Tourists

This, it turns out somewhat surprisingly to me, is the first original, vocal tune I’ve posted here. So be it: I like the tune, and the recording, after an initial try that was not only in too high a key for my voice (never a good idea) but was also, in its arrangement, more derivative of some other tricks I’ve used recently than I’d like.

I cut one track, just me singing and a guitar, live to tape, and then, after a couple of listens, thought it could use a little washboard. The two tracks are very slightly panned left and right, which gives it a little life. Generally, I like recordings as live as possible, and best of all is a live recording of a group of sympathetic musicians. I tend to sing best, too, in a complete take, rather than punching-in. There’s an internal logic to a performance that operates, for a good singer, which, in my way, I am, on a subconscious level. Interrupting that logic by cutting the vocal into pieces ruins it.

The lyrics:

Each month I get my VA payment
And each month, in a week, it's gone
It's just me and this kid beneath the I-15 bridge
We watch the San Diego River roll on
We can both shoot guns and for a while it was fun
Like the brochures said it would be
But we each met with an IED
And we both lost our legs

It was me in that smiling picture
Though they blurred my face on TV
He was the guy who shot Pat Tillman in his eye
Though he's sworn it to secrecy
Thinking like goners, gonna sink into the pavement
And find us the land of the free
If there's the tiniest trace to see
Just pretend we're not there

Gone are the times
When I kept a tight grip on my mind
We're broken and blind
Two of a kind
Or at least we're pretending to be
Sharing a meal
Reminiscing of shrapnel and steel
Sky ceiling, street bed
Downing drink until dead
And dodging the SDPD

Gone are the times
When I kept a tight grip on my mind
We're broken and blind
Two of a kind
Or at least we're pretending to be
Sharing a meal
Reminiscing of shrapnel and steel
Sky ceiling, street bed
Downing drink until dead
And dodging the SDPD

We've got $76 between us
And there's a Bakersfield bus at 3
We're gonna hit each town with a Greyhound station
And a mental health facility
Until that day that we're done with those whispers
That are with us wherever we go
We'll play our parts in this dismal show
And we'll get no applause

I’d had the first verse more or less complete since last August, but it turned out to need some time. I’d originally placed it in Los Angeles but, enjoying my surroundings here, thought it might be best to make it local. I am very sure that all the stuff I’ve been doing lately, thinking about traditional tunes and, though it hasn’t yet seeped into my writing, reading some books about the folk musics of the Americas, one in particular with a heavy emphasis on regionalism as an organizing principle, is leading me to emphasize the local in this tune and the other couple I’ve got brewing. I have lost all desire to hypothesize about the future of music in general, but in my case it seems like I am re-localizing my outlook. I don’t see this as a defeat of any sort.

The two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have long been an obsession for me as a writer. I was involved in the peace movement some time ago–should be more directly, still–and I was tight with a Vietnam vet, a beautiful, gentle guy who never got over the fact that he’d killed people. I hadn’t as far as I can tell ever been one of the smug leftists who looks down on people in the military but without doubt knowing this man knocked any vestiges of that in me. Indeed, I have since been convinced that leftist egghead types such as myself need to spend a lot of time working with people in the military and, very importantly, police. They serve a very destructive power, but have great potential for rebirth in this life.

That said, somewhere out in this world is the person who killed Pat Tillman, and the torturers of Abu Ghraib. This is an imagining of where they might be now.