Music Feature: Great Friend of Mine, “The World” and “tisina (5-3000)” (2009) (Creative Loafing)

About a year ago, my band started recording a full-length CD at Science Recording Studio on 10th Way in Sarasota – a street behind the old brick Binz Building just past the military academy, off Orange Avenue. Neil Parsons, who admittedly has little school-based training as an audio engineer but who is armed with unmatched ears and a love for hot sauce on Doritos, runs the studio along with J.R. Gunther.

Neil knows about bands and genres of which I have never heard, crazy stuff called downtempo or stoner, which he tosses off as though he was referencing common handles like jazz or reggae. When we were setting up equipment, loading stuff in and out of the studio, changing strings, or just bullshitting, Neil would invariably have something spinning that was bizarre and just far enough out of my comfort zone to make me feel uneasy and intrigued. On at least one occasion since then, my eyes have popped open in the early morning hours, an odd, angular melody floating around my head without any recollection of who the artist was or where I had heard it. Eventually I would realize that it was something Neil played in the studio. When he was not saucing up a chip, that is.

Neil’s favorite recording project at the time was a band called Great Friend of Mine. The band, in fact, consisted of great friends of his from Venice High School, now students at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. The band stays connected to Sarasota County through family and friends. They formed five years ago as Aim at the Kid. A little over a year ago, they honed their sound and adopted the new name. They replaced the original bass player with a new one. Clearly proud of what they captured in the studio, Neil played most of the dense, challenging concept album they called Desperate Songs, seemingly based on a surreal encounter between a narrator and a poetry-spitting stranger, for us. (On our dime? Hey, wait a minute…)

I would be lying if I told you the concept behind Desperate Songs made any sense to me. Nevertheless, one does not have to grasp art completely to enjoy it. I appreciate and applaud the incredible amount of time and effort it must have taken to compose and record the album, and I have listened to it quite a bit.

Still, I feel like I want to know what is going on, at least a little. Therefore, I emailed singer Paul Gonter about it, and he put it thusly:

The album has two spheres of influence that are not wholly different or the same. Both musically and lyrically we decided to take a more conscious and decisive approach. We did not want to write parts. We wanted to write songs, and we wanted these songs to not only function as entities on their own, but also as an overall movement from the first track to the last. This idea of cohesion came from many bands, but namely The Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come and Recover’s Rodeo and Picasso.  The actual content of the music came from our desire to create what we consider good, heavy music. We all grew up listening to punk and all of its various subgenres, and we wanted to create something new (if not new to someone else, at least new to us) that still held on to the aggression and the responsibility of the punk world. This responsibility aspect goes into the lyrical content, which I wanted to line up with what we were trying to accomplish with the music. The most blatant philosophical influence on the lyrics was Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem. Though it was not the only influence, it was a perfect example of the conscious individualism that the lyrics are trying to express.

Heady stuff, to be sure, but it is well worth the time investment, and the music rewards your efforts blindly. Much of the album, beginning with “We,” is intoned in the voice of the stranger, his voice “an uncouth symphony of rasp and cracks; his song was a quaking mountain on a burial ground,” an accurate description of Gonter’s vocal delivery. Eight songs later, at the end of “The World,” so to speak, a long, droning fade-out based on two alternating chords with peppering drums, will make you forget about anything else you have to do today. “The World” returns the voice of the narrator, who brings the listener back to the unfolding scene: “As the heat rose from the street and the passing cars created an incredulous beat, I took his dirt-covered hands in mine and we (the World) sang in unison until the sun did shine.” They begin to sing together:

A journey tells what a book can’t read-

A master sells only what he can see-

So this is our ledger, this is our coin…

… Finally, “Nothing above me but the sun” (3:15 on the recording), after which GFOM treats us to guitar-soaked sonic splendor, captured brilliantly by engineer Neil. On the very last track, “Tisina (5-3000),” Gonter sings the last line in the voice of the narrator, “The only thing to know for sure is silence,” repeatedly, to great effect.

