third rail

A Pinhole Shot From A .38 That Broke The Aching Sun

November 4, 2015 by Aaron

bart train, pinhole shot, subway, suzy, third option, third rail

I have a friend, Suzy, who I’ve known since 2004. I’ve never met Suzy in person. We met on Yahoo Chat. This was before Facebook if you can believe it! Now Suzy and I text and when one of us is drunk, we might call. I’ve seen Suzy go through relationships, deaths, changes. I’ve talked to her mom. I’ve seen pictures of her dogs. She’s helped me through breakups and heartaches. I’ve pissed her off, I’ve made her laugh. This is a good friend.

I met Suzy because for a while in 2004, after I’d been dumped by my girlfriend, I was spending a lot of time locked away in my apartment drinking Bud Ice (because it was the cheapest beer I could find), doing music composition exercises for classes at the University of Houston, listening to Jack Johnson and Manu Chao longingly, and chatting with people online. There were beer bottles and loose leaf sheet music everywhere, my studio gear, such as it was, was strewn about in piles, and I was basically the living embodiment of the blues. There’s something to be said for that, but I wouldn’t do it again!

Anyway, the way I met Suzy is, I saw her name on Yahoo and said “are you real?”, because at that time, these chat rooms were becoming less and less human and more and more spam bot. She always mentions how I said that. Apparently it was a really weird thing to say! I kept talking to Suzy off and on, even after I left Houston. I left Houston to go to The Bay Area, where I was accepted into the Master’s program at Stanford’s famed “CCRMA” (Center For Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), but I was still really sad and lonely from the breakup.

I used to ride around on the BART train a lot (it’s really the best way to get around out there). I did some poetry slam, I did some going around playing the piano at open mics, but generally I was just in school or riding around. I could have gone to hang with my friends who were hanging around with Green Day all the time, but instead I kind of rode around on the train.

As I was finishing Stanford and going back to our insane loft in Oakland, I decided to get the hell out of dodge. I’d been invited to play piano with Buddy Wakefield, who if you don’t know was an individual national poetry slam champion who had just signed with Strange Famous Records, which is the label owned by former Epitaph rapper Sage Francis. I’d done the piano for Buddy’s poem “Convenience Stores”, which turned out to be super popular. So I went down to Austin for the National Poetry Slam, where Buddy was opening for Sage at Emo’s. I remember standing in the audience while another opener did their thing and seeing this insanely pretty girl who I couldn’t take my eyes off of. She seemed to feel the same way because without a word she came up and put her arm around me. I really enjoyed the next part – she turned away for a bit, and it being time to do so, I disappeared and the next time she saw me I was on stage! 🙂 That won me points, clearly, but then she was ALL about getting me to get her into Sage’s green room, and I’m sorry, but I’m a professional. No dice! Besides, I was tired! Time for bed, yo! Heh.

ANYWHO, after I played Buddy’s piece, Sage invited me to come out and play with one of his tunes. I asked the guitar player the key, and he didn’t know, he just yelled a couple chords in my ear. So I made some stuff up on the fly and was digging on the 2000 candles being held up. It was phat.

After that, I did some other stuff and I was back home in Oakland. I forget how this time line goes, but I remember being at the same triangle corner desk when I sent Suzy a set of lyrics for a new possible song as when I got a call from Buddy saying would you like to do some dates with Ani Difranco. (YES!!). I sent these lyrics, to this thing called Third Rail, which was about all the feelings and thoughts that had been swirling around while I rode around on the lonely BART trains at night. I tried for it to be a slam poem, but it came out too rhymey.

It starts with “I see a flash from the third rail, and I wonder where it’s from, it’s like a pinhole shot from a .38 that broke the aching sun”.

Well I sent it to Suzy to see what she thought, and she wrote back right away and said she’d been crying. She liked it. It moved her to tears. That kind of thing doesn’t happen every time, but when it does, MAN, that’s cool stuff. So I made it into this song, which is kind of odd because it has no choruses. It has pianos and guitars by my friend Eric and this ethereal feel (I think). And I learned to play it (VERY SIMPLY) on the piano, and did it around Oakland sometimes. The point, I guess, is that it was kind of an exciting time. Bigger shows, people being moved, etc. I did five dates with Buddy and Ani Difranco where all I had to do was play 4 minutes and take in the sights. I even got paid twice as much to handle merch sales at Buddy’s table! HA! The funnest show was at The Mountain Winery, where my fingers were slightly slow from it being a chilly outdoor venue, I’d forgotten my sustain pedal but Todd (Ani’s bassist) couldn’t tell, and I didn’t have to sell merch because the venue handled it, so I got to watch Ani’s whole show from the side of the stage. YEAH! Or was it L.A.? That was cool because Buddy and I went swimming at Todd’s apartment’s pool, got some good eats, and everybody sang happy birthday to Ani before the show and ate cake. She was 7 months pregnant and we got to meet her husband and everything. It was fun times.

