My laptop crashed so I’m attempting the near impossible: posting this through my Wii. It’s giving me motion sickness. I’ll be attending Joanna’s Cincy tour stop at Memorial Hall on the 30th so check back for a review and the next two discs of “Have One On Me”.
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I’m really bad at paying attention to lyrics in songs. Most of the time I’ll get into a track just because I like the beat or its sound brings up a long-lost memory. But sometimes I’ll catch just a little snippet of the lyrics and think I know understand the song. Take, for example, the first song of this album: “Wop-A-Din-Din.” For the longest time I thought it was written about a sexy, exotic lover because of the first few verses:
She’s got big green eyes
And a long Egyptian face
She moves across the floor
At her own pace
When I’m here in bed
She’ll jump up on my chest
And when we lock eyes there’s so much love
I wanna cry
Wow, I thought, that’s a pretty intense. Big green eyes, long Egyptian face…this chick must be quite a looker. Yeah it’s a little weird that she jumps up on his chest but she’s probably just primed for some lovins. Those crazy kids.
And that’s how my perception stood for a long time until one day I just happened to catch the wording in the song’s next chunk and it left me scratching my head.
She comes in near
When I scratch under her ear
And she lifts her head
When I kiss around her neckWon’t go to sleep
When she falls along my side
And two green eyes fade
To a porcelain marble white
And somehow when I sleep
She’ll end up at my feet
And if I roll and kick her out
I might knock her to the ground
But she’ll come back anyhow
Why is he scratching his lover behind the ear and making her sleep at his feet? The song took a total 180 and I actually felt pissed that he was treating her so crudely.
Then I looked over at my cat, Piano Little, as she took a stretch break from her 22 hour nap in a pile of laundry and it all became clear. The big green eyes, Egyptian face, jumping on his chest, scratching of the ear. This wasn’t some sultry Mediterranean fling. Wop-a-din-din is his kitty and I am a fool.
It was really quite obvious after taking n the time to listen to what’s right out in the open. After this I told myself I’d never listen to a song again without understanding its true meaning. And for a while I did listen to the lyrics and found that most of the songs that I liked now really bothered me. They were either too repetitive, too trite or too confusing. Sometimes I just don’t get things.
So I’m back to merely absorbing the tones of the human voice instead of comprehending the underlying message. Yes perhaps that makes me a philistine but maybe if I wanted to read a poem I’d go to the library. Asshole.
I’ve found myself trying to write the beginning of this entry several times. Each time taking a different approach to conveying these simple truths:
1. There was a time when it was believed music could change the course of history and in fact some positive changes were obtained.
Woody Gurthrie and his Machine
2. The change those musicians made have mostly dissolved with time.Limp Bizkit, bleh, at Woodstock ’99
Limp Bizkit, bleh, making an ass of themselves at Woodstock '99
3. Our generation wants to change the world, perhaps with music, but doesn’t respect legitimate politically active artists.
Cure AIDS? Pfff....yeah right, Dr. Shades.
4. However, it’s ok to feign political activism maybe once or twice and still keep your cred.
5. We’re fucked.
Hey Barack HUSSEIN O-Bama, aka BARRY SOETORO, go back to Indochina. You ain't pushin socialist Chinese healthcare on me and my Baby! 'Merica!
So, while you wait for humanity to implode relax a spell and listen to these tunes from a more naive time; when the monster we know as the internet was just a twinkle in your grandmammy’s eye.
Don’t forget to check out Disc 1 Disc 2 and Disc 3
Side G: Of War, Love, and Hope
1. Ed McCurdy – John Brown’s Body
2. Frank Warner – Virginia’s Bloody Soil
3. Theodore Bikel – Two Brothers
4. Judy Collins – Masters of War
5. Theodore Bikel – Blow the Candles Out
6. Jean Redpath – Love Is Teasing
7. Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson – Sally Ann
8. Jean Ritchie – Little Devils
9. Limeliters – The Hammer Song
10. Woody Guthrie – This Land Is Your Land
Side H: Broadside, Topical Songs, Protest Songs
1. Pete Seeger, Almanac Singers, with audience
2. New Lost City Ramblers – No Depression In Heaven
3. Woody Guthrie – Talking Dusty Bowl
4. Big Bill Broonzy – Black, Brown and White
5. Oscar Brand – Talking Atomic Blues
6. Hamilton Camp – Girl From The North Country
7. Judy Collins – The Dove
8. Tom Paxton – High Sheriff of Hazard
9. Phil Ochs – The Thresher
10. Pete Seeger- We Shall Overcome
Click here for a random Rebuilt Tranny post
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I have to say that I love bluegrass. The whirwind of banjo, guitar, and maybe a XXX moonshine jug thrown in there somewhere always feels like the song’s about to run off the rails but somehow just keeps pluggin away into backwoods party mode. It tickles just the right spot in my tum tum and summons the most hilllbilly YEEHAW! imaginable–scaring the cats every time. Which is exactly why it’s such a bummer that bluegrass has never taken off as much as it should have in Cincy. You’d think that Cincinnati would be the perfect place for bluegrass music to flourish seeing how it’s on the corner of Ohio, Indiana, and The Home of Bluegrass: Kentucky. However, this woefully isn’t the case.