Listening to 7:31 minutes of “The World,” followed closely by “Tisina (5-3000)” (that’s how you should listen to the two tracks posted above), pushed up at dangerous levels of volume over Science’s monitors a year ago, I remember feeling mesmerized, old, irrelevant and galvanized all at once, and nothing has changed listening to it now. No, you do not beg the DJ to play Desperate Songs at your wedding, but these are serious, heavy songs laid bare and committed to 1s and 0s (and cassette) in our own backyard by ambitious young musicians.

The CD is for sale (click here), but as many bands are now doing, GFOM allows listeners who visit their website to download the whole album free of charge. “We all download a lot of music and it would be kind of hypocritical if we didn’t want people to download our music,” wrote Gonter. He feels strongly, however, that fans want even more: “The music industry has changed over the past 10 years, and though we have no ties to the industry itself, we have an understanding that as post-Napster music listeners we are going to want a little more out of releases than a few promo shots and typed lyrics. The Indie and DIY scene has really grasped onto this idea to help fuel a new form of creativity: the physicality of the release. I think this is why there has been a resurgence of vinyl and even cassette tape releases over the past decade… Artists are able to add an extra, tangible layer to their music that holds more weight than an mp3 in a labeled folder. So, we offer the free download, but also the hardcopy of the CDR with a zine style booklet that we have conceptualized, designed, and assembled ourselves.”

A company called Intellect is releasing Desperate Songs on cassette. GFOM recently recorded two new songs with Neil for a split seven-inch with friends Ghosting from Burlington, Vt., and are currently writing new material without anything specific release in mind. “Other than that,” Gonter stated, “we are playing shows whenever they are offered and are trying to set up a tour for spring break around Florida with our friends in You Blew It.”

Album Info: Desperate Songs (2009). Download an album sampler on Jamendo, and purchase it here.

Paul Gonter – vocals
Marko Kurtovic – guitar and vocals
Zach Frimmel – bass and vocals
Kyle Obney – drums

Visit Great Friend of Mine on MySpace and Tumblr.

Steve Vai, “The Attitude Song” (1984)

 

Guitarists grimace a whole lot when they bend strings. I think about this. This phenomenon received some attention in 2005 as something called “guitar face.” As early as 1992, my friends and I referred to the act of expressive facial scrunching as “making a chops face.”

My friend Ron had a website devoted to chops faces (the appropriately titled www.chopsfaces.com. I remember he wrote, “You want to better define chops face?  You’d have to put ‘rock’ into words.” Ron’s point was similar to the classic definition of swing by Dizzy Gillespie: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

According to whatever dictionary I’m looking at right now (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate, Mr. Picky), the earliest use of the word “chops” in literature dates back to 1589. It meant the fleshy covering of the jaws, as in “a dog licks its chops.” In the jazz age, “chops” became a slang term for a musician’s embouchure (a fancy word for, well, “chops”). Working on one’s “chops” meant working on the technique of one’s “chops,” or mouth. Since then, the term has been broadly used to denote the technical facility of a musical performer.

Another meaning came out of rock music lingo. A “chop” (singular) is a musical figure (or a “lick”) that is physically difficult and therefore require years of practice, but it’s rarely used in the singular form. We hear “chops” all the time. A rock-guy who is “working on chops,” then, in addition to working on his/her general technique, is practicing specific “licks.” The point of practicing your chops is to get them so engrained in your muscle memory that your can recall them without thought, so that when you are self-indulgently “jamming” you will not be hindered by the constraints of your fingers. This results in some pretty horrible music much of the time.

In the nineteenth century, Niccolo Paganini and Franz Liszt had chops. Naturally, they had chops faces too. Paganini and Liszt unleashed their chops and chops faces on the public. Naturally, the press characterized these two giants as though they were “transfigured” by the music into a state of intoxication. I once wrote a whole dissertation about it (not really). 

