Yeah
Well if it's true
Then she'll force it out of her mind
Congratulations
Fucking up for the umpteenth time
They say it's wrong
Spaceships guns and boobies ain't got no home
But it's a song
Can't forget the future when the past ain't ever known
She has an Elvis on her dashboard and a Dawn in pendant heart
And a dog tag of a fella who was there to play a part
When she spreads her legs and kisses everything goes down in flames
Just because it's life and death don't mean that this here ain't a game
Well had she known
She never would have entered but then she did anyway
Infatuation
That's for little punk ass mealy mouth with nothing much to say
But then that's us
Just a bunch of followers just glad to be alive
It's in the rulebook
Right after the chapter that says how to shuck and jive
Gimme a one shot dagger
Destined to blow my mind
No in between
Either the top or the bottom line
Singing on down the line
Spaceships
Guns
And boobies
She Fought For What Essay 14 September 2019
Back in college I was in a band called Forgotten Sons. As college bands do if you ain't REM (old as fuck reference #1) the band broke up and I was embittered. Being a John Lennon acolyte I wrote a "fuck you" song to Joel Baily, who left the band, in the spirit of "How Do You Sleep?" and a gazillion rap beefs that were on the horizon. Of course this isn't that song. But on the album that I wrote and recorded between Forgotten Sons and Doom Cookie, which I dubbed A BRIDE A DAY in honor of my buddy Paul Deboy who wrote a song called "Sporadic Sunjam" the chorus to which was "a brighter day" which I misheard as "a bride a day," I did write a song called "We Fought For What." Look, I repurposed much of that record for this record. But back to the original song it was kind of a primer on American wars and how I sided with the losers. The first line is "In the Civil War I would have been a rebel." I took solace in my racist stance by aligning myself with Chuck D who sang in "Prophets Of Rage" off of IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK "I'm a rebel so I rebel." The lie of the American Civil War is that the Confederacy was racist and the Union was not. That's as bullshit as it gets. You merely had apartheid in the north whereas in the south you had full blown fucking slavery. Race is still the greatest unspoken conversation of our republic. A little history lesson may be helpful and I never hear anybody making this point these days. Let's just use Iran aka them death-to-america-motherfuckers as a jumping off point. Iran is Persia. They have a loooooooong history. They had plumbing, cities, art, education, and medicine when the anglo-saxons and the nordic folk were wrapping themselves up in animal skins and beating each other with sticks. The ascendance of white folk is an anthropological blip. Here's another example - motherfucking Afghanistan. They used to be the Khwarazm Empire until they made the mistake of insulting the Great Khan - but even before that. This is the region subjugated by Persia, Rome, the Byzantines, and the Ottomans. You think US troops standing around for 20 years makes a difference to these people? This all ties into SPACESHIPS GUNS AND BOOBIES. Everything ties into everything. A bit less intellectually challenging, however, is how the original song was reworded so as to act as the bridge piece between TRAVELOGUE and THE SAGA OF REMOTE CONTROL. Charlene is Remote Control. That's the main point to take away from this song. I ain't quite figured out how it happens. I think maybe she's like the next evolutionary spurt and is exceptionally long lived or maybe even immortal like Jack Harkness/The Face Of Boe. Maybe she gets gifted immortality from the El Camino TARDIS.
Musically ol' Ochster really does well here, underplaying much to the benefit of the song. Many times while dubbing Andy has already recorded his percussion tracks and I use his accents for my extra parts. It's fun. While Brian and I were doing the vocals we didn't have the jack to plug the microphone into my guitar rig so I attempted full blown Yoko mannerisms. Obviously I've learned lo these past few decades that Yoko's vocal stylings are rooted deeply in international musical expression. That she was laughed at in the late 60s and early 70s is another example of the backwater nature of northern europe through-out most of human history. Growing up isolated and behind the rest of the world, anglos and nordics were never exposed to the grand awesomeness of the silk road. The close minded and short sighted dumbassery is now currently on display with the leadership in both Great Britain and the USA. Shit,we didn't even get a full century ruling the world and now we'r beat a hasty retreat from our global leadership role. Whatever, right? It's only international human rights and giving a shit about food and water.
But there you go, folks. Ideally Brian and I would be doing our weekly breakdown over the course of an hour but things are too hectic right now. That's fine. One needs to constantly adapt in order to survive and then prosper. By the way I love you all.
