For MLK Day: Len Chandler’s Shadow Dream – in memory of a singer, a movement & its leader
On Songwriting
About Jokerman by Bob Dylan.
Let’s see, it was October 1983 and I was still in the Plimsouls, but we had come in from the road, and 
had wound down, and I was just knocking about, living alone in a tiny pad up in Laurel Canyon (in the same cottage the Melvins eventually moved into, after I split). I was writing songs for what was gonna be my first solo LP, and felt like I was on the moon, ’cause I was living at night, isolated, kinda living in my dreams & musical ideas, and I didn’t have to show up anywhere or for anything, it was woodshed time.
It was a good time, I was 29 years old, freed up for the first time from a lot of things that had been bugging me.
So I picked up the new Dylan LP at Tower on Sunset, and took it straight back home, and threw it on, and was completely transfixed by “Jokerman.”
The first thing that got me about it was the Sly and Robbie groove, unlike anything I’d heard before: it’s not rock or reggae either, but something new, very open. As usual with a Dylan record you hear every word. He delivers that very clearly.
On first listen the song hits you with a strong sense of life, of what it’s like to be alive in the world at that moment, a sense of NOW. The complexity, color, seductive sensual lure, sense of danger, of freedom, of possibility that one feels in the world, call it the Modern World, is all communicated so vividly, that the flash of recognition I felt upon hearing it, EVEN THOUGH I HAD NO REASONABLE IDEA WHAT HE WAS ON ABOUT, gave me a rush of Companionship. So that’s the first thing about the art of his songwriting, he wins you with the representation of what it’s really like to be alive. And you feel that before you understand it.
I think “Like A Rolling Stone” did that for it’s time. And the song “Dignity” hit me with that kind of force, when I first heard it on the radio, and had to pull the car over. And it’s a hugely exciting thing.
I’m not sure to this day that I could say I understand the song really. But I find it really moving.
The lines about ships, mist, snakes, glowing eyes, all were like kindling and I went up in flames when he hit “freedom just around the corner for you — but with the truth so far off what good will it do?”
That’s what I mean about him reflecting the true complexity of being alive, instead of the party line, which would be something like, ‘”Gotta get free!” or ‘”I’m free — but with freedom comes responsiblility.” You know, “freedom good!”
I was in a period of my life when I felt a bit of freedom, but the nagging thoughts about the validity of what I was doing were unexpressed, kinda murkily swimming about in my mind, then PRESTO! Dylan’s said it, and I’m pushed into a new dimension of thought. All of this I just felt though on that first listen.
“So swiftly the sun sets in the sky…” yeah especially if like me you’re getting up in the afternoon and turning night into day, “You rise up and say goodbye to no one.” Check.
“Shedding off one more layer of skin, staying one step ahead of the persecutor within.” He does it again with this one, shedding off skin, sounds good, that’s what I was trying to do, reinvent myself, renew my musical vision, evade the weights and mistakes of my past. “One step ahead of the persecutor.” It was like he was reading my mind, I’d been guilty for my impulse to ditch the band and go solo, though it seemed necessary from a purely artistic point of view. So, those lines hit me too, and grilled me. As they would anybody I think, who was actively going through the kind of changes life threw on individuals at that time, which is still THIS TIME, by the way. The struggle of freedom, guilt, knowledge, power, foolishness that we all experience.
It’s a good song; there’s just so much in it. It seems alive, almost.
The chorus is so stripped down, it’s more tricky. “Jokerman,” that’s him singing about himself, and maybe about Jesus in verse three, and maybe about the silence of God at the end. But it’s also anybody, the Fool, jokers, trying to get serious, by that I mean, living with their eyes open, not “asleep neath the stars with a small dog licking your face” an image of a childish, maybe foolish sort, but also attractive in a way, hmm. The nightingale’s tune, it’s been pointed out that that’s like Keat’s Nightingale, the muse, or Imagination, flying high by the moon, that is, almost in the dark, moony, lunar, almost lunatic inspiration, like the subconscious, or unconscious (I mix them up!) which it always seems like Dylan relies on. For example, he always used to insist the songs come “through him” and the creation of his early work had to do with “power and dominion over the spirits.”
Is that clear at all? It does seem like he is singing, at least in part about himself. And it’s relevant to you and me, to the degree you want to apply it.
There’s a great difference between his best work and his other stuff. “Jokerman” is one of his great songs, right in there with the best of the early work, and the best of the ’70s. “Neighborhood Bully” doesn’t have this kind of impact, whatever you think of its message. “Man Of Peace,” likewise. I think “Union Sundown” is a great piece of work, but as a song lyric, though it’s good, maybe someone else could have written it, he merely covers the subject. Another song like that, from a later album, is “Everything’s Broken” from O Mercy. It’s strong, complete, but not necessarily “Dylan-esque,” in that it’s not communicating that super-vivid and 360 degree sense of life, of what it’s like to be alive at that moment. And when you hear the songs that have that quality, it’s like a mirror, or a trick window, you almost feel as if you’re looking through reality, getting a glimpse “behind the screen” and that’s what makes it so valuable.
So some of it is cold, detached, etc. but people need to hear his great stuff. His Greatest Hits, Vol 3 is pretty powerful, for that reason.
If you don’t get Bob Dylan, you don’t get much, in my opinion. Complaints about his voice are a sure sign of ignorance of music and history. It’s not really a matter of taste. It’s a matter of mind or not. I know as time goes on it may be harder for younger people to get in on. But it’s worth trying to find the door in, a whole universe opens up.
A lot of it is down to words. Can you relate to another mind, as related in language. Beyond the either/ors of binary choice. Dem or Republican? Hot/Not? Young/Old? Yes/No on this or that.
Bob Dylan uses roots music to tell his story, his way. That’s what I try to do as well. But you have to know your limits. Dylan is the best at that, he’s got that “bullshit- detector” that lots of people talk about. It better be real or forget about it.
I grew up in a house when blues and jazz and early rock and roll were just coming out, and the records were comstantly being played on our record player, and my sister and her friends (who were all about the same age as Dylan) were attempting to play the music,too, on piano and other instruments. And that ’50s music was all blues-based, or country. And then there was Elvis, who I experienced as a three year old. And he had the feeling on the Sun Records, and the early RCA, and I just soaked it up, but also the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Link Wray (the first HEAVY guitar) Richie Valens, Fats Domino, the great Little Richard and Jerry Lee on TV shows like Bandstand, and all of that is blues.
Then Dylan and the Stones, Beatles too, and I followed the streams and first heard Muddy Waters, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Carl Perkins, and Buddy Holly. I just loved all of that so much. And it got deeper from there, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson, McTell, Gary Davis, etc. I just loved it and listened endlessly. And kept TRYING to play and sing it, and I HATED what I sounded like at 17, 18 years old, so young and white and reedy. It was EMBARRASSING.
The story of all this is in my book, As Far As You Can Get Without A Passport, which I’ve been posting bit by bit for the last few months.
Somewhere in there it all opened up to me, but you still gotta keep a sense of humor, and the bulllshit detector trained on yourself, so look out!
And then you gotta work to be YOURSELF, to sing through the influences.
I think I need to write a part two of this!
(all rights reserved peter case 2005)
2019 tour dates: https://petercase.com/gigs/
see also: https://petercase.com/dionysius-invocation-for-the-show/
Songwriting Notes for July 21, 2018
“When the race starts close to the finish line…”
The Formula
“1) Get in touch with your feelings- access your underground: the unconscious: always feeling the background.
2) Nobody can make any good music unless they first learn to play for themselves. Forget about exterior stuff, their image, whether the stuff they play is any good or not , whether the audience is pleased or not, and all that superficial stuff.
“Go by your feelings, kid, forget about whether the audience likes what you write, what you play…”
3) Hard work…there’s no such thing as talent. Just emotions & paying attention to them, & hard work…thats the formula, & in the end, you can’t lose.”
-John Fahey
“Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.” -Marianne Moore
Woody Guthrie: “Just the idea of the title for your song is more than half the battle to catch your ballad. I’ve got thousands of titles laid away like postal saving bonds. I spend hours & hours just writing down my ideas for titles to my songs. I jump up late of nights & grab somebody’s pencil & somebody’s paper & write down just the titleline to some balladsong on the upper end of a blank sheet of paper & jump out of some other bed several years later and set down the the words to that ballad idea that hit me several beds ago. You’ve got to be financially able to pay for a large number of beds if you have the least notion of ever being any kind of a balladsong maker.”
‘ Just the right phrase can go a long way.’ -Chris Rock
Start a song notebook. Carry it with you, & use it.
Titles : collect them : make a list of 25
Phrases you hear, or that pop into your head and demand attention. Write them down and use them in songs.