In Bible stories, Saint Cecilia was given entrance to the heavenly choir and was transfigured. The downside to receiving chops from the Lord, however, as St. Ceci’s story tells us, is that you are not able to share your chops with anyone. Therefore, if your transfiguration is at all visible to anyone but yourself (i.e. if you flail around wildly like a spaz), you get locked up. Some listeners perceived this transfiguration as the ability of virtuosos to channel Satan through their fingers. Blues legend Robert Johnson is a more recent example of a virtuoso musician who sold his soul to the devil in order to gain chops. 

Crossroads (1986) stars guitarist Steve Vai as a shredder who sold his soul to the devil in order to shred – and also Ralph Macchio. Macchio plays Eugene, a conservatory student guitarist facing down a tough jury of music professors. Eugene performs a boring classical guitar composition, full of the requisite arpeggios, sweeps, and rest-stroke/finger style techniques. His face remains vacant and unexpressive. The judges are impressed up to the last second, when Eugene rips into a bluesy run concludes the piece. This makes them sad. Fittingly, Eugene sneers as the blues licks roll effortlessly from his fingers because, well, he feels it. The jury chides him for serving two Lords: blues guys and old, dead Italian guitar-music composers. Silliness. The remainder of the film, as everyone reading this knows (right?), involves Ralphie’s transformation from spoiled conservatory guy to road-weary bluesman as he guides an elderly friend, Willie, a true bluesman, back home to the Delta to renege on his deal with the devil. To complete this “short sale,” so to speak, he must pit young Ralphie against the devil’s shredder, Jack Butler, played by Steve Vai. This is good casting because Vai can play the guitar well. Not only that, he’s a virtuoso chops-face maker. He belongs in the Chops Faces Hall of Fame.

Vai always had chops faces in his arsenal. He once famously won friends by miming Jimmy Page’s guitar break in “Heartbreaker,” and since breaking into the music business in the late ’70s as Frank Zappa’s “stunt guitarist” he has continuously broken new ground in chops faces. During the Crossroads battle, Ralphie himself unleashes some of the acting chops that won him fame in The Karate Kid (1984). Crossroads, in fact, is Karate Kid, The Musical, featuring young Ralph trying to add meaning to his life by practicing the blues, a tradition largely invented, perfected, and maintained by people of color. I do wonder how many takes were needed to capture the right facial expressions for the music scenes.

Pat Metheny deserves special recognition for his role in claiming chops faces for the jazz community. Of course, it is not surprising that the top chops-face practitioner in the jazz world happens to be a guitarist, because it’s hard to make chops faces with a sax or trumpet jammed in your mouth. I’d venture to say that he has greater chops than anyone currently practicing chops faces. See, for example, the video he and his band made for the 1992 album Secret Story. (The real Secret Story, I would argue, is the chops face extravaganza witnessed by the select few who bought the video, which not only gave us Pat in pure grimacing form, it introduced many of us young aspiring players to the freakishly long fingers of pianist Lyle Mays.) 

Compare Metheny’s faces to those of John Scofield, whose playing is just as high on the technical scale. Sco’s pose is that of an aging hipster, a bearded, blazered, stoic figure, a professor of angular six-string wizardry. Naturally, his playing style, so different from that of Metheny, is reflected in his chops faces.

Some Live Attitude:

Album Info: Flex-Able (1984)

Fred Neil, “The Dolphins” (1966)

I listen to Fred Neil and I hear Old Florida. I lived in Florida for, oh, about four years, and I’m aware that hardly makes me a native. I moved there from Connecticut, and now I live in Connecticut again. Just as I got used to living in Florida, I was up and out. Funny, huh? It feels like a dream.

Living in Florida, I was aware of a sadness buzzing around all over the place. It wasn’t the only thing I was aware of, but it was certainly consistent. Naturally, there’s plenty to be happy about in Florida. The weather is spot-on gorgeous ninety percent of the time, and there’s no shortage of visual beauty. But like everywhere else, there are poor, ambitious, and hungry people, and if you don’t have sufficient means or a good job, life down there can be pretty tough. During these last couple of bust years, when construction jobs disappeared along with the cranes all around small cities, families have suffered tremendously.