Anyway, the song Third Rail is on an album (Bleed) and such, but I thought I’d give it to you for free here. Because why the hell not? This here is the “dirty single” version, which technically is unreleased although it’s not really different than the album version (it just has a crazy intro cut out but it still has swear words 🙂 ).

So here – download the Third Rail dirty single here (it’s not that dirty).

I think things have gotten a lot less lonely and more inspiring since then, so if you want to hear how that progression has gone, you can check out my new thing Livin Is Bling here. I’d be delighted to hear what you think!

Cheers,

Aaron

February 22, 2009 by Aaron

aaron j. trumm, bleed, nquit music, third rail

Another one I can play and sing (a version of). I just realized how that’s not usually news. But I really could never do that so it’s exciting.

My friend Larry wrote about this song in his music blog, 365 Songs.

I was really touched by what he had to say. That’s kind of the point of his music blog, is to write something profound about people’s songs, and hopefully, that’ll be pretty moving to the artists. It really is. You go all your life making this shit and being self centered but the point is you’re NOT just a selfish prick, you want to move and affect other people. You want them to listen, of course, to what you have to say, but the reason is you hope you can touch them.

I sent the lyrics of this when I first wrote them down to my friend Suzy (mentioned in previous blog entry) and she cried. Sent them to Tamara, who was notoriously unmovable, and she said she was flabbergasted.

So the point is not to brag as much as to just be present to that and say “wow something worked, something was honest enough and caring enough to move people”.

The song moves me, I really like the words. I don’t know how it was me that wrote ’em. They’re not works of complex Shakespearean genius, they’re just honest or something. I don’t know really.

The beginning is an actual message that Eric (guitar player Eric, if you follow this blog, which I know you don’t, because I’m watching the stats), recorded. I had left that message at 5 in the morning after this weird evening where I went down to this bar and was writing poetry while this rock band played. I saw this girl with this sort of built plastic surgery body but kind of hot in that playboy sort of way, and I looked at her, wrote her off as too much for me, and went away. Well this band was playing and she was sitting about two chairs away and just suddenly reached over and scratched my head with all four fingers, like from front to back – not like painfully but like sexually. So I went over there.

It was really loud and what I thought she said was “wanna fuck?” and so I just said “YES!” but reallly she’d said “wanna bump?” – and so immedietly she’s offering me a fingernail full of what I was told by a more savvy friend was “glass”, which in that case meant a mix of coke and meth. She gave me two bumps of this stuff – not sure when the 2nd was. I was also of course drinking like mad. So I was hangin all over this chick the rest of the night, figurin ahh gonna get laid by a freaky playboy drug slut. Yay.

Well something happened where a couple of total strangers really needed a ride home bad, way out in North Houston, so I stuffed them in my truck and told the chick I’d be right back, and drove them – drunk of course – (I no longer do crap like that)

Then I had no idea where I was or how to get back, and I was alone in this half ghetto and so I just started sort of driving, trying to feel my way back. So while I was drunk, driving, lost in the dark, I called Dustin up in Cali on the cell phone. Boy was he worried. I was trying to get him to guide me home, but he’d never even BEEN to Houston. What a trip. Then at one point I informed him that “oops I’m going the wrong way on Highway 59 freeway” and he thought I meant the WRONG WAY but I just meant I was headed in the wrong direction. I fixed that, felt my way back, and found that chick again.

She had lost some of the intensity of interest, but I was still able to sit with her. Only problem was I’d developed some mighty gas and was farting her out. I didn’t tell her it was me but she kept really being sensitive “what is THAT SMELL??? OMG!!” and so it all fizzled away.

And I had work as a stage hand for some university graduation or something that I had to arrive at at 7:30AM and it was 5AM. So I called Eric when I got home and ended up saying “fuckin fuckin fuckin fuckin”.

Hmmm. But that may not be the story I should tell. Maybe I should be talking about the lyrics. Flash forward a year or so and I’ve moved to Oakland and me and Dustin are there and I’m alone on the Bart train late at night, trying to get home. For the life of me I can’t figure where I would’ve been. On a plane? At work? At a venue?

