Why tell your story to the tabloids and settle for a one time payout and a little cheap notoriety?
With a properly jaundiced eye and a flexible sense of ethics, you might just parlay an interesting set of friends into an ongoing paycheck.
I’m Gonna Write a Soap Opera
I’m gonna write a soap opera
you’re gonna be the heroine
I’m gonna show the world just how ya think I’m gonna write a soap opera I won’t have to make up a thing
When we get the ratings back
you know I’ll take you out for a drink
I’ll get a famous model
to play your part for you
I was gonna ask you but you’re always busy We’ll get a famous model I know she’ll do real good, too
When the plot gets thick
She’ll be skinny enough to wriggle through
I’m gonna sell the rights
everywhere I can
there’ll be games and dolls and underwear I’m gonna sell the rights I suggest you buy up while you can
I said I’d make you famous
I think by now you understand
The first time I saw her, a long, long time ago, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She’d just got into town from West Virginia. She and her boyfriend and a tiny, tiny baby, whose father was back home. She had a soft coal country drawl and big eyes that made her look like a reticent, renaissance madonna (the religious painting kind, not the pop legend kind).
It’s undoubtedly a sad commentary on my fit in the human race, but I usually avoided women with kids. And it was for that reason — that I thought I was safe, that I let myself get sucked in, just a little.
She jettisoned her boyfriend within two weeks. I tried sympathy but she declared that he was a nice guy but a loser. She gave every sign of being a callous manipulator but I would look into those eyes and melt and think it was just the hard, tough life she’d led so far. I mooned around for awhile, unwilling to make any move (a kid… she had a kid… I was a kid… it couldn’t work) but secretly hoping (I suspect now, to my chagrin) that something would happen to force the issue.
It did, in the form of an older guy with a house and a good job. All of a sudden she was married and less than a year and a half later they were selling the house and splitting the proceeds in a moderately nasty divorce.
Not quite the situation in the song below… but if I told that story, I’d be in trouble.
I lost my best friend the day that I lost you
I lost my best friend the day that I lost you
I lost my best friend the day that I lost you
I may have lost my best friend but at least I got id of you
I feel so bad when I see him on the street with you
I feel so bad when I see him out on the street with you
I wanna rush up to him and say . . .
“Don’t worry brother, I know just what you’re goin’ through!”
Water beads on the shiny hood of the old Citroen as the girl’s driver noses it out into the rain. A groundsman closes the tall door of the stable behind as you look over your shoulder through the sloping rear window.
The girl’s knee presses against your thigh and she pulls at your hand, putting it on her own thigh.
It feels like someone else’s hand on someone else’s rich beautiful girlfriend’s perfect thigh.
How did I get here? you ask yourself, as though a plot device in a cheap melodrama.
But no flashback rolls out… just the dull, internalized throb of what felt like 20 years of smoky northern european discos. Even when his girlfriend made him stay by the side of the lake at Interlachen for a week, he felt the throb, like a factory worker who can’t lose the pound and grind of the machines, no matter how far away he goes. Or how drunk he gets.
He never used to drink that much. What happened there? he asked again, the words hanging like a bad digital reverb in the empty soundstage he imagined his mind to be.
But there was no threshold… no tipping point. Now, the alcohol was simply the sea that every night floated on. Every night a carefully measured voyage from wary alertness as he reached the club and set up to a deadened weariness as he got home at dawn… a slogging, dots-in-front-of-the-eyes almost deadness that was somehow both comforting and terrifying in its indistinguishable familiarity.
Of course, I didn’t necessarily have the jaded turntablist/DJ above in mind when I wrote this song. In fact, at a time when I’d been writing a lot of blues, I found myself thumping out the familiar 1-4-5 of a 12 bar blues and heard myself sing: “I’m sick of the blues…”
But I thought to myself… yeah, the world’s never heard a song about a guy or gal who’s been down so long, down’s got ’em down. How can I subvert this?
So I made the song a lament not about depression, loneliness, and heartbreak — but rather about literally being bored with blues music. Which I was. (In a loving way, mind you.)
But I was also bored with a lot of music. The catalog of styles reeled off in the first verse of this song is suggestive of what I was listening to back in ’94 (except for Madonna and Bono, of whom, indeed, I have always been sick).
By the time I got to the second verse, I realized that, while I could just spend three verses listing off music styles, maybe I needed some kind of development. So I started listing off trendy cuisines. And the last verse, a brief catalog of putatively desirable destinations, directly suggested the title I ultimately chose and hinted at the vignette above, variants of which I used in the past to promote the ‘studio’ version.
The studio version (and the studio, as I’ve noted before was some cheap gear hooked up to my computer, in mid 1999) was an instrumental — or more properly, a dub. I did cut vocals and they did suck.
So I did some serious dub deconstruction and reconstruction. (I remember when we used to have to do dub mixes in realtime… imagine… jumping around, bumping faders back and forth, wiggling Echoplex levers, smacking guitar amp reverbs… how undignified it all was. Too much work.)
Today’s acoustic version:
Dub version (1999):
Désenchanté
I’m sick of the blues
I’m sick of reggae too
I’m sick of rock and country
rap and techno too
I’m sick of Madonna and Bono
of course I always was
m sick of world music
ambient trance and dub
I am sick to death of everything
I always loved to do
I’m sick to death everything
but most of all of you
I’m fed up with cuisine nouvelle
I’m cuttin’ off Cajun too
I’m bored with bouillabaisse
with Thai and Greek I’m through
I wish I had a dollar
for every overpriced Bordeaux
I wish I had a dime for every time
you blew my roll
I am sick to death of everything
I always loved to do
I’m sick to death everything
but most of all of you
I’m désenchanté with
Cannes and St Tropez
I cannot regain
that simpaticismo
I felt in Spain
I can’t explain
this ennui borders on pain
but all around the world
everything’s about the same
I’m sick to death of everything
I ever loved to do
I’m sick to death everything
but most of all of you
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.
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
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.