My band practiced in an old celery packinghouse we called the Rat Hole off of Fruitville Road by the Interstate. People lived and/or squatted in adjacent areas of the packinghouse. It wasn’t a pretty place. Anyway, I used to stop and grab a six-pack at a convenience store on the way to practice. On my way in to the store, a guy outside asked me for some change so that he could buy a cheeseburger. He was a former construction worker whose job vanished along with everyone else’s in that industry. He decided he was leaving town for Orlando and the promise of work there. We talked for a few minutes. He was tired, dirty and discouraged. I went inside and bought my beer, and I brought him a tall can of Budweiser. He didn’t ask, but I just thought that would help his mood tremendously. He was so thankful, but I could tell he was somewhat embarrassed.

A lousy can of Budweiser doesn’t make me a Bodhisattva, of course. I’m not a charitable person, and I probably should have bought him a cheeseburger, anyway. The image of him along the Interstate that night, though, heading north to look for work, isn’t one I’ll forget. One can of beer and one genuine interaction with another human being in four years, or so it seems, was a gift that he gave back, one more valuable than a beer.

All of this, of course, has nothing to do with this song by Fred Neil, who was raised in St. Petersburg, Florida. Legend holds that, growing up, his father went around Florida filling jukeboxes with the latest records, and that young Fred got his hands on an inordinate amount of music. A checkered past, reform schools, it’s all in there. You might as well make it up for yourself.

By the time Bob Dylan got to Greenwich Village in the early sixties, Neil was already there. He put out a great album called Fred Neil in 1966, and wrote a song called “Everybody’s Talkin’” that was a huge hit for Harry Nilsson when it appeared in the movie Midnight Cowboy in 1969. Neil was a huge influence on David Crosby and Gram Parsons (another Florida native), and other leading figures of folk and country rock.

But Neil had a drug problem. He took his royalty checks from his few hits and headed to Coconut Grove, Florida, where he spent the rest of his life living in the paradise of relative obscurity. He wasn’t terribly prolific or ambitious. Read the lyrics of “The Dolphins.” It’s pretty clear Neil didn’t see himself as a protest singer. He was content to look for the dolphins and think about the past. He died in 2001.

Exhuming a previously discarded life feels, in a way, like being in a sand timer. While on the bottom, you don’t notice sand piling up on top of you. It’s a gradual feeling of suffocation, and when it’s flipped, you become aware that all those attachments are running out from underneath your feet. When, of course, you get shot through that narrow opening just like the rest of the sand, it’s not always a pleasant feeling, but it’s exhilarating.

This old world may never change / The way it’s been / And all the ways of war / Can’t change it back again / I’ve been searchin’ / For the dolphins in the sea / And sometimes I wonder / Do you ever think of me

I’m not the one to tell this world / How to get along / I only know the peace will come / When all hate is gone / I’ve been searchin’…

You know sometimes I think about / Saturday’s child / And all about the time / When we were running wild / I’ve been searchin’…

This old world may never change / This world may never change / This world may never change

Album info: Fred Neil (1966).

Tim Buckley recorded this song as well, and did a pretty good job of it, if you care to check it out, but I’m partial to Neil’s version.

Morton Feldman, “Piano and String Quartet” (1985)

 

The video above gives you about 8 minutes or so of this piece, which lasts 79:33.

Feldman once said that after an hour or so of music, there’s no form anymore. There’s only scale. His String Quartet II lasts five hours. I imagine composing this music was like practicing meditation for him. Listening to it approaches the act of meditation more than any other type of music I’ve come across.

I’m completely fascinated by Feldman’s late music, but not in an intellectual way. It hits me on a physical level. It’s like breathing or walking. You can sit and listen to the piano arpeggios and string chords and just be aware of them. I like to let bare attention notice each chord and note sound and then disappear without bringing any expectation to the process. There’s not much room for intention here, either from me or from the music.

If you enjoy doing this for eight minutes, be sure to pick up the full hour-plus long piece, which ends as quietly as it began.

