Okay… we’re in a groove. Sin, dissolution, degradation. We’re starting the year off right.
I try to present the lighter side of drunken depravity here, though, with a jauntily sloppy blues. (I realize the description of an AYoS song as “sloppy” is an exercise in redundancy — but I couldn’t figure any other way to get ‘jaunty’ in there.)
Me, I was a happy drunk. And a very, very lucky one. Of course, when I was coming up, there was a lot more tolerance of drunks. It scared me a bit, even then — or it should have. I’d snuck under the radar so much and had so many lucky breaks that I could feel it in my gut that I didn’t have any more coming. For awhile I drank at home. But for someone used to being out and carousing 6 nights out of 7, my dull groove of beer and television just provoked more drinking. One night about 11:25, watching a Cheers rerun and opening my twelfth beer that day, I bottomed out. I wasn’t particularly drunk. I was just tired. Tired of drinking. (And tired of Cheers reruns. My gosh.)
Thirteenth Bar Blues
It was the thirteenth day
of the thirteenth month
The clock on the wall
struck 13 o’clock
It was the thirteenth bar
on the thirteenth block
I had me twelve beers
and ordered one more for luck
13th bar blues…
Thirteen nightsticks
and thirteen cops
thirteen minutes
of gettin’ beat up
13 bones broke
in 13 ways
the judge said
Son, I’ll give you 13 hundred Dollars
or 13 days…
There’s always one guy who holds out… who thinks he’s too smart to fall for the latest girl or the latest drug. He laughs at all his friends when they make fools of themselves — or worse — and he swears it will never happen to him.
But whether it’s for a bottle blonde with a dangerous aggenda or a pipe full of something really wrong — this guy may be the last to fall but he’s going to fall and he’s going to fall the farthest.
I took the idea for the chorus from the street term, doll eyes, the dull, lifeless eyes of someone under a big load of sleepytime drugs like heroin or barbiturates.
Just Like a China Doll
She’s got eyes just like a china doll They look painted on and yet they’ve seen it all
All around Long Beach
and all the way to LA
the shattered lives are scattered
the hearts are spiked up on staves
— From the Ocean to the mountains
from the birthplace to the grave
Once you behold her
nothing will ever be the same
She’s got eyes just like a china doll They look painted on and yet they’ve seen it all
Everywhere you go
everythings about the same
they wander around dazed
just barely whispering her name
— They walk in front of buses
they throw themselves under trains
but the sick smile on their faces
show those sorry saps are still glad she came
[bridge] well I looked into her eyes and I saw my life flash by Now I wake up screaming every night dreaming doll’s eyes
I looked into the void and I saw myself fall in i see it every time i see it in her eyes t’s always been
Here I stand the last man to fall
under her spell
a moment close to heaven
an ice age on the cold side of hell
and how can I face F# ~ E ~ / Bm D A E
the other lost souls I find
When I laughed at all of them and then now
here am I the last in line
She’s got eyes just like a china doll They look painted on and yet they’ve seen it all
In 1996, for a few moments, I envisioned myself making a cottage industry of millennium-themed songs, of which this would be only the first.
It was, perhaps happily, the only.
Still, I did record a kind of techno house version of this song in my little project studio back in 1999, and posted it on the old Mp3.com… it was one of my least popular tracks, ever. I gave up trying to flog it. It whimpered through the fall of 1999 with a few plays and downloads a day, while other songs got scores and occasionally hundreds. (I tried for 10 seconds to revive it in December, 2000, the true millennium eve, but I knew it was futile.)
But… look… here it is, again, America and The World.
I figure, even though the millennium was pretty much a bust, vis a vis buildup, eventually there’s going to be a millennium nostalgia craze. I’m going to be there.
By the way, this special 2005 Edition of the Triple Zip Flip includes the seldom heard “lost last verse” which was really the song’s punchline — but which I cut, anyway, for reasons which may prove obvious.
