Tarot Cards (The Moon): I Can’t Understand the Moon

Andrew McKnight: I Can‘t Understand the Moon

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I collect Tarot cards, as much for the artistry as anything else. Tarot seems to inspire some amazing artwork at times, although it can also bring out the corniest side of some people as well. But the decks I like bring out all of the mystery and power of the Tarot. The Moon card I have chosen for this post is by Salvador Dali, and it comes from a complete deck that he painted. The card represents dreams. These can be the source of inspirations for great endeavors. But the Moon can also represent nightmares, or even insanity. To me, that is the aspect of the card the Dali captured best.

In my Halloween post on Oliver di Place, I promised that I would be posting another Andrew McKnight song here. McKnight captures another aspect of the Moon card. His narrator is lamenting the loss of a lover who was unattainable in the first place. He identifies her with the moon. But maybe he is literally referring to the moon, and maybe the rest is just his fevered imagination. To me, the song allows for either interpretation, and therefore is a perfect song to go with the card.

Tarot Cards (Justice): Justice

Alan Price: Justice

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We all want justice but you got to have the money to buy it/
You'd have to be a fool to close your eyes and deny it.

A cynical sentiment from former Animal Alan Price, "Justice" is one of the minor cuts on his O Lucky Man! soundtrack. (So you can imagine how great the major cuts are.) Price appears in the Lindsay Anderson film in the same Greek Chorus role as Jonathan Richman in "There's Something About Mary" and Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye in "Cat Ballou". In the film our hero, played by Malcolm MacDowell, must abandon his principles to succeed in capitalist society. Will he succeed and at what cost? The hairstyles and clothes may be dated but, in light of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the film's message has never been more relevant.

Tarot Cards (The Hanged Man): The Hanged Man

Mr. Fox - The Hanged Man

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The Hanged Man or Le Pendu (XII) is the twelfth trump or Major Arcana card in most traditional Tarot decks, and amongst others signifies suspension, rebirth, sacrifice, and transformation. Now I'm not sure of course, but I've got a hunch that the early seventies British folkers of Mr. Fox were well aware of this when they wrote the rather spooky The Hanged Man. "Walking a valley that never saw the sun, step by the stones where the icy waters run, stand in a church where the village choir once sang, and run along the pathway where the dead man used to hang..."

Tarot Cards (The Fool): The Fool

The Fixx : The Fool

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I'm not at all familiar with the Tarot or the various meanings of its cards. Let's just say everything I know about it I learned from Wikipedia, the blogger's friend.

I know more about the British band The Fixx, though, 'cuz they're one of my favorite 80s New Wave groups. They've always shown more complexity in their melodies and lyrics than most bands of the time. This song is from their first album, Shuttered Room, which also gave us the better-known hits Stand or Fall and Red Skies at Night. The group is still active, touring, and working on a new album that will come out next spring.

The Tarot's fool is a childlike spirit on a journey. In contrast, The Fixx's fool is a sad madman wasting away in confinement (So I'm locked away in my padded cocoon, A square of hell where nightmares bloom). I think I prefer the Tarot version, especially since I'm out of town on my own journey for a few weeks.

Tarot Cards (The Tower): Franklin’s Tower

Grateful Dead: Franklin‘s Tower

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To begin our week of Tarot cards, I wanted to make a fairly obvious connection between a card and a song. I will get all mystical on everyone later in the week. But I’m starting with Franklin’s Tower, simply because it has the word Tower in the title of the song.

Actually, Franklin’s Tower has one of Robert Hunter’s more mysterious lyrics. I could make a somewhat forced connection to the meaning of the card if I wanted to. But I think it suffices to say that a tower is, symbolically, a solid structure, a foundation upon which to build. For Hunter, it is a beacon, guiding the traveler through a mysterious landscape. It is a song that asks the listener to use their imagination to fill in the blanks. The Grateful Dead were famed for their musical imaginations, so this song represents at least one side of their artistry perfectly. The version of Franklin’s Tower heard here is a live version from the album Dead Set.

World Tour: Turning Japanese

Liz Phair: Turning Japanese

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No Use For A Name: Turning Japanese

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Asia represent! This well-covered and oft-parodied song is undeniably catchy, as noted by its long life in popular culture. The above image comes from the song's most recent incidence, a stylized art video featuring actress Kirsten Dunst first presented at a Tate Modern exhibit in London two years ago, seemingly in homage to the global cosplay movement.

