09 May, 2009

FiddleHeads



Goodbye my old home

You are now the lake's

Got a view

That I once did not

Hey hey hey hey


In your place is grief

For the plans I've laid

I can't forgive 

That goddamned lake

Hey hey hey hey


When I smile it hurts my face

But when I drink it helps

Hunk of peat

At my feet

And it's smoking well.


Chicago is a drain

To which all garbage flows

A thousand kids cry everyday

Hey hey hey hey.


And so my dreams are wet

And water fills my shoes

Where once perhaps I owed a bit

I've paid my goddamned dues


When I smile it hurts my face

But when I drink it helps

Hunk of peat

At my feet

And it's smokinng well


When I smile it hurts my face

But when I drink it helps

Hunk of peat

At my feet

And it's smoking well.


This is the song inspired, sort of... well actually totally, by my Uncle Gregg. 

The tune comes from an Irish movie I saw when I was twenty and living downtown Indianapolis.  I would take my saxophone and serenade paddleboaters for cash right out in front of our apartment on the canal.  It is a nice memory.  Sometimes I went under a big bridge and just wailed whatever tune came to my head.  And I noticed something.  There was a slackening of my embouchure and a kind of animation to the way I played that was different upon maturity than I had as a young high schooler.  At the time I couldn't play but two chords on a guitar, and had all the skills singing that the high school chorus could give me.  So that saxophone, and the paddleboats, and the faintly marine stink of a disused, never profitable conduit from The City On The White River to far flung places, taught me that I was a simmering stud beneath that secretly unstudly exterior.  As long as I was playing movie themes.


The reason it was inspired by Gregg is that for no reason, one night a few months ago, I was recording a spontaneous couple of songs simmering inside of me.  I finished those songs and had what felt like more inside (yes, it is that easy. And no, I am not proud.)  So, I sighed, and said, "OK you guys, but only one more time."  Once I was singing I realized that I was singing, after a bit of a quarrel amongst the muses, the Irish tune from back in the saxophone days: in fact "that" Irish tune from the downtown apartment.  Fairly quickly I forgot all about that, and realized I had just mentioned, while singing, a "hunk of peat."  My Uncle Gregg and I had not three weeks before been talking on the phone and he told me that he had brought peat back from Ireland, that they use as a fuel traditionally.  The image was a powerful one, due to my taste for peat moss and scotch (try them together...)  So this leisurely song, with an Irish  sound to it (maybe it's not an Irish sound.  The movie didn't say, "warning, fake Irishness ahead".) also contained a hunk of peat.  If you don't write, in general, and write poetry and songs in particular, than you can roll your eyes.  You don't know any better.  But in the world of writing rarely does subject matter and inspiration actually agree to eat dinner at the same knosh spot.  So, with that little bit of a push, I more or less sat down and lashed together a deliberately over the top lament for my dear old Uncle Gregg 'cus he had just lost his lake house due to some rather unfortunate storms.  The Chicago line is completely inaccurate. I love Chicago. So is the part about drinking improving matters.  This being for a member of my family, I don't really give a crap.  I sent the song to Gregg and he seemed to get a laugh out of it, while his house lay in ruins.  Being a carpenter, I am hoping to make a more direct contribution once he figures out what the hell he is going to do at the Goddamned Lake.



I have another entry in my other Blog that includes Fiddleheads as well.  The all consuming idiotic computer at Google doesn't much care that a fiddlehead could be here and there at the same time. It is totally baffled by my refusing to let it title this entry by the other entries name.  In other words it is less developed than a one year old human.  Yeah!





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