Punam over at dverse asks us to “Write about your favourite drink (alcoholic/non-alcoholic), write about getting drunk, use drinking as a metaphor, in short: write a poem in a form of your choice with a drinking connection”. (Update: I omitted to link this to Punam’s prompt, so I am now linking it to Open Link Night at dverse)
Willie’s Oasis
Houses hunker in the heat Out on highway 82 The landscape sweats and saunters Billboards block the view And this is not New York City This is not Saginaw This a dry county, son This is Arkansas
And I need a pack of Pauli Girl I need a bottle of wine I’m heading for Willie’s Oasis Outside the county line
There’s a woman in line waiting Someone’s girlfriend, someone’s wife Says she wakes up every morning And asks:”Is this my life?” Beef jerky on the counter Pickles in a jar This is a dry county, son This is Arkansas
And I need a pack of Pauli Girl I need a bottle of wine I’m heading for Willie’s Oasis Outside the county line
Good ol’ boys are chugging out Storm clouds on the horizon The water looks like iced tea Birds are improvising And this is far from New York city Far from Saginaw This is Ashley County, son This is Arkansas
My friend John Mitchell turned the lyrics into the song above (that’s Ben Mink on violin, look him up!).
This bar’s insured by Smith and Wesson Says the sign upon the wall Vern studies his empty beer glass Time slows down to a crawl
Audrey, the lank-haired waitress Watches from the bar Order something soon, she yells Or get the hell out of here.
There’s a special on at Wanda’s Ranch Tuesday night 2 for one But Vern doesn’t have the appetite He doesn’t have the wherewithal
There’s only one thing that he wants And he’s going to get it soon High Plains Sushi High Plains Sushi Hot Sake in a cup Five thousand feet above the ocean And he just can’t get enough
Two guys from the goldmine Old Arsenic and Rock Face Have journeyed up from the centre of the Earth To join the human race
But no matter how hard they try No matter what they do In the glow from the pool table They’ve still got that subterranean hue.
Something’s warming beneath a heat lamp Looks like deep fried road kill Beside a tub of mashed potatoes It’s making Vern feel ill
There’s only one thing that he wants And he’s going to get it soon High Plains Sushi High Plains Sushi Hot Sake in a cup Five thousand feet above the ocean And he just can’t get enough.
I spent a little time once in Elko, Nevada. There was a sushi restaurant in the town which served individual portions large enough to feed a small Japanese village. Elko hosts an annual Cowboy Poetry Festival. Interesting place. The theme over at dverse is food poetry.
This version of this poem appeared before as a dizain, one of those poems that keeps changing shape.
At night, the rotund tourists roam the street below drinking light beer from plastic cups and watching the river flow.
And Chuck, he’s in a restaurant playing his guitar for the plaid shorts and polo shirts and salesmen at the bar.
And life is neither good nor bad it’s somewhere in between Chuck thinks that one day he should leave this river scene.
Time’s a slowly burning fuse time’s a disappearing muse in time you feel every wound time’s a slowly burning fuse.
Karla’s in the house again trying to catch his eye her hair is blond and crinkled makes Chuck think of frozen fries
and when he hits another chorus she stands upon her chair chugs back her mojito and punches the empty air
and he knows that in this deck of cards we all can’t be the ace and if you’re going to take a fall then try and fall with grace.
Time’s a slowly burning fuse time’s a disappearing muse in time you feel every wound time’s a slowly burning fuse.
Jane, the late shift waitress her husband’s out of town Chuck thinks that later he might ask her around
and he’ll forget about alimony and the rent that he owes he’ll forget just about every thing if Jane comes around.
Time’s a slowly burning fuse time’s a disappearing muse in time you heal every wound time’s a slowly burning fuse.
This is based on a short poem I had published in Cyphers magazine. There are other versions of it, even a sonnet, but I think it’s finally settled down.
