“Green Broom”

    I don’t enjoy recording cover songs, but, if I ever had to, I would up-armor some old sweet song.  

    One Hundred English Folk Songs, edited by Cecil J. Sharp, originally published in 1916, adds another dimension to my collection of song books.  The song book is a collection of earlier songbooks:  Reverand Broadwood’s folk songs from Sussex, published in 1843, among them. 

    It’s fun to look up the song titles on You Tube to see how many versions are posted.  The song “Green Broom” pulls up dozens of different versions of the folk song.  The book of English folk songs from 1916 doesn’t mention “Green Broom” is actually of Irish origin. 

    After reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, I became more interested in songs and their transmission and dispersion. “Green Broom” was passed down through the centuries to all parts of the world.  The sheet music helped it survive, but other factors contributed to its longevity.  Credit for its long life has to be given the story the song tells:  in the case of “Green Broom” one could point to the fact that any man is made more attractive by having employment.  When young Jack sells brooms in the street, he is spotted by a lady in bloom.  Whether the lady is an old cougar isn’t mentioned yet somewhat implied.

    Parents of teen boys can surely relate to “Green Broom” as it questions whether a boy who lies in his bed until noon will ever be able to catch a lady in bloom.  Today, lads of the millennium generation suffer no short supply of ladies in bloom.  If they have any job at all they get hit-on by ladies from 16 to 76…and not necessarily for marriage.  Swarms of ladies peer from upstairs windows in need of a sleepy young lad crying ‘broom’ in the streets.

    Broom itself is a toxic herb – counter-indicated for pregnancy.  It’s the type of herb which can withstand a fire, growing back after its exposed half is scorched.  As an invasive plant with many species thriving and spreading in the United States,  other than rubbing it on the swelling of mosquito bites or taming wild horses, its flowers could still decorate country style weddings (if any such ceremonies remain of the old time Sussex variety).

    I’m not sure if Fairport Convention ever recorded a version of “Green Broom”?  It would interest me to listen to an electric version of the song played by them in their 60’s hippie style.  The true beauty of a great song shows up when you hear it  successfully played in different styles or varied combinations of instruments. 

    Bob Dylan wrote in Chronicles about when he showed up to play with The Grateful Dead in preparation for their tour, and they went down too long of a list of his songs.  He had just come off a tour with Tom Petty and was most familiar with songs from those shows.  How can someone who’s written so many songs be expected to play any particular one of them by request?  Perhaps the best practice would have been for them to play “Green Broom” together, with Jerry Garcia playing an electric dulcimer with a glass bottle slide.  Classic folk songs offer that common language, one to which players can bring their own unique talents.  

 

 

  

 

 

 

     

    

Roll Over, Carl Philipp Emanual.

    Try composing a song from the bass part up.  Attempt with all your might to cause Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to roll over in his Baroque era grave.  Don’t just do it for mankind, do it as part of a steampunk post-apocalyptic right-on, solid, power-to-the-people response to whatever it is preventing you from producing anything but electro-house.  To innovate Baroque style through songwriting, you have to pretend Schubert existed in the seventeenth century, and as if Scott Joplin had been made welcome in the parlors of musical authority back in that era. (Imagine how advanced music would be if diversity had existed four hundred years ago?)  

    Why not put Clara Schumann at the keyboards, if you can, in your imaginary steampunk band, playing a song written from the bass up, back in the times of basso continuo?  She could do so much more than light her crazy husband’s cigar.  And what about now?  Clara could clobber all alive today with a touched version basso absoluto.  To those already taking offense: please bare with me?  Her penetrating eyes fixed upon you as her left hand bangs out the bass line.  Ah, but she’s fancying Brahms…she’s craves the rotund.

   Most books I’ve read say you should begin with the lyrics when songwriting.  The hip-hop books I’ve read suggest always beginning with the drums, then adding bass, loops, and lyrics.  Books about music composition eventually tell you in their final chapters that you have many angles of approach to landing a finished piece.  You don’t have to always compose music in the same or most acceptable way.  No one slaps your wrist with a ruler for writing the bass part before any other, unless of course you really asked for it.  

    Try to keep in mind the vision of Charles Ives, when he shouted at members of the audience who had risen to leave the auditorium:  he pointed at some poor gentleman; told him to sit down and take it like a man.  What a trip it must have been for his Yale students back then.

