There’s an ugly, yellow, artificial twilight — it reminds me of just past dusk on the smoggiest of bad old LA days — a nasty, twighlight that overtakes you when you turn incandescent houselights controlled by a dimmer way, way down. A room can take on the aspect of a yellowed newspaper clipping… but the result isn’t nostalgic — but more an oppressive, claustrophobia-inspiring flatness… it’s as though the air was somehow sucked out of the room.
As the light gets dimmer and yellower, the eye can play tricks… shadows move — but it’s not the shadowy dance of flickering candles… no, the shadows move fitfully, restlessly… waiting until your attention is focused somewhere else and they are safely at the edge of your vision.
In the song below, the monkey demons and the reference to the old blues line, “I’ve been down so long, it looks like up to me,” come from the first (and sole) novel from lost writer-musician Richard Fariña, married to Joan Baez’s sister Mimi and killed in a motorcycle crash in 1966, after leaving the signing party for the novel on a borrowed bike.
I was a college drop-out, working in a rundown, inner city self-serve gas station where the prices were usually so high the only customers we sometimes had were people limping along on fumes. They’d sputter into the gas station, put a buck’s worth of gas in and drive a block or two down the street to get some cheap gas at our always-busy competition. I’d often stop in there on the way home from work, myself.
My GF at the time was a smart, pretty girl who grew up in Bel Air (you know, where Reagan lived after he left the White House?)
She was in law school most of the time we were going out (though she had dropped out during the brief period we actually lived together… it must have been her bohemian period) and she often bounced what she was learning off me. So I found myself picking up a fair amount of legal jargon and half-digested theory and doctrine. (One man’s seamless web is another’s jumble of disassociated bits and pieces.)
Probably no phrase or piece of jargon from that era has come in so handy, over the intervening years, as the snip of Latin, mea culpa, which, of course, means my guilt — or in the stunted vernacular of our head-shrunken era, my bad.
It seemed to cry out for a song. A nice little song about doin’ wrong.
But, in those days, I just couldn’t seem to write a nice simple song about someone doin’ someone wrong, oh, no.
If we were going to be talking about guilt, we were going to be talking about cosmic guilt… and multi-layered cosmic guilt, at that. I’d recently read Fowles’ The Magus, and my head was filled with notions of the illusion of identity and personality and revelation. So, a little bit of legal jargon became a jumping off point.
Even then, there was a certain autobiographical irony apparent to me. (Like divine irony, yes? — we need not, I think, distract ourselves with a usage argument over the word irony.)
My long suffering first real girlfriend (henceforth to be known by the acronym LSFRG) was the victim of a makeover plot by me… not really a plot, since she was willing to go along for the ride.
I had decided that, given some appropriate raw material, I could remake any intelligent, reasonable looking girl into my perfect girlfriend. (And it should be noted that LSFRG was considerably more than “reasonable looking.” I thought she was the cutest thing I’d ever seen, even in her leftover geek-honor student clothes. Once I got her tricked out in tight-fitting jeans and floppy peasant shirts she was, in my proud estimation, just about perfect.)
This was, of course, the addled and spectacularly uncomprehending thinking of someone who had grown up with some serious empathy issues. I was sentimental — to be sure. I understood the concept of other’s emotional pain and suffering… but the reality of it often escaped me.
And, ultimately, the reality of the situation was that I caused this young woman — who in my own selfish, thoroughly tweaked way, I really loved — enormous pain.
I could only evade that reality so long.
Eventually, at what was supposed to have been the end of the relationship, we engaged in a marathon emotional debriefing (which, like other pivotal moments, I’ve discussed elsehwere in AYoS) and it finally hit me… for maybe the first time in my life, I think, I started really feeling someone else’s pain, not as an intellectual or an ethical consideration but as… pain.
In the end, it was me who pined for her, for years, even as I realized she was far better off without me. The dreams I thought I’d thrown away came back to haunt me again and again… sometimes they haunt me still.
And, so, ultimately, the “I” in this song may not be me…
I remember a Sunday so long ago, the concept of Sunday was a new one… this special day when no one worked (in those days my mom worked weekdays and my dad was off on Tuesday and worked Saturdays).
On this day we were driving out to the country — the outskirts of the then-small city of Orange, California — to pick up friends of my folks and then driving up to the mountains at Big Bear.
In those days, Orange was mostly orchards and farmhouses, spreading out from a tiny downtown built around a turn-of-the-last-century roundabout (a traffic circle, if you will). Besides some fruit packing plants there wasn’t much to town except the children’s hospital I’d been born in.