Alliteration, vowels, long & short tones, contrast:
LOVE ME DO
by Lennon & McCartney
This is the one that kicked it all off for the Beatles
intro figure: (played on harmonica)
G C
Love love me do
G C
You know I love you
G C
I’ll always be true
NC
So pleeeease love me do
repeat figure
G C
Love love me do
G C
You know I love you
G C
I’ll always be true
NC
So pleeeease love me do
(play figure 1 again)
D C G
Someone to love Somebody new
D C G
Someone to love Someone like you
G C
Love love me do
G C
You know I love you
G C
I’ll always be true
NC
So pleeeease love me do
(play figure 1 again)
G C
Love love me do
G C
You know I love you
G C
I’ll always be true
NC
So pleeeease love me do
DARK AS A DUNGEON
As Recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford
Words and music by Merle Travis
[G] Come listen you fellers so [C] young and [D] fineOh [Em] seek not your [G] fortune in the [C] dark dreary [G] mine
It will form as a habit and [C] seep in your [D] soul
Till the [Em] stream of your [G] blood is as [C] black as the [G] coal.
Refrain:
It’s [D] dark as a dungeon and [C] damp as the [G] dew
Where [D] danger is double and [C] pleasures are [G] few
Where the rain never falls and the [C] sun never [D] shines
It’s [Em] dark as a [G] dungeon way [C] down in the [G] mines.
It’s many a man I’ve known in my day
Who lived just to labor his whole life away
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine
A man will have lust for the lure of the mine.
Refrain
The midnight, the morning, or the middle of the day
It’s the same to the miner who labors away
Where the demons of death often come by surprise
One fall of the slate and you’re buried alive.
Refrain
I hope when I’m dead and the ages shall roll
My body will blacken and turn into coal
Then I’ll look from the door of my heavenly home
And pity the miner a-diggin’ my bones.
A friend of mine used to say, that professional songwriters always have three songs: the one they just finished, the one they’re working on in the present, and the next one they’re going to write.
At some point I began to feel that whenever you had a problem in life, the best thing was to write your way through it.
As a singer/songwriter, don’t forget the “singer” part of the deal. work on your singing.
Turn your secrets into songs. If you sing them for strangers. tell everybody you just make them up out of the blue.
Make a list of your fifty favorite words, then write a page in your notebook, exploring each one. discuss them in terms of things, the sensual world.
Ideas can be your friends. existentialism, dreams as a mirror of reality, economic justice, environmentalism, human rights, grass roots democracy, beatitude, the grotesque. seize on clarifying the ideas you are actually living by–your philosophy.
Every word, every note, every beat is important.
Figure out who your biggest influences are. What do you love about their work? Make a list. Then make a point of putting these things you love directly into your songs immediately. Eventuallu, figure out what about their work you would improve on if you could. then set to work at doing it.
If you ever get stuck, move on.
Sometimes, if you are stuck in your writing, just try to put down one honest line. Or put down the exact OPPOSITE of the truth, and work from there.
( This suggestion os for the six week classes) Play with the techniques we’ve studied: reversals; haiku; american sentences; setting Blake and other well written poetry to music; nonsense; desire; people-place and time writing, kerouac sketching; collecting and writing from titles; song portraits; list songs;
Learn your favorite songs, and sing’em.
“No ideas but in things”: “Close to the nose”
“Develop a friendly attitude towards your own thoughts and ideas.”
If you don’t get it right the first time, try writing the song again, as a new song. Do this as many times as you need.
William Blake–“Without unceasing Practice nothing can be accomplished
Art is Practice. Leave off Practice and you are Lost.”
William Burroughs: Kerouac… he was a writer. That is, he wrote.
Andy Warhol : “You think too much. That’s ’cause there’s work you don’t want to do” –quoted in Lou Reed’s song Work, from Songs For Drella.
Leonard Cohen: On his relatively paltry recorded output and how he sets about the creative process, he is blithely dismissive of his talents. “Writing an album, it always feels like I am scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get the songs together,” he says. “I’ve never had the sense that I’ve had a multitude of choices. There is no sense of abundance – I’m just picking at what I have. It’s like what Yeats said about working in ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. I do get discouraged by the work.
“It is a mysterious process, it involves perseverance and perspiration and sometimes, by some grace, something stands out and invites you to elaborate or animate it. These are sacred mechanics and you have to be careful analysing them as you would never write a line again. If you looked too deeply into the process you’d end up in a state of paralysis.
“People ask about the imagery all the time but sometimes it’s enough to say that the imagery has its own validity.”
He does confess to a troubling kind of perfectionism. “I wrote 80 verses or something for Hallelujah . That song was written over the space of four years and that’s my trouble – I can’t discard a verse. I have to work on it and polish it. I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it’s not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.”
Bob Dylan on Woody Guthrie: “You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live.”
Bob Dylan–“I always try to turn a song on it’s head. Otherwise, I figure I’m wasting the listener’s time.”
Some great phrases of Jax-Pierre:
winters ragged hand
these poor rude lives
fortune & men’s eyes
flatter the mountain tops
my storm-beaten face
their rotten smoke
gentle thief
jump both sea & land
millions of strange shadows
captain jewels
hungry eyes
ages cruel knife
roses of shadow
the ambush of young days
beauty lived & died
a crow that flies
bare ruined choirs
arrest without bail
crooked eclipses
——
59 winters
summer’s green all girded
up in sheaves
astronomy
fresh numbers
eternal summer
men of less truth than tongue
gold candles
ages full hand
summer’s honey breath
marigold at the sun’s eye
a journey in my head
fairest créatures
beauty’s rose
the world’s fresh ornament
herald
dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field
youth’s proud livery
a tatter’d weed
treasure
deep sunken eyes
all-eating shame
fresh repair
unless some mother
the lovely april of her prime
thy mothers glass
a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass
——
“Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager, stay eager.”
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” –Susan Sontag
——
“Every hundred feet the world changes.” –Roberto Bolano
——
1. Look at problems in many different ways, find new ways to see them.
To gain knowledge about the form of a problem, restructure it in different ways. The first way we looked at a problem was too biased. Often, the problem itself is reconstructed and becomes a new one.
2. Visualize.
Look at the subject in as many different ways as possible, including using diagrams. Put it down on paper: writing is a magical act. Visualized solution.
3. Produce. A distinguishing characteristic of genius is productivity.
In a study of scientists throughout history, it was found that “most respected scientists produced not only great works, but also many “bad” ones. They weren’t afraid to fail, or to produce mediocre in order to arrive at excellence.
4. Make novel combinations. Combine, and recombine, ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations no matter how incongruent or unusual.
discuss: The file card method.
5. Form relationships; make connections between dissimilar subjects.
This is a habit of thought, paying attention, making connections for kicks.
Da Vinci forced a relationship between the sound of a bell and a stone hitting water. This enabled him to make the connection that sound travels in waves. Samuel Morse invented relay stations for telegraphic signals when observing relay stations for horses.
6. Think in opposites.
Physicist Niels Bohr believed, that if you held opposites together, then you suspend your thought, and your mind moves to a new level. His ability to imagine light as both a particle and a wave led to his conception of the principle of complementarity. Suspending thought (logic) may allow your mind to create a new form.
7. Think metaphorically.
Aristotle considered metaphor a sign of genius; the ability to perceive resemblances between two separate areas of existence and link them together.
8. Prepare yourself for chance.
Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up doing something else. That is the first principle of creative accident. Failure can be productive only if we do not focus on it as an unproductive result.
Instead: analyze the process, its components, and how you can change them, to arrive at other results. Do not ask the question “Why have I failed?”, but rather “What have I done?”
And remember, sometimes you have to discover yourself, see what you’ve done for what it really is, see it with new eyes, etc. suspending expectations. How would you hear this if you heard it on a radio, or just walked into a room and someone else was doing it?
Clamping the mind down on details. some exercises and then a song, or two.
William Carlos Williams: “It is in things that for the artist the power lies, not beyond them. Only where the eye hits does sight occur”
–haiku, I think, is a clever method to get ourselves to write/see/picture simultaneously.
First, most people during early school years actually did write some form of it,
and might recall it with fondness or joy, or embarrassment and scoffing. Either way,
many of us can remember the act of really writing, before we began an endless series of quizzes and bubbles and
dumbed down education.
So, we tap into what Wayne Kramer might call, original joy. Like hearing an effective pop song for the first time,
and trying it yourself for a few seconds, dreaming of the Monkees. Even if it didn’t pan out,
it tapped into your creative impulse.
In this exercise, I could care less about counting syllables, but I am concerned with three crisp lines.
The first two must relate/offer images of nature — you must immerse the reader, your must draw the picture
in words, you must avoid abstraction and empty language, vessels of nothingness. You must engage.
The third line is the repository of understanding, the link: eureka/satori/understanding, of how the first two
interrelate, how two juxtaposed images, by and of themselves, create a unifying element, stir
an association, and become packed with potential meaning, however latent.
Now, as you model this (I’ve even done this with fellow writers and teachers, and trust me, they
are just as stumped and shy as students at first), you can also show other writerly techniques, devices,
conceits, tools, etc.
For instance, I use a variation of this, imperfect, no doubt, but useful:
sun slants through trees barely naked
crow caws as moths whir
spring is here
Now, again, I don’t aim for profundity as much as potential.
I can exhibit:
Alliteration (sun slant / crows caw)
Parallelism (slants/caws)
Onomatopoeia (caw)
Inverted syntax (trees naked/ naked trees … a play on Whitmanesque lines,
“I saw in Louisiana a Live-oak Growing” rather than proper
formal English, which begin with prep phrase, “In Louisiana, I saw…”
Personification (naked trees)
Near/off/imperfect rhymes (whir/here)
etc.
