"Remember the Mountain Bed"
Words: Woody Guthrie
Music: Jeff Tweedy (Mermaid Avenue II)


Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves?
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds?
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
Face, breast, hips, and thighs
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled wood vines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did lie
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seed again.



First time I heard this song was at Lounge Ax. Tweedy opened with it during a solo show and it about made me (and the other 200 or so there) weep.
These words, put to the music Tweedy wrote for it, along with the fact that it's a seven minute-long chorusless song - that you never want to hear end - puts this in my top three.

I loomed so large on the horizon
People thought my windows,
Were stars

I was a teenage spaceship.




Thankyou Smog/Bill Callahan. This song has given me goosebumps, induced tears, sent me to a world of childhood fantasy, helped me grieve, made me feel glad to be alive. So many emotions on so many occasions. To me, it sums up everything that's poetically sad AND triumphant about being a child, an adult, and everything in between.

Bob Schick/Honor Role wrote:Every Thursday Sally
Brings in all her things
Dumps them on the office floor
So we can pick through and decide
The relationship of them to her
Now she's waiting while I'm thinking
She's deciding on the things I'll say
That she will be ignoring
And which ones she'll remember and repeat
She wantse an experts opinion
But really anyone who will listen
My number was in the book
So she called and then came over
She works, her husbands gone
Because of him there were no children
She works selling real estate
There's no one she can really talk to
She gets embarrassed by her passion
She gets embarrassed by her brains
There is no reason to be embarrassed
No reason to be ashamed
She wasn't always like this
She slowly grew this way
SHe had friends that she could talk to
Working her problems out that way
THen she got married
Lost some friends and time took more
OVer time they dwindled from neglect
She was alone when her husband died
Now she rolls up every Thursday
And we talk for an hour or so
About the loneliness she's feeling
And that she's sure she's not been cured
THe clock is tick tick tocking
And her checks just keep on popping
Into my mailbox
Don't tell me buddy
It gets hard to say no
Anyone could see it
It's half wrong, it's half right
But the money is the exchange
That keeps it going long past
The point where she's alright
Is it psychological addiction
To want to talk to someone who will listen?
Now she is staring at the ceiling
Waiting to find out what it is she's feeling
And all that i can do is try to be honest
And try to make do.

I usually don't give a shit about lyrics. This is the last song I listened to that really impressed me word-wise.

Connor

Untitled #12
Blind your head in catastrophe icicles
No-one’s fed in cycles led by cycles dead
Ask to shine the flag
Love is distance and blue sits like apples bite
And flows through our hands
I said ‘Hi’ to a man who shot his sister
Panned through the station
And jumped in front of a train
Said I’m a bit confused to meet you
Life’s what scissors do to a day
So their smiles pave the way
Sand drips with waves
And clouds my head cuz I’m a fortune fellah’s bed
And I’m the tunes played by the goons
Who ride in fairy’s wombs
And stole the road the other way
And sold tomorrow to yesterday and
I know the feeling of pushing you out of a building
Tiny people pulsating hit the sky
Still the ground got up and wiped your face
You expected to fly, wind up your misfortune
Sling ‘em to a Maitre-Dee
Who wears dead butterflies on his face
And is hoping to grow wings
He really wants to tell you
‘hey give your tears to today’
Grind yourself souvenirs under your stolen years
Hands in your pockets
Your hands getting numb been hurt in grinds jive
Do the avenues that seem to meet defeat you
Did you ever try to hug the sky behind your head
I walked forever sightseeing a screen
Shuffled a mean green ping
Dives head first into a hole in the water
Drives side to side like a floating machine
Dove dancing to a fable told to a sea of disintegration
Crawl to a celebration of dirt that leaves that taste of wine
Sucked from a hair that digs into the darkness
Full of the fair that my head rides.
I slide your kind through a ladder
Hanging on a star
Stray close so far
Away from the climb
A tape like section of introspection
To rewind would be to recline.
Hit the pounds underlying gently
Ride on the side
Tell your problems to zero
He’s got nothing to hide.

written by John Frusciante © 1994 American Recording

Kliuahysu

My friend played "Jolie Louise" by Daniel Lanois on our radio show yesterday. I'd forgotten about this song. So simple, so beautiful, so French Canadian.

