keep your hands off the shade baby, no one gonna care when the moon goes dead
Yes, I’m still talking about being born in the ’60s, 1963 to be exact. Which means my pop music exposure reaches back a decade or two before that time—think Mairzy Doats or Dream a Little Dream—all the way up to now.
I just heard a great set on an indie station here and damn if I hadn’t heard this song in about 25 years.
The Dream Syndicate always sound like sex to me. Loud dark dirty sex. Trying not to be loud dark dirty sex. Sex like you are in your 20s. Sex and dancing and lowdown drunkenness. And more dirty sex. And something not quite wholesome. Drunken sex. Wrong sex. Bad sex. Bad good sex. Good bad sex. Sex because your dad is dead sex. Depression sex. Yes, you get the picture. Their trippy sound, the squanking guitar and steady rhythm. Steve Wynn.
I remember riding the subway in NYC, my first time there, 1982, with one of my best friends and we must have looked pretty ridiculous. Yes, we had our faux-punk clothes, but they really missed the mark in terms of New York and all the grit that went before, the real Punk movement just before our time and across the ocean to boot. Thankfully, we were a beautiful pair. Nobody minds too much if you are young and pretty. She was tall and thin, with long legs, a curvy butt, dark hair and dark-rimmed golden brown eyes. She was and always will be one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known. I had the boobs, the blond hair and the blue eyes, a bit more on the curvy swaying side. We never lacked for male attention.
We went to a club, god knows where, and rode the subway to the wrong place, drunk, at about 3 am. I think a taxi figured in after that, but who really knows? I know we got back to where we were staying with all of our limbs attached.
It really is a wonder that nothing terribly terrible ever happened to me when I was drunk. Not one car dent (those all happened later, in my mini-van, sober, married), not one incident of being somewhere I didn’t want to be, not one man I couldn’t name. I think I threw up only once in my life from drink. I never passed out unless it was in my own bed. I swear. But don’t think I’m not an alcoholic, because of that there is no doubt. Wouldn’t it be great if all drunks got out as scratch-free as I did?
I don’t mean to say I didn’t suffer, that I didn’t have a lot to learn that others seem to “get” simply by virtue of not being drunks. Like how NOT to burn cigarette holes in the roof of a car, the little things. But I drank, like any good alcoholic, because it spoke to me, like this music does, this dark sound that comes from the place we’re not supposed to look.
And their magnum opus.
The original studio version is not on youtube, but this is a close second. I can’t believe I used to make it through the whole thing. I musta been drinkin’.
twinklysparkles 