Album Info: Kronos Quartet: Morton Feldman, Piano and String Quartet (1993)

Elvis Perkins, “How’s Forever Been Baby” (2009)

[Click the arrow right below THIS text to hear the song... live version below.]

 

A melancholy song for the end of a melancholy week. I think that everyone who has lost someone significant in their lives – which is to say EVERYONE, at least of a certain age or older – is feeling that gap right about this time of year. Death is the greatest teacher about life, though, in my opinion. All I have to do on any given day is say to myself, Cheer up: you’ll soon be dead!

That’s not as dark as it sounds. It’s meant as more of a celebration of the fact that i’m alive right now. Anyway, it always puts a smile on my face.

Elvis Perkins knows about loss. He is the son of actor Tony Perkins (Psycho, etc.), who died of AIDs when Elvis was 16. His mother, photographer Berry Berenson, died on Flight 11 from Boston on September 11, 2001.

“How’s Forever Been Baby” is a two-chord song that closes out the “Elvis Perkins in Dearland” album. It’s a song that always seems to end before I’m ready, even though it’s on the long side (5:20). I always hit rewind when it ends until I can’t anymore. 

Certain songs also seem to evoke certain memories and sensations for no apparent reason, like this one, which for me takes me back to playing in the cemetary by Gallow’s Hill Road when I was kid, where some important people in my life are now resting. I believe it’s because “How’s Forever Been Baby” mixes playfulness and celebration with undeniable sadness and recognition of mortality. The flowering tree planted in “rubble and debris” in the first verse is felled in the last, buried in ice “for all eternity to see.” “Carry me a candle and a lunar calendar,” evoking the light of the moon and the light of a single flame. Nicely done.

They don’t all have to be happy songs. Enjoy.

 

I: Remember let’s plant a flowering tree / here in the rubble and debris / I’ll tend it with a tear / if you only hold my hand / how’s forever been baby? how’s forever been baby?

II: You know I build fires to beat a post / you look out upon the sea do you still see the sea?  / I get the fire of the bones / you say I come in peace / how’s forever been baby? how’s forever been baby?

III: Outside the gates I arrive home / can you taste the spirit on the tongue the tongue the tongue / see me refuse you
send you out into the night / to fly a blank flag home // how’s forever been baby how’s forever been baby?

IV: Remember take me back to our teens / we can waste the time between between between / carry me a candle and a lunar calendar / will you stay the night with me? // how’s forever been baby? how’s forever been baby?

V: And it was let’s fell our withering tree / it bloomed in the rubble and debris / I would bury it in ice / for all of eternity to see // how’s forever been baby? how’s forever been baby?

A mediocre-sounding live performance…

 

Album Info: Elvis Perkins in Dearland (2009)

Cream, “Deserted Cities Of The Heart” (1968)

 

Verse/Chorus 1: Upon this street where time has died / The golden treat you never tried. / In times of old, in days gone by. / If I could catch a dancing eye. // It was on the way, / On the road to dreams, yeah. / Now my heart’s drowned in no love streams, yeah.

Verse/Chorus 2: The street is cold, its trees are gone. / The story’s told the dark has won. / Once you set sail to catch a star. / We had to fail, it was too far. // It was on the way, / On the road to dreams, yeah. / Now my heart’s drowned in no love streams, yeah.

Verse/Chorus 3: The street is cold, its days are gone. / The story’s told the dark has won. / It couldn’t last, had to stop. / You drained it all to the last drop. // It was on the way, / On the road to dreams, yeah. / Now my heart’s drowned in no love streams, yeah, yeah, yeah. / Now my heart’s drowned in no love streams.

Verse/Chorus 4: The street is cold, trees are gone. / There’s no retreat from time that’s died. / On this dark street the sun is black. / The winter life is coming back. // It was on the way, / On the road to dreams, yeah. / Now my heart’s drowned in no love streams, / Now my heart’s drowned in no love streams.

Cream flamed out shortly after this album and tour, and probably for the better. Even so, although I find Hendrix more compelling (and probably always will), a few Cream songs stay with me for some reason.