Gray clouds drift through skyscrapers
Birds fly in V-patterns
Winter awaits
But, most important, the images confer a crispness, a photograph-etching-eye glimpse
quality…
So, we set to work making two similar works based on our own sense of nature
Now, to get that started, we’ll do an immersive activity, like shut the lights off,
and then silently recall a meaningful place of nature, and then flush out our senses in memory, all five, one by one, silently, in our active brain, then we pop the lights on, and scribble first thoughts best thoughts
regarding images/sensations we recall, on notepads we write
the two haiku based on those impressions and scribbles…
–narratives
Next lesson, nailing People, Place, and Time. As we know, narratives do not
stem from vacuums, they come from environments, even latent and subtle, but
always from a sense of PP and T.
We create one-line sentences that frame the sense of PP and T for
their exposition, the first section of their narratives, or first stanza of poem/song etc.
Not unlike M. Gilmore who once wrote, tell stories like you are describing the
rooms you used to live in, like a walking tour. Immerse. Root.
Then I’ll write my own as the class scribbles, and last time it was something akin to:
Rockford: IL, a rust belt city where the guys walked around with stumpy fingers
flicking ash into the beer cans from endless cigarettes, or committed suicide
in garages with pulled-down pretty painted doors, or road motorcycles into Yield signs,
pummeling their faces.
The Ensmingers: The kind of family that bought old 1960’s Mustang with rust-eaten holes in the floorboards,
planted peanuts and pear trees in the backyard with bird baths and and dead buried
guinea pigs, and played basketball on the warm drive-way until dusk
awakened swarms of eager mosquitoes.
1989: The sound of metal “hair band” ballads swooning across the FM airwaves in hair-spray
glitter and excess spun from Hollywood boulevard nights until Nirvana let loose flannel shirts, duct-taped drum sets,
and teenage spirit, sweeping the spandex under the rug.
Imperfect, no doubt, but at least I give them a literal and figurative rootedness, a sense
of immersion, so when I craft my song or story, these elements may persist and leak over
into the narrative, providing context and a field of association…
–from david ensminger
–Kerouac Sketches
“Change now to
Dungaree shorts, gaudy
Green sandals, blue vest
With white borders & a
Little festive lovegirl ribbon
In her hair Carolyn prepares
The supper- ….
She prepares the aluminum
Silex for coffee – never
Puts an extra scoop for
The pot – makes weak
American housewife coffee
–but who’s to
Notice, the Pres. Of the
Waldorf Astoria? – She
Slams a frying pan on a
Burner – singing “I hadn’t
Anyone till you….”
“-The
gray sky above has
a hurting luminosity to the
eye & also rains with
tiny nameless annoying
flips & orgones –
life dusts of Time –
beyond is the vast
aecidium green Erie
pier, a piece of it,
with you sense the
scummy river beyond-”
So there is NYC…go find it still.
Or if you be in Colorado:
“…the one skinny
revolving windmill in
the Vast, – lavender
bodies of the distance
where earth sighs to
round – the clouds
of Colorado hang blank
& beautiful upon the
land divide-…”
And then, for Jack, a family home:
“…a pink-tinged pastel,
the No Carolina afternoon
aureates through the
white Venetian blinds
& through the red-pink
plastic curtains & falls
upon the plaster, with
soft delicate shades – here,…”
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does. ~ Allen Ginsberg
Here’s a few of my favorites from Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus:
The windmills of
Oklahoma look
in every direction
Iowa clouds
following each other
into Eternity
Two cars passing
on the freeway
– Husband and wife
Windows rattling
in the wind
I’m a lousy lover
Two clouds kissing
backed up to look
At each other
try song sketches
candle burning on my little table
coffee: black, & lemonade
bittersweet, just like the twilight
evening fall lights early fade
peppermints & cherry cough drops
coffee cups & candy bars
midnight drives & miles of music
for lonely men who live in cars.
Palo Alto Songwriting Workshop June 16: Saturday!
Buy Now
songwriting quotes
“Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager, stay eager.”
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” –Susan Sontag
——
“Every hundred feet the world changes.” –Roberto Bolano
1) ” WHOSE KID IS THAT?”
songs language must be at least that powerful.
2) development: something happens
3) writing practice that draws from
experience of the concrete world
—–
“Negative Capability”
” I IS SOMEONE ELSE”
–from the second verse of “long, good time”
Sweet little flowers called snowdrops
in the backyard with the fresh mint leaves
A cherry tree with a rope to climb
& robins nests under the eaves
My band was playing in the basement
driving folks out of their minds
Mother called down from the top of the steps
“Boys, play that nice song about suicide”
Songs can be written so you can walk into any place in the country and sing them and people will “get it.”
Is songwriting an art, or a craft?
Either way, the words have a double meaning.
Art is many things, but one definition would be: Art is the sum-total of techniques we use to get people to care about something. By people, I not only mean an audience, but also ourselves.
There are a couple of levels to look at:
1) Formal & technical aspects, that is, structure, rhyme, melody, harmony, rhythm, harmony, & the uses of repetition.
2) Content, depth, meaning. “Only emotion endures.” Concrete vs. abstract language.
“I like music where something happens.” — A & R rep, 1985
The comments I make in class don’t mean I “like” or “don’t like” : they are meant as “probes,” to stimulate the discussion.
“Now…well for one thing, the music, the
rhyming and rhythm, what I call the
mathematics of a song, are more second-
-nature to me. I used to have to go after a
song, seek it out. But now, instead of going
to it I stay where I am and let everything
disappear and the song rushes to me. Not
just the music, the words, too.”
–BD, 1965
the beatles: improvising
melody + lyrics
over chord changes
“it’s what you don’t play.”
a friend of mine used to say, that professional songwriters always have three songs: the one they just finished, the one they’re working on in the present, and the next one they’re going to write.
at some point I began to feel that whenever you had a problem in life, the best thing was to write your way through it.
as a singer/songwriter, don’t forget the “singer” part of the deal. work on your singing.
turn your secrets into songs, then sing them for strangers. tell everybody you just make them up out of the blue.
make a list of your fifty favorite words, then write a page in your notebook, exploring each one. discuss them in terms of things, the sensual world. or write a short poem for each one.
ideas can be your friends. existentialism, dreams as a mirror of reality, economic justice, environmentalism, human rights, grass roots democracy, beatitude, the grotesque. seize on clarifying the ideas you are actually living by–your philosophy.
every word, every note, every beat is important.
figure out who your biggest influences are. then figure out what about their work you would improve on if you could. then set to work at doing it.
if you get stuck, move on.
sometimes, if you are stuck in your writing, just try to put down one honest line.
play with the techniques we’ve studied: reversals; haiku; american sentences; setting Blake and other well written poetry to music; nonsense; desire; people-place and time writing, kerouac sketching; collecting and writing from titles; song portraits; list songs;
learn all of your favorite songs, and sing’em.
“no ideas but in things”: “close to the nose”
“develop a friendly attitude towards your own thoughts and ideas.”
if you don’t get it right the first time, try writing the song again, as a new song. do this as many times as you need.
William Blake–“Without unceasing Practice nothing can be accomplished
Art is Practice. Leave off Practice and you are Lost.”
William Burroughs: Kerouac… he was a writer. That is, he wrote.
William Carlos Williams: “It is in things that for the artist the power lies, not beyond them. Only where the eye hits does sight occur”
Andy Warhol : “You think too much. That’s ’cause there’s work you don’t want to do” –quoted in Lou Reed’s song Work, from Songs For Drella.
Leonard Cohen: On his relatively paltry recorded output and how he sets about the creative process, he is blithely dismissive of his talents. “Writing an album, it always feels like I am scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get the songs together,” he says. “I’ve never had the sense that I’ve had a multitude of choices. There is no sense of abundance – I’m just picking at what I have. It’s like what Yeats said about working in ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. I do get discouraged by the work.
“It is a mysterious process, it involves perseverance and perspiration and sometimes, by some grace, something stands out and invites you to elaborate or animate it. These are sacred mechanics and you have to be careful analysing them as you would never write a line again. If you looked too deeply into the process you’d end up in a state of paralysis.
“People ask about the imagery all the time but sometimes it’s enough to say that the imagery has its own validity.”
He does confess to a troubling kind of perfectionism. “I wrote 80 verses or something for Hallelujah . That song was written over the space of four years and that’s my trouble – I can’t discard a verse. I have to work on it and polish it. I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it’s not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.”
Bob Dylan on Woody Guthrie: “You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live.”
Tom Waits: “We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.”
‘ Just the right phrase can go a long way.’ -Chris Rock
invention: the finding of suitable topics. ‘a finding, a reaching into oneself to find what comes next.’
William Carlos Williams: So most of my life has been lived in hell–a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear. What would have happened in a world similarly lit by the imagination?
Charles Baudelaire: ” To use a language with superior knowledge and skill is to practise a kind of conjuring.”
Plato–“He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration, in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.”
Robert Graves–“Poetry is rooted in love and love in desire, and desire in hope of continued existence.” Also, “The poet must learn to think mythically as well as rationally.”