The sheriff disagreed He tried to make the distinction between death and extinction They stopped off at a place called Hamburger Heaven to grab a bite to eat But Helen had no appetite, she just drank a 7 Up while the sheriff tapped his coffee cup to a distant beat Kind of like Ooh ooh-ooh Ooh ooh-ooh It won’t look like those old frescoes, man, I don’t think so There will be no angels with swords, man, I don’t think so No jubilant beings in the sky above, man, I don’t think so And it won’t look like those old movies neither There will be no drag racing through the bombed out streets neither No shareholders will be orbiting the earth, man, neither It will be hard to recognize each other through our oxygen masks The successful sons of businessmen will set their desks on fire While 5-star generals of the free world weep in the oil choked tide It won’t sound like jazz Jazz, jazz, jazz Jazz on the Autobahn
Now isn’t that something to aim for…
The Felice Brothers are from New York City.
“The band has two main members, Ian and James Felice. Former members include their brother Simone Felice, their friend Josh “Christmas Clapton” Rawson, frequently described as a traveling dice player,[9] fiddle player Greg Farley, and drummer David Estabrook. At other times, they have featured a horn section in the band, composed of local Hudson Valley musicians. Ian is the main vocalist and plays the guitar and piano. James contributes vocals and plays the accordion, organ, and piano. Christmas plays the bass guitar. Dave Turbeville played the drums from 2009-2012, performing on Celebration, Florida, Poughkeepsie Princess, Mixtape, and God Bless You, Amigo. Simone Felice was the drummer as well as a vocalist and a guitarist. Simone is also an author, having released books entitled Goodbye Amelia, Hail Mary, Full of Holes and Black Jesus. Simone Felice left the Felice Brothers in 2009. He now leads his own band – The Duke & the King (named after the duo of con-artists in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) with Robert “Chicken” Burke. They released their debut album – Nothing Gold Can Stay on Loose / Ramseur Records August 4, 2009, followed by Long Live the Duke & King in 2010. Simone released a self-titled album in 2012, followed that up with an album titled Strangers in 2014, and then released his third album titled The Projector in 2018.” ….from Wikipedia.
I just popped that pill I got from a guy who called me ‘dude’ now the signs along the highway are leaking semiotic fluid
2
and the cacti look psychotic lizards parse the desert floor far off in the clint-eyed distance I see a slowly revolving door
3
and I’m feeling, demotic, neurotic, anecdotal, overused I’m looking for a sanctuary, the fisherman and the shoes I’ve got those hallucination highway peripatetic blues.
I’ve been writing/ rewriting this poem verse by verse this week, posting a new verse each day. I think I may have come to the end of the poem, but I may take it up again.
Either way, there is a fascinating prompt from Bjorn over at dverse on the subject of conceit: To quote Bjorn:
“A conceit is defined as an extended and complex metaphor”
From Wikipedia:
“In literature, a conceit is an extended metaphor with complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison.”
From the album, Mule Variations. Written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. That’s Charlie Musselwhite playing the blues harp.
This whole lyric is hilarious but these 4 lines get me very time:
“When the weather gets rough and it’s whiskey in the shade It’s best to wrap your savior up in cellophane He flows like the big muddy but that’s okay Pour him over ice cream for a nice parfait”
This bar’s insured by Smith and Wesson
Says the sign upon the wall
Vern studies his empty beer glass
Time slows down to a crawl
Audrey, the lank-haired waitress
Watches from the bar Order something soon, she yells Or get the hell out of here.
There’s a special on at Wanda’s Ranch
Tuesday night 2 for one
But Vern doesn’t have the appetite
He doesn’t have the wherewithal
There’s only one thing that he wants
And he’s going to get it soon
High Plains Sushi
High Plains Sushi
Hot Sake in a cup
Five thousand feet above the ocean
And he just can’t get enough
Two guys from the goldmine
Old Arsenic and Rock Face
Have journeyed up from the centre of the Earth
To join the human race
But no matter how hard they try
No matter what they do
In the glow from the pool table
They’ve still got that subterranean hue.
Something’s warming beneath a heat lamp
Looks like deep fried road kill
Beside a tub of mashed potatoes
It’s making Vern feel ill
There’s only one thing that he wants
And he’s going to get it soon
High Plains Sushi
High Plains Sushi
Hot Sake in a cup
Five thousand feet above the ocean
And he just can’t get enough.
