A couple weeks into the new semester and he found himself not in his Comp Civ 300 class but floating lazily in a creaky-oared rowboat on the tiny pond of a WPA-built park, tucked away in the foothills, a pretty, green-eyed sophomore facing him as he put up the oars.
130 year old oaks reached out from the edges of the rowing pond and an old Spanish American War cannon poked proudly from a cement nook. When he was a kid, the ornamental wall around the cannon wasn’t there. And there were a few other cannons, as well, strewn haphazardly along the banks. Like toys a once-proud owner couldn’t bear to throw out, he thought once, walking through the deserted park long after closing.
There’d been an older man rowing aimlessly around the pond when they got there but his time ran out or he got bored soon enough and they were left alone on the water. A radio buzzed faintly from the boathouse and a handful of little kids played on the cannon. It was a weekday and quiet enough that he could hear the nearly still water lapping gently against the boat.
He had the oars up and now sprawled out his legs and leaned back, gazing at her.
A trio of crows flew in loose formation across the half-sky that opened between the trees over the pond. Faint, rippled clouds floated high in a preternaturally blue sky. A pair of ducks quacked in undecipherable sequence from the other side of the pont, 50 yards away. In the boathouse, somebody changed the radio from one rock station to another. So faint he almost couldn’t make it out: Sam Cook’s “You Send Me.”
She was wearing a white, linen dress… the kind where the neckline is low and the shoulders are apparently designed to keep falling down the arm . Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders, a half smile played on her unrouged lips and her green eyes held his gaze. Her long, tanned leg reached out so her sandal-less foot could momentarily touch the side of his thigh. In the moment of the gesture he found a world of dreams and fears, swirling like a cosmos in formation then disappearing back into whatever dimension holds our deepest and most secret longings.
My buddy James would have said it was all just a little too on the nose.
I first met him around ’75 or ’76 in a class on Surrealism. He and his brother Dave were both in the class. I didn’t get to know them then. I don’t even remember talking with them. I think I complimented them on their final project: a four handed piano duet of the theme from Exodus — with each keyboardist playing in a different key.
It was… uh… challenging listening.
A couple years later, I would be in a local cover band dive drinking semi-cheap beer and listening to some surprisingly good pub rock from a band called the Daily Planet. It was a decidedly unhip room with a decidedly unhip crowd, for the most part, but I noticed a party of 8 or so trendy looking twentysomethings — well, they had short hair and dark clothes — not locals, I decided.
No One Said Nothin’
more music links at end of post
When a pretty young blonde appeared by my elbow as I watched the band and asked me to dance I decided this was not a typical cheap beer Thursday. When she invited me to join her party I thought it was getting interesting.
As we sat at the table, she leaned conspiratorially close and whispered, The guy at the end of the table is my brother. He doesn’t like people to make any fuss which is why we came here. Do you know that band, The Knack? (The insipid but ingratiating “My Sharona” was inescapable on the radio at the time.) My brother is Doug Feiger, the lead singer.
I looked at him.
He did look eerily familiar. Kind of like Feiger. But eerily familiar.
I decided to play it blase.
You know who that is, don’t you? She asked. She seemed just the slightest bit offended that I might not. I assured her I did — but I bit my tongue rather than follow my first impulse and launch into a frank evaluation of the song’s merits, possibly leading to a tirade on existential burden of its oppressive ubiquity.
It was not every day, after all, even then, that a pretty blonde asked me to dance and join her at her table.
The people at her table all seemed glib and glamorous… too cool, I thought at the time, to be associated with a band like The Knack.
And, at what clearly was the head of the joined tables was the guy I just couldn’t quite believe was Doug Feiger, flirting with the women and verbally jousting with everyone. He was assured, witty, sophisticated.
Clearly, he wasn’t Doug Feiger.
In fact, it would turn out that he was one of the two brothers playing that tweaked out four-handed Exodus I’d heard in my Surrealism class several years earlier. He’d recognized me from class and prodded his younger sister (drinking on a very fake ID) to bring me back to the table. She came up with the Doug Feiger gambit on her own, I guess.