Hart Crane– “An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself through certain experiences sideways and every artist must be in some things powerless as a dead snake.” –quoted by John Berryman
Bob Dylan–“I always try to turn a song on it’s head. Otherwise, I figure I’m wasting the listener’s time.”
‘potential… of a single vibrant word’ to create a world, to release infinite energies’
“The nucleus of my solar system is ADVENTURE “
— Roberto Bolano
“Journey of the act of writing through zones not at
all favorable to the act of writing”
—Roberto Bolano
“push the dragon out of the way…
& walk in!”
‘the void, charged with potential’
” It has to come naturally, you know…you’ve got to do it just like you talk & walk..”
—John Coltrane
“Every hundred feet the world changes.
—Roberto Bolano
“The only war is the war against the imagination.
—Diane di Prima
“Imagination is nothing but the springing up of
reminiscences. And ingenuity, or invention is nothing
but the working over of what is remembered”
—Gaimbattista Vico
“The sound in your mind/ is the first sound that you could sing.” —JK
“It is by folly alone, that the world
moves, + so it is a respectable thing
upon the whole.”
– Joseph Conrad
“…the duty of a poem in his mind was to be as good as possible when ever possible…”
—Mark Van Doren
” In true plain words, by thy true telling friend.”
-Jacques-Pierre
“Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.
It made me realize that so much of what makes music great is courage, and up to that, what I thought made music great was practice and study…This album says there’s more to life than you thought. Life can be lived more deeply, with a greater sense of fear and horror and desire than you ever imagined.”—Lester Bangs
“Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he’s waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along…It’s the great search, fuelled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed.” -Lester Bangs
William Carlos Williams:
Life is absolutely simple. In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always, there should never be permitted, confusion–
There are difficulties to life, under conditions that are impasses, life may prove impossible–But it must never be lost–as it is today–
The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated facts is not Knowledge. There is no end–
And what is the fourth dimension? It is the endlessness of knowledge–
It is for this reason I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science–in spite of everything.
Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality–Poetry.
The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current–which it has always sought–
In other times men counted it as a tragedy to be dislocated from sense–today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts–broken, bruised
few escape whole–slaughter. This is not civilization but stupidity–Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination–
With decent knowledge we can tell what things are for
There is no confusion only difficulties.
” I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side show performers – bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the rollercoaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn’t make sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was. At least it struck me that way.”
-Bob Dylan
Songwriter’s # 1 2018
Songwriter’s Workshop
USE TOOLS
1)Notebook: collect titles and phrases
flow: a) object writing,
b) sketching
c) journal
d) people places times
e) couplets—rhyming dictionary
f) the bones
g) words in keys, or suits—metaphors, imagery
h) mining this writing for song ideas and lines, etc.
2) The Harmonized Scale
I—IIm—IIIm—IV—V—VIm—VIIdim—I
3) Progressions, substitutions
building blocks of popular music
I—VIm—IIm—V7 (Rhythm changes) or I—VIm—IV—V7
I—IV—V—IV—I (La Bamba)
I—IIm—IIIm—IV—V (Like A Rolling Stone)
I—VI—II—V7 (Salty Dog, ragtime)
I—bVII—IV—I (rock, Gloria)
I—IV—bIII—bVI) (Nirvana)
Im—bVII—bVI—V7 (Hit The Road Jack, Spanish, Latin American)
I—III7—IV—I—V7—I (Pallet On Your Floor)
substitutions, major for minor, minor for major
bVII chord (Bb in C) •see substitution chart handed out in class
•modes “the scales on the white keys, starting at each note from C up”
4) Nonsense— “tongues” as a key to creativity
“I is another.”
5) Rhythm and melody
6) Listening for and recognizing inspiration.
“Develop a friendly attitude toward your own thoughts.”
7)Desires and Fears (are vision.)
8) Learn your favorite songs and sing them.
9)Work out melodies on the piano and accapella.
10) Absolute freedom in secret notebooks!
11) Put what you love straight into your music. Beg, borrow and steal!
12) When blocked lower the bar! Don’t get bogged down.
13) Finding our own voice.
14) Singing to warm our own hearts.
imagery:
Downtown Train
by Tom Waits
Outside another yellow moon
Has punched a hole in the nighttime, yes
I climb through the window and down to the street
I’m shining like a new dime
The downtown trains are full with all of those Brooklyn girls
They try so hard to break out of their little worlds
Well you wave your hand and they scatter like crows
They have nothing that will ever capture your heart
They’re just thorns without the rose
Be careful of them in the dark
Oh, if I was the one you chose to be your only one
Oh baby can’t you hear me now, can’t you hear me now
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
Every night it’s just the same, you leave me lonely now
I know your window and I know it’s late
I know your stairs and your doorway
I walk down your street and past your gate
I stand by the light at the four-way
You watch them as they fall, oh baby, they all have heart attacks
They stay at the carnival, but they’ll never win you back
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
Where every night, every night it’s just the same, oh baby
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
All of my dreams they fall like rain, oh baby on a downtown train
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
Where every night, every night it’s just the same, oh baby
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
All of my dreams just fall like rain, all on a downtown train
All on a downtown train, all on a downtown train
All on a downtown train, a downtown train
The Formula
“1) Get in touch with your feelings- access your underground: the unconscious: always feeling the background.
2) Nobody can make any good music unless they first learn to play for themselves. Forget about exterior stuff, their image, whether the stuff they play is any good or not , whether the audience is pleased or not, and all that superficial stuff.
Go by your feelings, kid, forget about whether the audience likes what you write, what you play…
3) Hard work…there’s no such thing as talent. Just emotions & paying attention to them, & hard work…thats the formula, & in the end, you can’t lose.”
-John Fahey
Within the personality, a womb of originality.
BE VIVID!
1) notice what you notice
2) catch yourself thinking
3) observe whats vivid
4) vividness is self selecting
-Allen Ginsburg
Clamping the mind down on details. some exercises that can help with generating ideas for the “memory song” we’re writing.
William Carlos Williams: “It is in things that for the artist the power lies, not beyond them. Only where the eye hits does sight occur”
–haiku, I think, is a clever method to get ourselves to write/see/picture simultaneously.
First, most people during early school years actually did write some form of it,
and might recall it with fondness or joy, or embarrassment and scoffing. Either way,
many of us can remember the act of really writing, before we began an endless series of quizzes and bubbles and dumbed down education.
So, we tap into what we might call, original joy. Like hearing an effective pop song for the first time, and trying it yourself for a few seconds, dreaming of the Monkees. Even if it didn’t pan out, it tapped into your creative impulse.
In this exercise, I could care less about counting syllables, but I am concerned with three crisp lines.
The first two must relate/offer images of nature — you must immerse the reader, your must draw the picture in words, you must avoid abstraction and empty language, vessels of nothingness. You must engage.
The third line is the repository of understanding, the link: eureka/satori/understanding, of how the first two interrelate, how two juxtaposed images, by and of themselves, create a unifying element, stir an association, and become packed with potential meaning, however latent.
Now, as you model this (I’ve even done this with fellow writers and teachers, and trust me, they are just as stumped and shy as anyone at first), you can also show other writerly techniques, devices, conceits, tools, etc.
For instance, I use a variation of this, imperfect, no doubt, but useful:
sun slants through trees barely naked
crow caws as moths whir
spring is here
Now, again, I don’t aim for profundity as much as potential.
I can exhibit:
Alliteration (sun slant / crows caw)
Parallelism (slants/caws)
Onomatopoeia (caw)
Inverted syntax (trees naked/ naked trees …
Personification (naked trees)
Near/off/imperfect rhymes (whir/here)
etc.
Gray clouds drift through skyscrapers
Birds fly in V-patterns
Winter awaits
But, most important, the images confer a crispness, a photograph-etching-eye glimpse quality…
Exercise:
So, we set to work making two similar works based on our own sense of nature
Now, to get that started, we’ll do an immersive activity, like shut the lights off, and then silently recall a meaningful place of nature, and then flush out our senses in memory, all five, one by one, silently, in our active brain, then we pop the lights on, and scribble first thoughts best thoughts regarding images/sensations we recall, on notepads we write the two haiku based on those impressions and scribbles…
Here’s a few of my favorites from Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus:
The windmills of
Oklahoma look
in every direction
Iowa clouds
following each other
into Eternity
Two cars passing
on the freeway
– Husband and wife
Windows rattling
in the wind
I’m a lousy lover
Two clouds kissing
backed up to look
At each other
Next lesson, for our notebook use, nailing People, Place, and Time. As we know, songs do not stem from vacuums, they come from environments, even latent and subtle, but always from a sense of PP and T.
Exercise:
We create phrases and one-line sentences that frame the sense of PP and T for
their exposition, the first stanza of poem/song etc.
Not unlike Mikal Gilmore who once wrote, tell stories like you are describing the
rooms you used to live in, like a walking tour. Immerse. Root.
I wrote my own as the class scribbles, and last time it was something akin to:
Rockford: IL, a rust belt city where the guys walked around with stumpy fingers
flicking ash into the beer cans from endless cigarettes, or committed suicide
in garages with pulled-down pretty painted doors, or road motorcycles into Yield signs,
pummeling their faces.