I spent a little time once in Elko, Nevada. There was a sushi restaurant in the town which served individual portions large enough to feed a small Japanese village. Elko hosts an annual Cowboy Poetry Festival. Interesting place. This poem started as a song lyric and then became a poem with a chorus which I believe is called a “duranga”.
(Willie’s Oasis…a song about looking for drink in all the wrong places)
This a song from my collaboration with John Mitchell (The Mitchell-Feeney Project).
I wrote the lyrics and John did pretty much everything else (except the violin)
The lyric was adapted from a poem I wrote called “A Dry Country in Arkansas”. The poem was published some time ago in Cyphers, a long -running Irish literary magazine. When I gave the lyric to John, I had no concept what kind of song would emerge, I couldn’t have been happier with what he did. I’ll let John explain…
“Willie’s Oasis” turned out to be quite a challenge musically. I loved the feeling of the tune, that southern heat out on Highway 82, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t hear the music. I tried using my electric guitars, my acoustics, I even tried my piano, but no matter what key I played in and what chords I used, I couldn’t make it work. So I decided to use technology, and I searched through some of my pre-recorded samples and found this rough sounding, bluesy guitar riff. As soon as I started to work with it and edit the sample, add a few more samples, voila, “Willie’s Oasis” appeared.The only live things I put on this tune were my handclaps and my vocals.
I decided that it needed something else, so I called a wonderful violin player friend of mine named Ben Mink and asked if he would put some fiddle on the tune. Modern technology allows me to send him my tracks, he puts on the violin and sends it back to me via e-mail. We were never in the same room. I expected him to put some real down-home fiddle on, but he completely fooled me and played the most smoking electric violin parts that took the song over the edge. “
(A note about the violin player, Ben Mink: Ben co wrote “Constant Craving” with KD Lang. The song won KD Lang a Grammy in 1993. Ben and KD Lang also got co-writing credits on a Rolling Stones song, “Anybody Seen My Baby”, because the Stones noticed that the chorus of their song had similarities to the chorus of “Constant Craving”).
Here’s a video of a live performance of a song I wrote with my friend John Mitchell. I wrote the lyrics and John did the rest, the hard part! That’s John and his band down in Olympic Village (Vancouver). I was in charge of taking the video (no self-respecting musician would let me near a stage and with good reason) and as you can see Martin Scorsese has nothing to worry about! Listen on headphones, this was recorded on an iphone! John and the band sound great.
Here’s the lyric:
The Note
Earl sailed up the Belize coast In his brand new custom built boat With the mother of all hangovers No water and a note
And now he’s sitting drinking In an ocean-side tourist bar Trying to get a jump on happiness In the hour before happy hour
Chorus: And the note read: Our love has lost its flavor There’s no point in hanging on No Doctor Phil, no savior We’re done, Yes, we are done.
And the people standing ‘round him Have been on Caye Caulker far too long They‘re talking about Paradise spoilt And how it all went wrong
Well Earl knows that Paradise Is a very, very temporary thing And this little piece of heaven Feels like hell to him
Chorus: And the note read: Our love has lost its flavor There’s no point in hanging on No Doctor Phil, no savior We’re done, Yes, we are done.
And Earl can’t put a finger on it Why it all went up in smoke He’s feeling like a punch line In someone else’s joke
And he don’t believe in karma Instant, good or bad He’s drunk and lonely on the beach With a bucket full of sad
Chorus: And the note read: Our love has lost its flavor There’s no point in hanging on No Doctor Phil, no savior We’re done, Yes, we are done.
Taking part in Open Link Weekend over at earthweal
Netflix has a new series called “Song Exploder”. Each episode takes a famous song and looks at how it was made, recorded, the inspiration behind it. I have watched one episode so far, the song in the spotlight was “Losing My Religion” by REM. I found it fascinating, particularly because the members of REM are such engaging and willing participants in the analysis of the song , none more so than Michael Stipe . It reminded me what a great and idiosyncratic lyricist Michael Stipe is. I won’t quote the whole lyric (I have attached a video which syncs the lyric with the song), but here’s the second verse:
“That’s me in the corner That’s me in the spotlight Losing my religion Trying to keep up with you And I don’t know if I can do it Oh no, I’ve said too much I haven’t said enough”
What struck me, on seeing this, was how each line emerges from the page like planes in a cubist painting; each line views the subject from a different angle.
