Category Archives: acoustic

Truck stop, french fries, ketchup on your cheek in the pale moonlight…

Truck stop, french fries, ketchup on your cheek in the pale moonlight

How many of us have the kind of memories we thought we’d have, growing up?

I remember the day I decided, once and for all, to find the malt shop. On bus trips and car trips through downtown, I’d kept my eyes peeled, convinced that I’d find that centerpiece of teen culture (that I saw on TV, in the movies, even in comics) among the other one-off exotica (a bookstore, a music store with sheet music, a fancy men’s store with elevators… the height of the urban sophistication in a county that had gone from farms and orange groves to suburban tracts almost overnight in the postwar boom… sure there was a single elevator far in a corner of the new Sears, there seemingly for the panic-stricken escalator-phobes who would freeze in panic in front of the then-new-fangled electric stairways).

Surely, there must be a malt shop full of bobby-soxed and pony-tailed teen girls with their pompadoured boyfriends.

I spent most of a day riding my bicycle up one urban street after another. There may have only been two business drags downtown in those days (still are, come to think of it) but there were a slug of side streets, at least five or six with fingers of business running off toward the old, 20’s and 30’s housing tracts that trailed off toward the eastern hills. I went up one, down the other, peering into every storefront.

Several times I thought I’d scored.

There was an old fashioned pharmacy with a short counter. Not a teenager in sight. I stuck my head in anyway to ask if they had malts. No, came the answer. But the pharmacist might remember how to make a cherry phosphate. It sounded like medicine to me, so I moved on.

There was an ice cream parlor… part of what would later become a massive chain. And they did have milkshakes. They also had a no loitering policy aimed squarely at the very teen scene I sought.

I never found that malt shop.

But I kept looking for it and other iconic cultural landmarks I thought were my birthright.

Even after I was deep in my teens and knew full well that I was chasing fantasies, I kept looking. Getting a car in that long ago era when gas was cheap (a car with virtually no backseat, frustrating yet another teen fantasy, but one with, for the era, great mileage) meant I could extend that search out over wider and wider geographic areas.

I found myself driving for… sorry my environmental brothers and sisters… the hell of it, often deep through the night, crossing counties, driving ever eastward into the hills, then through them into the inland empire that lay between and beyond our low coastal mountains.

Eventually I found myself late one evening in San Bernardino… San Berdoo as it was more often known. It was a Saturday night. By then I had long hair and looked like the other body surfers I hung out with… torn jeans, faded flannel shirt, hiking boots.

So when I pulled into a drive-in truck stop diner with sullen, beehive haired waitresses teetering out to rows of parked cars on red high heels, thick hose disappearing into particularly unsexy red shorts (with matching vests) I felt like I’d finally found the space and time warp that would take me to lost but not forgotten dreams of my youth.

And, yes, there were teens.

Pompadored dudes, complete with cigarette packs rolled in left sleeves of sharp white T’s and tight, pressed jeans, and pointed toe shoes. No lie.

The girls were… not the girls of my dreams. Instead of pony tails and poodle skirts they had thick masks of makeup, vampire eyes, and stiff, elaborate stacks of teased and ratted hair. When they’d get out of their boyfriend’s lowered Chevies, it became apparent that few of them would soon be recruited as runway models. Too many malts, was my guess.

But I see the Rose of this song more as a girl from my earlier dreams… a pretty little thing just a few months shy of adulthood, her dark eyes filled with both love and passion, her small hands holding her boyfriend tight, her trembling lips seeking his.

And I see that boyfriend — the singer of this song, if you will — filled with passion of his own… longing — and a primal, terrifying fear of the fiery love in this young girl’s eyes.

Internet Archive page for this recording
previous AYoS version

San Bernardino Rose

San Bernardino Rose
I am so alone
and there’s so many bad things
Bad things I have done

I know that you’re barely a woman yet
hope you’d come to understand
San Bernardino Rose
I want to love you
I need to be your man

Truck stop French Fries
Catchup on your cheek in the pale moonlight
I hold you you kiss me
I know it’s wrong when it feels this right

I know that you’re barely a woman yet
I’d hope you’d come to understand
San Bernardino Rose
I want to love you
I need to be your man

(C)1990, TK Major

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let’s be hypnotized

Meet me in the world of lies...