That whole experience in the Bay Area was an experience in watching homelessness, feeling homeless, watching and feeling lonliness (even though we had 3 of us in the apartment and quite a crew of stragglers and community, it was still really lonely). I was sitting there in the train looking out into the darkness. The whole place is one huge huge huge urban area. There is no part of California really that’s not an Urban area. It’s basically one big city from San Diego to just south of Napa. With a few exceptions.

So I used to either stand on my friend Teresa’s balcony or look out the window of the train into the unending field of lights wondering if there was anything good to find out in it. I was doing this and I saw this flash come from the electrified third rail and I really did wonder what it was.

I wrote down the first line “sometimes I see a flash from the third rail and I wonder where it’s from, it’s like a pinhole shot from a .38 that broke the aching sun” and thought I was gonna write a clever slam poem, but it didn’t come out that way. It came out as this rhyme and for me at the time, the whole cleverness of it was the triplets and way I was going to rap it. I figured its cleverness was the rhythm, and I almost didn’t even finish the thing because I didn’t think anything of the content, but then Suzy cried and I looked at it again.

I dunno man. I dunno if I can explain the lonely hopeless vastness of urban california, and how you feel like you’ve disappeared into a chasm, and you can barely survive and you don’t even know why you would, and the sort of saddened freedom you get from just sitting there on the train staring at the ridiculous pincushion of light and steel and concrete. I can really feel that feeling when I listen to this mix though.

God it makes me want to cry, really, and just sort of drop to my knees in the dirt and thank god for my family and having got out of there. I miss my boys, especially Dustin, but man. That place is strange. And yeah, listening to the song is making me appreciate things now. Especially having this feeling of suddenly the ground just reappearing beneath my feet and this utter relief. Relief from the fuckin Third Rail flash thingymabob.

There’s actually some other subject matter in the actual lyrics (you may remember me mentioning how the musical energy trumps the lyrical content in a song for me in the last entry – or not) – about darkness and giving the sun a break – neat stuff that I can’t really speak on right now but I’ll paste the lyrics.

sometimes I see a flash from the third rail and I wonder where it’s from
it’s like a pinhole shot from a .38 that broke the aching sun
I look to daylight for the answers but there’s nothing left to ask
and daylight just laughs and breaks his foot off in my ass
sometimes its way too bright in the grainy place with this gathering of souls
and just to get a sense of dark we need that little hole
even the sun needs help some days to make it through the cold
’cause answering every question in the world can get a little old
it’s like a way tall man began his day by sharpening a stick
and gave the light a little prick since it was feeling sick
and on the other side of this broken ball of dirt we call the Earth
a little woman in a scarf begins to say a prayer

she says “Release the sun from all its woes and I will be your slave
let 70 and 21 begin afresh today”
and the little woman made a pact with everybody tall enough
to give the god of heat a little break and let the cold come in
so every day a little baby dies or someone chokes
or someone hits a stroke of bad luck and ends up in a box
behind a fence inside a vast expanse of dust
and every evening someone lingers in a broken doorway shallow
and he knows he’ll have to sleep tonight on concrete wet with breath
and when he wakes up it’ll rain and no one walking by will care

but it’s a cost, he pays it gladly so the rest of us can see
we call him crazy but he’s just a prayer sent all the way from somewhere else
and everyone in Columbine or Red Lake, Minnesota
will shed another 7 years of tears we’ll use to lubricate
the stones we’ll use to sharpen every stick
that every tall man needs to prick
a little pinhole in the sun who aches for someone to appreciate
the days we’re sitting in the sand and nothing in the sky
can contemplate another strategy to make us hate this nutty fate

I remember everything I said when I was mad
I can’t believe the things I’ve seen
I can’t believe the things I’ve had
I jerked my mind off in my liver
and I waited for it to cum
now everybody’s watching me
and can’t believe the shit I’ve done
I stare off into empty space when I look in people’s eyes
it’s like this train has got a hold of me and I need a new disguise

I see a flash from the third rail and I wonder where it’s from
it’s like a pinhole shot from a .38 that broke the aching sun
now what it’s gonna take to give the light a goddamn fucking break
I can’t believe the things we leave
I can’t believe the things we take…
I see a flash from the third rail and I wonder where it’s from
it’s like a pinhole shot from a .38 that broke the aching sun

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