You know, a funny thing: this is the first time I’ve really examined the lyrics, which goes to show I don’t really listen to Cream for the words. Reading them now, they don’t make a whole lot of sense. It doesn’t matter. I could listen to Jack Bruce sing the alphabet and I’d be happy. I’m not a huge Clapton fan. Compared with Beck, Page, Hendrix, etc., he bores me. But I don’t consider listen to Cream to be the same as listening to Clapton. He was only one third of Cream. It occurs to me that he needed the other two thirds to bring out his most fiery playing.

Another funny thing: the only Cream albums I had growing up were Live Cream II and the Best of Cream. I didn’t have Fresh Cream, Disraeli Gears, Wheels of Fire, or Goodbye. The first time I heard Cream was when I lived in Canada in 8th grade, at my friend Akram’s house. His older brother had all these classic rock albums I had never heard before, including Disraeli Gears, Dark Side of the Moon, and The Song Remains the Same. I remember hearing “Sunshine of Your Love” for the first time at his house. I thought I knew my classic rock, even at that young age, but I couldn’t name the band. Even when he told me it was Cream, I was like, Who?

“Deserted Cities of the Heart” is one of those throwaway Cream songs, unlike “Sunshine of Your Love,” “White Room,” etc. Part of its appeal is the fact that it hasn’t been overplayed. Even “Tales of Brave Ulysses” falls into that category. “Deserted Cities” is a little nugget of monochromatic psychedelic bliss that never fails to grab my attention.

Clapton’s tone on his solo sounds like a collection of sped-up 8-bit samples thrown together. There’s a chugging momentum that carries all the way through this song, one that doesn’t even get slowed down by the bizarre time signature changes, characteristic of Wheels of Fire-era Cream (again, think of the intro of “White Room”).

Album Info: Wheels of Fire (1968)

Dr. Dog, “From” (2008)

Album info: Fate (2008)

The Avett Brothers, “Shame” (2007)

A hilarious song that gets funnier every time I hear it. I put the CD version on here because that’s the best way to hear it. The rhymes are classic… I could have picked any song from the Emotionalism CD, which is completely solid (next on the list was “Salina”).

There’s also a live clip at the bottom.. the sound’s not all that great, but the energy of their live performances is there.

Verse 1: Okay so I was wrong about / My reasons for us fallin’ out / Of love I want to fall back in / My life is different now I swear / I know now what it means to care / About somebody other than myself

Verse 2: I know the things I said to you / They were untender and untrue / I’d like to see those things undo / So if you could find it in your heart / To give a man a second start / I promise things won’t end the same

Chorus: Shame, boatloads of shame / Day after day, more of the same / Blame, please lift it off / Please take it off, please make it stop

Verse 3: Okay so I have read the mail / The stories people often tell / About us that we never knew / But their existence will float away / And just like every word they say / And we will hold hands as they fade

Chorus: Shame, boatloads of shame / Day after day, more of the same / Blame, please lift it off / Please take it off, please make it stop

Bridge: I felt so sure of everything / My love to you so well received / And I just strutted around your town /Knowing I didn’t let you down / The truth be known, the truth be told / My heart was always fairly cold / Posing to be as warm as yours / My way of getting in your world / But now I’m out and I’ve had time / To look around and think / And sink into another world / That’s filled with guilt and overwhelming

Chorus: Shame, boatloads of shame / Day after day, more of the same / Blame, please lift it off / Please take it off, please make it stop

Verse 4: And everyone they have a heart / And when they break and fall apart / And need somebody’s helping hand /
I used to say just let ’em fall / It wouldn’t bother me at all / I couldn’t help them now I can

Album Info: Emotionalism (2007)

Live in 2009:

Lambchop, “National Talk Like A Pirate Day” (2008)

I don’t pretend to know much about this Lambchop guy. I was drawn to this song because of the title (and the CD cover). The song doesn’t have a recognizable chorus, just five verses and two instrumental interludes between verses 2 and 3 and 4 and 5. I like that Lambchop doesn’t rhyme for cheap effect or because that’s what we expect to hear. I also enjoy how pronouns, tenses, and personas are jumbled from verse to verse: the “I” that is so pervasive in the first three verses becomes “he,” inexplicably, in verse 4; he self-consciously sings about singing to escape from having to talk like a pirate in verse 3. Perhaps the whole thing is a gag, random thoughts thrown together to make us search for meaning. But all songs are kinda that way anyway.