The Ensmingers: The kind of family that bought old 1960’s Mustang with rust-eaten holes in the floorboards,planted peanuts and pear trees in the backyard with bird baths and and dead buried guinea pigs, and played basketball on the warm drive-way until dusk awakened swarms of eager mosquitoes.
1989: The sound of metal “hair band” ballads swooning across the FM airwaves in hair-spray glitter and excess spun from Hollywood boulevard nights until Nirvana let loose flannel shirts, duct-taped drum sets, and teenage spirit, sweeping the spandex under the rug.
Imperfect, no doubt, but at least I give them a literal and figurative rootedness, a sense of immersion, so when I craft my song or story, these elements may persist and leak over into the narrative, providing context and a field of association…
–from david ensminger
–Kerouac Sketches
“Change now to
Dungaree shorts, gaudy
Green sandals, blue vest
With white borders & a
Little festive lovegirl ribbon
In her hair Carolyn prepares
The supper- ….
She prepares the aluminum
Silex for coffee – never
Puts an extra scoop for
The pot – makes weak
American housewife coffee
–but who’s to
Notice, the Pres. Of the
Waldorf Astoria? – She
Slams a frying pan on a
Burner – singing “I hadn’t
Anyone till you….”
“-The
gray sky above has
a hurting luminosity to the
eye & also rains with
tiny nameless annoying
flips & orgones –
life dusts of Time –
beyond is the vast
aecidium green Erie
pier, a piece of it,
with you sense the
scummy river beyond-”
So there is NYC…go find it still.
Or if you be in Colorado:
“…the one skinny
revolving windmill in
the Vast, – lavender
bodies of the distance
where earth sighs to
round – the clouds
of Colorado hang blank
& beautiful upon the
land divide-…”
And then, for Jack, a family home:
“…a pink-tinged pastel,
the No Carolina afternoon
aureates through the
white Venetian blinds
& through the red-pink
plastic curtains & falls
upon the plaster, with
soft delicate shades – here,…”
Exercise:
Try doing sketches in a pocket notebook, each one just filling up a page. paint the picture you are viewing in words. They don’t have to rhyme, or be complete sentences, but they need to express the senses.
Exercise: Object Writing (be sure to check this out, it’s very useful)
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does. ~ Allen Ginsberg
And that’s what our songs can do —PC
Another exercise, for kicks:
- Disclosure from Kenneth Koch
Use a two-line repeating form: I seem to be/I really am. - For example:
- I seem to be a man in the flying trapeze. But I am a man in the garbage can.
I seem to be an eagle taking a path of clouds. But I am a devil taking baths of fire.
I seem to be a crocodile. But I am a fish being stretched into a whale.
I seem to a pretty color—maybe ruby. But I am a word that means gone.
The upshot of this work is, you can mine it for phrases to use (sometimes with tailoring, or not.)
The next thing to study is the basic rhythm of lines, the stresses and number of syllables.
Andy Warhol : “You think too much. That’s ’cause there’s work you don’t want to do” –quoted in Lou Reed’s song Work, from Songs For Drella.
Dream On, Peter Case (Interview by Middle Mojo Magazine)
Peter Case left home when he was 16, taught himself to play country blues on the streets of San Francisco, and was in a couple of signal L.A. rock bands: The Nerves and the Plimsouls . For the last 25 years Case has worked as a singer-songwriter, building a lauded catalog of songs and a reputation as a musician’s musician. Springsteen and Prine and Ely are fans. Sir George Martin tapped him to play Beatles songs at the Hollywood Bowl. He returned from open heart surgery with 2010′s Wig!, a pummeling collection of blues, punk, and garage rock. We talked after a house concert he played at Boston luthier Yukon Stubblebine’s home.
Q: Before I turned my tape recorder on you were talking about arthritis.
A: Yeah. One of the things you take for granted when you’re younger is how many aspects of your creativity are physical. My problem is in my thumb, and everything I do comes through my thumb. I play guitar, I play piano, I write, I drive, I type, and I experience a lot of pain. Lately I know that there’s a price to pay for sitting down and playing piano, and it does hang me up. I’ll sit down at the piano and say “this better be good, I hope this is worth doing, because this is going to cause me pain.” The idea that “this better be good” is very non-productive. In fact it’s totally ruinous.
Q: What else has changed?
A: Songwriting’s a lot different than it was when I was younger and there are so many factors it’s hard to put your finger on. When you’re young, songs come to you. They come fast and it’s like getting hit by lightning. It would be quite a while until another one came or maybe another would come right away, but it always seemed kind of out of control. I didn’t have a writing discipline. I knew nothing about discipline. My life was very chaotic. I was pulling the pieces together of a very kind of shattered scene as a kid and I was on the run for a while.
Q: When did you start writing songs?
A: When I was a kid living with my parents I was writing songs regularly. Bands were playing them, older guys, and when I left, at 16, I didn’t start writing again for a number of years. I wanted to be writing. I wrote words and I played music but it took years before they turned into songs again.
Q: Why is that?
A: I was constantly hustling to make a living and I became very unfocused. But I learned how to play blues during that period, how to sing and play old songs.
Q: What happened to make you start writing again?
A: Here’s what happened. Stop me if it’s not interesting. I started having these dreams and songwriters would come to me in the dreams. I had this one dream where I skipped out of high school and went to a record store and I’m going through a record rack. John Lennon’s in there, and he’s right at the next record rack. I see this record called Hothouse Madmen by the Sergeants, and it looks really good to me, and John Lennon goes, don’t listen to that. You shouldn’t listen to that record. And I said, it looks really interesting to me. I want to hear it. Then he disappears and they put on the record in the record store in my dream and it’s this incredible song I’ve never heard before. And then I wake up and I write the song and it’s called “Hothouse Madmen.”
Q: That’s extraordinary. Did you record it?
A: Well, I was in this band, the Nerves, and I started playing the song and I start singing the words and the other guys didn’t understand them. They didn’t want to play it. They had control of the band and they voted it down. They told me, if you write a lyric that would fit in with the band we’ll definitely do the song. I tried to rewrite “Hothouse Madmen” so the Nerves could play it. I wrote version after version of it and hated them all. I was going crazy from doing that. So I would skip out of school, in a manner of speaking, to write other songs. I wrote basically the whole early Plimsouls repertoire trying to write “Hothouse Madmen” and not succeeding. I never did get that song. Strangely enough the music for it became the first song on my first record. T Bone Burnett wrote the lyric for it.
Q: What’s the takeaway lesson?
A: The problem with songwriting is you can’t force it. So the song I was trying to force never came through for me but it pushed me into something else. That’s the lesson, that you need to apply yourself to things that don’t cramp your style. I think we all know that a dream is some form of revelation, and it happens so much faster and more completely than in the conscious mind. The conscious mind is like a cripple. The conscious mind is very slow. If you start doing dream analysis, which I’ve done, there’s all this information in the dreams, and when you start recognizing and adding these symbols up, it’s incredible. Songwriting is a form of dreaming, a form of dreaming that you let happen.
Q: You’re a storyteller. Do stories present themselves in dreamlike fashion, too, or is there a more workmanlike aspect to writing lyrics?
A: Stories started adding up for me in 1985, mostly about things that happened when I was much younger in a period of my life that I never really worked out. The songs just came. Some of them, I wouldn’t even know what they were about when I first wrote them. And then I would realize, oh my god. You can’t just make up a story. For me, I want to feel some kind of authority from a story. I’m interested in discovering things and I use songwriting as a way to know my mind and to know myself. When I was little my father would get mad at me and yell at me and ask, what do you have to say for yourself? And I never had anything to say for myself. I would just sit there. He had a stuttering problem himself and he was passing it along to me, where I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t express myself. So songwriting is a way of stacking the deck so that you can say your best things. You find a way to say the most profound thing you can say. That’s why I love songwriting. When they ask me what I have to say for myself I don’t know. I still don’t know. I find things in songs that I don’t know.
Q: Do you have rituals? Has your approach to songwriting changed over the years?
A: I’ve had to change it every time I make a record. I can’t do it the same way twice. For some reason I have to always reinvent a new way to make songs, and that’s the impetus for writing songs. It’s weird. When I was in the Plimsouls I bought this boom box and took it on the road with me. I would set it up in my motel room and get my guitar and start rocking and wait until something happened. Then when I went solo, for the first solo record, me and T Bone Burnett were living together down in Texas and I was writing in the living room and I would sit there all day and write he’d come in at night and I’d sing what I had written to him. I’d read stuff, think about stuff, play other old songs. Then I got into this thing where I got this pen, this weird pen that wrote really tiny, and I wrote this whole other album in tiny little letters. I was drinking a lot of coffee and write these really concise lyrics. It was all written tiny in these notebooks. It seemed to me like every word was important. The next record I wrote with other people because after Blue Guitar I got married and we had children and all of a sudden I had no peace of mind anymore and no place to work. The publisher called up and said go write with other people so I wrote the record with Billy Swan, Fontaine Brown, John Prine, Tonio K, Tom Russell. It was communal writing. People generally think it’s my worst record and there’s a lot of different reasons for that, not just the writing process. I was distracted. Having children was super demanding. That’s when I started doing the dream thing.
