| John Prine – Mexican Home Lyrics | 3 years ago |
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There are no hidden meanings to worry about in Mexican Home. It’s just such a fine poetic, evocative portrait of a place and a feeling, well and fully observed. If you’ve ever lived in the desert in summer in an isolated area, you will be brought inescapably back to it. It got so hot, last night, I swear You couldn't hardly breathe Heat lightning burnt the sky like alcohol I’ve been in a place where the air is so hot, you feel like you can hardly breathe, and, if you’ve ever seen heat lightning crack the sky like it was a shattering pot over your head, you will never forget it. I have also seen spilled alcohol on a lab bench ignited by a spark. (Do not try this at home!) It creates a flame that reaches swiftly to every inch of the shallow puddle of liquid, and flames out fairly quickly if you don’t feed it. I sat on the porch without my shoes And I watched the cars roll by As the headlights raced To the corner of the kitchen wall Have you ever stayed in a desert motel by the side of the only road for miles? One where the cheap blinds are no help, and you can actually see the headlights from passing cars slide along the wall opposite of the window as you’re trying to get to sleep? Kind of like the one where Dennis Weaver is “the night man” in Touch of Evil? And I feel a storm All wet and warm Not ten miles away Approaching My Mexican home Another desert phenomenon. It may happen in other climates as well, but a tropical storm coming up to the desert is exactly like that. You can both see and feel it coming. My God! I cried, it's so hot inside You could die in the living room What a perfect juxtaposition of opposites. Take the fan from the window Prop the door back with a broom The cuckoo clock has died of shock And the windows feel no pane Again, clearly the kind of house that is so shabby that there’s not even any glass pane covering the window, just a rectangular hole in the wall. With the cuckoo clock having died of shock, there’s not even a ticking sound to distract from the seeming inevitability of the desert climate coming to take you. The air's as still As the throttle on a funeral train Again, the imagery is just stunning, perfect, and unexpected. What could seem more ominous and unrelenting than a slow funeral train heading to its mournful destination. My father died on the porch outside On an August afternoon I sipped bourbon and cried With a friend by the light of the moon In the place and time the poet describes, there’s no frantic call for an ambulance, no attempt to forestall the end with the hustle of a half-dozen workers all attempting to prevent the inevitable with their choreographed pre-funeral dance. There’s just an acceptance of the humility of human life against an unrelenting nature, and the very human act of sipping bourbon with a friend, while you mourn your loss under an uncaring moon. So its hurry! hurry! Step right up It's a matter of life or death The sun is going down And the moon is just holding its breath The poet invokes the cry of a carnival barker to drum up a crowd with the empty but urgent threat that “It’s a matter of life or death,” when in fact, the poet describes the reality of life or death in exactly the opposite manner with the steady, mechanical turning of the sun going down, and the moon holding its breath in patient anticipation of taking the sun’s place just as death will always take life in the end. It might be worth noting that, although John Prine’s father did indeed die on the front porch of his home on an August afternoon, that home was in Illinois rather than the desert scene that Prine describes, but poets are not court recorders and use real life as only the raw material to construct truth in human terms. We are all the richer for that. |
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| Warren Zevon – Carmelita Lyrics | 3 years ago |
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Carmelita by Warren Zevon is a masterpiece of melancholy deeply rooted in the underclass of Los Angeles of the late 60s. From the song’s very start with the subdued Latin-influenced guitar and its evocative reference to “Mariachi static on the radio,” to the final echoes of the chorus, where the singer is, “all strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town,” the song emphatically embodies a particular place and time. Now, more than 50 years after its composition, some of its imagery is rooted deeply in a milieu that, in our age of smart phones, is unfamiliar to many. I hear Mariachi static on my radio And the tubes they glow in the dark Radios and televisions in the 60s were very different from the tiny but powerful devices we have today. A radio in the 60s was a fairly large, box-like affair that was powered by vacuum tubes. These tubes would take maybe 15 seconds to slowly fluoresce and warm up before the radio began to function. They would glow with a faint colorful light we associate with neon. Because the tubes gave off significant heat for an enclosed space, the back of the radio had holes or open strips for ventilation, so the glow from the tubes would seep out of the back of the radio into a darkened room. The radios also used analog not digital tuning. There was a dial or wheel that you twisted slowly, listening carefully, until the station you wanted was coming in clearly. Usually you went past the optimum tuning a little bit until you were satisfied that the signal was getting worse and then turned the dial back a touch to the right spot. That meant that you would frequently come across the background static of a station with a weaker signal. Los Angeles was at the limit of the northward range of most radio broadcasts from Tijuana, but AM radio signals travel further at night, so you could indeed hear faint strains of Mariachi music obscured among the static as you tuned the radio dial. The singer paints a scene of a lonely, darkened room with a blue glow from the back of the radio as the only light. And I'm there with her in Ensenada And I'm here in Echo Park The singer imagines his spirit with his one-time girlfriend in Ensenada accompanied by the vague, obscured strains of Mariachi music, while he’s literally all alone in Echo Park, a rather shabby part of Los Angeles, not the glamor of Hollywood or the glitz of Beverly Hills or Wilshire Blvd and Santa Monica further to the west, but a part of LA long past its glory days from the early 20th century. The chorus that follows emphasizes the singer’s vanishing grip on life with its imagery of sinking, drug use, and its reference to the singer’s shoddy circumstances. Carmelita, hold me tighter I think I'm sinking down And I'm all strung out on heroin On the outskirts of town The following verse makes the singer’s despair more concrete even if somewhat obscurely. Well, I'm sittin' here playing solitaire With my pearl-handled deck The county won't give me no more methadone And they cut off your welfare check There is no such thing as a pearl-handled deck of playing cards, but there is, of course, such a thing as a pearl-handled handgun. What the singer is doing here in his lonely, darkened room is not playing solitaire, but Russian Roulette, courting suicide in his despair. The singer laments that he can now neither get money from welfare nor get his fix of methadone from the county health department, apparently because they have rightly judged that it will not accomplish their purpose of getting him off heroin. After another repetition of the chorus, the song continues: Well, I pawned my Smith Corona And I went to meet my man He hangs out down on Alvarado Street By the Pioneer Chicken stand A Smith-Corona is a typewriter, but there was a demo version of this song recorded in 1974 which had the line, “Well, I pawned my Smith & Wesson,” instead. Whatever led to the change of the lyric from pawning a handgun to the much less plausible pawning of a typewriter, it’s clear now that the singer has changed his mind from taking his life via a single stroke and succumbed to a slower death by artificial and evanescent pleasure that he can get from his dealer on Alvarado Street. All that’s left is for the singer to repeat his hopeless despair of rescue by a final repetition of the chorus: Carmelita, hold me tighter I think I'm sinking down And I'm all strung out on heroin On the outskirts of town What’s left for the listener to decide is whether the imagined Carmelita could actually rescue him from “sinking down” by holding him tighter or merely end up going down with him to his sad slide into self-destruction. Although I love this song for its transcendent sadness, I don’t recommend listening to it in a darkened room with either a gun or hypodermic handy. |
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