Consider this, the last verse, that play between “failed” and “flailing”, the conclusion “Now I’ve said too much”. Throughout the song, he doesn’t rhyme once, he just keeps throwing out those viewpoints, those angles, those curves: pretty much a perfect lyric.
“Consider this Consider this The hint of the century Consider this The slip that brought me To my knees failed What if all these fantasies Come flailing around Now I’ve said too much”
This is the song I went looking for, the day Gord Downie died. I couldn’t remember the title, all I had was the phrase “over-opiated” which had been stuck in my head for years. Why? I don’t really know but maybe it was the triple iamb and the repeated ‘o’? Unlike a lot of The Tragically Hip’s music, this song was never in heavy rotation on Canadian radio, but I knew the song that contained the phrase was on the album ‘Up to Here’ and I knew I had a cassette tape of that album which I had bought back in 1990.
That was the era of the cassette tape and over the years, as tapes became extinct and compact discs, then streaming, took over, I stop listening to the album. So on the day Gord Downie died I found myself looking everywhere for it, eventually finding it in the storage space between the front seats of my red 98 Ford Taurus station wagon. There was some serendipity to this, because the only tape deck I have left is in the Taurus station wagon. A cassette and a Taurus sound system – not exactly high fidelity, but then the Hip were never really about high fidelity; put the vocal and drums on top of the mix and let the rest take care of itself. Besides, the sound system isn’t bad. There are 4 speakers , 2 front, 2 back, and if you switch everything to the 2 rear speakers and the bed of the station wagon is empty, the sound is actually pretty good, good enough for a bar band with 2 guitar players that sound like Keith Richards and Ron Wood but not as sloppy. I don’t normally drive the Taurus except occasionally to take stuff to the dump, but on the day Gord Downie died, I drove it around Vancouver all day listening to “Up to Here”. Yes, I was one of those guys you see in a parked car with the windows closed, beating time on the steering wheel.
And it struck me what a good rock lyricist Gord Downie is. Much has been made of his talent as a poet, and he is a talented poet, but writing lyrics for rock music is a different skill. For me, both rock and blues are all about the set up and the punchline. Take this for example:
“You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine”
….Leiber and Stoller
Simple maybe, but deceptively hard to do well. Here’s Gord Downie from Boots or Hearts:
“Fingers and toes, fingers and toes Forty things we share Forty one if you include The fact that we don’t care”
Or this from the same song:
“I feel I’ve stepped out of the wilderness All squint-eyed and confused But even babies raised by wolves They know exactly when they’ve been used”
In fact, I could quote the whole song, because for me it’s as close as anyone has come to a perfect lyric. Or how about this from “New Orleans Is Sinking””
“Ain’t got no picture postcards, ain’t got no souvenirs my baby, she don’t know me when I’m thinking ’bout those years”
But Downie is also at heart a folk singer, a teller of tales. “38 years old” is about a guy serving time for avenging the rape of his sister; the story is told from the view point of his younger brother. I don’t think there’s a more devastating chorus than this one, anywhere in popular music:
“Same pattern on the table, same clock on the wall Been one seat empty, eighteen years in all Freezing slow time, away from the world He’s thirty-eight years old, never kissed a girl He’s thirty-eight years old, never kissed a girl”
Not all song lyrics look good on paper and Downie is an idiosyncratic singer who stretches and bends words to fit the song, but here’s a few more random samples from the album:
“In my dreams, a candy coated train comes to my door”
“Pumping hands and kissing all the babies Ain’t no time for shadowed doubts or maybes”
“Pulled down his birthday suitcase Brown with dust from no place Said, “I think it’s time we made a start” They danced the waltz of charity No car garage, two kids for free They were pissing bliss and playing parts”
“Up to Here” was the Hip’s first album, they want on to make many more, to become Canadian icons. Downie even wrote songs about hockey. When he died he was eulogised by a tearful Justin Trudeau and Canadian radio played Hip songs all day long. All deserved of course. Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Gord Downie – not a bad list to be part of. But Downie, was different. The rest of those artists came out of the folk music tradition, but Downie’s genre, modus operandi was bar band rock and his genius was that he succeeded in blending poetry with bar band rock. Just scroll back up and read that last verse, a short story in six lines. Rave on Gord. Now take a listen.
