| Slow Gherkin – Trapped Like Rats in Myers Flat Lyrics | 24 days ago |
| Slow Gherkin was a band with ties to Santa Cruz, and I saw them a few times there in the mid-1990s. Myers Flat is a community in Humboldt County that in the 1990s was strongly supported by the then-illicit recreational cannabis production industry. Blatz was a down-market beer brand that became a generic word for cheap beer in the punk scene. The song seems like observational stream of consciousness about being very high somewhere one does not want to be, with an element of paranoia about being busted. I don't know if they ever made it out of Myers Flat. | |
| Slow Gherkin – Trapped Like Rats in Myers Flat Lyrics | 24 days ago |
| Slow Gherkin was a band with ties to Santa Cruz, and I saw them a few times there in the mid-1990s. Myers Flat is a community in Humboldt County that in the 1990s was strongly supported by the then-illicit recreational cannabis production industry. Blatz was a down-market beer brand that became a generic word for cheap beer in the punk scene. The song seems like observational stream of consciousness about being very high somewhere one does not want to be, with an element of paranoia about being busted. I don't know if they ever made it out of Myers Flat. | |
| The Velvet Underground – Oh! Sweet Nuthin Lyrics | 4 months ago |
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Think of the context beginning with the album title. "Loaded" is a double entendré that can mean extremely high on drugs as well as full. New York was awash with heroin in 1970, both the low-grade Brown that Jimmy and Ginger would use, and the higher purity white that Polly and Joanna can get. Junkies would sell the shirt off their backs and shoes off their feet for a fix. Nodding off from a dose of heroin often resulted in a posture of having one's head on the concrete sidewalk. Addicts were often rolled for everything they had left in such circumstances. When Polly is high on smack, she can't tell night from day. Joanna might be turning tricks during the day and calling it love, but at night she takes the money she made from her Johns, ties off, shoots up, and nods out. Lou was much more explicit about the subject in Heroin. Waiting for the Man was also about scoring smack. All this I say from living in New York in the 1970s and losing a wife to addiction. |
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| Elvis Costello – Dr. Luther's Assistant Lyrics | 5 years ago |
| @[BaxterBotox:34543] Being out of the kitchen and in bed made her a whore. | |
| Elvis Costello – Dr. Luther's Assistant Lyrics | 5 years ago |
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The only interview of Costello that I could find about the composition said the following: "I’d daydreamed about being able to get into the derelict building and run pictures of my own choosing, and kids later made up stories about teenagers breaking in and running amok. Later still, I wrote a macabre, carnal tale called “Dr. Luther’s Assistant,” which, in my mind, was set at this exact location." https://www.vulture.com/2015/10/elvis-costello-on-his-inspiration-for-alison.html That isn't much to go on. "Home movies with no subtitles" Home movies were often low-quality 8mm films from the 1970s. Silent with no subtitles. "When the film keeps playin' playin'" During that period, a popular way to view pornography was by viewing loops that played continuously. "Oh, "He's Dr Luther's Assistant / He'll close in when he seems so distant" The cameraman stays out of the frame ,but comes in for the close-up. "He'll get on top of you when you lower your resistance" The cameraman gets sloppy seconds after the male talent has popped his shot. "Luther is locked in a broken-down cinema" Peep shows were frequently located in derelict cinemas abandoned by mainstream movie distributors. "Watches his wife with his video camera" Luther's wife performs sex with others in part to satisfy Luther's voyeur and cuckold fetishes.. "Sees his best boy makin' her grin" The 'best boy' is a technical assistant on a film crew..Luther watches the loop of his assistant having sex with his wife. "Out of the kitchen, she's gone with the wind" A popular saying at the time was that the perfect wife was a lady in the parlour, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in bed. Being out of the kitchen *Gone with the Wind* was for many years the biggest box office success from Hollywood. It was a carnal tale considered racy for the time. It could also mean that Luther's wife has run off with his assistant. |
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| The Kinks – Sweet Lady Genevieve Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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In 1973, around the time Preservation (Act 1) was being composed and produced, Ray Davies was going through a breakup and eventual divorce of his first wife, Rasa Dipetris. He was struggling with the old "demon alcohol" at that point, and he admitted assaulting her while drunk. He tried to keep her, "telling her lies" but he knew he would "break her heart" and possibly more. After she left and took their daughters with her, he attempted suicide by a drug overdose on July 15 that year. Between then and September 21, when Sweet Lady Genevieve was recorded, he tried to persuade her to come back, begged her forgiveness, and promised to reform and give up drinking. She never did return. We are left with a great work of art born of pain and sadness. |
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| Cream – Doing That Scrapyard Thing Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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Famously a rush-job. I read that Jack Bruce called Peter Brown at 3am to give him the melody. Cream had broken up and the record company wanted three more songs for "Goodbye". Clapton contributed "Badge" and Baker contributed "What a Bringdown". What I imagine is Brown making a cup of tea, playing the melody first on a crappy recorder, and then on a "mongrel piano" while "banging his favorite head". Looking around his flat at various random things, he just played with silly word association in the wee morning hours. The second verse seems to speak to Bruce's Scottish roots. By the third verse he's getting hungry and goes to the fridge and cracks an egg. The last verse seems like a shout-out to the Beatles (I am the Walrus and Yellow Submarine) and the newly-formed Led Zeppelin. There, he's done and ready to call Jack Bruce up at the recording studio—which has devolved into a zoo given the tense nature of the breakup—and blow his mind. |
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| Donovan – Jersey Thursday Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| I've always assumed that the song refers to the Isle of Jersey in the British Channel. My sense was that Donovan was experimenting with acid and was up all Wednesday night with a lover. When the dawn came on Thursday, he was looking at her through coloured glasses. The vibrant colours of the sunrise overwhelmed his senses. And yes, I think it was "gulls" who were wheeling and spinning in the Channel sky. | |
| Looking Glass – Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne Lyrics | 7 years ago |
| Melodic pop about gritty urban life and romantic hope. Two street-wise small city kids dream of getting out of their dead-end lives and being able to escape to something better because they have each other. What's not to love? | |
| Three Dog Night – Easy to Be Hard (Hair cover) Lyrics | 7 years ago |
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The line in question is actually "Do you only care about the be-in crowd" and is commonly misheard. http://kissthisguy.com/do-you-only-care-about-the-bleeding-crow-misheard-11915.htm The first Human Be-In was a psychedelic gathering that took place in 1967 in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and there was another in Manhattan's Central Park a few months later, in anticipation of the Summer of Love. The "Be-In Crowd" included people like Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Allen Ginsburg, and people from Andy Warhol's Factory, including Edie Sedgwick. In other words, the counter-culture cognoscenti and the hippest of the hip. So it wasn't a bleeding crowd or being proud. Like so many lyrics from Hair, it is a cultural reference that was trendy at the time and is now obviously dated. |
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| 10,000 Maniacs – Like The Weather Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| Of course, depression runs through the lyrics, but why? It is about being sick in bed during a typical winter day in Western New York, which would make anyone depressed. | |
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