There are lies. There are damnable lies.

And there are pretty lies you want to live inside forever.

You want them whispered to you. You want to hear them in your dreams. You want to find them scribbled on notes and stuck on the refrigerator in the morning.

And when they’re just a fading, bittersweet memory… you long to hear them again — one more time.

Internet Archive page for this recording

THE WORLD OF LIES

Meet me in the world of lies
let’s be hypnotized…

You know that love
is just a foolish game
it always fades away
I know that you won’t stay
but at least you’re here today

Meet me in the world of lies
let’s be hypnotized
Something in me
dies
every time a dream slips by

I know that I’ll always be alone
I know life is just to die
a wise man gives up the world
but I guess I’m just not that wise

Meet me in the world of lies
let’s be hypnotized
Don’t let this dream die
meet me in the world of lies

Summer 1983

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Hoping for rain…

The world is so big...

 

 

You know you’re lonely when you find yourself doing lonely things like hitching half the length of California (don’t try that in your century, kids) or going on long, rambling, solo camping trips, driving from forsaken spot to god forsaken spot and packing up and moving on if anyone else shows up in camp even if you just got there that morning. You find yourself listening for thunder through the mountains a lot. Feeling it resonate in the emptiness inside you… filled for a moment with rumbling sound and dull pain and then empty again.

Internet Archive page for this recording
previous AYoS version

World So Big*

The world is so big
then again the world’s so small…
I might be in your arms tomorrow night
or I might never make it home to you at all

true love, baby, the bottom drops out
and then you fall…
it only happens one time baby
if you’re lucky maybe not at all

I could live a thousand lifetimes
I’d never forget a single one of your lies…
I could die a million times
ant the ghost of you would still draw me back to life


*name changed from “The World Is So Big” (9/25/2007)
(C)2007,TKMajor

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Important

You must think you're oh so very terribly important

When I think of rich people I’ve known, I always forget about Howard Hughes.

Well, I didn’t know him, personally, but an ex-GF’s mom had been a very good friend of Hughes’ second wife, the actress, Jean Peters. Peters threw a party at Hughes’ estate for my GF’s little sister on the occasion of her baptism or confirmation or… something or other.

At one point, my ex-GF said, Hughes himself came out of an upstairs study, stood by a balustrade for a moment, looking down on scores of little girls in frilly dresses, shook his head, and went back into his study.

Yeah… that was my first brush with the super rich.

It didn’t really change my life.

But my intimate connection with Hughes didn’t really end there. Later, I would become friends with the daughter of Hughes’ most famous biographer, whose unpublished manuscript was stolen and became the basis for an infamous hoax, a Hughes “autobiography” that turned out to be eerily close to reality because it was based on years of my friend’s father’s reporting. (He went on to have a bestseller of his own but that’s another story.)

I go on at length really only to show that I have no clue how the super wealthy live their lives or how they think.

Hughes was a driven man, clearly, he made a fortune in aircraft and then, perhaps drawn in by his dalliances with starlets and actresses, became a movie exec and producer.

He was, in the thinking of the time, about as rich as God’s older brother but the end of his life was shrouded in mystery as a group of former CIA and other intelligence officers insinuated themselves as his “handlers” — allowing or encouraging doctors to keep Hughes, himself, loaded on deadening painkillers, barbiturates, and powerful opiates and hypnotics.

Hughes reportedly stopped cutting his hair and fingernails, and an incipient obsessive compulsive disorder began manifesting itself, perhaps aggravated or even caused by the powerful drug cocktails that kept him in a semi-stupor while his supposed assistants ran his empire in ways that often seemed contrary to his own interests but which, perhaps not surprisingly, seemed to benefit both the handlers and their associates in the US intel and covert action communities.

Eventually, Hughes died, misunderstood, unkempt, apparently even malnourished… he was, in essence, broken and alone.

 


[produced dub version on Soundclick | requires Flash]


Internet Archive page for this recording

previous AYoS version (30 September)

Spit in the Ocean

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.

(C) 1975, T.K. Major

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