Stay tuned.

Witty rhymes like

Your looks intoxicate me
Even though your folks hate me

or this bit about going to a movie:

They’ll turn the lights way down low
and maybe we won’t watch the show

sound skewed, coming from the guys who gave us Happy Together. Skewed for 1968.

In fact, they were skewed intentionally. Howard Kaylan, writing a no-love letter to their record company, put together a grab bag of twisted cliches and words that never belonged in a pop song. It was intended as a parody of Happy Together which backfired delightfully.

Who can forget the timeless romance of the line You’re my pride and joy, et cet’ra ?

And after each verse, sung by Kaylan, bass and drums lead the band through BAWM bawm bum bum and 93 voices and some church bells ring out the delicious delirious chorus, beginning

Elenore, gee I think you’re

swell

I think it’s swell.

(In one of the strangest musical connections ever, Kaylan and his partner Mark Volman, performing as Flo and Eddie for legal reasons, joined The Mothers of Invention and sang with Frank Zappa. I have long dreamt of the son of Orange County’s cover of Elenore in the style of something like St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast.)

If you read my last post you know my family didn’t listen to much music when I was a kid. When we did it was Burl Ives and Perry Como. So how did I get introduced to Tom Jones and Anne Murray? Why those two very different styles?

Our family had a good friend when I was a teenager who became almost like a second dad to me. Sometimes I would go help his mom who was not in great health. Mostly she was lonely and enjoyed having company and someone to talk to. Anyhow, once when we were cleaning up around the house they gave me these two cassette tapes (yes, way back in the day!)

I don’t remember which albums they were. I just remember enjoying She’s a Lady and Anne Murray’s love songs. I wonder whatever became of those two cassettes?

I just learned that Tom Jones is Welsh and Anne Murray was born in Nova Scotia. Maybe that’s why I liked both of them.

Guitar again. This time, it takes off.

One beat before the vocal starts, Robbie Robertson bends root and fifth way up the neck of his Strat and Bob Dylan launches into the psychedelic story of his 115th dream.

Probably not possible to determine whether he really had this dream, or if he did, how much it was edited before becoming a song. Heisenberg probably doesn’t think we can translate our dreams into words anyway, so we do what we can.

During the next 6 minutes we meet:

• Captain Arab (pronounced, very exaggeratedly, AY rab)
• a cop who disapproves of selling harpoons
• a Guernsey cow (takes a midwest boy to choose a Guernsey over a Jersey)
• a handsome waitress (he’s wearing a powder blue cape)
• an order of Suzette (could you please make that crepe?)
• a girl from France
• her angry boyfriend
• an Englishman saying “Fab!”
• a mortician (I repeated that my friends were all in jail, with a sigh. He handed me his card. He said “Call me if they die.”)
• a foot in a phone booth
• the Coast Guard
• an emissary of the Pope of Eruke
• the deputy sherrif
• and some guy named Columbus

Y’know how in your dreams there always seems to be some meaning, something important, just beyond reach? While this has all Mother Goose’s signals and triggers, the social commentary and historical satire never quite surface.

It just seems to be goofy for the sake of goofy. Set to fun music, played well. Good enough for me.

The two records I do remember we had and that I listened to with my mom were records of Burl Ives and Perry Como. I couldn’t even tell you which ones they were. I do know that I enjoyed them.

I remember Burl Ives having a gruff voice but it sounded grandfatherly. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it because I didn’t have a grandfather. Well, I did, but I didn’t know either of them. My mother’s father died when I was very young and I never met my father’s dad.

Of course Perry Como had a smooth voice and was a very handsome man. You’ve got to watch Brendan Fraser in Blast from the Past as he sings along with Perry Como. It made me smile and reminded me of the times mom put Perry’s record on.

Every once in a while when we were kids the next door neighbors would play music my dad found obnoxious. So he’d put on one of our records and play it just a little loud. Apparently the neighbors, playing their 70s music, didn’t care for Perry and Burl. They almost always turned their music off and left the house. Dad was pleased.

It’s strange thinking back how little exposure I had to music growing up. Especially since I ended up married to Joel who loves music more than anyone else I’ve ever known.

Volga and Range both had 2-room school houses, with 1st through 3rd in one room, 4th through 6th in the other. About 10 kids in each grade; 60 total in the school. We moved in after the school year started so I had the last seat in the 1st graders. When I was promoted, I didn’t even have to move my desk, I was just the first seat in the 2nd graders.

