was gratifying.

LA’s Not Such a Big Town

more stream & DL options

previous versions
Monday, December 12, 2005

lyrics
LA’s Not Such a Big Town

Well, I hardly know where you’re coming from
but it ain’t hard to see where you’re going to
Hey hey, Darlin’
I just can’t save you now

You hold on to me, so damn tight
then push me away — I walk home through the night
thinking ’bout how
I’d be seeing you around

Hey, hey, Darlin’, guess I’ll be seeing you around
After all L.A. ain’t such a big town
Hey hey Darlin, I hope you ain’t feeling down
cause those blues will sit on your head
jack your heart and turn your life around

Now you always argue about everything
In your domain irrationality’s king
I got a list of topics
a mile long that can’t be brung up

You called me up on the telephone
and asked me if I was alone
I said yes —
you said good –and you hung up

Hey, hey, Darlin’, I guess yer feeling proud
after all) ya cataloged my faults told the whole
goldang world out loud
Hey hey darlin, I guess it ain’t so strange
You tore up my body,
broke my heart, and threw away my brains

Well, I tried to talk out all those things
but your inattentive condescendance stings
Hey hey darlin
there’s no point in talking now

Well I never had the money for diamond rings
nor the guaranteed returns wise investment brings
Hey hey darlin,
I guess I’ll be seeing ya around

Raise a glass to the bosses!

1 Reply

And the Company Says

Raise a glass to the bosses!

Toiling away in their chrome steel towers, a secretary on the lap and a Cubano going out in the ashtray, they pull the levers that make you and me dance.

A hundred years or a little more ago there was open warfare between the bosses and the workers… the workers had the numbers — after all were the ones doing the work — but the bosses kept the money, or most of it. And they pumped a fair bit of it back into protecting the system they had worked to perfect, hiring private armies to beat back the roiling masses outside their towers. When voices and placards were met with fists, and fists were met with clubs, and clubs were met with guns, guns were met with bombs… there was war in the streets and in the factories.

It wasn’t good for anyone.

There’s self interest and then there’s enlightened self interest. But there wasn’t a whole lot of that, then. It took years, decades to turn a hard-fought and uneasy impasse into a period of relative productivity, peace, and even prosperity for… more, if not all.

The Good Book (pick your favorite) seems to suggest that greed is the root of evil.

And that’s always made a lot of sense to me.

People who think their needs are so important that they are justified in taking from you… people who become trapped in a self-built prison of compulsive aquisition, as though they were saving up for the afterlife… we know what they do to society.

But what do they do to themselves? The malignancy of their greed eats them from the inside out, even as the wealth piles up around them…

And the Company Says

more stream & DL options

previous versions
Tuesday, January 10, 2006

lyrics
And the Company Says

You walk into town
and you look all around
and it doesn’t take long
to see that something is wrong
very wrong

the people stand around
with their eyes on the ground
it doesn’t take long
to see that something is wrong

and the company says
it’s a company town
now, if you don’t like that
don’t ya hang around

and the Company says
it’s a company town
if you don’t like that
sell a penny on the pound
give ‘way

One man stands
says I don’t run
but the goons come around
with their clubs and guns

and they knock him down
and they kick him around
and they drag his body
to the edge of town

and the company says
he’s better off dead
than fightin’ with us

and the company says
it’s a company town
if you don’t like that
we’ll put you in the ground

and the Company says
it’s a company town
now, if you don’t like that
don’t ya hang around

and the Company says
it’s a company town
if you don’t like that
sell a penny on the pound
give ‘way

and the company says
he’s better off dead
than fightin’ with us

and the company says
it’s a company town
if you don’t like that
we’ll put you in the ground

We picked up our places in the game that went before…

1 Reply

I Was Just a Kid

How did I live so long?

Ah, well, the one thing we can be sure of is that it once and for all disproves any positive correlation between virtue and longevity. Not that I’m that old. But I’m definitely well past the good die young age band. More in survivor territory, I’d say.

Anyhow, gettin’ old. It’s hell, yadda yadda.

They talk about wasting youth on the young — but, really, I don’t think I could take what I went through when I was young, now.

Or put myself, through, more than anything. But it had to be gone through, apparently: driven by a highly personal vision of my dharma, I plunged on.

At any rate, nowadays I have philosophy on my side — and plenty glad I do. Getting old is hell…

I Was Just a Kid

more stream & DL options

previous versions
Saturday, December 09, 2006

lyrics
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 our 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, 2007, TK Major