“The true revolutionary is guided by love.” – Che Guevara
Nah… it’s not one of those up-against-the-wall things… but it’s that disconnect between the notorious phrase of itimidation, harrassment, and implicit death threat and a story of timeless, hopeless love that fired up my creative energies… not unlike how a chemical battery generates current, I suppose.
You’ll notice that there’s some real ambiguity in these lyrics. I considered different ways to try to make the song less ambiguous — but each one seemed to diminish the song, rob it of power. So I left the words more or less the way they spilled out.
You’ll have to figure out for yourself what goes on in this song…
Up against the wall
the moon was in her eyes
I felt her heart beat
I heard her sigh
I touched her cheek
a tear met my hand
I didn’t know it then
but that tear fell to her plan
10,000 years is not a day too long since the world began I’ve been hangin round here waiting for you to come along
I have seen that shining light
one too many times
I have heard the angels sing
while I riddled the devil’s rhymes
I have seen your eyes
burn into my soul
I have seen the truth
and I will never again be whole
10,000 years…
I’d do it all again
and still come back for more
I know how it’s all gotta end
but I’ll never know what it’s all for
Until the end of time
there’s not that long to go
I thought I knew heaven’s secrets
what the hell did I know?
10,000 years
is not a day too long
since the world began
I’ve been hangin round here
waiting for you to come along
Okay… not sure this song is really done, actually. But I’m tired of waiting for the last verse to correct itself, so I’m posting it, anyway, misgivings and all.
As with any of my songs, no matter how long ago they were written, there’s a pretty good chance the music will evolve — or mutate — certainly, this performance leaves much to be desired. But — anyhow — here it is.
Hard to believe I used to be a marketing guy… huh?
I told my self
Life has no meaning
I told myself
I should stop dreaming
I told myself
I should stop being such a fool
I told myself
love’s just a lie
I told myself
I should get wise
I told myself
being kind is just being cruel
Lookin in my heart was like lookin’ in a well and if there was a bottom you couldn’t really tell as dark as midnight all the way down to hell one day I looked in and then I just fell
Then I looked in my soul
and I saw that it was empty
and I said to myself
just like the rest of them
and i said out loud
from here on
it’s all ’bout number one
But I added that up
and I factored in forever
I subtracted my dreams then
divided that by never
When I saw the bottom line
I sat down — I knew that
I was done
Lookin in my heart…
Back then I told my self
Life has no meaning
And I told myself
I should stop dreaming
Then I told myself
I should stop being such a fool
But then I thought to myself
what’s it all for?
and I thought to myself
must be something more
and I realized all at once
there’s more than one kind of fool
When I came up with the phrase, “in my daddy’s rented Cadillac” — I knew the Caddy would have to come to a violent end, hopefully along with the presumably rich and spoiled young protagonist.
Without doubt, the more interesting part of this story — who this young wastrel is/was, what he did to warrant (what increasingly seemed like it would have to be) a fiery demise, who he’d be thinking about in those final moments, who he’d leave behind — all of that got left out of this song.
All that’s left is a kind of man and the road saga of a compulsive drive on a spooky night culminating in… the end of the song.
When I left the high school dance
in my daddy’s rented Cadillac
I didn’t know what trouble was
I didn’t know there was no way back
The moon was a hole in the night sky
heaven knows who was looking in
The night was a hole in my life
and I didn’t know I was falling in
I made it past dead man’s curve
and the cliff at the top of the hill
I glided deftly through the hairpin turns
past the old graveyard that’s not quite full
I drove up that twisted mountain road
straight up into the night
Now I was totally all alone
drving through a hole in my life
My heart was pounding but my hands were dry
The engine was throbbing and the gears whined
My mind was racing at the speed of light
and my knuckles on the wheels glowed ghostly white
My life was the road and the road was my life
as it twisted and turned into the night
The road was the world and the world was night
as I rounded the bend and drove straight into the light
My eyes were shadows in the back of my brain
My mind was unravelling and my soul was in flames
The car was gone I was cut loose in space
Dogs from heaven laughed in my face
I was spinning I was falling I was going down
fallilng through a world without light or sound
I was watching from a hill from far away
when the Caddy hit the gas truck —
great balls of flame!
I wish I’d known that as a kid. It seemed like I was always bored, then. It wasn’t until I more or less stopped watching television late in my teenage years that I stopped being boring. (OK, I did spend some delirious late, late night hours watching old horror movies over at my pal Shawnee’s house. Her parents were amazingly tolerant of her hippy friends, even after the rest of the household became seized by Born Again Fever.)
But, by the time I had crossed paths with that truism, I was already decidedly unboring. If I do say so myself.
I had a pal who was out on the road in those days with Chakka Khan’s band. It seemed so extraordinarily glamorous. But it was driving him nuts. He had a beautiful wife and a young baby and he really wanted to be home with them instead of holing up in a seemingly endless series of motel rooms.
I remember listening to him and offering up one suggestion after another… but he had them beat. And more or less legitimately. I offered up sight seeing and he said, Mostly, I’ve seen it. I suggested museums. You’d be surprised how lame the museums in Peoria and Hackensack are. How about learning a new instrument or something? I offered. He just looked at me funny. How about drinking, I finally said, and cracked the seal on the Tequila in front of us.
Some years later I would pick up a Rolling Stone magazine and glance at the lead article on a certain poor little rich boy rock star. Fabulously wealthy, he languished in his own shadow. His lack of passion became a burden and, for a time, he stopped writing. The Rolling Stone writer tried his damnedest to capture the star’s dilemna — and maybe if I’d had a little more compassion in those days, I’d have been able to dial in that wavelength.
But it just slipped past me.
All I could think about was all that money and all those possibilities and all he could come up with was… boredom.
I have considerable more empathy, now. Once I stopped drinking a dozen years ago, I started finding some compassion for those who could not, as I’d often advised, reach right down and pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Because, once I’d taken away my own medicine, I found my own bootstraps just a little hard to reach… they were so far and every effort, in those days, seemed crushing.
I eventually climbed out of it — but for way too long, I was depressed. Some days I couldn’t bring myself to go out or even do the simplest chores. Once an aggressive, restless bon vivant, out many more nights than not, I found myself unable to stay at parties more than a few minutes. After a while, it just seemed easier not to go.
So I holed up in my house, with my cats and my guitars…
[update 2006-11-11 – mp3 content corrected]