Q: What exactly do you mean by the dream thing?
A: When you’re writing songs, sometimes you don’t really work on the songs. You try to get yourself more in the moment, more in tune with your dreams, less distracted. You put away all the books and stuff, whatever it takes. You try to work on yourself, you know? And maybe you try to be more articulate with people, and you try to be nicer to people, you try to do different things so that you’re in a better state of mind. You have to work on yourself. You don’t work on the songs. I mean, you do work on the songs, but the most important thing is to get yourself in a frame of mind, which could involve doing things differently in your life. You have to be living on the up, to the best of your ability dealing with things. You have to take chances, to feel alive. You have to be aggressive with yourself, to push yourself out on a limb. You have to do things that make you feel excited.
Q: Is it second nature now, getting yourself into that frame of mind, or does it get harder? You sound very alive on the new songs.
A: I agree that my songwriting does seem like it’s still alive, and one of the reasons is that I have not been successful monetarily. Every year starts out and the question is how are we going to get through this fucking year. And at the end of the year it’s, oh my god how’s it going to work? It’s a constant thing. But the nice part of that is it keeps you in touch with something really alive. It’s the world’s condition, you know? My heroes are blues singers and poets, Allen Ginsberg and Lightning Hopkins and John Lee Hooker. Those people taught me something, and what they taught me was that what you want to be, you already are. You can be everything you want to be right now. You’re it. You’re living it, you’re making it right now. John Lee Hooker didn’t need a hit record. Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell, they went out and made incredible music all the time and nobody knew them from Adam. I love Allen Ginsberg.
When I was a kid in San Francisco I had this group called the Frozen Chosen, we’d play on the street across from City Lights, and Ginsberg started coming out. He’d come over to the corner with us and say, hey guys, you mind if I sit in? He never introduced himself, but we knew who he was. We’d say, sure man. He’d say, can you do some country blues? We’d go yeah. So we’d play blues and he’d make up songs on the corner and sing to people going by. It’s 1974. Sailors and hookers and tourists and kids are going by and nobody ever stopped but he would make up these incredible songs. If you have that real love of a thing it drives you through it. I love words and I love poetry and I love blues music and I love rock and roll and I love it so much that maybe I could survive getting a million bucks for it. I know Bob Dylan did. He made it through. Some people do and some don’t.
Q: What made you start playing music?
A: I had a lot of problems and music was a solution to me, maybe on a level of the boy who couldn’t stop washing himself. I went through a period that I describe in my book a little bit where I lost my depth perception and nothing seemed real. It was a really trippy period that brought a lot of anxiety. Music was a solution to a lot of different problems I had.
Q: Is it still?
A: Yeah. Absolutely. As you get older, though, you get a few other solutions, you know? I’ve had different things in my life that have really helped me. I don’t put the same weight on music that I used to and in a way it’s been better. I’m still on the road all the time but, without getting too corny about it, I’ve got different things that people do to soothe themselves. Meditation, or whatever you want to call it. As you get older you find things like that. I was against it for a long time, but it has helped me.
Q: Does meditation help with songwriting?
A: Not necessarily. It helps with comfort.
Q: What were your ambitions when you were younger? Have they changed?
A: Ambition is hard to explain. I was taught that it’s not good if it’s for yourself. Ambition is for the music, for the songs, to make this beautiful thing that you can give to people or that you can leave. I remember I saw Lightning Hopkins in Boston in ’70, I had run away from home and was travelling around the country hitchhiking and I spent my last $3.50 seeing Lightning in Cambridge. It was so magical. It was such a powerful example of a person expressing himself. I felt the same way about Ginsberg, Art Blakey, sometimes people you’ve never even heard of but you just walk into a club. That’s what I feel like I’m trying to do, is to bring music into the world like that, where it lives in people and they remember it gives them some sort of comfort. Not comfort, but a beauty that makes life worth living. That’s the way I look at it. That’s the ambition. To create things that are beautiful or good and also are of value as you go along, to other people and to yourself.
Q: Value can be hard to quantify. And it seems like the pressure of measuring up would at some point start to feel like a real burden.
A: I don’t know if everything needs to be of value. For me it’s a creativity killer if I’ve got to prove the value all the time. I made this record, Full Service No Waiting, when my kids were starting school, and I had to be home to deal with that stuff. The kids would go to school and I rented this tiny room and I put a desk and a guitar in there and every day after the kids went to school I went straight to this room. I had a Smith Corona and I sketched out the whole album, what it was gonna be, starting with the first word of the first song, and I just typed the whole record and heard the music in my head. I sat there every day from, like, 10 to 3, and I thought it was some of the best music I’ve ever done. It ended up being 40 pages of legal typewriter paper, a big sheath of the stuff in tiny type. I would write the rhymes off the top of my head and create these rhythms, and a lot of lines didn’t make it but I kept going forward. I didn’t throw anything out. It’s an interesting work of art of its own. I’d go home to take care of the kids and I’d pick up the guitar and sometimes the song I heard in my head that day, I’d just sing through the whole thing. That would be it. That would be the music. I really enjoyed making that record.
Q: Where did you go from there? You said you make every record a different way.
A: Writing the next record I tried to do the same thing and it totally sucked.. It didn’t work. I had to try something different, so I wrote it on the run. You’ve got to trick yourself. You’ve got to get away from the rational mind. You’ve got to be thrown into some kind of new situation.
Q: Do you tell that to students in your songwriting classes? Does that advice apply to beginners?
A: I do, but they don’t necessarily get it. We’re at a more basic level. They’re not dealing on that level.
Q: Can songwriting really be taught?
A: Yes and no. You can help people that are songwriters. You can help them over their problems. But everybody in the culture seems to write songs. Everybody is a musician. The two things that are prevalent in modern life are advertising and music. Music is the central activity people are involved in besides being receptacles for advertising.
Q: You had major heart surgery last year. How does illness and mortality figure into your music?
A: Hard to say. I really don’t know yet. I do know that I’ve never had my head in the sand about dying or anything but it definitely brought that to the forefront. Especially for a few hours in there at one point. And then I had a lot of time to think. I took some time off.
Q: Do you think Wig‘s immediacy and raw energy came out of that experience?
A: I think so. It’s funny. When I first came out of the hospital I was on drugs, you know. Somebody pointed out to me that I’m on morphine, and I’m listening to jazz. We’ve gone full circle here, you know? I’m sitting down at the piano and I’m stoned and playing these really weird chords, these weird jazz chords. I was listening to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles, all these ex -junkies. I was just hanging out. Finally I’m like an old man, in one place on the couch. And I started to hear music. Literally I heard this music that I wanted to play and wanted to hear. Sometimes it gets real visceral, you know?
Q: You went through a transformation from pop guy to rootsy singer-songwriter.
A: When I joined the Nerves I turned my back on a lot of the things I’d been working on, the country blues that I’d learned how to play. I started playing electric bass and playing in these rock and roll bands. You know, I loved rock and roll, I really did, and it was a very creative period for me, but I also had turned my back on a whole side of my personality. I rediscovered it when I went solo after the Plimsouls.
Q: Have your powers as a songwriter increased over time? Have you lost things along the way?
A: Dave Alvin said to me that it gets a lot harder, because you’ve already written a lot of songs, and your new songs have to be better than the old songs, or somehow occupy a space that the old songs don’t occupy. I wrote “Two Angels” and I’m not going to write another “Two Angels.” I only felt the one, you know?
Q: People do it all the time. Not everyone places the value on pressing forward.
A: Well, I want to. I keep on feeling that this next one could really be something, you know?
Q: What do you mean by something?
A: I really want to make something that has a life of its own and is surprising, and is beautiful, and that I discover things in. When I was a little kid listening to music my mom would come in and say, does that send you? I’m trying to create that. I don’t know. You’re living in a world with Bob Dylan, such a heavy artist. He’s like Keats or Milton for our time. More so even than Ginsburg. Much more so. Most people don’t come close to that in their songwriting. And we all have to live with that.
Q: Do you think about relevance and your place in the culture? Does it impact your work?
A: Oh yeah. It hurts. It’s really difficult. Nobody cares about half of what you’re doing but you’ve got to feel like you’re doing something. I think gigs like this tonight, they’re important, though you don’t really see how, exactly. It’s often hard to see the present. That’s the art that Bob Dylan has: the ability not to see the future but the present, for what it is. The present isn’t really what’s advertised as the present. The present is this thing that’s being born every day. It’s not in the magazines, you know. I’ve had a couple of friends die in the past few years and it’s been really profound to experience what their deaths and their lives meant to me. You remember moments differently than you experienced them at the time. You go through a little of that and you see how valuable things are. The culture is a one-way ticket to nowhere, if you ask me.
Q: You put the Plimsouls back together in the mid-90s. Why did you want to reunite the band and did you get what you wanted?
A: The band was something I put a lot a lot of energy into creating. The Plimsouls projected rock and roll in an incredibly believable way and it’s a very rare thing to have that. We did it ’cause we could, you know? And I feel like it was a valuable thing at the time. Now we’re kind of at the end of it again, after ten years of being together again, maybe more. Fifteen. It’s sort of sad. We’ve had problems, but it was good, and it kept me younger in a way, too, to remember that. You know music gets in your body. Rhythm gets in your body. Maybe it got a little cerebral and I came back to the Plimsouls to tap into this thing that gave me another burst of youth, in a way.
