Bad enough if it’s with some jet set pretty boy or sweet talkin’, movie star-handsome lothario with a two thousand dollar suit and a low slung sports car.
But when it’s an overweight pool guy or the middle-aged, balding fellow the mini-blind store sent out to measure the windows… well… it’s enough to send you back to the pre-nup with a magnifying glass and a legal dictionary.
About today’s version: I was feelin’ a little frisky when I cut this. It’s more than a bit of a mess but… well… I think by now we all know that tight and clean is not what AYoS is all about. The guitar and vocal on the left was the original track, I added another guitar, switching to a slide part way through, realized the original vocal was even more buried, decided to chip in another vocal track, and decided some of my patented, arhythmic percussion work would be the cherry on top of this hot fudge mishegaas.
how come you love me
how come you hate me
how come you just won’t leave me a alone
did you ever have the notion
you ain’t gotta monopoply on emotion
honey can’t you tell my pain is real
honey come here put your hand on my heart there’s a world of feelings trapped inside look in my eyes and tell me once and for all honey make your mind up are you his or mine
how come you love me
how come you hate me
how come I can’t tell them apart
where was your conscience
when your mind told my body
to make sure that your soul
had my heart
honey come here put your hand on my heart there’s a world of feelings trapped inside look in my eyes and tell me once and for all honey make your mind up are you his or mine (C)2007, TK Major
War! What’s it good for?
Say it, say it, say it again…
So… this song, below, is certainly not one of my best songs, by a stretch. And, yet, I’ve posted a slug of versions of it here on the AYoS parade of songwriting shame…
What gives?
It’s this damn war, I tell you.
Like the overwhelming majority of US citizens, I’m sick to death of it, sick of the suffering of others, sick of the squandered sacrifices of our men and women who feel called to fight, sick of the lies, and sick of the excuses of those politicains and legislators who claim they were fooled into supporting it.
That, my friends, is a sock full of shit.
The truth about what US intelligence analysts really thought about Saddam and the supposed threat he posed to the the Middle East and the US was known then, as it is known now.
It was, indeed, in — if not all the papers — certainly in responsible, mainstream publications like the Christian Science Monitor and plenty of others, even if the supposedly liberal New York Times seemed to focus all its energies on promoting this most foolish of modern boondoggles of death, destruction, and cynical profiteering.
And it was well covered in the British and Australian press who had a lot less temerity when it came time to speak “truth to power” and seemed far less worried about offending those whose first response to the 9/11 attacks was to rain death and destruction indiscriminately on any handy villains, guilty or not.
Now… don’t get me wrong.
I did support the incursion into Afghanistan to get the people who our intel officials did think were behind the 9/11 attacks — and who, in fact, were bold enough to take credit for it. Hell, I thought just the act of claiming credit was worthy of some serious ass-kicking…
But there was — in the words of our very own intel and security experts — “little or no credible evidence” of Saddam Hussein’s purported involvement with the attacks.
Yet, there we were, confronted by the sorry spectacle of not just the idiot-president’s own party of warmongering lackies (full disclosure: I am a Republican) rushing to join the gangpile of those willfully ignoring the truth — but the “loyal opposition” — the then-Democratic Congressional leadership joining the festival of deception and disingenuity, rushing to vote for war against a nation for which there was little or no credible evidence of involvement in the monstrous attacks on New York and Washington.
So… yeah… this Old Beast, again…
A note about today’s version:This recording was actually made in early 1998 as part of the AYoS precursor, TK Major’s Song of the Day. Unlike the mostly acoustic/folk AYoS, the SotD project was all over the map, production and style-wise but this song, with its string arrangement (OK, synthetic strings, to be sure, I’d already spent the retirement money I could have devoted to hiring a real string section) and putatively soothing background vocal harmonies, was an odd duck, even for that polystylistic culture jumble.
Have you embraced the beast?
I see the mark is on your face
Have you embraced the beast?
Are you a slave of greed and hate?
Have you embraced the beast?
Do you serve the war machine?
Have you embraced the beast?
Did you trade in your soul on (for) the finer things?
Have you embraced the beast?
Do your taxes buy bullets for fascist death squads?
Have you embraced the beast?
They’ll be coming to your hometown before too long . . .
Have you embraced the beast?
