"Words are only words but we turn them into gifts... then we seem confused as their meaning slowly shifts"

Behind "a flagless moon" - #6 in a series

From time to time I will post pieces like this that will examine the ideas and motivations behind the songs on my new album beneath a flagless moon.

 

THIS CRAZY WORLD

The initial spark that led me to create this song, I think, was taking in all that is happening politically in America right now. It’s beyond stupid. Mindless is a word that springs to mind. Uncaring is another. America has always valued success. It is a country built on free enterprise and entrepreneurial drive. But then somewhere along the road, relatively recently, those things became so single-minded that all sense of community and society was thrown out of the window. By one political party at least.

I have said before I feel sorry for long-term, old-style Republicans because their party has been stolen by narrow-minded, religiously-blinded, racist extremists. I know how hard it is to give up on something that meant a lot to you but if this country is to survive with anything like the humanity the founding fathers built into it from day one, we have to deliver not only the presidency but also both houses of Congress and as many state governorships as possible to the Democrats in November. It's as simple as that. Because any notion of shared power and shared responsibility will not work. It’s what has pushed President Obama into some unfortunate compromises during his first term. His intentions were always better than the legislation that ended up being passed – purely because of the bloody-minded negativism of the Republicans, not only in Washington but, at its worst, at the state level. Governors will be recalled – which is great – but we have to learn from the horrendous mistakes this country made in November 2011 when people used local appointments to complain about a president who was “failing” only because their own people were blocking him every step of the way.

If you believe women are second class citizens, who should be popping out babies (preferably Republican babies) at a rate to rival the original baby boom, if you believe black Americans should return to being second class citizens, if you believe that the children of illegal immigrants, born here in America through no choice of their own, are second class citizens – or rather should never be citizens – then you are a Republican. If you answered no to any of the above, you are not. A realization that I hope millions of Americans come to before November of this year.

So, you can see why I called my song THIS CRAZY WORLD! It truly is. Issues we thought were resolved decades ago have somehow come roaring back. Blatant racism masquerading as protection of American freedoms. Blatant corporate crimes masquerading as the American belief in free enterprise. The rich getting richer while the poor get poorer being, incredibly, defended as the American way. It’s hard to know what to say or how to turn this fucking disaster around.

I was sitting watching another beautiful New Mexican sunset when the idea of days being “burned” came to me. “The sun comes up, the sun goes down, another day is burned.” It was then a logical step to ask what we did with that day that we can never get back again. “Our eyes open, our eyes close, another lesson learned?…no”

It seems, right now, that we have learned nothing. I hope I am wrong and that we will soon see a demonstration of what we have learned unleashed with a sweeping return to caring for our fellow citizens and non-citizens alike in this country.

“Nothing seems to change, we’re still the ones to blame, and this crazy world goes on just the same.” The second line of the chorus changes every time to match the verse before it but it essentially captures the heart of the song – nothing seems to change. And we are still the ones to blame because change comes from each individual heart. You cannot – although many do – blame President Obama for not delivering the change he promised when you directly or indirectly prevented him from doing so. Anyone who voted for any Republican last November has absolutely no grounds for complaining. Anyone who sits on their ass this November and doesn't vote, equally has no right to complain. We decide government before it can decide anything!

The second verse is more personal. Surrounded by seemingly contradictory religious noise (Christianity teaches care for your fellow human beings – but you wouldn't think so listening to the absolute crap spouted by some of its followers) I took a slightly more Buddhist theme in writing, “A child is born, an old man dies, the circle goes around. A great oak falls with no one there, so doesn’t make a sound.” It’s all part of what I then call “the endless cosmic game.” It seemed to me that this sense of progress followed by inexplicable people who want to return everything to how it was a century ago is indeed a game. It’s as if we don't actually want to achieve a peaceful, rewarding, productive life for all the citizens of earth because there’s too much money to be made from not getting there! It would be easy to say that each generation has to repeat the mistakes of earlier ones, to learn for itself, but right now we have implausible, unjustifiable thinking from people old enough to know better - old enough to learn from the mistakes of the past.

“A wise man speaks, a fool speaks too, and promises are made. But which is which, and what is what, it’s all a sad parade.” I think I'd just heard Newt Gingrich pompously and with no possible chance of delivering on his promise, say that if he were elected president, gas would be back down to $2 a gallon. Why Newt should have any more influence over the global buying and selling of oil than anyone else including the president baffled even his fellow Republicans (well, some of them at least). Absolute unmitigated bullshit – from someone who thinks he’s qualified to lead this country! I happen to think the word “wise” is quite applicable to Obama. Yes, a little inexperienced at first, but essentially a wise man who learns fast. I would not use the word “wisdom” in a sentence containing the name of any of the Republican challengers – and certainly not when describing Mitt Romney, the apparent winner of that embarrassing contest.

