Hotels and Motels:Songs About the Chelsea Hotel

Jefferson Airplane: Third Week in the Chelsea
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I am willing to bet that there is no other hotel or motel in the world that has inspired more songs than the Chelsea, located in the lower Manhattan neighborhood of the same name. Recently purchased and closed for renovations, the hotel has long been identified as a place for artists, performers, writers and musicians to live and work, which probably explains its popularity in song.

Wikipedia lists 22 different songs referencing the hotel, and one of them, Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2” has been often covered. You could create a pretty credible cultural Hall of Fame consisting just of residents of the Chelsea, which for years was a residential hotel, including Bob Dylan, Charles Bukowski, Janis Joplin, William S. Burroughs, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg, Iggy Pop, Arthur C. Clarke, Allen Ginsburg, Diego Rivera, Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Stanley Kubrick, Uma Thurman, Jane Fonda, Alice Cooper, Larry Rivers, Christo, Julian Schnabel, Alejandro Escovedo, Jimi Hendrix, Willem de Kooning, Robert Mapplethorpe, Gore Vidal, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Dennis Hopper, Thomas Wolfe, Elliot Gould, Elaine Stritch, Edie Sedgwick, and many, many more. And, of course, Sid Vicious’ girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, was found dead at the hotel, as were Dylan Thomas and Charles R. Jackson, the author of The Lost Weekend.

Cohen’s song has been discussed previously on this blog, here, and a cover by Lloyd Cole is discussed here, Dylan’s “Sara” was mentioned, if briefly, here, and a post about Joni Mitchell's "Chelsea Morning" is here. But there are many, many others to talk about.

My favorite is “Third Week in the Chelsea,” the second song from Jefferson Airplane’s Bark album that I have written about (which is pretty interesting, considering that it is generally considered a pretty mediocre album). It was written by guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, and it is a beautiful song, filled with sadness and resignation about the impending demise of one of the great bands of its era. It is a classic of the “leaving the band” genre, right up there with Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill.” Although the whole thing is great, this stanza always kills me:

All my friends keep telling me that it would be a shame 
To break up such a grand success and tear apart a name 
But all I know is what I feel whenever I'm not playin' 
Emptiness ain't where it's at and neither's feeling pain 

Because, when it is time to go, it is time to go. Luckily, he had Hot Tuna to fall back on.

Leonard Cohen’s song, which we really aren’t going to discuss, was about an (oral) sexual encounter at the hotel with a woman he later acknowledged was Janis Joplin. Jeffrey Lewis, a New York singer/songwriter, wrote “The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song” which is both about and not about Leonard Cohen’s song, and has a certain shaggy dog charm of its own (and no actual oral sex):



Dan Bern, who is often compared to one time resident Bob Dylan, because they are both Jews from the Midwest who have raspy voices, play guitar and write interesting songs (making the comparison somewhat plausible), also wrote a song about having sex at the Chelsea. This version was recorded at the Turning Point in Piermont, New York, just across the Tappan Zee Bridge from my house, which gets surprisingly good acts, considering that it is about the size of a small living room. And it has a trumpet solo.



And, finally, here’s Okkervil River’s “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed On The Roof Of The Chelsea Hotel, 1979.”



Campbell was the real name of the former Chelsea Hotel resident, singer Jobriath, who is considered to be the first openly gay rock musician signed to a major label, as well as one of the first well known musicians to die of AIDS.

The song appeared on Okkervil River’s The Stand Ins album, which is filled with songs musing about celebrity and pop culture. Jobriath, whose albums received generally good reviews (and had both Peter Frampton and John Paul Jones contribute to his glam-rock, very David Bowie-esque music), found his career derailed first by excessive hype by his management, then his disillusionment with the industry, and finally by his illness. He apparently did an interview from the roof of the Chelsea in 1979, but it was different from what Okkervil River sang about. Although not directly related to the hotel, here’s one of his songs, “Take Me I’m Yours,” about S&M, which certainly could have happened at the Chelsea Hotel.

Flowers: Blue Tulip

Okkervil River: Blue Tulip
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When it comes to mothers, I am incredibly lucky. My mother is a wonderful woman—she was a great mother to me and my siblings, immediately considered my wife to be another daughter, and has been a great grandmother to my kids and my nieces and nephews. My wife is amazing—she is my best friend, and has been everything I could have hoped for as a mother for our kids. And my mother-in-law is also a remarkable woman who has welcomed me into her family unconditionally and is also a superb grandmother. So, Mother’s Day, earlier this week, was an opportunity for me to celebrate with these three paragons. It was also my birthday, so I got some attention, too.

