I prefer to think of this track as the mix I was working on when I realized it was almost midnight and I needed to get an AYoS song posted.
The original version (below) of this, from my (one man) band, one blue nine, was released in 1999. It was a busy, somewhat funky trip hop thing and it did pretty well on the old mp3.com, rising into the trip hop top ten for a brief period (No. 7, if I recall correctly).
The piece is built around the found sound of a 60’s survivor retelling some of her experiences in Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love.
It was a time when love was in the air and you had to be careful what was in the Kool-Aid. A time when clowns were kings, when saints were sinners, cops were criminals, and a wise man often played the fool.
A word to the wise: don’t try this in your century.
Today’s remix version:
Release version:
[A note on this track. With drums, bass, keyboards, and found audio, this is a very different track for AYoS, more typical of my ‘band’ work with one blue nine. It does not represent a new change in direction for AYoS, although I have started sneaking a few more elements into the simple acoustic versions I’ve been recording daily. Honest to gosh… I just lost track of the time and wasn’t able to record a new acoustic track. (Yeah, yeah. It shouldn’t take more than 5 or 6 minutes, I realize. But it does.) And then my cable net connection completely disappeared in the middle of uploading this track… Anyhow, it’s done. I didn’t add it to the now very long playlist of AYoS Radio, since I thought the sudden shift to a full band might be jarring in that context. Always thinking of you, gentle readers and listeners. Heh.]
The rec room curtains drifted in and out of the open window, so slowly as to be all but unnoticeable. A fly droned several times around the room and smacked itself against the smudged and dingey closed half of the window.
He looked at the fly and knew it wanted to die.
The rec room TV was stuck on MTV. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if the sound worked. But one night a few weeks back someone had put a pool cue through the speaker so far it got stuck and stayed there sticking out into the room like a flagmast. But the picture was great and no one had bothered to turn the set off since then.
Now, laid off for at least a week by a downturn at the plant, he was idling away the days nursing beers that soon turned warm and flat, watching Beavis and Butthead reruns, and thinking about what how good he had it before Mavis Jean went off with the talent scout from the spokesmodel try-out fair.
It was looking like it was going to be another hot, smoggy San Bernardino Christmas but the deep greens and bright festive reds on the TV transported him for a few moment s to the fantasy Christmas he’d imagined everyone else enjoyed when he was growing up: a smiling family gathered around a glowing hearth, snowflakes fluttering outside frosty windows.
And as he floated in the sway of the moment, the family holiday was replaced by sleek images from a trendy perfume ad, a stark modern art montage leading up to an oddly familiar, hollow-cheeked, waif-like face filling the screen. And then a series of flash-lit jump cuts to reveal Mavis Jean’s too-skinny body draped in dark pajamas, her blank eyes staring hypnotically into the camera.
Her lips moved a tiny bit. At first he thought she was blowing a kiss to the camera as her level gaze held the camera. Then he realized she must be saying something… and it was hard to tell for sure, but he was convinced he knew what what it was:
Send for the doctor
send for the priest
The End must be coming
’cause Baby’s On TV
She’s talking with her eyes
She couldn’t hold a job
could hardly spell her name
now she’s lunching at the polo lounge
and wintering in spain
(she’s speaking from her heart)
she’s talking with her eyes
I’d been expecting
to be surprised
but when I saw that advert
the sun fell from the sky
she’s talking with her eyes
saying what a fool I’ve been to never realize
just an average girl next door
without an ounce of style
now she’s a jetset darling
soul-kissing me good-bye
shes talking with her eyes
I met her in a cross-dress bar
down in San Antone
She was draped across some gigolo
and most of her clothes were gone
Her eyes were blue her hair was green
and her legs were impossibly long
but most of all it was her blank-eyed stare
that really turned me on
I knew right then
she was the only one
who would ever break my heart
I took her home and we settled down
in the Camelot Trailer Park
But Fate intervened in the mall that day
at the Spokesmodel Try-Out Fair
they loved her look they loved her legs
they loved here blank-eyed stare
send for a doctor send for the priest
the End must be coming
’cause Baby’s On TV
Shes talking with her eyes
Shes got clothes She’s got cars
she’s seen with politicians
she’s seen with handsome stars
I’m sitting home watching baby on TV
Babys on TV
Babys on TV
she’s talking with her eyes
saying what a fool I’ve been to never realize
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
In 1999, I collaborated over the ‘net with an English techno kid named Deakin Scott. He’d heard my trip hop stuff on the old mp3.com and he asked if I wanted to write a vocal part for a 140 beat per minute mix he was working on.
He emailed me a work mix as a guide. I listened over and over, playing with different ideas. Finally, in frustration, I picked up my acoustic guitar and started hashing out some classic rock and roll chords, unrelated to Deakin’s music.
There was, in that first exploration, a kind of teen angel sort of vibe and when I surrendered to that vibe, the lyrics below pretty much came out whole. They play off the teen tragedy vibe, focusing on the protagonist’s feelings in the moment of loss.
I don’t mean to trivialize the emotional resonance of the lyrics for me, though, at all. I really wanted, in my small and clumsy way, to explore the tragic beauty of love and inevitable loss. But… see… you can’t talk about that. Or it sounds like, well, that, and, yet, is simultaneously somehow too personal. So I like the ironic distance afforded by reworking a classic form.
The chords I came up with are reflected in the version below, for the most part. The delivery to Deakin’s 140 bpm music precluded conventional singing, so what melody there was was somewhat irrelevant. Nailing the lyric rhythmically at that tempo was challenging, but after much work I came up with a set of vocals I could really live with.
I emailed them the vocals (bare and attached to his mix as an example/guide) with careful instructions on how to set them on the beat in the mix, since there’s a fair amount of syncopation. Somehow, those instructions must have got lost.
Deakin’s music sounded even better than the guide track I’d worked with — but the vocals I’d sent him were dropped in just a tiny bit off the mark. I explained my concern to him, but he said he’d fallen in love with the mix just the way it was (which I usually take to be code for I’m working on my next project, shouldn’t you?) Anyhow, I can’t make my mix available for download, but broadband users can hear it here (or at the link below).
You’ll find a link for a ‘studio version’ as well — that’s my music and vocals — and while the chords are essentially those I use in the AYoS version, here, the production and arrangement are considerably different… so three three quite different versions.
Today’s acoustic version:
Deakin Scott/TK Major (TK’s Mix):
Mountains Come, Mountains Go
Mountains come and mountains go
but a love like ours will surely show
the stars themselves to be a fling
I’ve seen the End of Time
It’s no big thing
The ocean deep is just a pond
I throw my coat for you to walk upon
The waves are tears that mist my eyes
The mighty wind is
just your sleepy sigh
When I sing to you the angels sing along
and yet I know there’s something wrong
The sky above is in your eyes
and I know that means
you’re lying on the ground
The sirens freeze my blood is cold
suddenly the world’s just too damn old
the future fading in your eyes
time and space collapse
in one last sigh
Mountains come and mountains go but a love like ours will surely show the stars themselves to be a fling I’ve seen the End of Time It’s no big thing