Enjoy. Argh.

1: This is my song don’t sing along / It’s opinions disarrayed of might are drooped / Like good men I am disabled / From understanding what we are taught to condemn / In the kingdoms of the well and of the sick / And the hours that it took to think of this / And the road that got the best of you one day / Can you see it all

2: Some how I knew this wasn’t it / Some how I knew that we will see this to fruition / They said I was a ditsy housewife / And I have a crude opinions of unpractised men / In my pajamas I still hold my record player / There’s a hockey game on the table by the chair / And when it rains your hair begin to curl / Come the winds of dawn

(Instrumental interlude)

3: Without your eye patch and your parrot / I’ve been informed it was national “talk like a pirate day” / Perhaps this singing is a refuge / From other equally uncomfortable thoughts / And you disregard the clock upon the wall / It’s a wonder you can disregard at all / You just try to find a softer way to fall / Back into my arms

4: Now he thought he was a citizen / But only in the vaguest sort of way / And we will take it to the people / And the people will then take it all away / With our pencils we are righteous and we’re rough / It’s a wonder when your education starts / And you wipe your nose upon your pretty sleeve / And then you leave

(Instrumental interlude 2)

5: I think we had better call a cab / Our thirst for this has made these no use / And I remember our last kiss / And I’ll remember all the others from now on / Until it’s time to sing this song over my grave / Like a boy who just forgets the mourning shave / Or the girl gets that hound dog to behave / I will sing to you

Album Info: OH (Ohio)

Drive-By Truckers, “Bob” (2008)

This song’s interest lies in the contrast between the traditional, countrifried musical setting and the provocative subject matter. Bob’s an ambiguous fellal; even his name is a palindrome. The tension in the lyrics between straight Bob and gay Bob (“he might kneel but he never bends over”; “Bob ain’t exactly scared of women / he’s just got his own way of livin’”) makes us wonder if Bob is the product of a strict society that wouldn’t stand for alternative lifestyles or if he’s simply too introverted to venture out and meet a woman, get married, etc. (not that the two are equivalent). Perhaps his mom is the problem; we are told that “every week at the beauty shop” she hears of “of another woman made another man disappear.” We feel like she’s been saying these thing to Bob his whole life, and clearly Bob’s father isn’t around.

I dunno… for a 2 minute song, it’s a pretty compelling little character sketch.

Verse/Chorus 1: Bob goes to church every Sunday, Every Sunday that the fish ain’t biting / Bob never has to have dinner with the preacher, cause Bob never bothered getting married / He likes to drink a beer or two every now and again, he always had more dogs than he ever had friends / Bob ain’t light in the loafers, he might kneel but he never bends over

V/C 2: Bob takes care of his mama, she’s the only one he lets call him Robert / She don’t drive anymore so he takes her to the store / and keeps her yard looking just like she wants it / Every week at the beauty shop Bob’s mama hears
of another woman made another man disappear / Robert ain’t exactly scared of women, he’s just got his own way of living

Bridge: Bob’s still got an antenna on a pole two channels come in, two more come and go / He used to watch the news but he don’t anymore, ain’t none of it new it’s the same as before / He figures all any of it’s any good for is keeping every bored till there ain’t nobody like Bob anymore

V/C 3: Bob takes care of his mama / she’s a mess but he feels like he oughta / How big a mess today? Ask Bob he’ll say,
“She’s a big one and she’s gonna be a lotta” / He likes to drink a beer or two every now and again, / he always had more dogs than he ever had friends / Bob ain’t light in the loafers, he might kneel but he never bends over

Album Info: Brigher Than Creation’s Dark (2008)

Live at Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro, NC (where I used to live and saw many shows).