For a man who does not believe in god, that entity makes quite regular appearances in my writing. This time around I thought I’d deliberately upset some of the more traditional believers by referring to god as “she.” Forgive me my little bit of fun. The second line is a little more serious – “We don’t need a god to see how far the apple fell.” You would think that people of religious faith would be the first to see how inhumane some of the attitudes (and would-be policies) are that are currently being espoused by the Right. Returning to a rich white male dominated America is, according to them, the only way to save this country. May their god forgive them – because I won’t.

Well, at least he said one thing right! Not sure he believed it.

My latest favorite comment @Jango

"Great tune, can't put my finger on a voice but Tom Petty X'd with Bob Dylan = Great!!!"

The man who taught me to C

Yesterday saw the passing of guitar legend Bert Weedon at the age of 91. 

Bert was one of the first wave of electric guitar players...having hits of his own, that foreshadowed the later success of instrumental bands like The Shadows, as well as backing many famous artists including Frank Sinatra.

But what Bert is equally remembered for is his book Play In A Day. It has sold over two million copies. While that title was more than a little of an over promise, it was key in getting millions of people - and I was one of them - to feel that learning to play the guitar was not an impossibility. Bert avoided the standard, piano-based method of teaching music, avoided scales and such and had the first few lessons teach the basic chords. So in a short time you could sit there strumming a C chord and getting a decent sound out of your guitar - which encouraged you to keep trying, keep learning. 

It worked. Players from Eric Clapton to Paul McCartney, from John Lennon to Pete Towshend credit Bert and his book with helping them in the early days. A nice reminder that even musical greats were once bumbling novices!

So, thanks Bert. I doubt that without you I would have been playing guitar for nearly 50 years now. Somewhere I still have my copy of Play In A Day. I should dig it out and pass it on to a want-to-be guitarist. 

Sad. I just realized looking at that photo...they are all gone. Bert, Jim Marshall and Leo Fender. 

Behind "a flagless moon" - #5 in a series

From time to time I will post pieces like this that will examine the ideas and motivations behind the songs on my new album beneath a flagless moon.

I'LL BE THERE FOR YOU

A song over twenty years old finally sees the light of day. It’s true, these words were written that long ago. Along the way they have had maybe four different melodies attached to them. I even posted an earlier version under the heading “From the archives.” You can find it using the search window over there on the right. But even that was not the first version.

Obviously a song called “I’ll Be There For You” must involve a “you” – but too much time has passed to go into detail about who that was. Let’s just say she was real and, at the time, so were the sentiments of this lyric. I think I wrote somewhere, once upon a time, that the “offer to be there for her was real but I’m glad she never took me up on it.” That’s not meant to sound cold, it's just a recognition that, later, I wasn’t willing to live up to my own words.

Maybe it’s because of the time separation from the events that made me write these words, that I continued to search for the version of the song I was happy to put on an album – the song now had a life of its own, disconnected from the person who inspired it. I think the effort paid off. It’s certainly my favorite version of all the ones that exist. And Jim Oliver’s great keyboard work also helped cement this as being the version that comes the closest to how I'd always heard this song but couldn't quite nail in the past.

The words speak for themselves. I think their simplicity is what always drew me back to wanting to write better music for them.

Earlier versions, I felt, were always too sad. Yes, the song talks of dreams that are “beyond repair” and hopes that are “in retreat” but ultimately it’s a love song – the singer sets up these scenarios so he can make the promise, “I’ll be there for you.” But, of course, we do not know if the girl in question actually feels that her dreams or hopes are beyond saving. Something tells me all these years later that they never were.

I read somewhere that one of the greatest clichés in songwriting is the notion of being there to “catch someone when they fall.” And I cannot disagree. So here I had fun with it by saying I'd be there “just before you fall.” So the potential fall, like those broken dreams is an invention of the writer and may not have happened whether he was there or not!

My favorite line in this song – and strange as it seems, it is in a verse that was omitted completely from early versions – is “Call me when tomorrow seems too far for you to get to from where you are.” I think I like it for its optimism. Today not working out? Don't worry, there’s always tomorrow. As for “I’ll drive you there in my hired car” that’s an odd one. Why the car is hired, I’m not sure. It injects a little distance, a little of the impersonal, into a song that is supposed to be about a close relationship. But then when I look at it again, that sense of distance pervades the whole song. Maybe that’s why distance was needed to make it work.

One last observation: we did indeed used to hang out “in that little place down on Prince Street” – the Prince Street Bar & Grill, which today is a shoe store!

 

Levon Helm (1940 - 2012)

The Band with Bob Dylan 1974.

 

One of the stunning group of multi-instrumental, multi-talented guys who came together under many names but eventually became The Band, Levon Helm was a superb drummer, as well as singer and actor.

