Churlish Knave
Stranger to the Blade
I woke up at 1:30 in the morning last night from a nightmare where some mean dog had my dog in its jaws.
Gasping awake, I could feel Teenie was safely right next to my head, where she had been in the dream. (Thank gawd.)
Couldn’t get back to sleep though.
Thankfully, I had this book to read:
Lou Reed: The King of New York, by Will Hermes. (Really enjoying this book!)
4:30 a.m. rolled around and I had to put the device down.
“White Light/White Heat” was on my brain as I eventually fell asleep.
It got me thinking on this song that I made up back in 1997:
a driving dirge that is less than cloyingly sweet, kinda like the Velvet’s jam.
You might listen to this song and wonder, what the heck was this Faux Jean fellow thinking?
Well …
I was thinking about a couple that used to come in to the restaurant where I was a busboy back in the 90s.
They were regulars and both had had a lot of work done.
As for the wife, the girls were where they were supposed to be—large, heavy, fake. Wild cleavage.
But lift potench.
Crows feet pulled back to hyper-alert.
The husband had hair plugs that looked like a hairbrush coming out of his forehead.
Gold watch, drove a Jaguar.
And they had a kid who was small and largely uncontrollable.
One day they came in to dine and the boy refused to sit down.
He stood on his chair and evaded their grasp and ignored their repeated pleading to “Get down, get down!”
That was the inspiration for the song.
What I wasn’t thinking when I recorded this was “How long should this song be and what should the arrangement be?”
I’d been given an old keyboard with a built in “rhythm maker” drum machine that also had a pretty good bass sound.
That created the foundation of this song idea.
I did not count, I did not ask, should there be a bridge here?
I just set the drum machine to go and played guitar wildly for a while, trying to catch the wave.
And layered as much as I could on the cassette tape.
This was my baby for a minute.
I am writing this newsletter today on my phone at my daughter’s golf lesson, so I am breaking with tradition and not including the lyrics to go along with the song, but I do have these images from my songwriting journal from 1997:
I remain your humble servant,