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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