    When composing from the bass up, some credence must be attributed to Mozart’s rule that a melody must remain pleasing to the ear.  What was pleasing to Mozart’s ear remains evident in his pieces; however, it’s unknown what he would find pleasing in modern times.  The modernist masters had no way to incorporate cantabile into any algorithmic for serial melodies; there’s no way to verify if a melody is singable other than to try to sing it.  Thelonious Monk may be more singable than  Schoenberg; but there are only so many hours in a day one can bicker about, back and forth, like a Mozart string quartet, over the subject of what is pleasing to the ear.

    “Augmented chords eagerly smash the south of troubles.”  An algorithm wrote the previous sentence.  It’s abstruse.  That, in and of itself, can add value.  The algorithm forms the sentence, but any meaning has to be brought to it by the reader.  The same thing can happen with a melody in a song, especially one written from the bass up.  The use of basso continuo can change the atmosphere of the expression to the point where it is ambiguous or becomes subject to interpretation.  Carl Philipp Emanual Bach understood this concept centuries ago.

    To lead from the bottom half, the unorthodox, is to step boldly into a dark alley beaming with confidence; perhaps wanting to score your bass line at a faster pace than your fingers allow, challenging your own abilities to catch up to the metronome tempo you set, and then adding thumping beats on top.  Good God, man!  Why digress with such nonsense?  Type something else.

    Perhaps you are overheard practicing what you’ve laid down – one track of fingered bass married in stereo to one track of picked bass; this may seem odd from the perspective of those who don’t record their music, so you have to remind them to read that book about Phil Spector, and to do so with comprehension.  

    I stood in the used book store reading about Phil Spector and his “wall of sound” technique.  A cute teen girl came right up to me and smiled.  She practically bumped her pink blouse into my arm.  I was reading, so the first I saw of her were her hot pink high heel shoes practically stepping on my New Balance cross trainers. (For the record, hot girls never bump into me, so I figured God was trying to tell me something about Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” recording style and reading for comprehension.) Anyways, the book said he used four acoustic guitars, two basses, two pianos, and then would add drums depending on the amount of room left in the mix; so, that’s where I got the idea to play the bass track twice and then merge to one stereo track.  The result sounds like a wall of bass compared to a recording of just one monophonic bass track.  

    Of course, the book says he recorded the acoustic guitars first, like Keith Richards did on Street Fighting Man.  The wall of sound is very evident on that recording.  There’s something about acoustic guitars that expand to fill the audio space available.

    If you’re still awake and have not yet dosed off, for this song, I will compose the upper register parts next, jamming section by section against what I’ve written for the bass.  I use computer notation software, and can select sections and jam.  My next post should be about layering riffs over the composed bass lines, working my way toward completion of the composition and recording. 

 

     

Oil Blooms Are Short Lived For The Perfect Cavemen Ideal

Oil blooms are short lived. The history of human culture hangs creative spurts upon walls, dashboards, storefronts, and utility vans. The concept of capturing the exact moment of a creative outburst has never had so many possible ways to plume.

Notes from another forehead: the third critical attribute with which to contend in relation to what was previously revealed, especially that stuff about the exact moment: let’s face it, if you are heterozygous for Z, that could be something rare indeed; when relative significance is mentioned by an intellectual such as White, you do get the sense of your own physical disturbance with a post-settlement process; and, those susceptible people, ones with sliced liver rather than chopped, compulsively explode with a variety of inner content via just as many or variable a means: things like conversation, plaster-of-Paris, bus rides, and increased taco consumption.

This suggested to people who never really lived, such as Robinson Crusoe, that some user queries, though they may be automated and performing a set of tasks put before them by some international mastermind from the hacker club at some remote middle school, that multiple document databases made accessible online to perfect cavemen – many of whom can’t even wash their own clothing or make themselves a salad for lunch, feel oxidized to some degree by the formidable ubiquity of the modern technological construct.

It is now time to tell you why, then, it will soon become necessary to carry a passport to enter some of America’s small towns; women playing the bass for alternative rock bands always know this and are approaching a zenith of understanding their inner systems of articulation, expressed by the onslaught of frustrating federal requirements to hit the road; they argue – not the least bit unjustly, that they already are a commodity, so how would they bottle that up and sell it as lemonade near neighborhood fruit stands? That, to them, is evidence of an existing “perfect cavemen” ideal.