But long before anime, manga, and other Japanese "identity artifact categories" swamped nerd and geek culture, the song's easily sung chorus and verses had featured in many iconic media products, from the original Jackass movie to video games (Rock Band 3, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks The 80s) to an old and overplayed KFC commercial. As an homage to this cultural cachet, I've skipped the crisp, bouncy 1980 original, and shared instead a pair of mid-nineties punk versions - both grungy as hell, as befits the song's frenetic pace updated for the angry, ironic pre-millennial set.

There's some debate on the interwebs about whether songwriter David Fenton of British new wave/power pop band The Vapors is being honest when he claims that this song is about "all the clichés about angst and youth and turning into something you didn't expect to"...or whether the term "turning Japanese" actually refers to the face males make when reaching masturbatory climax, an easy interpretation which would set Fenton's VH1 True Spin comment as a specious attempt to rewrite his own wild youth by saying otherwise. The song works both ways, and the original video doesn't help, with its geisha girl imagery merely muddying what would really be a question of which sort of racism we're talking about here - "Japanese" as a euphemism for distant and isolated, or "Japanese" as equivalent to squinty-eyed - so we'll let you make your own conclusions.

World Tour: Cuban Pete

Jim Carrey: Cuban Pete

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Keep in mind that, in 1946, Cuba had not yet been taken over by Fidel Castro. There was no US embargo, and so artists of various sorts traveled freely between the two countries. So it is not surprising that a Hollywood studio would have made a movie that year to promote the newest Cuban musical sensation. The movie was Cuban Pete, and the star was Desi Arnaz. The song was a smash, with Louis Armstrong among others doing his own version.

Almost fifty years would pass. The song disappeared during my childhood in the 60s and 70s. In fact, I never heard it at all until 1994, when it was in a hilarious scene in the movie The Mask. Remember this?

World Tour: Canada

Pilot: Canada

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Ear Worm Warning: Listen at your own risk

Look out California
Ooh-Ooh, I gotta warn you
Here comes Canada

So maybe it wasn't the smartest commercial move --trying to pit The Golden State against The Great White North, but the Scottish trio Pilot ( best know for their Top 5 hit "Magic") just couldn't help themselves.

 They named their third album, Morin Heights, after the tourist town in Quebec where they recorded with Roy Thomas Baker.With generous measures of Beatlesque melodies and Queen-like harmonies, Morin Heights has been called Pilot's "Abbey Road".

 Lyrically though, they've always been lightweights.Witness:

Canada, you proved your worth
You got snow peaked mountains tumbling down
You had them from birth

Though I prefer British Columbia with its majestic mountains and sunny islands, the list of rock bands who've recorded in Morin Heights is impressive: Rush ( naturally), The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, The Police, Cat Stevens and The Bee Gees, among others.

World Tour: Far Away In Australia

Dolores Keane: Far Away In Australia

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Known primarily for her work as an interpreter of Irish folksong, both as a solo artist and as a founding member of longstanding Galway-based Celtic Folk band De Dannen, Dolores Keane toured and recorded non-stop for a quarter decade before throwing in the towel in the late nineties to focus on family and home life. But her songs live on, as does her reputation as the queen of the soul of Ireland: this traditional ditty, most recently re-released on her 1998 "Best Of" Greatest Hits collection, is short and sweet, with none of the disaster that so often accompanies the canon; its simple, direct interpretation showcases both the depression-era Irish ideal of Australia as a land of opportunity, and her strong lilting alto, providing apt entry for an artist whose debut appearance here at Star Maker Machine is long overdue.

World Tour: Vietnam

Jimmy Cliff : Vietnam

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Leon Thomas: Damn Nam (Ain't Goin' To Vietnam)

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There's Vietnam, the country, and then there's Vietnam, the war. Both these songs, written in 1969, refer to the latter, when 550,000 American soldiers were serving there, Nixon had begun serving his second term, the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstrations took place, and a growing majority of Americans thought the war was a mistake.

Jimmy Cliff in 1969 was a Jamaican reggae singer whose worldwide popularity was growing. Leon Thomas was an American soul/jazz singer releasing his first solo album. Both songs capture the anti-war sentiments of the day.

World Tour: Long Bed From Kenya

Betty Elders: Long Bed From Kenya

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Between 1981 and 1995, Betty Elders released four albums that show her to be a very talented songwriter. Four albums in fourteen years is not a lot, but that turned out to be it. From the fact that she sung back-up on Norwegian artist Roy Lonhoiden's three albums, I’m guessing that Elders may have relocated to Norway no later than 2004, but that is just a guess. What I know is that Elders has an album’s worth of unreleased songs on her website. If anyone knows why Elders has not done an album in her own name in so long, please let us know in the comments.

