North of the Border

Song 279: The name of this week’s playlist track is Coyote by Rank and File, written by Chip and Tony Kinman. After hearing the Rank and File debut album Sundown once or twice at the record store, I quickly decided that I wanted a copy, and it soon became a favorite, as one of those LPs I listened to from beginning to end, sometimes tempted to replay. While I enjoy all of the record’s cuts, The Conductor Wore Black (Song 180) tops the list, with this one coming in a close second, and in light of the recent (and ridiculous) controversy over accepting Syrian refugees, it seemed like an appropriate song to post at this particular moment in time. The track tells the kind of tragic tale that had occurred on the north side of the Mexican border for decades when the Kinman brothers wrote it, and that still continues in shameful variations to this day. My own song End of the Highway (which you can hear here) tells a somewhat different melancholy story, but basically comes out of the same border conflict, with similar tragic consequences. The lyrics of Coyote paint a clear picture of a boy who has ended up alone, separated from his family, in a strange place that’s “too far north” with no place to go and no way back to where he came from. Anyone familiar with this border conflict will recognize the callous attitude in the lines, “What’s all the fuss, they ain’t like us, they don’t matter anyway.” Those words, that come from a rancher’s son’s following his reply to “what happened to the lad” where he says “Oh, I don’t know but we didn’t do nothin’ bad,” tell the listener that they most certainly did do something bad, confirmed by the rest of verse 1 when the listener hears “took their hands and we bound them up with wire and when the sun went down they felt the fire.” The Kinman brothers crafted a very powerful and timeless tale three decades ago that sadly resonates much too strongly in the present day as well, with types like Trump only adding fuel to the fire. In watching an Austin City Limits video of this song, I wondered if any of the dancers actually understood the story painted in the lyrics, although this is the kind of song that you can enjoy without grasping its deeper meaning, and I will confess that at the time of the ACL performance, I myself hadn’t picked up on that thought, and wouldn’t do so for quite a long time. Today, though, I can’t miss seeing the fear in the eyes of those who would say, and believe, “they ain’t like us, they don’t matter anyway.”

Where Are We Going Now?

Song 278: For an illustration of how music can take you to some unexpected places, this week’s playlist track is Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp by Laura Nyro, who also wrote the song. In the fall of 1970 i saw Laura Nyro perform a concert in Chicago, touring to promote her latest album Christmas and the Beads of Sweat which included this cut, and she probably covered it that night, but it was her performance of another track from the record that left a deeper impression on me (Song 174 — Been on a Train), plus a couple of her older hits that she did to close out the show. Fast forward a few years, and on a typical bone-chilling Chicago winter night, as I entered a woman’s apartment in the process of helping her move some items out to a car, I heard her stereo playing a song that sounded familiar, but I couldn’t identify it, and had to ask her what it was. When she answered, I felt as if I should have known, and when I got back to my place, I soon had Christmas and the Beads of Sweat on the turntable, reacquainting myself with music I had learned to love a few years earlier, but that I had somehow lost track of at some point along the way. One thing that always impressed me about Laura Nyro was the way in which she varied the timing in her songs to fit the emotion and the movement of the track. In most forms of music, from classical to RnR, musicians usually follow time signatures religiously, or try to do so, but Ms. Nyro made some very impressive recordings in her career that did not adhere to strict timing, and those tracks convey a sense of freedom, taking off and flying in any direction, in a way that could change at any moment, and perhaps coming in for a landing in a very unexpected place. This song provides an entertaining example of this type of unexpected flight of fancy, and along with a number of her other cuts, such as Been on a Train, it opened my ears to possibilities for playing with timing, and inspired some of my own personal flights of fancy, such as Shake the Dust. On a side note, for anyone who thinks I might be pushing the season by posting a song from an album with Christmas in the title, just remember that four days from today is a day commonly known as Black Friday, and I think most of us know that it has earned that name because of its connection to a certain December holiday.

Feel It In Your Bones

Song 277: For this week’s playlist track you’ll get Jealous Bone by Patty Loveless, written by Steve Bogard and Rick Giles. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, you could often hear Patty Loveless in the mix on the NYC station that played music that at the time they were calling New Country, and I liked a lot of the cuts I heard from her, with this one being a particular favorite. As a songwriter, I never had any great interest in records about jealousy, and I tend to hear jealousy songs as a sign of lazy songwriting. Of the other 276 posts on this list, maybe a half dozen could be considered genuine jealousy tracks, and there might be about a dozen others where jealousy is part of the lyrical picture, along with other factors, so lyrics about jealousy don’t generally get me that excited, but there are a few notable exceptions, such as the Beatles You Can’t Do That, and I include this cut among those notable exceptions as well. Personally, I guess I’d have to say that if I have a jealous bone somewhere in my body, it must not be very big, especially compared to some other people I have known who seem to have a much larger jealous bone that they don’t try to hide in any way. On a side note, this track is a sly reference to the second verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, which begins with the line Should Patty Loveless (?) You can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here.

