She said why don’t you come see me
When the sun goes down
It’ll be just like the old days
When I used to let you hang around
Well I don’t know I might not speak the language anymore
I’ve been too long in the wasteland
Too long in the wasteland
It’s gonna close some doors --- James McMurty
Haven’t thought about that song in a while. I usually think about the part with bullet holes in the mailbox but I couldn’t remember it. I left the phrase in a note to a person or persons who or whom shall remain undisclosed. It’s a bitch trying to work whom into a sentence, and I didn’t use the most common form, was is kind of a holdout from when there was more Saxon in the Anglo woodpile, but I’m pretty dang sure you can use it for a buttload of who’s. Dr. Seuss is dead so I don’t know what a bunch of citizens from whoville are called (hooville? Christ I read sues to my kids without even having to look at the words) but I’m pretty sure whom would be misused in that sense, or even hoom or Hume.
Poor James McMurty, a singer songwriter labeled as country during a period of American history where even rednecks weren’t listening to Country music, when the rhinestone stock was down fifty percent at the Grand Ole Opry. I don’t know, folk hasn’t really appealed to the masses, or not in a way they’d admit, since Dylan went electric. Heh. Brief mild cognitive impairment history lesson here y’all; Long about the crack of 1965ish at the Monterrey folk festival , Bob Dylan, who most considered the headliner of the three day event, came out with --- awww shit, mild impairment indeed --- um, a bunch of guys who’d later become famous folk rockers, he plugged in his little Stratocaster and played Maggie’s Farm. He was booed off the stage, well, no, they tried booing him off the stage but the impure devils music was too loud. Pete Seeger unplugged the octopus tangled of cords to the generator.
Yeah, boy howdy, next time someone asks why I don’t teach English or history to high school students (to be fair it’s been a while since anyone has said that, but I used to get it a lot. You’d think that Why ellipse ellipse ellipse high school would have a self-evident answer to it wouldn’tja?) I’m going to link them to that little mangled piece of haredawg history. I mean it’s got to be somewhere on YouTube where the video is much harder to argue with. It’s sort of what happened though; I’m sure about Monterrey, Maggie’s farm and Pete Seeger.
Anyhow, 1989ish was not a good time to be a C&W singer songwriter unless you’d already been one for a century or so. It’s a shame, if he’d gone to Athens Georgia a year or two later I wouldn’t find it necessary to explain who the fuck he was or probably still is. It’s a good album; I hope it’s still on sale somewhere, not that I’m going to buy it; I just like it out there.
There was this band who put out one very good album and within minutes of hitting the shelves in wound up in bargain bins, garage sales, those places that cropped up, at least in PDX, with discs for a buck with holes punched through the bar code (I’m sure that had something to do with record labels writing them off as tax losses) --- They Eat Their Own. I don’t know if they were badly marketed or what. There was nothing wrong with that album either. It might have rocked a little too hard for the indie lovers of the time and not hard enough for the blossoming be-mohawked punks or the huddled yearning masses of butt rockers that made it necessary for there to be punks and shoe gazers (when art gets too commercial there needs to be a rebellion; the more complacent the commercialism, the harder the rebellion. The sex pistols, for instance, might have been the best band ever; they sucked bad. Real bad.
Another album that was always side by side with They Eat Their Own in the bargain bin was The House That Wolf Built, by a side project called Little Axe. I have absolutely no Idea why every radio station in the world doesn’t play a cut off that album on the hour. I really hate the genre, but it was never filed under the genre, nothing to suggest it was, basically, house dub techno nonsense. It wasn’t really, it was samples of Howlin’ Wolf (hence the house (( as in house music)) that wolf --- e.g. howlin’ wolf --- built) over some really tasty crunchy beats, probably programmed, and some really inspired Bass that couldn’t possibly have been programmed.
Yeah, Ok, I really mean I’ve been too long in the wasteland. You know, bullet holes in the mailbox n shit.
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