Bullying was a big part of my life when I was younger. Whether it was the bully’s natural desire to attack the defenseless, or a reaction to my, I’ll admit, sometimes abrasive personality, I spent more time running through school hallways or running home than most kids.

Nowadays, injustice makes my blood boil. I have to work to keep my reactions reasonable but still passionate.

Okay, that’s way darker than I intended. Here’s how the song was recorded which, as a songwriter, feels kinda cool.

Just a Couple of Kids

It was pouring rain. Not quite Texas thunderstorm, but northern California’s reasonable facsimile thereof. Just rain, no thunder or lightning.

For a lark, I connected two mic cables and hauled the microphone onto the back deck. It was a raised wooden deck covered by the roof of the house. Down below was another wooden deck at ground level. The rest of the yard, sadly, was concrete. Not great for the Little One to play in, but excellent for the sound of rain slashing away at the earth.

Not knowing when the rain would stop, I wanted to record the vocals right away, with the rain in the background. More efficient to just record the rain, then overdub, but I wanted to do it live. Since I’d written the music for the song 10 minutes before (using lyrics which came to me all of a piece, as fast as my hand could write) I knew I wasn’t going to play guitar and sing at the same time. It needed a twangy electric, anyway, and I know better than to play electric guitar in the rain. (Comments about knowing to come in out of it are unnecessary. Really.)

Trusting my sense of rhythm, I sang the vocal track a capella and hoped for the best. Then I dragged it all back inside and recorded the twangy guitar by playing behind the last pickup on my Strat, where the twang lives.

It turned out well enough that it’s the song I open my shows with now.

In the summer of 1992 Garth came to San Diego, California, where I was then living. His Ropin’ the Wind Tour brought him to the Naval Station-32nd Street Athletic Field July 18, 1992 for a show. I went with friends and thoroughly enjoyed the show itself. Garth is a dynamic performer!

Garth’s album Ropin’ the Wind includes one of my favorite songs of his, The River, as well as a cover of Billy Joel’s Shameless, and What’s She Doing Now.

Another Garth Brooks highlight for me is the night my son and I performed Karaoke at a friend’s house. We did Friends in Low Places. It’s the one and only time I’ve ever done Karaoke. My son was a teenager and loved to sing and was brave enough to get up there with me in front of all our friends and sing his heart out.

And of course I love his closing song in the movie Frequency titled When You Come Back Again.

It’s always fun, then, to love a song for the music, then discover its message.

The two versions of Peter Gabriel’s Shaking the Tree I own (from his live album Secret World and from the movie soundtrack Jungle 2 Jungle) are fun, smart, world music. Ancient rhythms and modern instruments, used well.

And an ancient injustice throughout the lyrics.

I’m pretty sure that about 5 minutes after the fall in Eden, Adam was blaming Eve, and ever since, men, in general, have been given women less than honorable treatment. While I’m not an advocate of equality (please; are men and women equal? Not if equal means what I think it means) but dignity, fairness, honor, kindness—basing them on gender is monstrously immoral.

I, for one, know that I’d be nothing without my Best Beloved.

What about you?

Shake it.

A handful of years ago, Charlie and a group of friends wrote a song which was nothing but nouns. It didn’t make much sense, but it sure had nouns.

My only fiction book may suffer a bit from telling instead of showing. I know it’s a good rule. My most popular songs, though, are the ones which ignore it completely.

Popular may not be precisely the right word for beautiful carelessly sultry, but noun is definitely not the right word, because there aren’t any. Yes, I wrote a song with no nouns whatsoever. Not even pronouns. Verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions.

Even more, except that the chorus repeats, no word is used twice.

And just to take it completely over the top, I decided it had to mean something, not nust be random words strung together. Give it a listen, and if you can’t tell exactly what it’s about I’ll be most surprised.

beautiful carelessly sultry

As a result, I’ve been hearing Sarah Through the Wall for months without having a clue who Brad Barr is (or Sarah, for that matter.)

Now that I’ve read a bit about the song and Brad and his brother and their music, I am once again grateful to Pandora and the Music Genome Project for giving me even more of the whole-brained spiritual gift that is music.

When a song has words I can write about it all day. When it doesn’t, you should just go listen to the joyous dance and smile.