THE WYMAN WEEKLY

Underemployed. Unattached. Unimpressed.

Issue 22 September 12,1996

 

 

 

So I’m walking down the east sidewalk of Hennepin and am crossing 9th Street after the Neil Young show last Saturday. I’m in the middle of the crosswalk with the sign still saying “walk” and traffic’s backed up on 9th to at least LaSalle and some folks starts honking their horns. Always such a useful ploy, especially when the light is still red. Fueled by one of those aquariums of Gluek’s and by Neil’s rendition of “Sedan Delivery”, I stop and turn to wave at the cars, figuring that they’ve read issue #21 and are voicing their appreciation. “Thank you! Thank you!” I yell as I briefly wave and then continue on across the street. Waiting for me on the sidewalk are two cleancut young men who were crossing in front of me, no doubt on their way home from the yuppiefied Rock Bottom Brewery. “Ya tryin’ to get our asses kicked?” one yells at me. I shrug and smirk and don’t bother trying to explain the responsibilities of being a role model.

 

THIS ONE GOES OUT TO THE ONE I LOVE

 

Neil Young played “Down by the River” which my older, wiser Neilhead buddies informed me he rarely plays. And yeah, the song is loud and electric; but it’s still part of Neil’s folkie leanings in that it has the chorus of “down by the river / I shot my baby” thereby following the folk tradition of singing songs about killing the one you love. So as Neil and Crazy Horse jammed this song out, my mind faded (me being of short attention span) into thoughts of what are my Top Five Songs About Killing the One You Love. So here they are, in no particular order ‘cept the one I came up with to make some semblence of a flow.

 

5) “Cocaine Blues” - Johnny Cash: a coked-up Willy Lee shoots his baby down “because she made me slow / I thought I was her daddy but she had five more.” On Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison it’s played before men who probably lived it.           

 

4) “99 to Life” - Social Distortion: Cash-indebted punkers sing of a man who killed his lady ‘cause he “thought she’d be true” and she wasn’t, or maybe he just thought she wasn’t. The weapon used to do the deadly deed is a knife so I bet the NRA is BIG on this song.

 

3) “Hey Joe” - Jimi Hendrix Experience: The tale is by now familiar. An unfaithful lover and another death. A ton of bands covered this one back in the sixties, but you gotta take Jimi’s version for his “and that ain’t too cool” vocal aside commenting on Joe’s lady messing around. Hot off of their “Cop Killer” controversy, Body Count covered this tune on the Hendrix tribute album a few years back and no one raised a protest as (I read this somewhere and wish I had thought of it) it is apparently okay to sing about killing your lady but not okay to sing about killing law enforcement officials - which is another big theme in folk music (check out “Pretty Boy Floyd.”) Soundgarden covered “Cop Killer” during the ‘92 Lollapolooza tour and now has a new song that starts out with what sounds like a mandolin or banjo and has a chorus of “I shot my love today / will you cry for me?” thereby further solidifying their folkie credetntials.     

 

2) “Point Blank” - Bruce Springsteen: I’ve had late-night barroom arguments with friends as I maintain that the narrator of this song is singing of killing his old girlfriend but others say it’s an allegorical killing. Years ago I heard a live bootleg of my brother’s where the song is scarier than The River version. The girl is hooked on drugs and wandering the streets of New York trying to score another fix and gets killed in the process. (Okay I’ll confess: I’ve never had an argument about this song ever.)

 

1) “Legs” - PJ Harvey: And because decades of men singing about doing bad things to women (notice the narrators of these songs almost always seem to blame it on the victim - yeah, tell it to the judge) is bound to cause some sort of backlash, PJ Harvey took it upon herself to turn the tables for her gender and makes all of the above murderers look like little babies. This brutally beautiful song’s opening line is “did I tell you you’re divine / did I when you were alive” and ends with “I might as well be dead / but I could kill you instead.” You don’t wanna know the title significance. (“Did it hurt you when you bled?” she asks.) I’ll take the version from 4-Track Demos, because it’s better than the Rid of Me version and plus I wanna piss Steve Albini off.

 

TRAINSPOTTING

 

I finally went and saw Trainspotting last weekend. It was good and the guy who played the leading character, Ewan McGregor (he was the guy with long hair in Shallow Grave), did an excellent job and I would even say his performance was on par with Matt Dillon’s in Drugstore Cowboy and Dillon is one of my favorite actors and Drugstore Cowboy (a favorite movie) is about drugs, and so it Trainspotting. This movie isn’t for the squemish, as since the advent of Tarantino, movie makers seem to be in a contest to up the ante on grossouts. Another warning: it takes place in Scotland and doesn’t have subtitles, so due to those accents you sit there and wonder what the hell some of the characters are saying. I never understood one word out the mouth of one main character, but luckily he was a good actor so I just read the expressions on his face.

 

JUNK

 

The drug of choice in Trainspotting is heroin and Newsweek, those bastards, had a recent cover story about the current fascination with heroin and the piece starts off with the writer trying to be IN by saying she used to do all the right heroin-related things without ever touching the drug. Idolizing Keith Richards, she constantly listened to Exile on Main Street. So? I mean it’s great she didn’t touch the stuff but everyone knows Sticky Fingers, not Exile, is the Stones’ heroin album. Exile was more concerned with reds, greens, blues, speed and being mythical.

 

If jamming needles in your arm is the latest in chic fashion, I’m way up on the hip meter as I get my allergy shot faithfully every month. And instead of nodding off and looking pathetic, I get to sit in the waiting room after my fix and read pathetic magazines like Newsweek. I have to sit there for thirty minutes in case I have a reaction and my esophagus swells up and they have to do a trachetochmy on me. But that danger just makes it so much more exciting.

 

PAUL WESTERBERG

 

I wasn’t too thrilled with Eventually, but Westerberg knocked me out back in 1993 at First Avenue and we all know the real test of a rock ‘n’ roller is how he or she comes off live. Still, I was wary sitting up in my balcony seat at the State Theatre as Westerberg had said in a recent interview that he was tired of loud guitars posing as rock ‘n’ roll. The thought of Westerberg being some kind of a crooner didn’t thrill me. When he came out wearing a doublebreasted grey pinstripe suit, white shirt, red tie and big red carnation I wondered what the hell was going on, but he proceeded to play mostly rockers through the night. You see, Westerberg live isn’t a rock ‘n’ roll pose, it’s the real thing. Surprisingly, Westerberg genuinely seemed to be enjoying himself (unlike 1993) throughout the show and when he told us “fuck you” it came off in a big brotherly way instead of a pissed off way. Lots of Replacements stuff was played (significant stat: songs from Pleased to Meet Me outnumbered the ones from 14 Songs 6-2), he made witty wisecracks between songs and did such a good show that he kept my eyes on him and off of the babe with the red miniskirt sitting way down below me on the main floor.