From Where?

Song 276: For this week’s playlist track, you can hear I’m From New Jersey by John Gorka, who also wrote the song.  Once again it comes around to seven weeks since my last personal friend song post, and in this case, I’d probably more accurately call John a friend of a friend. From the late ‘80s up through the mid-‘90s, I moved through the same folk circles as him, and a number of my singer/songwriter friends knew John well. We met occasionally, and were quite friendly, though I’m not sure that he would recognize my name, but I well remember once playing a short set at Godfrey Daniels Coffeehouse in Bethlehem, PA, (a set that included Under the Table, which is the latest lyric video from the Who Said What CD to be posted on my YouTube channel), and John had good things to say about my songs after the set, which made me feel pretty good. I saw John perform in a number of settings, from intimate coffeehouse rooms to expansive outdoor festival stages, and he often sang this tune, which never failed to please the crowd. Doing it live, he would often draw out a few of the funnier lines, for comic effect, and it worked every time, bringing smiles and laughter to the entire audience. The line about which exit would often get a smile from people in the area around NJ because residents from the state would regularly refer to their home area by exit number rather than place name, which is a phenomenon I never encountered anywhere else. I’m not from New Jersey, but I have lived there for a few stretches, and somehow I could never remember what number my exit was, though maybe that happened because I sometimes took different routes, and I often caught the train when and where I could do so. There were a few different ways to get to Maplehurst Farms, where I lived when I recorded As Long As Merle is Still Haggard, and where my friend Gabriel Lopez shot the scenes for the Merle song video that included my landlord Herb, but not long after we shot the video, he sold the place, and now Maplehurst Farms is just a set of soulless McMansions, or Houses in the Fields, as John would have called them. When I lived on that farm, at least one of the other tenants referred to it as paradise, and I felt it was a very special place to live, like a hidden island of country surrounded by clueless suburbia, but the For Sale sign was already up before I moved out, so I didn’t expect too much. These days, if I drive down to the end of Maplehurst Lane in Piscataway, I don’t like what I see, but the old Maplehurst Farms ended, and so I have to adjust. Somehow, I think John would understand.

Things May Change

Song 275: Listening to this week’s playlist cut, you can meet Society’s Child by Janis Ian, who also wrote the song. When this track hit the airwaves in the summer before my HS junior year, I liked the sound of it, and I quickly learned to sing along with the chorus, but I didn’t know most of the verse lyrics, and I had no idea about its subject matter — I thought it was just a song about a girl breaking up with her boyfriend. I also didn’t even know the name of the song — I assumed it was called Can’t See You Any More or some variation on that theme. Hanging out with an Asian friend, at a time when there weren’t many Asians living in our town, he asked me if I liked that new song Society’s Child and I told him I wasn’t sure if I’d heard it. He soon had it spinning on the turntable, and of course I recognized it, so I told him I had heard, and liked, the record, but I just hadn’t connected with the title. He then asked me what I thought about the controversial topic of the lyrics, and I had to admit that I had no idea what he was talking about. He promptly quoted me the opening lines, and I quickly realized that this was much more than just a simple love song. At the time, I considered myself a political conservative, as did my parents and grandparents, but I had no problem with the idea of an interracial couple, and as far as I knew, neither did anyone in my immediate family, so I admired the song, and the songwriter, for the powerful message that came wrapped in a very personal narrative. I also took it as a good sign that someone only a few months older than me could have a hit record riding up the charts. I had been writing songs for a year, and sharing dreams of musical fame and fortune with my classmate Brian Johnson, even occasionally playing guitar with him, though the dreams, some talk, my songwriting and the sporadic guitar jams were as close as we ever came to actually having a band. Still, the fact that a girl my age could have a hit song that summer made me feel that my own dreams should have some possibility of coming true. The fact that Leonard Bernstein gave Janis and her song his official stamp of approval, via a TV special, plus accompanying press promotion in at least one of the major weekly magazines that my family subscribed to (probably Life, Look or the Saturday Evening Post), banished that Devil’s Music shadow that sometimes followed my pop music favorites, because, as a violin player in the HS orchestra, I knew the name Bernstein quite well, as did my family, at least in part because of my involvement with the violin, so his very public praise of Janis’s music carried a lot of weight in my family circle. In the final verse, Janis sings “When we’re older things may change,” and at the time, I fully expected big changes in the realm of race relations during the time frame from then to now, but sadly, as recent events with conflicts over the Confederate flag and KKK icons have illustrated, it’s just as possible today that Janis could play this song on stage and have to hear people in the audience screaming “Nigger lover! Nigger lover!” just the way they did at a concert she played when she was 15. She showed bravery then in performing the song, as she had in writing and recording it, and she crafted a classic record that endures, and that conveys a very important message that needed to be heard in 1967, and that still needs to be heard today.