Songs like Long Bed From Kenya are why I wish Elders would do more. Long Bed sounds at first like a song about growing older in a relationship. But, in the second verse, Elders adds a key detail. While the singer feels herself growing older, her partner remains smitten with a woman he met on a long ago trip to Kenya. The narrator ages, but the woman in the memory never does. The long bed sent home from that trip serves as a constant reminder to the narrator of a competition she can never hope to win. The story is told in just a few economical lines, but the emotional resonance is strong.

This performance of Long Bed comes from a mainstage performance of the song at the 1998 Kerrville Folk Festival. Elders also recorded a more fully arranged version of the song on her last album Crayons. But this version, with just voice and guitar, puts the focus on the songwriting, and it holds up just fine.

World Tour: Dominion/Mother Russia

The Sisters of Mercy : Dominion/Mother Russia

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Mother Russia, released in 1987, is about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster the year before. The "old man in a dry season", a reference to a T.S. Eliot line, is Reagan, and the whole song expresses Andrew Eldritch's anti-American sentiments, with numerous references to the Cold War.

The Sisters of Mercy released 3 albums, each with a different line-up; the consistent member is Eldritch (well, and his drum machine, Doktor Avalanche). Their last recording was in 1993, but they (for various values of "they") still tour. In fact, I enjoyed their gothic rock sound so much that I ventured off to see them live a few years ago, which turned out to be one of the weirder and most distancing concerts I'd ever been to. The continuous use of 3 fog machines rendered the stage nearly opaque, so much so that it wasn't until halfway through the show that I realized there was actually a live bass player up there—and I was a mere 15 feet from the stage. At least I presume he was live. I don't think any of us could tell if the musicians were simply acting out to prerecorded music or not, and the in-between comments were kept to an absolute minimum.

I do recommend their music as great work-out stuff, though. That heavy drum beat is hard to surpass for exercising to.

World Tour: It's A Long Way Back To Germany

Ramones: It's A Long Way Back To Germany (link now working)

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As a German living outside Germany, the title of the Ramones song appeals to me. The track turned up as a bonus track on the 2005 remastered edition of the Ramones’ 1977 album Rocket To Russia. It is billed as a UK b-side, without any further information. It seems it was also a b-side elewhere, to 1978’s “Do You Wanna Dance”.

“It's A Long Way Back To Germany” was written by Dee Dee Ramone, whose mother was German and who spent much of his formative years in West-Berlin, until he returned to New York City at the age of 15. He also sang a bit in German on “Born To Die In Berlin”, the final track of the final Ramones album in 1996. Dee Dee died six years later, not in Beelin but in LA.

Rocket To Russia featured a song that has been covered twice by German bands. “Rockaway Beach” was first done in 1979 as “Müngersdorfer Stadion” by the Zeltinger Band, a punk rock band fronted by the balding, overweight and often kaftan-wearing Jürgen Zeltinger, one of West Germany’s first openly gay recording artists. Performed in Kölsch, the dialect that is unique to the city of Cologne, the setting of Rockaway Beach in the Ramones song became the public swimming baths adjacent to the football stadium of the same name, and hitching a ride there in the Ramones song became fare-dodging on public transport. (You can get the song HERE.)

In 2005, another German punk band, Die Toten Hosen (from Düsseldorf, just down the road from Zeltinger’s Cologne), covered “Rockaway Beach” in English, as the b-side for their “Alles wird vorübergehen” single.

You might find it quite easy to sing along to “It’s A Long Way Back To Germany”. Just sing this: “You by the phone, you all alone. It’s a long way back to Germany. It’s a long way back to Germany.”

(Image borowed from 45cat.com)

World Tour: Baby, Let's Go To Mexico

Sir Douglas Quintet: Baby, Let's Go To Mexico

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While we're visiting Mexico....

The godfather of Tex-Mex rock'n'roll, Doug Sahm earned the nickname Doug Saldana from South of the Border fans. "They said I had so much Mexican in me that I needed a Mexican name" he told biographer Joseph Levy.

This song sure makes visiting Mexico sound like a good idea. I've been there a few times and I'd suggest visiting somewhere other than one of the country's famous resorts mentioned in this tune. The shot above is of Taxco, the silver capital of Mexico. It's a beautiful city with streets so narrow even the VW bugs used as taxis have to do three-point turns to get through town. One very "Taxco" experience involves another kind of bug: jumiles. Stink bugs that are often eaten alive. Quite spicy. And crunchy too.