Q: What is it about youth, or the qualities we associate with youth, that brings so much to bear on creativity?
A: It’s unbridled, uncynical energy. A freshness of life, you know? You have it when you’re young and it goes away. When you’re young, every room you’re in is so intense. Every person you talk to and everyone you meet, it could go anywhere. Anything could happen. With the Plimsouls you’d get this burst of energy and it would seem like something magical could happen, like you could walk through walls or something, just for a little while, you know, you would feel those walls come down. You’d feel once again like you were in this place that was very fresh. It’s hard to describe, really, but that’s sort of the role of music. I think it’s what people want from music. That’s what art does. It makes you feel the impact of being alive. Music allows you to feel things that are so big you can’t feel them until you hear the music. When you’re young, emotions come through your body. You feel them. And I think people shut them off because they’re painful. Plus they’ll get you in trouble, you know? Everything changes when you get older. I’m old now, man. I’m 56. I’ve been on the road a long time. These days I wonder, you can’t help it when you go on the road, am I going to make it through this tour? After the heart thing and all this stuff, you wonder, you know? There’s a lot of different aspects of being older that are weird.
Q: Are there good aspects?
A: Some of them are great. When you turn around 40 you get a bird’s eye view of life. I understand things that I never understood when I was a kid, man. I see people and situations and I know exactly what’s going on.
Q: Does that make you a better or a deeper artist?
A: I don’t know. Only if you can figure out a way to use it. You have to get at it somehow. And that’s the whole trick about art, you know? You got to keep going to that place. You’ve got to be willing to go out on a limb. That’s the trick.
Q: How do you get to that place?
A: I don’t know. Keep going. Hit the road. Have a heart meltdown. Nearly die. Keep doing rock and roll. Have no money.
Interview by Joan Anderman:
One Comment by Wayne Haught
- Great, Great, Great interview with Peter. His songwriting wisdom is always worth spending time with. I especially like the part where he says that whatever it is you want to be you are already it! Also that Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell made great music without anybody much knowing who they were or that they existed even. Never thought about it that way before, but now that I am I like it.
Hendrix, The Poet
to David Ensminger, for Joe Carter:
In response to your question: “What do I believe are the poetic qualities of Hendrix’s lyrics?”
First of all, he created memorable, and dynamic original phrases of speech, blazing lines that stick in your head forever. I think he had more of these in three or four albums than the Beatles, for example, made in their whole run:
“‘ ’scuse me while I kiss the sky!” (from purple haze)
” I know what I want but I just don’t know/ how to go about gettin’ it” (from manic depression)
“will it burn me if I touch the sun?” (from love or confusion)
‘there ain’t no life nowhere!” and
“”i don’t live today/ maybe tomorrow, I just can’t say” (from I don’t live today)
‘let me stand next to your fire’ and
‘move over, rover, and let Jimi take over!” (from fire)
castles made of sand/ fall in the sea/ eventually (from castles made of sand)
“aw shucks/ if my daddy could see me now’ (from up from the skies)
”if all the hippies cut off all their hair/ i don’t care/ I don’t care” and
“if six turned out to be nine/ I don’t mind/ I don’t mind
’cause I’ve got my own world to live through
and I ain’t gonna copy you” (from if 6 was 9)
’she’s walkin’ through the clouds/ with a circus smile/ running wild’ (from little wing)
This just touches the surface, off the top of my head.
These are great powerful, forever memorable and meaningful original phrases, with a rhythm and punch present, in the best American tradition, which often has a punchline-type diction, and often lands with an accent of sound and meaning on the last word of the phrase. It’s the “American Sound” and Hendrix has his own version of it, big-time.
2) Secondly, he used the poets tools. Jimi was a natural poet. But, I think he was helped in his quest to write great songs by studying strong sources, that themselves were tapped into poetic tradition. These would be:
A) Exceptional soul music songsmiths like Curtis Mayfield, Otis Redding, James Brown, and Don Covay. From these he learned how to form the premise of a song around a powerful, but simple idea, with a catchiness, and simplicity of phrasing. The imagery in these writers work is reflected in JH’s songs like ‘Remember” ’You Got Me Floating” ‘Little Miss Lover’. Is it poetic? I believe this type of writing at it’s best IS. Also, he knew Chuck Berry and Little Richard, both for the great SOUND of their words, and for their INNOVATION. Chuck Berry is a chronicler of American Culture and in his way, Hendrix was too, (though of a more psychedelic era.) Little Richard spoke in tongues “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bop bop” (from tutti frutti) Hendrix excelled at this, in all of the above examples and many others.
B) Bob Dylan: a huge and liberating influence on JH, “Songs can be about anything”. Dylan was a path to the Beats for Hendrix, using the poetic tools of vivid imagery, alliteration, assonance, dissonance, as well as his art of twisting phrases that Jimi adapted. Listen to the album “Blonde On Blonde,” to hear all these poetic tools being used. It was reportedly one of Hendrix’s favorites, along with “Highway 61 Revisited.” He learned a lot from these, eventually covering ‘Like A Rolling Stone” in his US debut. Dylan would say “The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken” which could easily be a Hendrix line. Colorful mad twists of rhythmic language.
C) The great blues singers and songwriters: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Elmore James, and others. He topped the imagery in these writers most forceful material, in songs like “Voodoo Child” ”If 6 was 9″ and others. It’s a strain that runs all through his work. Rhythm conveying emotion, mythic bragging imagery like JH’s “knock down a mountain with the palm of my hand’ etc is from songs like Dixon’s ‘Hoochie Koochie Man’, or Muddy Water’s “Just To Be With You”
And intimate talk like Jimi’s acoustic 12 string version of “Hear My Train A-Coming” (be sure to watch this on youtube if you haven’t yet) (a great performance of a great piece, his emotion so close to the surface he nearly cries, common for him but very clear here) (great poetic lines like “I’m gonna buy this town/ and put it in my shoe”)
I think it’s important to recognize how deeply JH studied and played into the tradition he was coming up in. He made sure he knew EVERYTHING about R+B, Blues, and Rock and Roll. He knew the songs, the licks, the grooves, and he knew about what went into making up the WORDS. He played with everybody who was great, and he listened and learned intensely.
I think Wind Cries Mary is one of his best: Mary is his mother (tho’ her name was Lucille) also the Virgin Mary; a feminine deity or principle he looks to for protection. His sorrow in the wake of events leads him to feel the whole creation is calling out for this missing feminine spirit.
It’s imagery that creates a dimension of feeling that goes beyond normal songwriting: I call that poetic.
After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers Mary
A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries Mary
The traffic lights they turn up blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
‘Cause the life that lived is, is dead
And the wind screams Mary
Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past
And with his crutch, it’s old age, and it’s wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last
And the wind cries Mary
I hope this helps you as you consider Jimi Hendrix the poet. I could go on a lot more than this. It’s an interesting subject. Have you see the book Cherokee Mist with so much of his writing in it? I recommend it. Another great one, maybe the best book about Hendrix, is Greg Tate’s “Midnight Lightning.”
The Tale of the Peter Case lp: I go solo in 1985, taking chances, and “unraveling the mysteries of music”
“If this record doesn’t sell a million copies I quit the business.”
T-Bone Burnett was addressing the visitors to the control room of studio B at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, on a distorted radio shack bullhorn.
It was early Spring 1986, and we were listening to a playback of my first, self-titled solo album, a collection of songs and music that was considered a big departure. The material had begun the journey to vinyl two years before and run into a gauntlet of trouble and interference. Though I’d spent the previous ten years playing in some “perfectly good rock n roll bands,” I was hearing music in a whole new way. It was a personal, musical, and spiritual upheaval.
“Unraveling the mysteries of music.” That’s how I expressed it— “the quest for musical fire,“ after a popular caveman movie that was exhibiting around then. I’d travelled back and forth across the country a lot by this point touring in the bands. More recently I’d been delivering some cars for an agency in LA, making the fast and vast transcontinental drives, and the songs were coming during those jaunts. And I was praying on my knees a couple times a day.
One day, a wag asked in my direction, “What’s the one word that describes your life?”
And I said, “Nevertheless.”
The stories started to happen: On Sunset Boulevard one long afternoon, at the counter in Ben Frank’s, I was killing time, drinking black coffee, chain-smoking Camels, and doing a newspaper crossword puzzle when the lines came in on the ether: “Out past the cemetery down by the willow bend…” I wrote them in the margins of the page.
The lyrics began pouring out faster than I could write. It took shape before I even had time to figure out what it was. I paid my check, left a tip at the counter, picked up the newspaper, still scribbling as the words hit, and made my way across the parking lot to my car, then across the town to my pad.
The tune was nearly complete as I pulled in front of my place. I double-stepped to my front door, opened the lock and got in, grabbed the Hummingbird guitar laying on the couch, spread the scribbled-on Times out in front of me, and sang. “Walk In The Woods” was done in five more minutes. I’d never played anything like it before. It didn’t necessarily sound like a chart hit, but as a song it was undeniable. I felt like I’d broken a code. The arrangement was all there even if I played it solo, and it became the basis for everything I was going to do for a long time.