“There’s flies in the kitchen I can hear ’em there buzzing And I ain’t done nothing since I woke up today. How the hell can a person go to work in the morning And come home in the evening and have nothing to say.”
This is from “Angel from Montgomery” by John Prine……a life in 4 lines, says more than some novels.
There are many versions of this song but one of the best is by Bonnie Raitt and John Prine.
Despite what he says
not everybody knows,
not everybody knows
like Leonard knows.
Not everybody knows
that the best songs
are about loss,
endings,
so long,
ways to say goodbye,
closing time,
and that age
can be laughed about
but not at,
if I had a hat
I would raise it to Mr.Cohen
perched up there alone
in his tower of song.
I have posted this a few times before, but since this week is turning into music week at stopdraggingthepanda, I thought I would give it another outing
A note on the genius of Leonard Cohen:
Below is the first verse of “Suzanne”. Notice how he doesn’t hit a conventional rhyme until the chorus where he rhymes ‘blind’ and ‘mind’ and creates a tension and release which runs through the whole song (he repeats that pattern in the next 2 verses).
“Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her Then she gets you on her wavelength And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind And you know that she will trust you For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind”
“There’s flies in the kitchen I can hear ’em there buzzing And I ain’t done nothing since I woke up today. How the hell can a person go to work in the morning And come home in the evening and have nothing to say.”
This is from “Angel from Montgomery” by John Prine……a life in 4 lines, says more than some novels.
There are many versions of this song but one of the best is by Bonnie Raitt and John Prine.
This bar’s insured by Smith and Wesson
Says the sign upon the wall
Vern studies his empty beer glass
Time slows down to a crawl
Audrey, the lank-haired waitress
Watches from the bar Order something soon, she yells Or get the hell out of here.
There’s a special on at Wanda’s Ranch
Tuesday night 2 for one
But Vern doesn’t have the appetite
He doesn’t have the wherewithal
There’s only one thing that he wants
And he’s going to get it soon
High Plains Sushi
High Plains Sushi
Hot Sake in a cup
Five thousand feet above the ocean
And he just can’t get enough
Two guys from the goldmine
Old Arsenic and Rock Face
Have journeyed up from the centre of the Earth
To join the human race
But no matter how hard they try
No matter what they do
In the glow from the pool table
They’ve still got that subterranean hue.
Something’s warming beneath a heat lamp
Looks like deep fried road kill
Beside a tub of mashed potatoes
It’s making Vern feel ill
There’s only one thing that he wants
And he’s going to get it soon
High Plains Sushi
High Plains Sushi
Hot Sake in a cup
Five thousand feet above the ocean
And he just can’t get enough.
I spent a little time once in Elko, Nevada. There was a sushi restaurant in the town which served individual portions large enough to feed a small Japanese village. Elko hosts an annual Cowboy Poetry Festival. Interesting place. This poem started as a song lyric and then became a poem with a chorus which I believe is called a “duranga”.
Last week there was a Simon Pegg retrospective at our local cinema and Slim invited me back to his one bedroom apartment after we watched an early showing of “Shawn of the Dead”. Slim had prepared dinner and by that I mean he had peeled back the tin foil edge of a take-out carton of butter chicken, removed the cardboard lid, and handed me a plastic fork and a can of Old Style lager. He then lapsed into one of his silences.
I found myself noticing the beads of condensation on the clear plastic lid of the steamed rice container. The rice was long past fluffy. The evening stretched before me like a Sunday in Ottawa. My only recourse was to ask Slim an irritating question.
“So, Slim”, I said, “who do you think is the better poet, Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen?”
Slim’s face wrinkled in disgust. “Bob Dylan’s not a poet”, he snapped,“ he’s a poetic songwriter”.
“And Leonard Cohen is…..?”