My mother-in-law is of Dutch descent, and she and my wife both embrace their heritage. I suspect that is why the tulip is my wife’s favorite flower (also, they are beautiful). And no, I wasn’t smart enough to buy her tulips for Mother’s Day, but I did cook a really nice brunch for everyone. Instead, I decided to write about this song, despite the fact that my wife doesn’t know it, will probably not love it once she hears it, and it isn’t about tulips at all. Because it is, we are always told, the thought that counts.

Okkervil River is one of those bands who I like and respect, for their sound and songwriting, but who I admittedly haven’t spent an enormous amount of time thinking about. My guess is that if they existed when I was in college, I would be totally obsessed with them, but now I’m (just) 52, and don’t do that as much anymore. I do, however, own a good chunk of their music. The band was started by some high school friends from New Hampshire who got together after college in Austin. I was hoping, based on the name, that “Okkervil River,” was in Holland, because that really would have tied this up nicely, but it is actually in Russia. The band took its name from a short story by Tatyana Tolstoya, a Russian author who is a distant relative of both Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev (which I mention because I read both of those authors when I was in college, between shifts at the radio station where I obsessed over various bands that did exist at the time).

In 2007, Okkervil River released The Stage Names, an excellent album about pop culture, fame and death. Originally conceived as a double album, the band instead released a second album in 2008, The Stand Ins, containing the unused material, and continuing the theme. A couple of years ago, my colleague Darius posted a piece about these albums and the way that their cover art is related, here.  This song clearly explores the issues of celebrity and fame, and does so with music that builds to an intense climax before ending in an electronic drone.

Having listened to it a few times in preparation for this piece, I have to say it is a very good song, by a very good band. I can pretty much guarantee that neither my mother nor mother-in-law will like the song, if they listen to it, and I can’t say that my wife will love it, although I suspect that, at least, she won’t hate it. And sometimes in a relationship, that is good enough. Remember, it is the thought that counts.

Album Cover Art: Okkervil River - The Stage Names and The Stand Ins

Okkervil River: You Can't Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man

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Okkervil River: Calling and Not Calling My Ex

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Okkervil River is an indie rock band mostly based out of Austin, Texas. The cover art for all six of their full-length releases and some of their EPs has been done by artist William Schaff. Many other bands use the same artists for all of the their album art (Steve Earle has featured Tony Fitzpatrick's artwork since 1995, and the Drive-By Truckers featuring Wes Freed's art since their 2001 opus Southern Rock Opera. What I particularly love about Schaff's artwork for Okkervil River's 2007 release The Stage Names and 2008 album The Stands Ins is that first, they were both done entirely in embroidery. Second, the album covers were designed to go together (to get a closer look, see Schaff's Flickr album art page). But fans didn't realize this when The Stage Names came out in 2007. We fans just thought is was another cool William Schaff abstract creation. The album itself is a loose concept album of the perils of being an entertainer, be it as a touring musician, a poet, or even a porn star. The Stage Names and The Stand Ins were recorded at the same time, and the music on The Stand Ins mostly doesn't fit The Stage Names theme. But how delighted were we fans when The Stand Ins was released a year later and we found out that the hand reaching out of the gerpy water
was actually that of a drunken skeleton-man, reaching out for help? Wonderful concept, and a very unique design.

Guest post by Rock Star Aimz of My Aimz is True

History: He Was a Friend of Mine/The President Is Dead

The Byrds: He Was a Friend of Mine

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Okkervil River: The President Is Dead

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Wow, here we are four days into our history theme and no one's beat me to the Kennedy assassination! Here are two tracks that, taken together, say something about how one's proximity to an event can color the content of the song. The Byrds' "He Was a Friend of Mine" was released on their second album, 1965's Turn! Turn Turn! (probably their most self-important album, and the most generically "Byrds" sound, and one of my least favorites by them). The song is a traditional folk song and has been done by plenty of other singers over the years, but Roger McGuinn changed the lyrics to make Kennedy the "friend" of the title. The simple lyrics and melancholy tone of the song are reverent, and probably mirror the feelings of a lot of people in the country who actually lived through the trauma of seeing a beloved president killed.

Okkervil River's song, on the other hand, was written forty-three years after the fact, not two. Thus Will Sheff takes things in a more literary direction. He starts with the news coming over the radio, but by the second verse, when he asks "where were you when," he moves the song into a completely domestic picture, lyrically abandoning the outside world altogether until the lyrics circle back again to the news coming over the radio. The song is more interestingly written than the Byrds tune, though Kennedy is treated more as a lyrical device than an emotional trigger.