Now he's gone. 

"He passed away peacefully at 1:30 this afternoon surrounded by his friends and bandmates," Helm's longtime guitarist Larry Campbell tells Rolling Stone. "All his friends were there, and it seemed like Levon was waiting for them. Ten minutes after they left we sat there and he just faded away. He did it with dignity. It was even two days ago they thought it would happen within hours, but he held on. It seems like he was Levon up to the end, doing it the way he wanted to do it. He loved us, we loved him."

Larry Campbell, himself an extremely talented musician and former Dylan band member, produced both of Levon's more recent albums - a comeback after his first battle with throat cancer took his voice for many years - both of which, Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt, were Grammy winners. 

Check them out. And for those not familair with his work, check out The Band album Music From Big Pink (with the song The Weight - sung by Levon - that Rolling Stone listed at number 41 in its list of all time greatest rock songs) and also Bob Dylan's album Planet Waves (not well received at the time of its release but now seen as a classic reunion of Bob and his earlier backing band.)

Few people have left so much great music behind as Levon Helm. 

 

Two songs from BENEATH A FLAGLESS MOON recognized. And more.

 

I'm thrilled to report that I have got three finalist slots in the upcoming NMMA. Two songs from beneath a flagless moon are among the five finalists in their category.

In addition, davetutin.com is a finalist in the Best Artist Website category. My site was designed and built by my good friend Brian Fallon.

Finally, I cannot let it slip by that the producer of my next album, and stunning guitar virtuoso, Jacy Oliver also has two finalist slots with his band CassoVita (drummer Ben Durfee will also be on my next release). See them live here.

Behind "a flagless moon" - #4 in a series

From time to time I will post pieces like this that will examine the ideas and motivations behind the songs on my new album beneath a flagless moon.

THE ROAD TO NEVER MIND

This song was originally called The Last Road, and each verse ended with “going down the last road” instead of “on the road to never mind” – but I was never happy with the way that worked although I had very strong feelings for the song overall.

For guitar players out there, this tune is quite difficult to figure out just from listening to the recording. My guitar is tuned to open Dminor – DADFAD – but I have a partial capo holding down just the 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th strings at the fifth fret. This is how the wide gap between the bass notes of the three-chord walk-down that forms the basis of the song and the higher tone of some of the other chords is achieved. I get strange looks from some people when I play this song live – it looks like I’m playing below a capo, which is impossible. But once players discover partial capos it opens up a whole new world of sounds you can get from your guitar. Randall Williams has a great little book called The Partial Capo (The Basics, Tips, Tricks and More) – it’s published by Hal Leonard Corporation and comes complete with a CD so you can hear the examples given in the book.

This is the capo I use on The Road To Never Mind. Some people think there are two guitar parts on the recording but it’s all just one, no overdubs.

So, to the lyrics. This was always going to be a bit of an epic song. It was meant to be a man looking back at pretty much every aspect of his life. And I knew that before I started writing.

But it starts with a little bit of humility…”No one here is listening to a single word you say – but you know yourself so well you’re gonna say it anyway.”

Now if I were famous then this would rank as fake humility, but in my case it’s closer to the truth. But there’s still a bit of contradiction in the fact that since this is a recorded song then someone is listening. Still, I can live with the sentiment if you can. Especially since it’s followed by, “that’s how it all gets easier, how anger is confined”. It’s more about the act of writing and its cathartic capabilities than it is about concerns over whether or not anyone is listening.

And then the first verse, like all the rest, ends with, “On the road to never mind”. Why did I change it from the earlier version? Because ‘the last road” was too poorly defined. It sounded too fatalistic. And since later verses went quite far back into the past how could it be the last road? No, what I was always trying to say was that something happens to us as we go through life picking up learning, having experiences that range from epiphanies to almost mind-numbing boredom. We chill, basically.

What seems to be of the most intense importance when we are young softens into something else as we age. We realize we are not the first person ever to fall insanely in love with someone. We realize we are not the center of the universe. We realize that every challenge, problem, or opportunity we are faced with, every feeling we feel, every emotion we wrestle with has all happened before. It’s all been done, felt, even written about since we acquired the ability to communicate these things. And before that they were probably still part of us but were experienced in silence. It’s simply our little corner of the human experience. It just feels more intense when it's you rather than someone else.

So that’s essentially what this song is about. It’s the path of a life - mine – that leads from the fiery extremes of youth to the moment when we are able to say, no matter what we are facing, “Well, never mind.”

Verse 2. This is still taking the overall view that verse one did. I think we all feel that as subsequent generations go their own ways, which they have every right to do, the things that mattered to us get discarded. I grew up as part of a generation that thought music could and would change the world. It didn’t – except for us. Music is now disposable background noise. And if that’s the way the people buying it want it, then it has to be okay. “They’re just moving forward, leaving you behind.”

