I was reading Stephen King's "The Stand" at the same time I was playing this album over and over, so this song gave me a strong impression of the journey of "The Trashcan Man" from that story.
That character was a half-dead radiation-poisoned pyromaniac schizophrenic who survives what is essentially the Apocalypse. He is part of the "bad side", travels West across America and ends up getting destroyed in a nuclear explosion, so the phrases of "gas hed" (Fire), "Memory that dies" (post-apocalypse), "exemplified his clan", "marches on" and "lanced his head with light" (vaporised by a nuke) had a lot of strong correlations.
I doubt that's the original meaning of the lyrics, but that's what they mean to me now.
I was reading Stephen King's "The Stand" at the same time I was playing this album over and over, so this song gave me a strong impression of the journey of "The Trashcan Man" from that story.
That character was a half-dead radiation-poisoned pyromaniac schizophrenic who survives what is essentially the Apocalypse. He is part of the "bad side", travels West across America and ends up getting destroyed in a nuclear explosion, so the phrases of "gas hed" (Fire), "Memory that dies" (post-apocalypse), "exemplified his clan", "marches on" and "lanced his head with light" (vaporised by a nuke) had a lot of strong correlations.
I doubt that's the original meaning of the lyrics, but that's what they mean to me now.