I kept writing in all sorts of situations, and finally the record was coming together. We went into the studio in early 1985.
Jerry Marotta, was crazy-eyed intense, big, bushy-headed and wired to go, able to turn a four-four beat inside out at the drop of the one, and fascinated with torturing his Linn Drum machine beyond any reasonable limits: He’d open it up with a screwdriver, get into its inner workings and scramble, putting the snare drum chip where the cymbal was supposed to be, the triangle into the kick drum, getting it ringing on all the off-beats, until the groove would be so contorted it was hard to even tell where the “one “ was. Very refreshing.
I demonstrated to Marotta my lick for “Three Days Straight” and he came up with an insane driving groove on the Linn, then the two of us went into the main room at Sunset Sound and recorded the song, with Jerry playing the full drum kit along to the Linn, really rocking it, while I played and sang. The playback blew us away. His brother Rick Marotta, popped in to visit, listened to a minute of the tortured Linn drum part, the manic groove all tied in knots, and said, “I’m telling Mom!” That’s Victoria Williams on harmony with me, and Warren “Tornado” Klein on tamboura. That instrument always makes a profound effect wherever its placed. After this session we snuck into the tape locker, and for laughs, overdubbed tamboura on all of the tracks on Marshall Crenshaw’s soon to be mixed new album. It sounded great but I don’t think he used any of it.
“Small Town Spree” was an intimate solo recording that Van Dyke Parks came in and transformed, writing and conducting the string arrangement. I got to hear my harmonica solo in front of a string quartet. Thanks, Van Dyke!
Mike Campbell came in brandishing a giant swordscape of twang over another song finalized on caffeine at the Ben Frank’s counter, back before coffee was delivered by a Brinks truck. “Satellite Beach” was composed on one of those cross-country drive-away trips that ended at a vacant motel over-looking Cape Kennedy. Challenger was on the launching pad.
Jim Keltner I’d met a party, and invited to the studio the next day. “Pair Of Brown Eyes” is the result. Elvis Costello had sung the song for me during a party one night in T-Bone’s room at the Le Mondrian Hotel, and then asked permission from the Pogues for me to record it, as their version wasn’t out yet. Besides Keltner, the band on this track is Van Dyke Parks on organ, T-Bone on acoustic guitar, David Miner on bass, and Roger McGuinn on the Rickenbacker 12-string.
Keltner also played the huge sounding drum kit on “Old Blue Car,” at Capitol Studios, with Fred Tackett on guitar, and Jerry Scheff on bass. Someone produced a case of beer, put it out into the middle of the studio floor, and the producer kind of danced around it, conducting while the rest of us played. That’s a live take. Steve Berlin commented with a laugh, “Guess you don’t care if you get any harmonica sessions.”
T-Bone himself may possibly be the Sergeant Bilko of rock ‘n’ roll. Who else would convert the control room into a gamblers paradise where we watched the horse tracks at Hollywood Park & Santa Ana on retractable screens with the bookie on the phone line too? Who else but a Bilko would covert the faders on a Neve soundboard so it become a roulette wheel, with all of us laying bets, until the instant the Geffen A & R staff showed up at the door and all this madness disappeared with a wave and a blink. “Yes sir, no sir, of course, of course” was the code in the moment, but the second they departed the screens appeared, and it was back to the races.
It was the last night of recording and all through the studio no one was stirring their drinks; they were pouring ‘em down like they were trying to put out a fire. Or maybe it was just me. I’m not sure. I do know Mr. Burnett’s pal Sam Waterston was out in the studio, positioned on a microphone, orating in a very sonorous voice, over the track of “Satellite Beach.” God knows what kind of a text, it was T’s idea. It seemed absurd and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Pray For Rain
In Los Angeles every day’s brilliant & blue
The sun shining brighter than a worn out shoe
Hands on an old piano—pen to a sheet
Awaiting the lyric that sails down the street
Tea when you’re thirsty—booze in the fridge
Power in numbers but I ain’t got the didge
Where’d everyone go? the bands disappeared
Premature start on that old age they feared
Curly, Larry & the Edge had the top down today
Nobody’s walking on Malibu Bay
Who am I kidding—as I nervously jink?
Throw down the empties & scour the sink
I hadn’t yet realized what’s known to be true:
The best way to get’ em’s when they comin’ at you
I was stirring the pot tossing cards in a hat
Air unpredictable—had it down pat
& some that show up aren’t the ones you expect
But you take down the message long distance collect
SO—the record company sat on it for nine months, and it seemed at one point it would never be released. We said “well some artists just hang their paintings in their own yards” which was comforting and depressing both. And it seemed like that would be it, but…
Nevertheless! It came out. T-Bone never quit the business but the record found its audience, and I still sing these songs whenever I perform on the road. People are always telling me about the impact the record had on them, and thirty years later I’m still proud of every cut.
Always remember, your giants have thick, tough skin.
Now let’s see you do it!
[ BTW this CD is available from Omnivore Recordings, remastered with many groovy bonus tracks from the sessions, and new photos by Greg Allen]Joey And Chris And A Million Miles Away
I ‘d met Joey Alkes and Chris Fradkin at just the right time, the same week the Plimsouls began playing in the Hollywood clubs. We’d hit it off immediately.
I ‘d always wanted to be a Brill Building songwriter, like Otis Blackwell, Doc Pomus, or Carol King, who were adept at composing three minute rock ’n roll symphonies on demand. I felt Joey and Chris were my ticket to that dream, to that kind of fun. And we always had a blast writing songs.
I’d get up in the morning, get some coffee and head straight over to Joey’s. Chris would show up, and we’d get right into making up songs, trying anything and everything out, looking for a real idea.
Joey’s from Brooklyn, was a few years older than me and Chris, had been in the army, was a published poet, too, but his specialty was great song hooks.
Chris had studied music, and played guitar and piano. He’d been music director for a wild band Joey had managed in Denver, and always had a lot to say about grooves and arrangements.
Chris and I would sing and play riffs or chords on our guitars, me still banging on the Yamaki deluxe, that same guitar I’d been banging’ on for years. We’d work for hours without stopping, sometimes making up several songs in a session. It was fun, a lot of laughs, tough sometimes if you thought you had something and the other guys gave it the thumbs down.
But the great thing about writing with Joey and Chris was the camaraderie, and that came through in the music. I wrote a different kind of song with them than I did alone.
Joey lived in one of those Hollywood pads where the apartments circled a pool. Even on the sunniest day, we never sat by the pool, but we sort of looked at it through the windows as we gathered around his kitchen table and worked. Joey didn’t play an instrument, but he’d be singing choruses and horn parts—just making sounds, that added to the general feeling.
We knocked out a load of songs over there. “Now,” “Lost Time,” “Hush Hush,” were all on the first Plimsouls album. “Hypnotized,” the first song we wrote, was featured on our debut e.p.. Writing became nearly my favorite thing to do, and whenever the ‘souls were back from the road I’d go over. Sometimes it would be like a party; we’d buy beers and bottles of wine, or whiskey, get high, and keep writing. Sometimes we’d get too messed up and have to adjourn to the next day. But we just kept writing songs. It was so much fun, walking in with nothing and coming out with a song a few hours later. When we got one, we’d put it down on the boom box, making a cassette I could take with me. I’d go learn it with the band. And then, when everybody got to it, wow, that was the best feeling.
Meanwhile it seemed like every gig the band played was bigger than the one before it. The EP had been a hit on local radio, especially a song I’d written on my own, called “Zero Hour.” Like Rodney Bingenheimer, KROQ’s great punk rock dj liked to say, “IT’S ALL HAPPENING!” And there was pressure to come up with a powerful song to lead off the next record.
One night Chris and I went out to see the Germs play a gig at the Starwood. The place was going nuts. Punks were climbing up the walls to the balcony and diving off head first, back into the crowd. We watched it from the back for a while, then decided to work on a song.
We drove to Barney’s Beanery, a horrible bar and restaurant a mile or so up the road. We sat in a booth in the back, and Chris ate dinner, while I drank a beer and scribbled lyrics on a scrap of paper. We talked about the words, and each kicked in some lines. I was remembering something from a long time back and the feeling was pouring into the song. I’d been having an affair with a girl I really thought a lot of, and that had just broken off. Something of my childhood was in it too. A lyric was taking shape based on all of this. We wrote the second verse and a bridge but still had no title or chorus.
We got out of the restaurant and drove the five minutes over to Joey’s. He rang us in the front door of his building and met us outside his door. His wife Esther was asleep. I went in and grabbed the cheap acoustic 12 string I’d left behind the table and came back out playing. The whole song came to life as I sang the lyrics. I played the guitar riffs between the lines the way Chris and I had laid them out that afternoon, and the build up of the bridge. It was all coming together in a rush. But what’s the title, where’s the chorus? I told Joey I wasn’t sure, then somehow Joey nailed the chorus, just like that. “I’m a million miles away” and I threw on the tag “and there’s nothing left to bring me back today,” and we had another one.
We taped it on cassette, adding it to the other two songs we’d done that day, and that was it. We forgot all about it for a while.
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