First… a GIG ALERT:
I’ll be joining fellow legends, Tim Swenson (formerly of Lunchbox [the original late 80s LA faves — not the johnny-come-lately 90s band of the same name] , Candida, Drink Deep, and Thieving Kind) and Raindog (aka publisher and poet RD Armstrong in his bluesy, whisky-voiced folky mode) at Long Beach, CA, cultural mecca, Portfolio, this coming Friday,FEBRUARY 23, at 9pm, in an informal roundtable, song-swap format. Portfolio is a charming, comfortable old coffeehouse with great coffee. There’s no cover and all ages are welcome.
Uh… remember me?
I didn’t think so.
I’m the guy who used to write this blog, here. I had podcasts and silly little vignettes purportedly designed to illustrate or augment the mostly acoustic versions of my songs I’d been posting since Fall Equinox 2005…
I know, I know… it’s pretty hazy to me, too.
Of course, it’s really only been a few weeks since I posted any new music… but in that time I’ve lost my voice, forgotten how to play (just in time for the live show mentioned above), had my songwriter’s block turn into blogger’s block and, not necessarily unrelatedly, had to move the written content part of this blog from one server to another. (Forget that happy face talk in the post below… the aftermath of the move was, as they say on the internet, a royal PITA.)
But I’m back, damn it, and, if not proud, at least unbowed.
Here’s a little (and I mean little) improvised instrumental guitar duet (featuring that great duo me & I) just to get things rolling again…
And, now while we change servers, we’ll hear this lovely organ interlude…
[Update: the move went almost perfectly. It was eerie. Anyhow… no music this post. Your ears needed the rest.]
Nostalgia: Tape Decks I Have Known
Yes, before women and the bottle… I had another love…
I’ll spare y’all the 3340-S’s and 3440-S’s, the Series 70 1/2″ 8, or the 40-4 that is, I think, my last remaining reel machine. (All those were TASCAMs by the way.)
We’ve all seen our share of most of those, probably.
But yesterday I was pondering this picture I’d earlier stumbled across on the web of (an instance of) the first tape machine I did an overdub on, circa 1964, Sony TC630. (It belonged to my “rich” cousin and it was an object of great envy on my part. But he was also generous enough to loan it to me a few times, including to do the preprogrammed music for my grandparents’ 50th anniversery party, for which I also recorded my mom dueting with herself on “The Anniversery Waltz” — my first overdub.)
While I pondered the glory that had been the TC630, half-watched on the TV was the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 DVD of The Crawling Hand.
I looked up from the photo of the TC630 just in time to see one of the characters in the movie opening a small tape recorder… it took a second but I realized it was a copy of the same, no-name, no-capstan $20 battery powered tape recorder I got for Christmas in 1962 — my very first tape recorder.
The Machine That Started It All for Me
About halfway through the message he’s taping to tell his girlfriend and her professor uncle that he’s turning into a monster he goes into monster mode and smashes the poor little machine (How poor was it? So poor it couldn’t even afford a capstan. Buh dum.)
Or tries to smash it. The plastic top goes flying right away — but it was made during the waning days of the overbuilt-metal era of Japanese transistor consumer electronics — and no matter how the teen-monster kicks and stomps it, it remains amazingly intact…
Around the beginning of my senior year of high school I pulled my savings together and bought my own stereo 7″ reel deck, a Sony TC-250a… it was $119, fair trade, IIRC — and it was NO TC630… you couldn’t even record a single track at once — just what was effectively “joint stereo,” so there was no overdubbing possible. That would have been nice but I didn’t play an instrument then and I mostly wanted to make my own mix tapes and… you know… stuff.
My first plug in tape recorder, also a Sony, a little hazy on the number, was a 5″ reel transistor-tube hybrid machine (transistor recording preamps and tube power amp). I HAVE seen a picture of it on the web but foolishly didn’t save it — and haven’t seen one since. It had a molded white heavy styrene top and a coral colored grill and underpan. I really loved that thing but sold it for something like $3.50 at a yard sale in the early 70s. I guess sometimes you gotta let go. The kid who bought it probably had a lot of fun. I hope.
Terminator menu system-like, I see a short list of possible angles and ledes…
1) Since the beginning of time, the fool has symbolized man’s ambivalence about the relationship between knowledge, wisdom, and grace…
2) The idiot. The savant. Are they not two sides of the same illusory coin of enlightenment…?
3) In the medieval courts, who better than the sovereign’s own chosen fool to plumb the inner machinations of that court or even to orchestrate those intrigues…
I dunno.
Here are two songs that both have the word fool in the title.
The first is something of an oldie, going back to the early 80s but here rearranged somewhat, different chords, a slightly darker feel.
The second is, even by the rough standards of AYoS, pretty sloppy. Intentionally sloppy — but that’s like intentionally ugly in a painting: you have to be an artist to make it work. Here, we just have sloppiness. Still, there’s a cheery, who gives a good goshdarn exuberance to it that matches the relatively optimistic lyrics.
Relatively optimistic, that is, for this writer. I still manage to get in a line about falling down the well of one’s own soul, bottomless, hell, yadda yadda. So, anyhow…
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
I told my self
Life has no meaning
I told myself
I should stop dreaming
I told myself
I should stop being such a fool
I told myself
love’s just a lie
I told myself
I should get wise
I told myself
being kind is just being cruel
Lookin in my heart was like lookin’ in a well and if there was a bottom you couldn’t really tell as dark as midnight all the way down to hell one day I looked in and then I just fell
Then I looked in my soul
and I saw that it was empty
and I said to myself
just like the rest of them
and i said out loud
from here on
it’s all ’bout number one
But I added that up
and I factored in forever
I subtracted my dreams then
divided that by never
When I saw the bottom line
I sat down — I knew that
I was done
Lookin in my heart…
Back then I told my self
Life has no meaning
And I told myself
I should stop dreaming
Then I told myself
I should stop being such a fool
But then I thought to myself
what’s it all for?
and I thought to myself
must be something more
and I realized all at once
there’s more than one kind of fool
A sense of betrayal hung over America when this song was written. It was so heavy you could taste the bitterness in your mouth.
That feeling seeped into seemingly every aspect of our lives, from religion to family, to romance, like a corrosive leak, slowing eating its way through the infrastructure of our lives.
I wrote about that in the political sense when I posted this song before but I neglected to explore the broader implications of that acidic doubt and distrust… how it ate into not just societal institutions like government, schools, jobs, church, but right into the family and and the most intimate relationships between people.
Everything we knew was wrong.
That’s how it looked, most days.
But when I wrote this song — one of my very first — I wanted to craft a simple expression of faith in love in the face of doubt and fear… or get laid. I can’t remember which. Probably the latter.
I know what promises mean today
I don’t care I believe in you anyway
I don’t care what anyone says
I’ll believe in you until I’m dead
But at the rate things are going
That could be any day
I don’t care
I believe in you anyway
You say you’re my lover
my sister my brother my friend
I’m surprised you don’t claim
to be my mother my father
and the priest that the church said they’d send at the end
And I still don’t care what anyone says
I’ll be loving you until I’m put in my grave
but at the rate things are going
that could be any day
I don’t care I believe in you anyway
I know what promises mean today
I don’t care I believe in you anyway
