Tag Archives: So How Does It Look From the Stars?

Those Brahmin girls…

So, How Does It Look From the Stars?

 

 

 

 

Ah… those Brahmin girls…

Always one step ahead of you even when you’re both racing for the gutter… and yet they always pull up at the last instant, leaving you splashing, face first, in the soggy, slimy defeat of your own victory.

At least, you know, that’s how it always was for me.

So, How Does It Look From the Stars?

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studio version[soundclick]

previous versions
Friday, December 09, 2005
Sunday, June 11, 2006

lyrics
So, How Does It Look From the Stars?

I’ve been up to your penthouse but
I… I was afraid to look down
I’ve been all around the world
but I’m only at home on my own side of town

I’ve been up all night
trying to find
the right way to come down
I been inside out and I know all about
the emptiness all around

everything happens for reasons
but we never get to find out what they are
from way down here it all looks pretty big
so how does it look from the stars

you laid it all out
and I wanted so much
to just pick up
what you put down

I can taste it right now
but still somehow
I’ve finally found
the power to shine on

everything happens for reasons
but we never get to find out what they are
from way down here it all looks pretty big
so how does it look from the stars

(C) 2001 TK Major
(C)2007, TK Major

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I was afraid to look down…

I was afraid to look down...

If rich girls and poor boys didn’t exist — songwriters and novelists would pretty much have to invent them.

Happily — or not — I didn’t have to do any research for this song.

As I wrote not long ago, I was working in a self-serve gas station during the first gas crisis in the mid-70s. It was a great gig, in at least one way: it paid double minimum wage at a time when a lot of folks were plug out of work in the slumping, stagflation-driven post-Vietnam recession.

I thought of it as combat pay… one week three people were shot dead on the block the station was on… two of them while I was on duty. Those killings occurred in a grotesque abandoned apartment house used as a flop by a crew of junkies and hanging by the fingernail types who were motley even by the distressed standards of the era.

It was during that period I ended up falling in love with a rich girl. She was wonderful in so many ways. She was smart as a whip (in her second year of law school at the age of 21 or 22), liked to argue about politics and philosophy and could take it as well as dish it out — an important consideration as far as I was concerned — and she could drink like a man. As we used to say.

It could be odd, getting off work on a hot sweaty day in a part of my town hard-pressed and degraded by the city’s blind-eyed neglect, showering, and driving to the chi-chi enclave of Bel Air (now famous as the one time home of O. J. Simpson and former president Ronald Reagan) to pick her up and drive to some south bay bar where we would proceed to get hammered on cheap beer.

We ended up moving in together after we’d only been going out for a month or so, which may have been the first nail in the coffin of that terminal relationship. Still, one day she brought home a card, in Spanish, from the Guadelupe Wedding Chapel, which, taking advantage of a new state law, was offering “no-wait” marriages to cohabiting couples.

The card became a running joke… but I was never entirely sure it was a joke. “C’mon,” she would say after a few beers, “let’s go up there right now and do it.” I was invariably evasive. I thought she’d back out at the last instant — but I was never sure enough to test my theory.

(And, when she did get married 4 or 5 years later, it was an enormous church wedding at a prestigious Presbyterian church in Beverly Hills, with a reception at an exclusive and rambling hotel in that same town that was lousy with out of town movie stars and visiting dignitaries. I was invited and attended with my then current GF. But that’s for another blog entry. Or maybe it was, already. I’ll get back to you on that.)

When we first moved in together, she had just decided to drop out of law school and took a job in a local bank as a teller. Pretty soon, law school must have started looking pretty good. After 6 or 7 months, she announced she was taking her father up on an offer to return to law school. And, she said, while she wanted to continue the relationship, she was going to move back up to LA to be closer to the school.

By then, the relationship had taken a few hits, provoked in part, by my own insecurity in the face of my girlfriend’s whipsaw ability to snap from scared little girl to steely independence at the drop of a wrong word — or even a dropped cue.

From there it was on again and off again… a roller coaster I ultimately found completely fatiguing and emotionally flummoxing. I was hooked — but hammered, emotionally. Eventually I realized I’d had enough — and was convinced she had, too, though she didn’t know it, I said, “You know what? You don’t need me. You think you do. But you don’t. I love you and I think you love me. We had some dreams, I guess. But they’re over.”

Of course, that was a lie… sometimes I awake with just the wisp of one of them disappearing in the daylight. And for a few moments I remember — I feel those old feelings. For a few moments.

Last time I saw her, she was married, had a couple of beautiful kids, and seemed glowingly happy. Call me nuts — but that’s how I want to remember her.

We all have our dreams.

previous AYoS version


[full version on Soundclick | requires Flash]

So, How Does It Look from the Stars?

I’ve been up to your penthouse but
I… I was afraid to look down
I’ve been all around the world
but I’m only at home on my own side of town

I’ve been up all night
trying to find
the right way to come down
I been inside out and I know all about
the emptiness all around

everything happens for reasons
but we never get to find out what they are
from way down here it all looks pretty big
so how does it look from the stars

you laid it all out
and I wanted so much
to just pick up
what you put down

I can taste it right now
but still somehow
I’ve finally found
the power to shine on

everything happens for reasons
but we never get to find out what they are
from way down here it all looks pretty big
so how does it look from the stars

(C) 2001 TK Major

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So, How Does It Look from the Stars?

So, How Does It Look from the Stars 

 

The sweat stung his eyes as he wiped his forearm across his grimy brow, shifted his weight to the broom he’d been using to sweep in front of the little bodega, and looked up toward the 7th floor penthouse terrace.

For a few moments that steamy summer night, the city was quiet and he heard melodic laughter skitter across the rippled surface of some subdued piano jazz. It sounded like a real piano and he knew from delivering there once that they had a big white one shaped like an ocean wave.

A handful of people drifted out to the edge of the terrace and he saw her once again. She leaned back against the terrace wall as she seemed to listen to someone he couldn’t see, her pale hair drifting in the summer air as though in the languid waters of a rowing pond.

In the apartment over the bodega, he could hear his kid sister suddenly rolling through the city’s radio stations on her big old portable aimlessly, looking for somewhere she’d never been before.

(C)2001, TK Major

So, How Does It Look from the Stars?

I’ve been up to your penthouse but
I… I was afraid to look down
I’ve been all around the world
but I’m only at home on my own side of town

I’ve been up all night
trying to find
the right way to come down
I been inside out and I know all about
the emptiness all around

everything happens for reasons
but we never get to find out what they are
from way down here it all looks pretty big
so how does it look from the stars

you laid it all out
and I wanted so much
to just pick up
what you put down

I can taste it right now
but still somehow
I’ve finally found
the power to shine on

everything happens for reasons
but we never get to find out what they are
from way down here it all looks pretty big
so how does it look from the stars

(C) 2001 TK Major


[full version on Soundclick | requires Flash]

Fans of this song take note: this is among the songs I plan on revisitng a time or two during AYoS, so I hope you won’t feel shortchanged by the not-quite-there version above or by my reprinting the vignette I wrote in 2001 to promo the online release of the ‘studio version’ of the song.

In fact, next time, I plan on writing a bit about Dead End, the play (and movie) that helped inspire this song. Recently, I was lucky enough to see a big budget revival of the stage play and it was pretty amazing. Think looming, chaotic tenement stage set and — get this — a wharf over a huge tank standing in for the East River. Anyhow, that’s next time.

By the way, if you listen to any of the studio versions of AYoS songs, I would recommend you listen to this one (or perhaps the studio version of “Baby, I Just Got the Blues“). If you’re not familiar with my (one man) band one blue nine, you may be surprised.

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