I see the mark is on your face
Have you embraced the beast?
Are you a slave of greed and hate?
Everyone had a story. Some had been factory workers laid off from a string of jobs. A couple had been suits, grinding away in corporate offices. There was an accountant. He liked to joke that he’d help the others with their taxes for a swig of Mad Dog 20/20.
For a while, there was even a doctor, a foreign guy who’d been caught overprescribing. Word was he’d overpribed half the inland empire and, when he lost his license and his world came down around him, warrants out for his arrest, the doc had run away, eventually spending all his cash and ending up under the wide overpass, on the railroad right-of-way… not more than a quarter mile from the harbor. With the rest of the nobodies who used to be somebody.
When people asked the lanky, long-haired guy with the cloudy blue eyes for his story, he kept it simple:
“One day… I just fell.”
That was it. All you could get out of him. He kept to himself and slept somewhere else, only coming into the encampment to trade and occasionally score something to take the edge off. Folks said he drank — but he drank alone. Someone said he often sat by the bluffs along the beach, a pony bottle in an inside pocket of his worn, gray parka.
One day some college kids came down into the camp.
“We heard about this guy, here. He used to be a rock star.” They said a name and a younger guy with half his teeth missing, taping a battered baby stroller back together with duct tape said, “Yeah, I heard of him.”
The college kids passed around a photo. It was one of those head and shoulder shots with the top of a guitar showing and a rough and chipped brick wall in the background.
“Oh, yeah. That guy. He comes around here maybe once or twice a week. He’s kind of a loner. So… what? He was a big rock star? When?”
When? A long, long time ago, indeed. A million miles and ten thousand years ago.
A condo, a fiance, a fancy car, an agent, a dog, and 25 guitars ago…
Go back home and tell all the kids this is what it’s like when their hero hits the skids
go out to the farm and tell my ma and pa the higher you climb the farther you must fall
I started out thinking
that I’d always know the score
now I hardly know
what I was counting for
I lost my one true love
my agent and my car
my condo and my dog
and twenty five guitars
but baby I was lost before
I ever got to town
I threw the map away
the day I let you down
yeah I hit the big time
but the big time it hits back
and all the way up
I was looking back
Wake me up and say its all a dream we could drink coffee and talk about what it all means I dreamed I dreamed I threw it all away If I could just wake up back in your arms today
I was on the fat side of heaven
how come it felt like hell
each day was a struggle
one day I just fell
The bottom dropped out
I laughed the whole way down
with a noose around yer neck
LA is a much nicer town
Wake me up and say its all a dream we could drink coffee and talk about what it all means I dreamed I dreamed I threw it all away If I could just wake up back in your arms today
Go back home and tell all the kids
this is what it’s like when their hero hits the skids (C)1997, 2007, TK Major
It’s easy to lose your perspective in this world. It’s easy to start thinking you’re… you know… somebody.
Even though, in the end, you will certainly be nobody.
But, with the household staff buzzing around you like so many worker bees making things nice for the queen, it’s easy to forget that inside that Greek-columned mausoleum, inside that marble crypt… you’ll be just as dead as the nameless drunk in potter’s field.
You must think you’re oh so very
terribly important
with your car, your house, your maid,
your butler and your porters.
But seen from the stars you’re the same as all of us are. And it might seem a queer notion but we’re all just spit in the ocean.
Hop upon a plane
run around the world
Tokyo, Paris, Rome, Berlin
and they’re all full of your kind of girl.
You can have all the ones you want you can play with people’s lives. You can have all the rope you want but soon enough they expect that noose to be tied.
Seen from above just another slightly balding head a little bit of dandruff on the shoulders but you’ll be dead soon enough, anyway.
Hiding in your villa
on the Dalmatian Coast.
Your blue ribbon Afghan hound at your feet
the one that you prize the most.
But your baby’s got the rabies
and he’s gonna bite your foot.
ain’t there an end to the indignities
through which a human being
must be put.
Seen from the stars Just another chunk of rock in space. little ones crawling about on it but they’ll be gone soon enough, anyway.
You must think you’re oh so very
terribly important
with your car, your house, your maid,
your butler and your porters.
But seen from the stars you’re the same as all of us are. And it must seem a queer notion but we’re all just spit in the ocean.
