It's all about the words

For somebody who considers himself a writer of sorts, I'm more of a melody and harmony guy than a word freak, which means that I tend to hear music the way a dog does. Where you may hear something like: "Well, she don't make me nervous, she don't talk too much/ She walks like Bo Diddley and she don't need no crutch," to me, that tends to register along the lines of "Woof. Woof woof woof. Woof woof."

That doesn't mean I can't appreciate a well-turned phrase. My current favorite line comes from the Flaming Lips' song "Do You Realize," which apparently some forward-thinking legislators in Oklahoma recently nominated for the state song. Unfortunately, there was a quorum of evangelicals maintaining vigilance in the statehouse to put the kibosh on such alleged tomfoolery, otherwise we'd have Okie schoolchildren singing the Buddhist sentiment "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die" - which might be shock-inducing for a few of them.

Heartbreak is a primary component in the loam of the songwriter's muse, and there's nothing like a broken heart to kick a songwriter's ass into writing great stuff. "You're a Big Girl Now," one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs, from his 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, has its share of excellent lines in that regard. The final verse begins kinda weakly, with the couplet "A change in the weather is known to be extreme/ But what's the sense of changing horses in midstream," but then Dylan goes in for the kill: "I'm going out of my mind, oh oh/ With a pain that stops and starts/ Like a corkscrew to my heart/ Ever since we've been apart." Yep. Bob totally nailed that one.

On a lighter note, the Ramones opened their anthem "Rock 'n' Roll High School" with this great couplet: "Well I don't care about history/ 'Cause that's not where I wanna be." No angst-ridden French philosopher ever put it more succinctly.

I've tried to write a few songs over the years, and it's really hard to find the right words; melodies and chord progressions are easy. Most of my efforts are clunky, in the way Brian Wilson was on "Johnny Carson" from the 1977 "comeback" album The Beach Boys Love You: "When guests are boring he fills up the slack/ Johnny Carson/ The network makes him break his back/ Johnny Carson ...."

Yeah, that's about my speed as a lyricist. So I have a deep appreciation for people who can match words to music effectively. Even if it all sounds like "woof woof woof" to this dog's ears.

Failed blogger returns for more?

It would seem that blogging might be the least au courant thing a person could do in mid-2009, so what the hey. Time to commit to writing on a regular basis again. Or semi-regular. Or, uh, as has been the case with so much of my brilliant blogging career, intermittently to the point of one or two posts and then nothing.

But I'm gonna put my name on this thing, and add the subject line "on music," which means that I'm intending to write about music. Yes, just what the world needs: another middle-aged white guy blathering on about stuff he likes to listen to, or stuff he hates rambling within earshot of, or stuff that makes him shrug his shoulders and go "meh."

I miss writing about music. For nearly three years, I was a music columnist at the weekly Sacramento News & Review. A few years before that, I toiled for nearly five years at the SN&R as the arts editor, and wrote a lot of stuff about local acts, until I jumped at the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a startup I now refer to as Digital Shmegegge Group. Some people made money there. I didn't, or at least I haven't yet; here's hoping the comedy treatment I'm scribbling onto a cocktail napkin somewhere gets the proper action it deserves in Hollywood.

And before my stint at the SN&R, I worked for 16 years at Tower Records' Pulse! magazine as an editor and writer; I wrote a column called "Spins" under various bylines: my own, Nesbitt Bireley, Camaro Bob, Goog Houngo Phlumphigan, His Royal Snertliness the Snert and a host of others, whose relative incoherence depended on whatever I was ingesting that particular month. Unfortunately, when Tower Records went under a few years after I left, the Pulse archives were auctioned off to whoever bought the chain's website; I think the owning entity is headquartered somewhere in the Cayman Islands, but all the stuff I wrote for Pulse is nowhere to be found. And a 2001 house fire cremated my archive of old Pulses, so the only thing I still have from that period is an issue with a cover story I wrote on Johnny Cash.

So. Well. Ahem, I guess it's time to start writing about music again, with the hopes that someone will read it, and maybe someone else, and then there will be enough someone elses to attract advertisers, and there will be enough advertisers so that I can afford several vegetarian burritos from Oscar's Very Mexican Food on Freeport Boulevard in Sacramento (it's across from McClatchy High School; go there; it's really good and really cheap, and this is my first plug on this blog, but I promise to only pimp things I'm really on board with), and maybe I can shop at the Co-op more often and sustain my bicycle-riding vegetarian lifestyle.

Some of the acts I cover will be local, meaning Sacramento, Stockton-Lodi, Nevada City or otherwise Northern Californian. Some won't be, like the great Sport Murphy of Long Island, New York. And I'm gonna do plenty of ranting about the charred husk that's left of what used to be the music business. Somebody has to give Bob Lefsetz a run for his money, right?

OK, so there's your first post. More tomorrow. This time, I promise.