Category Archives: acoustic

Baby, I Just Got the Blues

I used to drive around all night.

I’d start out in Long Beach and drive west across the first bridge onto Terminal Island, home to shipyards, a federal prison, and, in those days, a strange little warren of crack-in-the-wall neighborhoods, wedged in between railroad right-of-ways and wrecking yards.

Baby, I Just Got the Blues I’d often cross the ‘big’ bridge, the Vincent-Thomas (which apparently cries out for and often gets a prefix of “Saint” from southbay locals), driving through the darkened streets of San Pedro, past the cliffs at Point Ferman and on along the crumbling, two lane coastal road around the peninsula and up to Torrance or on to Santa Monica or beyond to Malibu, Zuma… and once all the way to Port Hueneme, 85 or 90 miles to the north.

Other times, I’d drive east across Orange County, driving into the then empty hills along the two lane, winding Santiago Canyon Road. There were a few pockets of homes, some ranches. A favorite was a certain tiny canyon community (now all but surrounded surrounded by suburban subdivisions but then isolated and exotic).

In those days, there were lots of ghosts in the hills, with stories of hauntings from the first settlers blending with Indian legends, running together with the fervid urban legends of primitive mid-century media, a time when it could take six months of hard work to determine if a girl ever really did end up with a nest of black widow spiders in her heavily sprayed bouffant hairdo.

There was a semi established tour of old cemeteries. (And, yes, one night I saw something quite odd — although not in a cemetery… It seemed in every way to be a jaw-droppingly classic shade — but, trying to be skeptical, it is possible it could have been the way the moonlight played on a bent little old lady in what appeared to be 19th century garb taking a 3 am stroll through a scrub forest 50 yards from an otherwise deserted two lane black top.)

Another memorable night, my long suffering GF and I drove, following my displaced sense of travel longing, up the old Alameda Ave, a way-past-midnight crawl through strange, ghostly, industrial neighborhoods. We ended up in Los Angeles, in the rail yards and warehouse district, watching trucks being loaded and unloaded by an service force of ragtag loaders, paid per job, and openly throwing back hard liquor out of half pint bottles, with harsh laughs that boomed empty loading bays. One night I ended up talking to a few of them for a couple hours, drinking wine with them and smoking cigarettes.

And, a lot of times, my drives would end up at the break of dawn, with a barefoot walk in cold wet sand, fog rolling across some beach, maybe Laguna — maybe Zuma… but always lost in a swirl of the night’s thoughts.

Baby (I Just Got The Blues)

I drive around all night
looking for nothing to do
I play guitrar til dawn
and every song’s about you
if I sleep I might dream
and we all know that dreams don’t come true

Ain’t nothin wrong with me baby
I just got the blues
Ain’t…

walked along the shore
wondering what a smart guy would do
in the Idiot’s Guide to Love
I must be listed in the back under “fool”
sure once I had some answers
now I’d settle for some lies that sound true

Ain’t nothin wrong with me baby
I just got the blues
Ain’t…

It’s easy for you sugar but then
everything’s easy for you
You know what you want
and you know how to make it come true
But, it’s hard for me, doll, to
bid all that we had adieu

Ain’t nothin wrong with me baby
I just got the blues
Ain’t nothin wrong with me baby
I just got the blues

Without Warning

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Without Warning
Artistic, romantic types (like us singer-songwriters, yo) often seem to fall in love with goddesses and ghosts. Those conversant in the literature of myth and legend are probably familiar with the deeply troubled relationships that grow when man and immortal become romantically entwined.

I wrote this song in 1974 when I was involved with a goddess — and a ghost. The goddess was a ringer for 30’s screen diva, Carole Lombard, and, by society’s then-outmoded standards, was technically otherwise entangled. But I knew it was me she loved, even though she told me she didn’t have the courage to be free…

For a young man, a young artist, in that position, deeply torn but deeply in love, intoxicated with the heroic tragicness of the situation, there was little recourse, then, but to lose myself in the arduous work of seducing one of my best friends, a pretty, serious-minded strawberry blond with — I firmly believe in retrospect — absolutely no romantic or sexual interest in me — but who, in her own way, lusted for a sort of platonic but passionate friendship and who seemed to show up, unbidden, on my doorstep at the strangest times.

[UPDATE: I just listened to this again… and, my gosh, it’s sloppy — even by the extraordinarily loose standards of AYoS. Mercy.]

WITHOUT WARNING

You came without warning
on a Monday morning
the day was all shot through
by shadows from the past
afterimages of the last
time that I was with you

and it didn’t take nothing
to see that you were something
that I just had to do
Well it mighta been right
on a Monday night
to release a little energy with you
In the end it came down to you

Now I didn’t mean maybe
when I put it to you baby
There’s just time space and nothing more
But instead of pain
we could have pleasure again
just like before you heard about the fall

So when you come come
come come come around me
please take some form
please take some from I can see
Well ghosts are fine
but I like some flesh on mine
you can’t steal my love
you can’t have my love for free
you can’t steal my love
you can’t have my love for free

19 Days

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19 Days

This is not a murder ballad.

It’s a song about a long-haul trucker coming to the realization that his marriage is over. He thinks about it when he drives. He thinks about it when he lies awake in the sleeper in the back of the cab. And he prays about it in a little church on the way home. Simple, hunh?

That’s what I thought.

But I had to stop performing it because people kept coming up afterwards and saying, “Man that’s dark. It’s so seething and brink-of-violence. So, how does he kill her?”

And… as I read the lyrics now, they may be vague but, yeah, depending on how you read them, they could also be a bit ominous. But, really, what I had in mind was a guy simply breaking out of that thrall of indecision… just before you finally give up on someone you were positive would change your world. Not that, you know, I was ever such a sap. But people have been…

Ever think of all the great songs that started with the phrase “wake up”?

Yeah… well, I just checked, and, as of today, four of the songs so far (out of 71 songs since September 22) from A Year of Songs have the words “wake up” in the first 3 words of the song — and one more has “woke up.”

Don’t ask me why. If I had to guess, I’d say I was subconsciously on a quest to come up with a line with the classic elegance of “Woke up this morning / got myself a beer” (Jim Morrison) — which, I’ve always felt, pretty much sez it all.