We met up with another car load of young adults and, leaving Orange, we drove down two lane roads for hours until, sometime long after noon (another slightly hazy concept — I think remember someone on the picnic explaining that it meant the sun was directly overhead) we arrived in what I recall as a big valley meadow between two sets of snow-capped mountains.
I don’t remember too much about the picnic but this is what I do remember — even though it seems oddly dreamlike:
After we’d been there a few hours and the sun was edging down toward the mountains I now know to have been in the west, we heard a long, low roar echoing out of the mountains behind us. A visceral, beastly roar…
Everyone froze and the girls — I swear this is what I remember — got scared. I think someone said something like, “Well, maybe that’s the Big Bear they named this place after.” A couple of the guys wanted to go see what it was. But a couple of the girls seemed genuinely frightened and one of them seemed panicky, insisting that we pack up and go.
And we did. As the adults hurriedly packed up (the scared girl was sitting in the back of one of the sedans and refused to come out even to help pack up) I remember looking down at my arm and seeing the little bumps around the hairs on my arm. Someone said they were “goosebumps” and that was a new one to me, too. I don’t remember much else except that it was long after dark on Sunday night when we dropped my folks’ friends off.
To this day, I still wonder what the hell that sound was. And, sometimes, when the memory seems really vivid, it can still raise goosebumps and I can still feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
NEW VERSION of the brand new song from last week…
It takes a while to find each new song, often as not, and this one is no exception. I’ve been rolling around some changes (I’ve wrestled with the “lots and lots of lots” issue but I’m sticking with what I wrote for now).
This version was actually recorded earlier in the week. The vocals are still somewhat awkward. Some of the guitar work is, too. But it’s pretty different than the first, fingerpicked version and I think it’s worth putting up, capturing a different aspect of the song… I think it suggests where I want to go a little better. I’ll probably rough it out with a fleshed out version with drums, bass, and more guitars in the coming weeks…
A Land So Far Away
I was born so long ago
between some forgotten wars
times were different then I know
it’s the one thing that’s for sure
There were cows across the road
I can still feel the dairy smell
where it’s only houses now
and they stretch all the way to hell
and back then I never thought
I would ever hit the road
but before I knew what was what
there was nowhere else to go ch and right now I know I want
to find this place called home
I don’t know where it is
and I don’t know where to go
I was born between some wars
between the mountains and the shore
in a land so far away
you just cant
get there anymore
I saw the world there’s a lot to see
and sure I was impressed
lots of hope lots of fear
and lots of girls undressed
lots of bar rooms lots of dreams
lots of lifelong friends
lots of pals you’ll always love
and never see again
ch right now I know I want to find…
I was born so long ago
between some forgotten wars
times were different then
it’s the one thing that’s for sure
and back then I never thought
I would ever hit the road
but before I knew what was what
there was nowhere else to go
ch and right now I know I want
to find this place called home
I don’t know where it is
and I don’t know where I have to go
I was born between some wars
between the mountains and the shore
in a land so far away
you just cant
get there anymore
Bad enough if it’s with some jet set pretty boy or sweet talkin’, movie star-handsome lothario with a two thousand dollar suit and a low slung sports car.
But when it’s an overweight pool guy or the middle-aged, balding fellow the mini-blind store sent out to measure the windows… well… it’s enough to send you back to the pre-nup with a magnifying glass and a legal dictionary.
About today’s version: I was feelin’ a little frisky when I cut this. It’s more than a bit of a mess but… well… I think by now we all know that tight and clean is not what AYoS is all about. The guitar and vocal on the left was the original track, I added another guitar, switching to a slide part way through, realized the original vocal was even more buried, decided to chip in another vocal track, and decided some of my patented, arhythmic percussion work would be the cherry on top of this hot fudge mishegaas.
how come you love me
how come you hate me
how come you just won’t leave me a alone
did you ever have the notion
you ain’t gotta monopoply on emotion
honey can’t you tell my pain is real
honey come here put your hand on my heart there’s a world of feelings trapped inside look in my eyes and tell me once and for all honey make your mind up are you his or mine
how come you love me
how come you hate me
how come I can’t tell them apart
where was your conscience
when your mind told my body
to make sure that your soul
had my heart
honey come here put your hand on my heart there’s a world of feelings trapped inside look in my eyes and tell me once and for all honey make your mind up are you his or mine (C)2007, TK Major