This couplet, she is like the fake Italian, but is no. Is the Quebecois Englais:

My kids are small, 4 and 3
Et la bouteille, she's mon ami
I drink the rum 'til I can't see
It hides the shame Louise does not see


The rest:



Ma jolie, how do you do?
Mon nom est Jean-Guy Thibault-Leroux
I come from east of Gatineau
My name is Jean-Guy, ma jolie

J'ai une maison a Lafontaine
Where we can live, if you marry me
Une belle maison a Lafontaine
Where we will live, you and me
Oh Louise, ma jolie Louise

Tous les matins au soleil
I will work 'til work is done
Tous les matins au soleil
I did work 'til work was done
And one day, the foreman said
"Jean-Guy, we must let you go"
Et pis mon nom, y est pas bon
At the mill anymore...
Oh Louise, I'm losing my head
I'm losing my head

My kids are small, 4 and 3
Et la bouteille, she's mon ami
I drink the rum 'til I I can't see
It hides the shame Louise does not see
Carousel turns in my head
And I can't hide, oh no, no, no, no
And the rage turned in my head
And Louise, I struck her down
Down on the ground
I'm losing my mind, I'm losing my mind

En Septembre '63
Kids are gone, and so is Louise
Ontario, they did go
Near la ville de Toronto
Now my tears, they roll down
Tous les jours
And I remember the days
And the promises that we made
Oh Louise, ma jolie Louise, ma jolie Louise

Bob Dylan wrote:

Ain't it just like the night
To play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet
We sit here stranded
Though we're all doin' our best to deny it...

Need I go on?

And Merle Haggard wrote:

I was born the running kind
Leaving always on my mind
Home was never home to me at any time
Every front door found me hopin'
I would find the back door open
There just had to be an exit for the running kind

Within me there's a prison
Surrounding me alone
As real as any dungeon with its walls of stone
I know running's not the answer
But running's been my nature
It's the part of me that keeps me movin' on

And Bob Seger wrote

I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then

howiemarx wrote:Blind your head in catastrophe icicles

[. . .]

And I’m the tunes played by the goons
Who ride in fairy’s wombs

[. . .]

Grind yourself souvenirs under your stolen years

[. . .]

Sucked from a hair that digs into the darkness
Full of the fair that my head rides.


written by John Frusciante © 1994 American Recording

Whoah.

Wrong thread, friend. So, so, terribly wrong.

[quote="LAD"][quote="howiemarx"]
Blind your head in catastrophe icicles

[. . .]

And I’m the tunes played by the goons
Who ride in fairy’s wombs

[. . .]

Grind yourself souvenirs under your stolen years

[. . .]

Sucked from a hair that digs into the darkness
Full of the fair that my head rides.


written by John Frusciante © 1994 American Recording[/quote]


Whoah.

[url=http://www.electrical.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6187]Wrong thread[/url], friend. So, so, terribly wrong.[/quote]

how about this:

Your Pussy's Glued To A Building On Fire

Your pussys glued to a building on fire
I paint my mind just because I'm alive
If you see me roaming the hillside
Won't you come along?
You paint your eyes
Mine are in the sky
No worldly word I could say would be golden
The smile on my face isn't always real
But the way you make me feel is all that's really real
You little duck house



written by John Frusciante © 1994 American Recording

Forgiving the scentific error in the first stanza, I really do love Mastodon's "Blood & Thunder"

I think that someone is trying to kill me
Infecting my blood and destroying my mind
No man of the flesh could ever stop me
The fight for this fish is a fight to the death

White whale - holy grail

What remorseless emperor commands me
I no longer govern my soul
I am completely immersed in darkness
As I turn my body away from the sun

White whale - holy grail

Split your lungs with blood and thunder
When you see the white whale
Break your backs and crack your oars men
If you wish to prevail

This ivory leg is what propels me
Harpoons thrust in the sky
Aim directly for his crooked brow
And look him straight in the eye

White whale - holy grail

And the inscrutable David Berman from Silver Jews writes some incredible stuff:

The Frontier Index wrote:A robot walks into a bar
orders a drink
lays down a bill
The bartender says, hey we don't serve robots
and the robot says, oh but someday you will

...

Boy wants a car from his Dad
Dad says, first you gotta cut that hair
Boy says, hey Dad Jesus had long hair
and Dad says
that's right son but Jesus walked everywhere

And

How To Rent A Room wrote:No I don't really want to die
I only want to die in your eyes
I'm still here below the chandelier
where they always used to read us our rights

I want to wander through the night
as a figure in the distance even to my own eye
Have you ever rented a room
have you ever even rented a room?

An anchor lets you see the river move
but now that your evil dreams came true
there on your face
a row of teeth he'll come to replace

I know you laughed when I left
but you really only hurt yourself
When you see your curtains move in the wind
you can bet I'm betting against you again

Cause I'm a man who has a wife who has a mother
who married one but she loved another
You're a tower without the bells
you're a negative wishing well

I should have checked the stable door
for the name of the sire and dam
you were always at the dogtrack
with your brother and all his friends

Chalk lines around my body
like the shoarline of a lake
You're laughter made me nervous
it made your body shake to hard

Now there's a lot of things that I'm gonna miss
like thunder down country and the way water drips
when you're running for the door in the rain
read the metro section...see my name

No I didn't really want to die
I only wanted to die in your eyes
Grant me one last wish
Life should mean a lot less than this