Tag Archives: light

Scared of the Light [acoustic]

ScaredOfTheLight4

 

A quick rough draft of a song written for the RPM Challenge — on the last day. This is not that version — it was really, really, really bad, we are talking laughably so — but rather  this is an acoustic version I recorded for posting to the Internet Archive (the content home of AYoS). The lyrics are unchanged and the melody, or what passes for it, little so.

Backstory: I jotted down the title for this song while watching the “Swan Song” episode of the old Columbo TV show sometime last year. In it, Johnny Cash plays a gospel singer who is also a murderous sinner. The episode leads off with a rousing ‘live’ version of “I Saw the Light,” his character’s big hit of the moment. Many months later, while I was dragging a song out of a clever potential title on the last day of the RPM Challenge — having completely forgotten the inspiration — I took a break while recording to watch a little TV.

There aren’t a whole lot of the Columbo episodes, which were shot as ‘two hour’ specials for airing a few times a year. I’ve gone through them on Netflix twice now and that day, on the 28th of February, finishing “Scared of the Light,” up came Johnny Cash and I quickly realized that the episode had been the inspiration for the song sometime last year and… well, dang… the circle is unbroken…

Two more versions will follow shortly, each very different. Stay tuned.

Scared of the Light

more download and streaming options at Archive.org

From the very first zero
to the very last one
I can see what has happened
I can see what will come

Like a train in a tunnel
like a mole in a hole
like a bullet in a barrel
I know where to go

From the very first day
to the very last night
I’ve been through the darkness
but I’m scared of the light

From the very first zero
to the very last one
I can see what has happened
and I see what must come

From the very first day
to the very last night
I’ve been through the darkness
but I’m scared of the light

(C)2013, TK Major
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Pass the dust, I’m apparently under the gravely mistaken impression I’m Bowie…

Scared of the Light [Electric Version]

 

When he awoke, it was dark. His heart was pounding. He felt as though a giant hand was wrapped around him, squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He must have been dreaming but he remembered nothing. He forced air into his lungs, but his breath felt odd and shallow and each breath seemed to take tremendous effort.He tried to shut out the panic but that seemed to make it more acute. He threw off the covers and turned on the light on the little table next to the bed… but its dim and yellow light seemed, if anything, to make his room just that much more oppressive and claustrophobic.

Steeling his grip on himself, he quickly got out of bed and threw on the clothes he’d been wearing the previous night, a pair of bluejeans and a hooded sweatshirt. Glancing at the clock, he saw the red glow of 4:43 a.m. He pulled on his boots and laced them, grabbed his phone and keys, and walked out into the crisp pre-dawn air.

As he often had decades earlier, running from the all-but-forgotten demons of his youth, he found himself walking toward the ocean through the empty, dark streets.

He walked past the lagoon, the shadowy trees looming above languid, almost black water, along the manicured sands of Mothers’ Beach, finally across the trendy little business strip to the bay. As he walked along the crescent of sand, still moving toward the ocean beyond the little bay, the tiniest sliver of golden sun appeared above the houses and trees across the bay.

Until that moment, he’d just been walking. Not thinking. Trying not to feel. Just trying to get away from whatever unknown fear had gripped him in dream so tightly that he feared it would crush the breath out of him.

He searched inside himself for the sense of relief he thought the sun should bring. But all he found was a veil of vague and uneasy dread, pierced by a slim, rosy crescent.

He walked a few steps down closer to the shore, the shift of perspective returning him to the moment just before sunrise. He surveyed the low line of houses, the mirror-like calm of the water. It was beautiful, he recognized numbly.

So beautiful that it seemed a shame to waste it on this moment of vague and free-floating dread.

He paused, pulled his phone out of his pocket, switched its camera on, held his breath just a moment and heard the simulated sound of a shutter snapping open and closed.

_______________________________

 

From the very first zero
to the very last one
I can see what has happened
I can see what will come

Like a train in a tunnel
like a mole in a hole
like a bullet in a barrel
I know where to go

From the very first day
to the very last night
I’ve been through the darkness
but I’m scared of the light

From the very first zero
to the very last one
I can see what has happened
and I see what must come

From the very first day
to the very last night
I’ve been through the darkness
but I’m scared of the light

(C)2013, TK Major

The third (and final?) version of “Scared of the Light”…

(The title of this post is a light-hearted lift from the late, lamented Black Randy — of infamous LA punk/funk provocateurs, Black Randy and the Metro Squad — whose first album was called, “Pass the Dust, I Think I’m Bowie.”)

I’d written out about three quarters of the lyrics and was settling into the chords and melody when I started roughing out the arrangement… something about the way it was going together really made me think of post-Berlin-era Bowie and, I dunno, I ran with it.

 

 

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Scared of the Gumbo

gumboThis is the second version of my latest song, “Scared of the Light.” Last week I posted the solo acoustic version. This one is dubbed, for lack of a better name, the swamp gumbo version. (You’ll see why.)

Coming next: the full, Pass the Dust, I’m Apparently Under the Profoundly Mistaken Belief I’m Bowie version.

Scared of the Light (swamp gumbo version)

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Daddy’s Rented Cadillac

Daddy's Rented Cadillac

I did go to a high school prom in my dad’s Cadillac but, unlike the guy in this song, I had a date, didn’t wreck the car, and survived to tell the story. (Not to mention that my dad’s Caddy was a genteel 4 year old de Ville he picked up for a song from some prosperous relatives.)

Like so many of my songs, this one started with a phrase (the title phrase in this case) and sort of fell out from there. When I was a kid, first driving, I used to drive up in the then rustic hills above Orange County, California, and we used to go ghost hunting up there playing hooky from boring parties or dances. I like to blot them out, but I know I had a lot of close calls on the roads up that way.

Indeed, one time driving back from an especially long loop that took me the length of Santiago Canyon road (back when it was a moonlit, winding, two lane blacktop) and all the way down to Laguna, I had pulled out onto Pacific Coast Highway north of town and was heading up one of those long grades when the sky ahead of me lit up almost like daylight.

This was the late 60’s and I honestly thought they’d finally dropped the Big One on LA to the north. I couldn’t think of any other explanation.

It was with a sense of fascinated fatalism that I continued driving up the hill. As I topped the crest, I was temporarily blinded by the intensity of the light.

For a moment I was afraid I might crash into something and then the light dimmed perceptibly and my eyes adjusted as well.

The two southbound lanes were consumed in huge flames, almost obscuring a fuel tanker and what looked like one or two cars. It was all I could do to drive by the intense heat. A CHP car was just rolling up from the north, dropping flares behind it.

I drove by, thinking, close call.

I really expected nuclear war back then.

Everyone did.

This version uses chords I improvised on the spot, since I was a little hazy on the actual chords as I’d written them back in ’81.

I’d been listening to Jack Tarr and some other chanties and folk songs and I wanted to get that kind of dark, folk ballad feel.

BTW, the round faced, vaguely South Park-looking character behind the wheel of the Caddy in the pic above [and let me tell you, it was plenty hard to get him in there behind the windshield… it only looks like it’s transparent, you know] is none other than my alter ego, my frequent bulletin board avatar, my better half:


(While I don’t actually have any studded wristbands and never did, I do have a Pop Group T-shirt just like that. Well, to be honest, I have 3, because I decided I liked how good it looked on my avatar, here, and… maybe I’ve been on the internet too long.)

DADDY’S CADILLAC

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!

Copyright 1981
T.K. Major

Bonus Mystery Link

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