“Leonard Cohen is a poet who writes songs”.
“Ok then, what’s your favorite Bob Dylan line, verse, whatever”
“I can only think of the bad ones”
“So what’s the worst Bob Dylan line ever?”
Slim blinked once like he was accessing a folder in his brain with an internal mouse.
“John Wesley Harding, ‘As I walked out One Morning’, third verse:
‘Depart from me this moment
I told her with my voice’.
It’s like saying ‘there’s going to be a jailbreak somewhere in this town’”
“But that’s Thin Lizzy”.
Slim looked like he had taken a sip of battery acid.
“My point is they are expressing the obvious just for the sake of a rhyme. It’s obvious that the jailbreak will be at the fucking jail and how else will he tell her except with his voice, they are in a field, for fuck sake!”
I have posted this a few times before, but since today’s the anniversary of Leonard Cohen’s death I thought I would give it another outing.
A note on the genius of Leonard Cohen:
Below is the first verse of “Suzanne”. Notice how he doesn’t hit a conventional rhyme until the chorus where he rhymes ‘blind’ and ‘mind’. He repeats that pattern in the next 2 verses.
“Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover
And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind”
Now I lie here so out of breath And over –opiated Maybe I couldn’t catch up no but Maybe he could have waited
Opiated….The Tragically Hip
This is the song I went looking for, the day Gord Downie died. I couldn’t remember the title, all I had was the phrase “over-opiated” which had been stuck in my head for years. Why? I don’t really know but maybe it was the triple iamb and the repeated ‘o’? Unlike a lot of The Tragically Hip’s music, this song was never in heavy rotation on Canadian radio, but I knew the song that contained the phrase was on the album ‘Up to Here’ and I knew I had a cassette tape of that album which I had bought back in 1990.
That was the era of the cassette tape and over the years, as tapes became extinct and compact discs, then streaming, took over, I stop listening to the album. So on the day Gord Downie died I found myself looking everywhere for it, eventually finding it in the storage space between the front seats of my red 98 Ford Taurus station wagon. There was some serendipity to this, because the only tape deck I have left is in the Taurus station wagon. A cassette and a Taurus sound system – not exactly high fidelity, but then the Hip were never really about high fidelity; put the vocal and drums on top of the mix and let the rest take care of itself. Besides, the sound system isn’t bad. There are 4 speakers , 2 front, 2 back, and if you switch everything to the 2 rear speakers and the bed of the station wagon is empty, the sound is actually pretty good, good enough for a bar band with 2 guitar players that sound like Keith Richards and Ron Wood but not as sloppy. I don’t normally drive the Taurus except occasionally to take stuff to the dump, but on the day Gord Downie died, I drove it around Vancouver all day listening to “Up to Here”. Yes, I was one of those guys you see in a parked car with the windows closed, beating time on the steering wheel.
And it struck me what a good rock lyricist Gord Downie is. Much has been made of his talent as a poet, and he is a talented poet, but writing lyrics for rock music is a different skill. For me, both rock and blues are all about the set up and the punchline. Take this for example:
“You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine”
….Leiber and Stoller
Simple maybe, but deceptively hard to do well. Here’s Gord Downie from Boots or Hearts:
“Fingers and toes, fingers and toes Forty things we share Forty one if you include The fact that we don’t care”
Or this from the same song:
“I feel I’ve stepped out of the wilderness All squint-eyed and confused But even babies raised by wolves They know exactly when they’ve been used”
In fact, I could quote the whole song, because for me it’s as close as anyone has come to a perfect lyric. Or how about this from “New Orleans Is Sinking””
“Ain’t got no picture postcards, ain’t got no souvenirs my baby, she don’t know me when I’m thinking ’bout those years”
But Downie is also at heart a folk singer, a teller of tales. “38 years old” is about a guy serving time for avenging the rape of his sister; the story is told from the view point of his younger brother. I don’t think there’s a more devastating chorus than this one, anywhere in popular music:
“Same pattern on the table, same clock on the wall Been one seat empty, eighteen years in all Freezing slow time, away from the world He’s thirty-eight years old, never kissed a girl He’s thirty-eight years old, never kissed a girl”
Not all song lyrics look good on paper and Downie is an idiosyncratic singer who stretches and bends words to fit the song, but here’s a few more random samples from the album:
“In my dreams, a candy coated train comes to my door”
“Pumping hands and kissing all the babies Ain’t no time for shadowed doubts or maybes”
“Pulled down his birthday suitcase Brown with dust from no place Said, “I think it’s time we made a start” They danced the waltz of charity No car garage, two kids for free They were pissing bliss and playing parts”
“Up to Here” was the Hip’s first album, they want on to make many more, to become Canadian icons. Downie even wrote songs about hockey. When he died he was eulogised by a tearful Justin Trudeau and Canadian radio played Hip songs all day long. All deserved of course. Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Gord Downie – not a bad list to be part of. But Downie, was different. The rest of those artists came out of the folk music tradition, but Downie’s genre, modus operandi was bar band rock and his genius was that he succeeded in blending poetry with bar band rock. Just scroll back up and read that last verse, a short story in six lines. Rave on Gord. Now take a listen.