World Tour: Mexico

Jump: Mexico

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This fantastic song by Jump (previously known as Jump Little Children) is less about Mexico as a country, and more about how far away Mexico is. The song is a beautiful tale about how the singer won't let his lady leave him again unless she goes far away to Mexico, because as long as she's closer she will just rebound back to him, so if she wants to go she better go far away and not come back to him again.

It appeared on their 1994 album "Between Dim & The Dark", a great album and and even greater song.

World Tour: Kingdom of Spain

The Decemberists: Kingdom of Spain (early version)

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Kingdom of Spain presents the king and queen in all of their apparent splendor, but we soon learn of their cruelty and misuse of power. The song tells the story in three short verses, but that is all that is needed. The song can be found on the Decemberists EP Picarsqueties, but that is not the version heard here. On the EP, the song is backed only by chiming piano chords that can also be heard as funeral bells. The version I am featuring has a fuller arrangement, with bass and intertwining guitars, and I like the way it enhances the structure of the song, by splitting each verse into two aspects. This version can be found on an import collection from Spain called Acuarela Songs 3. The songs an this album are by various indie artists from the year 2004. Many, like the Decemberists, sing in English, and all of the songs were original to this collection.

1996: Inside

Patti Rothberg: Inside

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1996 was an important year for me musically. It was the year I discovered music could mean something, that it wasn't just about being catchy and fun to listen to. As I've written on here before, my breakthrough came as a high schooler discovering Lisa Loeb's album "Tails" and it grabbed me so much and made me think "wow, is there more music like this out there?". Luckily for me, this was the start of the beautiful few years where female singer-songwriters actually got airplay on mainstream radio, so my mind (and music collection) expanded at an alarming rate.

One of those first discoveries after "Tails" was hearing this single on the radio. I loved it immediately and remember turning the volume up in my dad's car as we drove home from dinner one evening to hear if the radio would say the artist's name so I knew what to look for when I got to the music store. I played this CD a lot that year, and I still really love it. It's one of those singles that a lot of people wouldn't remember if you asked them about it, but if you played them some of it they'd say "oh yeah, that was a pretty good song!". And the whole album is like that, not a bad song on it. It was a shame that the album did not get more recognition, but since then I've come across a number of people who get so enthusiastic if I mention this album because they have such fond feelings towards it as well.

1996 was a good year.

1996: Farewell Angelina

Tim O'Brien: Farewell Angelina

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Former Denverite Tim O'Brien released his brilliant tribute to Bob Dylan in 1996. He wittily named it Red on Blonde (he's a redhead, get it?). Darius posted another song from this album back in 2008 (Man Gave Names to All the Animals). I waffled a bit on which one to pick since they're all great, but I've gone with this one because it features his sister Mollie on vocals. Really, though, if you like "newgrass" you really should check out the whole album.

1996: The Barricades of Heaven

Jackson Browne: The Barricades of Heaven

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Jackson Browne has been known since the early 1970s not only for his performances, but also as a great songwriter. That makes the writing credits on his 1996 album Looking East interesting reading. Each of the songs is credited to the same seven writers, including Browne. Looking at who plays on the album, I assume that Browne wrote the lyrics, and then brought them to his working band at the time. They then would have created the melodies and arrangements together. The lyrics are personal, as they often are in Browne’s work, so I have to assume he created those himself. On the other hand, it is possible that Browne always worked this way, but he felt it was high time his band got a share of the writing royalties. It must have made some music industry types nuts, especially with all of the different publishing credits.

As for the song I have chosen, The Barricades of Heaven finds Jackson Browne looking back at his youth, when he was just discovering the joy of making music. The song has some of the feel of early Bruce Springsteen, only in LA instead of Asbury Park. The title refers to Browne being on the verge of becoming a professional musician with a major label contract.

1996: Penthouse in the Woods

Scud Mountain Boys: Penthouse in the Woods

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Joe Pernice holds an MFA in creative writing from The University of Massachusetts where he apparently learned less is more. His lyrics are sparse. They give flavor to the often moody songs he writes, but they explain nothing. "Penthouse in the Woods" could be about anything...but I'm thinking a murder is involved. The weapon: an airtight garbage bag. The singer's guilt can't be washed off stained gloves. The song comes from 1996's Massachusetts, the last album Scud Mountain Boys would record before Joe would head off with brother Bob and record the sensational Overcome By Happiness as The Pernice Brothers. Those who mourn The Scud Mountain Boys will be pleased to learn The Scuds have a five-date East Coast reunion tour beginning in mid January of next year. In 2009 Joe realized a life long dream by publishing his first novel, It Feels So Good When I Stop  via the hip Penguin imprint Riverhead Books.

By the way, the photo is of a Free Spirit Sphere I visited on Vancouver Island,BC.