The thought of J-Lo not able to hit her sales forecast sickens many of the industry’s top con artists, who fling blame upon the independent labels, rapidly filling with teen girls who wear their hair in such a fashion that it completely covers their face; and, little known to us average Joe’s, some of them do this solely to frustrate the federal security analysts watching them undress between shows.

As we enter the dark halls of garbage, seeking to define that which creates the oil blooms within the long swags of hair masking faces, we move with consistency to discover stylistic imitation of stylistic cultural lifestyles, begging for harsh winters across the prairies of ambivalence, to aesthetically disavow whatever the top moguls in the music industry dictate as cool. Those Haim girls…keep your eye on them! Yeah.

Sunglasses, Undead

After spending 9 years underground, my lost pair of Ray-Ban’s were unearthed while gardening.

Evolutionary Necessity

Certain expectations and practices develop around,
Conniving soothsayers or network conjurers,
Initiated by Hannah Montana shows, if you can, where
8-year old’s host makeover birthday parties,
Initiated by the mass media to instill senses of entitlement,
To spur consumption’s future tense,
Unconditional attention:
Between attacks of vomit,
Sticky notes lash out,
The beach scenes, the cupcakes,
The peanut butter and avocado wraps,
Must be posted on a basis of twelve times per hour,
Or one notices descriptive patterns of thematic choice;
Consider the black & white cupcakes with candles on top,
What deep and profound sensation,
Does clicking those counterpointing arrows form within
Telltale circulating patterns of hypothetical satiation,
And every five minutes anew: cupcakes, beaches, unblemished interiors;
How many Los Angeles gang hand signals must one know,
So as to form an omniscient perspective of tethered,
Oceanic and subtropical margins of pure and abysmal horror,
When measuring the body temperature of the amygdala,
Of one responsible for deciding to share that with followers,
Is it any wonder whatsoever that the new American Stasi,
The chamber of secrets in real time, if you will,
Chomping their sandwiches while scrolling posts,
Five miles below the surface of fenced federal areas,
All answer to the flip side,
As an evolutionary necessity.

“I Want Candy”

I drew this Little Audrey ‘fandom’ cartoon to ameliorate the desire for things we want as a personal motivational factor.

Stop Yearning and Start Earning

The VP, visiting the sales office, stood in the front of the small auditorium, not a wrinkle in her black business suit.  Frodo dimmed the lights so all the folks could view her PowerPoint slides.  Karl facetiously yelled out, “Sit down, Frodo!  I can see her just fine.”  Everyone laughed.  

Her basic message: stop yearning and start earning.  Get off the endless cycle of personal materialism and just follow the steps laid out before us to become top salespeople.  If we just do the job we’re supposed to do all the rewards will materialize in our favor.  Make the money first, and the desire to blow it all may not vanish entirely but will decrease proportionately with the work effort expended.

I had a little bit of trouble vanquishing the vision of that new bass guitar with the Union Jack top at the local guitar shop. It’s tone, I fancy, would totally add a smooth groove to my ever expanding musical menagerie. To me, there’s always existed that endless train track between desires, work, and reward.  It terminates at a vanishing point miles ahead of my feet.  

When the lights came up again, most of us were back to catching that three-ten to Yuma, but that VP caught her next flight out.  Adherence to the instruction manual had given her life a golden set of functional wings. 

 

 

 

 

Anatomical Distinction

Anatomical Distinction

gasmask

I made this drawing using a Bamboo drawing tablet.

Try On A Mirror Of Combinations

I recently walked into a clothing store in a different corridor.  A female sales clerk led me to a type of electronic mirror:  you stand in front of it and it scans your image, then it instantly displays you wearing various outfits.  You won’t ever have to try on clothes again prior to purchasing them. You stand before this “mirror of combinations” (I believe that’s what she called it) and your image is turned into a 3D animation which turns and twists as you do.   

The mirror of combinations showed me what I’d look like in various sport coats, suits, blue jeans, and pajamas, without my ever stepping into a dressing room.  I’m not sure how far behind this corridor’s technology is at present, but it can’t be too distant.  There are already 3D animation graphics, 3D movies, etc.  Why not a 3D mirror for clothing shoppers who want to see what they’d look like in certain combinations of clothing?  Maybe another 20 years?