Happy New Year!
acoustic version
‘studio version’
The Triple Zip Flip
Some people say its the end of the world
I say “C’mon all you boys and grab a girl”
Some people tell you it’s the end of time
I say “all the more reason to get off the dime”
It’s been a long long journey hope you liked the trip c’mon everybody do the Triple Zip Flip
Maybe there’ll be famine, maybe flood
for sure there’ll be suffering and rivers of blood
but that’s just one more year like all the rest
another year older and closer to death
It’s been a long long journey…
The mighty shall tremble
the wicked shall fall
about the same time the good folks
learn how not to crawl
judgement will come
judgement is due
let’s just hope they don’t
judge — me and you
It’s been a long long journey…
its just like the prophet said long ago
first there is Knowledge then the neighborhood goes
one little taste it all gets way out of hand
write a few lines of code make a world out of sand
they say Information just wants to be free so far it’s been trapped inside of you and me but I hear that Info has got a new plan go live in cyberspace and make a monkey out of man
It’s been a long long journey hope you liked the trip c’mon everybody do the Triple Zip Flip
It was a Thursday night back in the mid 90s and I was playing a coffee house gig with a guitar and a couple of notebooks of songs. It was a tiny joint, so it was easy to fill it. That night, the only people I knew in the audience were sitting near the stage. In fact, I didn’t recognize the girl at first, a pretty brunette with green eyes in her late 20s. She was with an artist friend of mine. (Later I’d realize I met them both 4 or 5 years before at small party where I ended up talking to them for a couple hours. Sometimes I can be a bit oblivious.)
As I worked my way haphazardly through an impromptu set, I played my song, “Fell,” which is, pretty much, about suicide.
At the end of it, in the lull after the applause (which was thunderous, I gotta tell ya, especially since the whole place probably held a max of 14 or 15 people), this pretty girl looked straight at me and said, “Don’t you just feel like that sometimes?”
I said, yeah, you bet, then caught myself and muttered something about permanent solutions to a temporary problems.
After my set, I sat down at their table. After my friend introduced her as his ex-girlfriend, I all but ignored him, falling into her green eyes that seemed to dance with warmth and life. It’s safe to say I was captivated. I fabricated some way of giving her a business card and I felt like I’d hear from her.
Several days went by and I found myself at the computer, a guitar in my lap, writing this song. I came up with some moody synth cello lines and, tweaking sounds back and forth almost at random, came up with an eery gliss motif. (You can hear the ‘studio version’ at my one blue nine soundclick page.)
As I worked back and forth with the guitar and the computer, writing the MIDI arrangement, I came up with the words below, more or less a single stanza and chorus. It captured the feel and I figured I would come back in the next few days and finish the lyrics.
I didn’t know exactly where I thought the lyrics would go. It seemed clear to me that they were about a young girl, deep sadness, and maybe suicide.
Although the pretty brunette with the green eyes had been on my mind, the song wasn’t about her and I certainly hadn’t consciously decided to write another song about suicide. But in the back of my head, I know I was hoping I might get a chance to share the new song and recording with her. I really felt like something was around the corner.
But I didn’t hear from her.
Life presented other distractions and it wasn’t until later in the week that I bumped into my friend, the green-eyed girl’s ex. He was ashen, somber.
I asked him what was wrong and he said, remember the girl I brought to see you the other night? She’s dead.
My blood felt like icewater going through me. I looked at the coffeehouse table we were sitting at. I felt strange and cut off. All I could think was suicide. I didn’t say anything.
It was weird, my friend was saying. She was cooking dinner for friends the previous Sunday (the very afternoon I was writing “Jennifer”) and the friends came over a little after the appointed time — but she didn’t answer the door. This was before cell phones were prevalent and they walked down to a nearby liquor store to call but there was no answer. They walked back, thinking maybe she’d had to make a quick trip to the market to pick up a last minute ingredient.
When they got back, they thought they smelled food burning and pressed up against a window. They saw what looked like someone lying in the kitchen and called the police.
Do they know, I finally asked, do they know what killed her?
She’d had trouble with depression before, my friend said (and, of course, as I’d suspected from her comments after “Fell”) but she’d seemed so upbeat and positive lately. He didn’t want to think it was suicide but…
It was over a week later when I found out the results from the coroner’s inquest. It was her heart. She’d had a congenital defect no one knew about. There may have been complications from medication she’d been taking.
I’d been resisting the idea that my song might have played a part in a tragic dialectic and I finally was able to breathe a sigh of relief — but it trailed into a sigh of deep sadness. I’ll never forget those eyes… and how I thought — for a few moments — I’d be staring deep into them for eternity.
I never finished the song…
Jennifer
Jennifer
I swear it’s not your fault
It’s always been the same
It’ll always be this way
Jennifer youre not to blame
Jenifer
Jenifer you’re not to blame
Jennifer
Jennifer you’re not to blame
Jennifer
Jennifer you’re not to blame
Jennifer