On the interstate Charlene was just a rebel
Wrong as long as you're the one carrying a badge
In the aftermath of that sky blue El Camino
When she took one hell but it didn't hurt too bad
Now a polarized consensus leaves a girl without her senses
The aftermath was thus as much as but
She fought for what
Just to make it clear Charlene's Remote Control
You could see this swerve like a heel turn telegraphed
If you didn't know the scent of burnt rubella
Has a healing cypher and a myth just do the math
chorus
in the place where the bison thunders echo
lead that fuel gas her up and get go oh no
So the time space loop in the multiverse of stoners
Making stories up so the moon becomes the sun
Here's a reprobate sexier than Cleopatra
Let her fill your lungs up and smoke that son-a-gun
chorus
Dave and Dennis speak on Dennis's movie CATONSVILLE: MUSIC CITY MARYLAND, a Sunrider 9 Production.
Nowhere Ones Essay 5 September 2019
This is convoluted, but then again so is everything. Fuck. Here is an immediate existential digression. Follow it? Why the fuck not. Maybe go stream of consciousness. That always feels like a cop out. Who fucking knows. The thing with stream of consciousness is that it's the amalgamation of everything one's little pea brain is sorting through. Just because the words come tumbling out doesn't imply a lack of preparation. That's the biggest thing that pisses me off about motherfuckers who can't grasp the complexities of improvisation. Improvisation is the exact OPPOSITE of lack of preparation. It's living one's life constantly in the state of immediate creation. It's just that when improvising the artists shines the artist's spotlight on the shit purging itself from the soul of the vessel-artist. Then again artist as vessel is another hoary cliche. Anything that smacks of "otherness" is annoying. Like there are different "things." Things? Really? Is there ONE thing. Is one infinite. Of course it is, dildo head.
As for the Nowhere Ones it's all there. It all fits. I always think of the movie YELLOW SUBMARINE where the psychedelic words spell out "nowhere" then they desperate into "now here." It's there. It's here.
Initially this song was called "Nowhere Son" and it kicked off A BRIDE A DAY, the cassette I did between Forgotten Sons and Tude and Doom Cookie. It served as a reset there and it serves as a reset here. A lot of these initial bits are from that period, riffs wise, probably because Andy is drumming and he drummed Love & Hate and Forgotten Sons. It's amazing how much I have stayed on point in terms of large lyrical concepts.
Anyhoo, the story continues. This is concurrent with 1993. There the mundanity of existence bumps up against the harsh realities of young adults finding out that fucking up has consequences. Here though? Pure fantasy, baby, and yes I say "baby" too. It's not that there are no consequences in THE SAGA OF REMOTE CONTROL as much as it's an attempt to apply improvisational techniques to long form storytelling and seeing where the story goes. There is an outline of 30 something records for THE SAGA OF REMOTE CONTROL. That's the backdrop. That's the fabric of existence. That's the land upon which we stand as we set forth into by the minute story telling recreated in a studio and brought to YOU, you brilliant motherfucker.
I have to give all due props to Matt Besser and his podcast IMPROV4HUMANS. They make it up, duh, with even less preparation than my absolute holy grail of improv podcasts Scott Aukerman's motherfucking brilliant COMEDY BAND BANG. I bring up Besser, though, because I consider him a peer simply in that we're the same age and grew up punk as fuck. Of course he fulfilled his artistic dreams and I'm still slogging through. When he has on musical guests, mostly alt-country (natch), he asks what a certain lyric meant. I imagine he's asking me about a certain lyric from, say, Meltdown Shuffle from ACT 9 ATLANTIS and replying along the lines of "I'm really not sure what it means. It was just improvised in the larger story, like when you guys make shit up. Later you can go back and figure it out. In the moment it was stream of consciousness - in so much that every thought is stream of consciousness." I've quoted it a million times because it's perfection: "turn off your minds relax and float downstream."
"Nowhere Ones" is an attempt to bring lonesomeness into a universal realm, to try to include all the people who feel out of focus and invite them all to the party. To me that was always the great promise of rock and roll. Everyone is invited and everyone is accepted. That's pretty much a good way to approach existence. At any rate, friend, 7.
Fifty damn years on down the road
I was driving late at night
Under pollution lights
But it didn't stop the sun from coming up
To interrupt
Everything I seen
And everyone I known
My young self stumbled by
Too drunk too wonder why
Ain't no stars in the sky for the nowhere ones
That never won
Beat you black and blue
Bleed a drop or two
I see it in my sights
I glimpse it in the night
I don't know what is right for the nowhere ones
That never won
We're the nowhere ones
That just begun
00 Otis Redding
05 It's the science fiction western.
10 If there's ten songs he put a shaker on nine of them.
15 ...And he played in the Sprouts?
20 Paul bought it.
25 That was for six!
30 It just doesn't feel right.
35 Nothing is to be dismissed.
40 It might not be my chair.
45 You have some riffs.
50 I smoked pot at the first Circle 9 practice.
55 They were surfing in Tahiti.
60 He...he...he...he....