I had just landed on Caye Caulker, which is little more than a sand spit off the coast of Belize, when it started to rain heavily. There was nothing else to do but go to an ocean-side bar, in the hour before happy hour. It was as crowded as a bar gets on Caye Caulker and there was this guy bragging in a loud voice about how he had just sailed up from Placencia in his new boat with “the mother of all hangovers” and no water on board. The guy was a bit of a jerk, so I decided to write him into a poem (which turned into this song lyric) and give him a hard time. By the way I tried working “Placencia” into the lyric but the word just hissed and flopped around like a drunk snake, so I gave up on it! Take a listen, and then John Mitchell will explain how he managed to sound like a rock band all by himself!
Here’s John:
I could hear “The Note” played by a real southern rock band. That’s the attitude I took to the musical arrangement. Earl had a bad case of the regrets mixed with a helping of anger, a bad hangover and topped with a soucent of despair, all in all a pretty heavy feeling, so it needed rough and heavy music. The opening distorted guitar lick is a nod to “Susie Q” by CCR played through an overdriven Fender Deluxe amp. I tried to make the track sound like a 5 or 6 piece band playing live in a smokey, roadside bar. I added the rock and roll piano on the choruses, as if Leon Russell was playing and the greasy Hammond organ as if Greg Allman was sitting in, especially the solo played through an overdriven Leslie speaker with a tear in the cone. I think Earl would appreciate how the band interpreted how he was feeling after getting “The Note”.
Click here to preview/ buy the whole album or individual tracks! Also available on iTunes (search for “The Mitchell Feeney Project”, no hyphen)
This lyric started with a poem I had published in The Shop literary magazine (called Down and Out in Idabel), then took off in a different direction. When writing the lyric, I was thinking of the feel of Kris Kristofferson’s, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and the structure of songs like John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” in which the verses are a series of snapshots that connect back to the chorus. Play it in your car and sing along with the chorus when no one is listening! That’s what I do!
Here’s John to tell his side!
When I saw that Idabel, Oklahoma was in this little bitty, piece of land between the states of Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma I jumped right off the front porch, because now I could REALLY do a country song. I’ve always loved the pedal steel guitar but you have to have it in the right song, and “Saturday Morning in Idabel” is just the song.
The chord progression is pretty much true country. I found a lovely little rhythm track with some nice tight fills, added the bass and then I used my Larrivee D-50 to lay down the acoustic track. I added some Fender strat. with heavy Duane Eddy tremolo for flavour. I called up John McArthur Ellis, a wonderful pedal steel player, and asked him to just play whatever he felt fit the song, and he was fantastic. Again the tracks were exchanged by e-mail. I think the best way to be a producer, is to let players play the way they feel, with only a soucent of direction. If you don’t trust them, don’t hire them. After I did the lead vocal, I called on the John Mitchell choir to do a little back-up singing, and there ya go. A swell little country song thanks to the inspiration of Jim Feeney.
Click here to preview/ buy the whole album or individual tracks! Also available on iTunes (search for “The Mitchell Feeney Project”, no hyphen)
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