James was then 21 and still at the university. I’d find out later that the huge, sharp Caddy he was driving belonged to his employers, ultra-wealthy Newport Beach nouveau riche types for whom he was a sort of butler/personal assistant/retainer.
(I’d later find out that the boss on that job was an utterly infamous investment scam artist who’d been on full page ads on the back of Sunday supplements and on late night commercials for years working his ultimately rather uninmaginative but surprisingly effective pyramid scheme. Years later, after the investment scammer hard died, James would be hired to rewrite the book for the widow who was preparing a new round of book blitzing as the memory of her late husband’s sins faded. He’d end up doing three times the work and getting 1/3 the pay he expected… no writing credit and no residuals, of course. It goes without saying.)
James Norling was a fine singer, a strong rhythm guitarist, and at his best a great — if not ultimately prolific — writer. I’d been in a couple punk bands and a no wave dance band but I was really anxious to do something else. I’d been listening to a lot of Joy Division and Magazine and when I found out that James was into much of the same moody, art-damaged music I’d been listening to (he had a truly amazing record collection… Eno, Can, Faust, Cale, old Pentangle) I felt like I’d really found a musical soul mate.
It seemed natural to introduce James and my buddy Rick Black, who lived about a 30 second walk away from the house James shared with his sister Sheila, the pretty blonde I’d danced with that night.
At the time Rick was just finding himself as a guitarist. He had speed and power but unlike a lot of guitarists of the era, he also knew how to play in between the notes, how to bend and sing notes lyrically.
Rick was the fauvist bluesman, I was the fervid, mic-swallowing punk, and James was the urbane sophisticate… what I guess you’d call your metrosexual kinda guy. I was surprised, at the time, when I found out he’d never been to Europe. But then I had to remind myself he was barely into his twenties.
Like any new band of the era, it took us a while to find a drummer. After some false starts and dead ends we ended up with a young guy named Marty, who was just out of high school and going out with James’ sister.
Marty brought a muscular, tom-heavy punkish tribal drive to the band. With Rick riffing and occasional twisting off into soaring or searing feedback-edged solos, me playing a usually overdriven bass (and switching off to lead guitar every third or fourth song — every bass players dream), and Marty’s pounding polyrhythms, it was left to James’ rhythm guitar to somehow anchor each song with edgy backbeats and quirky chopping rhythms.
First we were the Dogmatics. For a week we were the Wacky Wabits, and finally we settled on Machine Dog* — inspired by the needlepoint illustration of a particularly classic English Bulldog on the wall of our practice space in the back of a furniture store in Orange. (*Not, not not to be confused a certain set of latter day poseurs who no doubt came up with the name of their band independently — around a decade later.)
We played through most of 1980 and into 1981 — even through a fall where first James had a nasty carwreck where he broke his ankle and ruptured his spleen removed… or was it gall bladder… one of the ones that isn’t that big a deal. Gall bladder. I dunno. Anyhow. Bummer. We played as a 3 piece for a couple weeks unitl James came back. That was August 23, 1980.
A precise month later, Marty the drummer got in a fight in the bleachers of his old high school when one of his ex classmates and class rivals gave him a hard time for cutting his hair to be in a punk/new music band. Marty easily to the best of the other guy bur somehow ended up with his ankle caught in the bleachers and broke it. The ankle, I mean. James and Rick and I played three weeks without a drummer. His accident was September 23. Like I said, a precise month later.
One more precise calendar month later, on the night of October 23, I was riding my motorcycle home from a Mexican restaurant about 4-1/2 miles from my apartment when a driver t-boned me, breaking my femu, my hip — and my ankle.
(Rick and his girlfriend [now wife] were away on a trip up the coast. I said a little prayer for them — but I figured the real vortex of improbable patterns would make November 23rd the real threat. Happily, Rick, by staying very very still in a very safe place, was able to avoid calamity, thereby breaking the jinx and perhaps saving the world as we know it.)
Our buddy Steve Becker, a fine guitarist and harmonicist in his right, filled in for me on bass — and when I got out of the hospital two months after my accident, I was back at practice a week later. In a walker. But there.
part 2, coming soon…
Today, September 22, at 9:03 pm, PDT, marks the Autumnal Equinox, the moment in the year when day and night are closest to equal in length.