We do have a spattering of bluegrass every now then, though mostly entwined rather curiously with dreadlocks and patchwork pants. This city is infected by two dominating tribes: transplanted Applachian hillbillies attempting to cover their redneck pasts, a la Ben Folds, and an alarmingly large number of GO CUBBIES FANS that are about as bland as vanilla flavored wallpaper. Both, teamed together in some unholy white person’s culture-smashing union, turn the sensical into the nonsensical. We fail miserably at realizing our geographic potential and continue to imbibe all of the half-authentic, corny-ass country music and butt rock we can handle. Heaven help us.
Anyway, Side F continues on with the The Folk Box’s tradition of reaching deep down into the microgenres of Folk and pulling out the gooey goodies–this time ripping out the Blues from the heart of a Louisianna mudpuppy. It starts out with a harmonica being thrown, no coughed, no hum-cough-uppercuted directly into your right temple. I watched a show on PBS this week about the Jazz movement in Paris in the 1920s titled “Harlem In Montmartre” (which was surprisingly sponsored in part by a large donation from Hugh Hefner) that gave an anecdote about a US Army marching band comprised of black soldiers who played an expo of some sort in Paris after WWI. Apparently the conductor of the French marching band demanded to see their instruments because the black musicians made sounds the French thought impossible. It was as if they were making their instruments sing instead of playing within the confines of notes or scale or pitch . Their trumpets, clarinets, and maybe even their tubas were talking to the Parisians. I kind of feel that this is what the show was describing with Sonny Terry’s demonic harmonica possession entitled Lost John. It’s just bonkers. The most bonkers, dirty-ass joke you ever heard. Also, don’t miss Leadbelly’s Black Snake Moan. He might be playing a smooshed bloodhound instead of a guitar–I haven’t been able to confirm yea or nay yet though.
Don’t forget to check out Disc 1 Disc 2 and Disc 4
Side E: Country Music – From Ballads to Bluegrass
1. Willy Clancy – Sligo Reel and Mountain Road
2. Eric Weissberg – Old Joe Clark
3. Clarence Ashley – Coo-Coo Bird
4. Tom Paley – Shady Grove
5. Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman – Flop-Eared Mule
6. Jean Ritchie – Nottamun Town
7. Doc Watson and others – Amazing grace
8. Doc Watson and others- Cripple Creek
9. The Dillards – Pretty Polly
10. George Pegram and Walter Parham – Yellow Rose of Texas
11. Green Corn – Dián and the Greenbrian Boys
12. The Dillards – Old Man at the Mill
1. Sonny Terry – Lost John
2. Big Bill Broonzy – I Wonder When I’ll Get To Be Called A Man
3. Leadbelly – Black Snake Moan
4. Blind Lemon Jefferson – See That My Grave Is Kept Clean
5. Hally Wood – House of the Rising Sun
6. Mark Spoelstra – France Blues
7. New Lost City Ramblers – Carter Blues
8. Dave Ray – Slappin’ On My Black Cat Bone
9. Dave Van Ronk – Don’t Leave Me Here
10. Josh White – Southern Exposure
Click here for a random Rebuilt Tranny post
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Disc two brings us the only two things an honest man ever needs: work and God. Soul abounds in these tracks start to finish from back in the day when being Irish was to be oppressed. Now it just means you’re expected to celebrate St. Paddy’s day like a baffoon and carry on a hearty tradition of freckle fetish. With the other tracks I feel like I’m listening to premixed tracks from Moby’s album Play. Just that sort of southern, sweltering, heart-squeezing music. Like grit under your nails and baptismal water in your hair: righteous.
Don’t forget to check out Disc 1 Disc 3 and Disc 4
1. Leadbelly – Pick a Bale of Cotton
2. Seafarers Chorus – Haul on the Bowline
3. Pete Seeger – Paddy Works on the Railway
4. Harry Jackson – I Ride an Old Paint
5. Cisco Houston – Zebra Dun
6. Horace Sprott – Field Holler
7. Koerner, Ray & Glover – Linin’ Track
8. Willie Turner – Now Your Man Done Gone
9. Josh White – Timber
10. Negro Prisoners – Negro Prisoners – Grizzly Bear
Side D: Many Worshippers, One God
1. Marilyn Child & Glenn Yarbrough – Mary Had A Baby
2. Josh White – Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin’ Bed
3. Blind Willie Johnson – Dark Was The Night
4. Judy Collins – Twelve Gates To The City
5. Theodore Bikel – A Zemer
6. Glenn Yarbrough – Wayfaring Stranger
7. Ed McCurdy – Simple Gifts
8. Leadbelly – Meeting at the Building
9. Bob Gibson – You Can Tell The World
10. Christian Tabernacle Church – Down By The Riverside
