An American man don’t need you around anyhow!

 

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This brought a simile to my face:

link

Did Rock 'n' Roll contribute to global warming?

Discuss!!

[Post Hurricane Irma updates here too, please]

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Here are the full lyrics for A Pair of Brown Eyes (1985) by The Pogues. See if you can follow the two narratives. It's about a drunken encounter of two men in a pub--one young and the other much older. The plot is easier to follow with the indentation separating the two first-person points of view:

One summer evening drunk to hell
I sat there nearly lifeless
An old man in the corner sang
"Where the water lilies grow"
And on the jukebox Johnny sang
About a thing called love
And it's "how are you kid and what's your name?"
And "how would you bloody know?"

In blood and death 'neath a screaming sky
I lay down on the ground
And the arms and legs of other men
Were scattered all around
Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed
Then prayed then bled some more
And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labeled parts 1, 2, 3
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes

I looked at him he looked at me
All I could do was hate him
While Ray and Philomena sang
Of my elusive dreams
I saw the streams, the rolling hills
Where his brown eyes were waiting
And I thought about a pair of brown eyes
That waited once for me
So drunk to hell I left the place
Sometimes crawling sometimes walking
A hungry sound came across the breeze
So I gave the walls a talkin'
And I heard the sounds of long ago
From the old canal
And the birds were whistling in the trees
Where the wind was gently laughing
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
A rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes

For the longest time (30 years!) the lyrics confused me. First, I didn't understand that two different men were having a dialog about the same thing. In this sense, it's a bit like Neil Young's "Old Man." Second, I didn't understand that the older man had not only been through a horrific wartime experience but that he too had lost a woman. The older man says:

And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labeled parts 1, 2, 3
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me

I used to think that he was talking about literally finding a pair of disembodied brown eyes, or maybe a survivor with brown eyes who then vanished when he came back to "label (body) parts one to three." Rubbish. The soldier's memory of a woman with brown eyes back home got him through the horror. But when he returned from the war, she had left. This triggers the younger man who too had once had a woman with brown eyes. The younger man leaves the pub, hating the older man. 

I wanted to subtitle this post "When the artist betrays his own meaning." Just look at the video released by The Pogues to promote the single: 

linky

Utter rubbish. It's all Thatcher Derangement Syndrome and Big Bad Government. Why couldn't they have been truer to the meaning of the song?

It’s just about a guy getting pissed at a bar 'round here. He’s getting pissed because he’s broken up with this bird and… you know how it is when you just go into a pub on your own to drink and it’s really quiet and you get this old nutter who comes over and starts rambling on you. So this old guy starts on about how he came back from the war, the First World War. Or the Second. One of them anyway. And he tells him about the ship he had out there and how he got out and came back and this girl had fucked off with someone else, a girl with a pair of brown eyes. Which is the same situation as the young guy sitting there listening to all this rubbish and the juke box playing Johnny Cash and Ray Lyman and Philomena Begley, classic London juke box tracks. And in the end he gets to the stage where he says fuck it, and he goes stumbling out of the pub and he walks along the canal and starts feeling really bad, on the verge of tears, and he starts realising that the old guy has had a whole fucking lifetime of that feeling, going through the war and everything, but his original reaction is to hate him and despise him. I’m not saying he goes back and starts talking to him but you know… ~ Shane MacGowan link

Donald Trump loses his campaign soundtrack to Bernie Sanders

"Neil Young snubs Donald Trump, gives “Rockin’ in the Free World” to Bernie Sanders"

Young said in a statement that Trump “was not authorized to use ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ in his presidential candidacy announcement.” The statement added that, “Neil Young, a Canadian citizen, is a supporter of Bernie Sanders for President of the United States of America.”

Trump’s camp claimed they paid both ASCAP and BMI for rights to the song, but would cease from using it out of respect to Young. The singer, meanwhile, out of respect to his own political beliefs, has turned around and given Trump’s opponent Sanders permission to use “Rockin’ in the Free World”.

The funny thing is, I just so happen to remember a blurb about the song I had read while making an iTunes top 500 greatest songs of all time playlist off Rolling Stone magazine. Which said about the song...

"Don't feel like Satan/But I am to them," Young spat in this raucously ambivalent song about the pride and guilt of being an American. It was inspired by a remark from a member of Crazy Horse, who said gigs were safer in Europe than in the Middle East: "It's better to keep rockin' in the free world." "It was such a cliché," Young said. "I knew I had to use it."

Isn't the inspiration for the song more conceptually in line with "Stop muslims until we can figure out what the hell is going on" Trump, than with Bernie Sanders?

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link in case the video doesn't play

I love the sound of the pedal steel guitar.

The lyrics are crystal-clear and need no transcription. I'm surprised that the song didn't chart well at the time of its release (1992). Instead, "War Of Man" did better. Neil Young is at his best when he sings about things he loves rather than about what he hates, like war. The temptation to moralize gets the best of him as it does me.

The video shifts backwards in time about mid-way through, as if Mr. Young were reliving a younger version of himself and his wife. One benefit of growing old with the same person is that you can remember younger days together.

Question for the audience: Linda Ronstadt sang backing vocals on this track...is that her in the video?

I'm a little late with this post...I should have posted it under the eclipsed harvest moon a couple weeks ago. Oh well, it's a lovely song and there will be other Harvest Moons.

Neil Young is rocking with Bernie Sanders

Reportedly objects to Donald Trump's use of one of his songs

When Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy at the Trump Tower on Tuesday morning, he took the stage to the tune of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World."

The problem: Young is objecting to Trump's use of his 1989 work. In fact, Young is endorsing a candidate on the other side of the political spectrum, Bernie Sanders.

"Donald Trump was not authorized to use 'Rockin' In The Free World' in his presidential candidacy announcement," said a statement from Young's manager, Elliot Roberts of Lookout Management. "Neil Young, a Canadian citizen, is a supporter of Bernie Sanders for President of the United States Of America."

But Trump's campaign says they did secure authorization.

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link in case the video doesn't load

Bob Dylan said about that song:

The only time it bothered me that someone sounded like me was when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about '72 and the big song at the time was "Heart of Gold". I used to hate it when it came on the radio. I always liked Neil Young, but it bothered me every time I listened to "Heart of Gold." I think it was up at number one for a long time, and I'd say, 'Shit, that's me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.'

I too have a memory of that song but it's from '79. Having spent a month in Italy without seeing another American, I got to Pisa by train late at night with an Italian friend. Our usual routine was to sleep outside at or near the train station and then to see the city the next day before moving on - a buon mercato. I couldn't wait and went off looking for the Leaning Tower. Along the way, or on the walk back, I watched a guy singing that song, alone, under a street light. Unforgettable.

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Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain" always reminded me of Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game."  If you're a fan of both songs, perhaps you've thought the same or maybe you knew it already. Not until tonight did I realize that they are explicitly related. Joni Mitchell explained:

In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock'n'roll band (...) he had just newly turned 21, and that meant he was no longer allowed into his favourite haunt, which was kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you're over 21 you couldn't get back in there anymore; so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it's one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn't play in this club anymore. 'Cause he was over the hill. (...) So he wrote this song that was called "Oh to live on sugar mountain" which was a lament for his lost youth. (...) And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there's nothing after that, that's a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It's called 'The Circle Game.' Link

Here's a video version of "Sugar Mountain" that includes some rare before and after banter by Young which usually gets deleted in compilations:

Link in case the video doesn't load

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Cowgirl In The Sand

Tried that once on a beach & I don't recommend it. Grittier than sixty and it chafed.  Didn't take no 10 minutes either.