Verse 3. Parents. We don't pick them. We can't change them. We just learn to love them – a process that takes a different amount of time depending on the circumstances. I read somewhere that we should not blame our parents for anything after we turn 20. That makes sense to me. It’s around that time that we figure out they were, “simply flying blind.”

Verse 4. Paris. Personal. The memories that with time change from gut-wrenching intensity to warm proof of a life well lived. The flagless moon of the album title reappears in this song. So we know this all happened a long time ago.

Verse 5. “Distant Asian rain” – something changed obviously. The anger somehow got “washed away” but because all the feelings can never be unique, “the questions still remain” to be asked by others in other times in other places. We have a tendency to “enshrine” our own answers as if they are the only ones. But they just become, “dusty”.

Verse 6. Loving someone and telling them you do are two quite separate things. I have seen relationships fail because one person stopped telling the other how they felt. Even though the feelings themselves may not have changed. This is disastrous. Is this one of the downsides to progressing along “the road to never mind”? When we are young we tend to say what we feel. As we age we risk letting “never mind” become the norm. Fight it!

Verse 7. Dangerous territory – “I don't believe in god”. There it is stated plainly, no skirting the issue, no pandering to an audience that largely does not agree with my position. But it's not as bad as it sounds (to those who do believe). “There’s no place where faith can be safely redefined” – I may not be the simple non-believer the first line suggests. I believe we have a spiritual aspect to our nature – that’s the only word that comes close to what I mean. What I do not have any time for whatsoever is organized religion. They all manipulate their followers through fear. And more wars have been fought over who follows the one true god, that there is absolutely no question in my mind that our progress would have been much faster without religion. But the redefining will not happen during my lifetime. Never mind.

Verse 8. Back to the main theme: “the past just keeps repeating with the names and faces changed” – experiences we think are painfully personal turn out to be universal. Every generation looks at the ones that come later and thinks, “That’s not me.” But that’s the way it’s worked down through time. Which is why we ask that “tomorrow look with kindness on all that we declined” on our inescapably personal trips “on the road to never mind.”

I want to thank Jim Oliver for his beautiful keyboard work on this song. I asked him to give me a hint of The Moody Blues, a band I loved growing up, and he did just that while still letting it be me.

 

Jonathan Pryce gives his all...but San Francisco doesn't want it

On a recent trip to San Francisco we were lucky enough to get tickets to see Jonathan Pryce in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker.

I met Jonathan many years ago - he provided the voiceover for several of the TV commercials I wrote.

He was an exceptionally nice man. In fact many of the actors I met in this way were wonderfully un-celebrity-like. John Hurt, Ian Holm, George Clooney, Frank Langella were all a joy to work with. Then there were the others who shall remain nameless.

Anyway, I take this digression to explain why I am always interested in what Jonathan is doing. His career is littered with amazing performances. So I was fairly sure we were in for another. And we were.

As one reviewer said...

"Clarity is not commonly thought to be one of Harold Pinter’s signature virtues. But when his work is done right — and the penetrating British import production of “The Caretaker” starring two-time Tony winner Jonathan Pryce at San Francisco's Curran Theatre is nearly flawless — there’s a dreamlike lucidity that will have you seeing deep into the underground pathways of human nature."

Nearly flawless. I agree.

But sadly the place was half empty the Saturday night we saw the production. And the applause at the end was polite but not in keeping with the tour-de-force performance the audience had just witnessed.

You can never know what a performer is thinking as he or she takes that bow at the end of a powerful, tiring and demanding perofrmance - and in this case, the second of the day - but from my seat just four rows from the stage I could see Jonathan glancing around the theater. Was he looking at the empty seats or the filled ones? Was he wondering where the standing ovation was? Was he wondering how much more he could give...what this audience wanted that they did not get?

I had a horrible feeling at that moment. And I want to apologize to my old acquaintance (it would be going too far to say friend) for not being the first to stand and start the response his performance merited. I was too in shock at the half-hearted response of the room!

It was not the perofrmances that night, everyone in the play is terrific. So was it the play itself? The critics don't seem to think so and nor did I. So it is the city? I think the sad answer may be yes.

I imagined this same performance at BAM in Brooklyn - where we saw John Tuturro and Patrick Stewart do great things with Becket and Shakespeare - and became convinced that it would have been a packed house and a very different reception.

Why this is I'm not sure. But it does not bode well for this kind of theater.

Delving into the depths of the human condition, wrestling with the words of great writers, putting more of yourself into another character than is probably safe for your own sanity, surely this is what great theater is all about.

Jonathan Pryce in The Caretaker is great theater. But I worry that this is not what most people are seeking when they go out on a Saturday night in San Francisco.

The production goes on tour after it's stop in the Bay Area. Catch it if you can.