| Warren Zevon – Veracruz Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[IwanTheLordeLover:25146] Nice idea, but the characters of Woodrow Wilson and Zapata suggest a much later date than 1842 for the events that are the basis for this song… | |
| Lyle Lovett – Flyswatter/Ice Water Blues (Monte Trenckmann's Blues) Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[Tokebi:25023] Okay, my second 'edit'. Firstly, 'Tink' can be a surname in Texas, so perhaps the Tink here is Bill Tink? (That's a wild guess!) Secondly, an Athens, Georgia band called Time Toy has a song called Icewater/ Flyswatter, but apart from that they have nothing to do with Lyle Lovett. Sorry for that mistake! Finally, the release date here is actually 1992, which means that the Eels' song Flyswatter from 2000 might well be influenced by Mr. Lovett's work. Eels leader Mark Everett could have heard this song on the radio for example. | |
| Lyle Lovett – Flyswatter/Ice Water Blues (Monte Trenckmann's Blues) Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[Tokebi:25018] Okay, sorry, I spelled "Monte" with a y… my mistake. I just got to thinking that if Monte Trenckmann's a real person, then the 'Tink' mentioned in the second verse might be a real person too, but so far I couldn't find anything. Maybe someone at the company or someone with a good knowledge of personalities in the Texan construction industry could shed more light on who it might be. | |
| Lyle Lovett – Flyswatter/Ice Water Blues (Monte Trenckmann's Blues) Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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It's interesting to note that the Eels breleased a song called Flyswatter containing the words "Ice water, fly swatter gonna get you through the day." It would seem to be a clear shout out to Time Toy, only the Eels' song came out in 2000 while this track didn't come out until 2006 although it is the older of the two. Did the Eels get inspired by seeing a Time Toy show in person or did they hear a Time Toy bootleg? Anyway, what does the song mean? Hmm… I pretty much agree with Splerb's take… it is called a blues, so it's not all happy, but it's about stability, maturity, cohabitation and cooperation. This character has his problems, but he's getting on with his life. The subtitle is Monty Trenckmann's blues. Now, Monte Trenckmann Designers & Builders is a firm in Texas, which isn't so far from Time Toy's Athens, Georgia home. Perhaps the character in this song is supposed to be Monty Trenckmann himself,in which case the irony is that he's singing about the daily grind when later on what he's started is going to get pretty big, and presumably he will be a rich man. Another possibility is that the character here is singing Monty Trenckmann's Blues because he's working at that company, in which case success is not necessarily assured. However, the apostrophe ess on the end of Trenckmann makes the possessive, so it seems this could well be a song put in the mouth of the man himself, and perhaps a tribute to him? |
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| Warren Zevon – Excitable Boy Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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Allegory and humour in Excitable Boy "You get the feeling there are messages behind his lyrics." Marty Duda Considering the certain weightiness that has been apportioned to the song, "Excitable Boy", I wanted to consider the role of allegory in the third verse. Taken literally, the tale is stark- rape, murder, and then to cap it all, the body is delivered back to the family residence. However, like a lot of Zevon's work, his tongue is firmly in his cheek. It would be possible to interpret the piece as four interconnected black jokes- "Does your dog bite?" "No, but I do..." Werewolfery is evident in the second verse. However, is humour all that's going on here? The victim, Little Suzie, is originally a character in an Everly Brothers song. As we know, Mr. Z was the bandleader for the Everly Brothers for a spell. Furthermore, unless I'm mistaken, he never once covered an Everly Brothers song in one of his own shows. (Please do correct me if I'm wrong.)"Wake up, Little Suzy," sang the Everlys, almost infinitely. It's catchy as hell, but I bet Mr. Z just got sick of it. Hence the dark joke- guess what! Little Suzy ain't gonna wake up because she's dead. In this light, Excitable Boy appropriates and rewrites the plot of the Everly's song, bringing closure to Warren the bored band leader, and allowing him to take a pop back in jest at his old bosses. Meanwhile, allegorically, killing Little Suzie represents Mr. Z's ascendance over the Everlys. It's a new age and he isn't taking orders from anyone now. It's his music. In the fourth verse, the excitable boy returns to dig up the corpse and make a cage with the bones… Mr. Z himself said that the expression "make a cage with her bones" came from a yo mama joke popular when he was a kid, but to only slightly over-extend the allegory, the cage from Little Suzie's bones could also be a recognition of the debt owed by the new music Mr. Z would play to the music of the Everlys and their generation |