It is also the anniversery of A Year of Songs.
My “Someone Said Something” was probably my friend James Norling’s favorite in my songbook and he insisted — no, really, he insisted — that he or I or, occasionally, our pal Jose Alba perform the song at almost every party, barbecue, picnic or poker game where a guitar came out. It became a running gag but it never really ended.
Until this last week.
James Norling passed away unexpectedly. He lost consciousness and never woke up. He was 49, if I’m doing my math right.
I’ll offer this wordless version of “Someone Said Something” as my final song for A Year of Songs. Well… this year of songs.
You hope you’re just a memory to her, as you squat on the heels of your boots in a forlorn little park on a hill over the city, smoking a cigarette and looking down. You want to be a memory… faint, as though you died in an almost forgotten war.
Another reading of this song… not sure why I felt compelled to do it again, just now. I was fooling around with the minor slide tuning and remembered I used to do it in a similar tuning a few years back. The recent version had an almost jaunty folk-funk thing going… here I go back to a darkly minor feel… the feel of a storm gathering. I was hoping to suggest a cold, restless spirit driven to self-exile by his own emptiness. Not to get purple on ya.
The world is so big
then again the world’s so small…
I might be in your arms tomorrow night
or I might never make it home to you at all
true love, baby, the bottom drops out
and then you fall…
it only happens one time baby
if you’re lucky maybe not at all
I could live a thousand lifetimes
I’d never forget a single one of your lies…
I could die a million times
ant the ghost of you would still draw me back to life
*name changed from “The World Is So Big” (9/25/2007)
He lay across her bed, counting the holes in the ceiling tiles.
The afternoon sun came in through slitted mini-blinds, angling down across his naked body. A sheet lay across his thighs and strayed across the floor.
He heard her in the tiny apartment’s kitchenette.
As soon as they were done — he was done — she’d jumped up without a word and begun making noise in the other room. A coffee grinder screamed to life for ten seconds and after a few minutes he heard the gurgling of a coffee maker.
He lay there, thinking she probably expected him to put on his clothes and join her.
Instead, he lay there thinking, This means nothing.
He wanted it to mean something. He thought it should mean something. Yet it didn’t.
He wanted it to mean something to her but he wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t even sure he liked her, really.
But he wanted her to like him. And, clearly, she didn’t.
She had once.
And he had thought of her as… promising. She was attractive enough and could even transcend her own programmer geekiness when the occasion warrented — as it had several times when they first started. He remembered watching her as she moved through a restaurant on their second or third date and thinking… she could be mine.
And, while he was convinced that that was true, he never figured out a way to make it true. Previous girlfriends, mostly setups arranged through friends, had been mostly disastrous. He never knew what to say or how to say it. And, usually long before the end of the date, he would find himself shrinking from whomever he was out with.
But when he first ran into the small brunette with blue eyes and too many earrings (three — it was too many) in his company’s breakroom and noticed she was working in longhand on a C++ routine, he found himself thinking that maybe, at long last, he’d found a soulmate right in his own backyard.
But it wasn’t going to happen and he was just realizing that she’d known that for a long time.
[A brief note on this recording: I hadn’t played this song much since January when I last recorded it for AYoS. I made a point of not listening to that version before I recorded this, more or less winging the chords as I felt them under what passes for the melody. And I liked what I came up with. But then I listened to the January version and thought, Oh man, this is so much better. So… dig this ver if you will… but if you want to hear a near-definitive (yet still quite sloppy) stylistic reading of it, check out the version from January 25.]
“version creep” is all she said
as she stared at her feet on the edge of the bed
“data drift” as she stood in the door
“we just don’t vector anymore.”
counting the holes in the ceiling tile
analyze the sex, index and file
measure the angle of the afternoon sun
measure the darkness when it’s done
beta girls come and beta girls go leave not a mark upon his soul beta girls beta girls beta girls beta girls go
pools of light and soul-black night
17 at first daylight
silent complex cleaning crew
wait to shave until they’re through
she gets to work just by noon
takes her laptop to the old break room
he trys not to look when he has to walk by
but as he closes the door he hears her cry
beta girls come and beta girls go leave not a mark upon his soul beta girls beta girls beta girls beta girls go