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| T. Rex – Planet Queen Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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@so-succexy James had the wrong end of the stick The guy replaced by Mickey Finn was in fact Steve Peregrin Took, who became unmanagable due to his drug use and was whipping himself and drawing blood on stage. (A little Iggy Pop-esque and generally a bit much.) However, Steve was out after Unicorn, the third album, and Planet Queen is off Electric Warrior, the sixth album. I'm not saying it's impossible that Steve came back for the session, but unless you have evidence to the contrary, I'm going to rule it out. (Is there perhaps an early version of Planet Queen from around the Unicorn period fearuring Marc and Steve as the Tyrannosaurus Rex acoustic duo? ) As for James assertion that Marc was T.Rex, it's essentially correct, but later on, in the early 2000s, Mickey Finn did put out a version of T.Rex. The singer was a Marc Bolan look- and sound-alike, and apart from Mr. Finn's iconic presence, they were essentially a T.Rex covers band. They didn't do Planet Queen when I saw them in a field in Lincolnshire playing to a crowd of 150 or so locals… they were excellent though. What does the song mean? It's a Bolan image adventure again. An alien queen, flying saucer abduction, a girl child fathered by Marc (whom he wants back). His head gets used as an exploder and a revolver. There's a good chance he's not talking about the head on his shoulders. The "dragon head" is "machine bled", which makes you wonder what is happening there. My conclusion is that Marc got this idea for a space romance story which was too hot to present explicitly, so he made it into a song which showed people what happened rather than told them. It is what you make it, as much a vibe as a tale, but the many strong clues such as the spaceship taking Marc away and the daughter point to the content being alien sex experiments and a trip into space to another world where strange things happened. This in turn could be a redux of a strange encounter Marc had with a freak in the 60s or 70s, or perhaps it could be an argument for general sexual freedom. At one point Marc claimed he had spent time with a wizard in France doing magic and brewing potions, so maybe his story about being taken into space is also a real story? He got up to some stuff after all… |
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| Ramones – Locket Love Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[Tokebi:23628] "distutbing" should be "disturbing" too. | |
| Ramones – Locket Love Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[Tokebi:23625] Excuse me for trying to type while asleep. When I wrote "The last word of the third line of the last verse", I meant "The last word of the third line to last of the last verse". | |
| Ramones – Locket Love Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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This song is a bit of a trojan horse. To the casual listener, it is bubblegum pop. A salute to the sixties. Dispensible. Some will dismiss it. Repeated, careful listens reveal a different story. Obsession, sickness and murder. Even this site's compilers have not listened closely enough. The last word of the third line of the last verse isn't "too"- it's "you". At least on one level, this is a murder ballad, and it is all the more distutbing for its subtlety. |
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| Alice Cooper – Shoe Salesman Lyrics | 7 years ago |
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The song writing here is a little understated. The first verse details the protagonist's encounter with a needle-using junkie, the titular shoe-salesman. By the second verse, the habit has become the protagonist's own. You can use your imagination to fill in the blank space. In short, the shoe salesman got him addicted. The popsicle which starts of the second verse is a sugary, cold, sweet treat. The flavours are both sour. This could be a throwaway line, but perhaps the image is loaded- cheapness, artificiality and craving could be some of the feelings it conjures up. The "special" is drugs. The winking girl suggesting a ride could be offering the protagonist sex, and he worries if she will notice the marks of his addiction, the "freckles", if he takes her up on the offer. At the end of the song, he seems to be ready to go ahead with the encounter because he doesn't think she will notice the needle marks. Things are left open, but one wonders if there is not a least a hint that the girl may become an addict too. The quoted, slightly ironic, perhaps accusing line, "Do you think these freckles will stay?", may now be hers. The quoted line could be answered in several ways: "Yes, they will stay. You will always be a junky now." Alternatively, "No, this habit is going to kill you, and when you are dead, they will rot away with the rest of your flesh." Perhaps there is also a hint that the freckles, along with the drug habit, are passing from person to person, parasitic and, in a sense, eternal. Denial pervades the song. If freckles are snailtracks, then shoe salesman might be code for a drug-dealer. Perhaps the popsicles are phallic symbols. With so much left for the reader to fill in, other readings are surely possible… If it were to be taken as a suicide song, the ride could be death (cf Zevon's "My Ride's Here"), the freckles could be knife cuts to the wrists, or perhaps stigmata(!?), and being left speechless could represent death too. Still, the drug habit in and of itself seems lethal enough. If there is any suicide in the song, one may feel it is in the protagonist's swift surrender to the opiate which will mark him, and take his mind and his health. |
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