There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #13 – "Great Pumpkin" by Mikey Mason

Yeah, I don't believe in a lot that is spiritually based. But, as a fan of Halloween, I still believe in the Great Pumpkin. 

If Linus were my friend, I would probably be at the pumpkin patch with him regardless of whether I believed or not. Friends gotta stick to together, and Linus has a security blanket that he uses to perform pretty groovy tricks. 

Sure, Linus is a pretty religious kid; he can spout bible verses like no one's business. But Linus also has this weird, darker side where he sits in pumpkin patches while all of the rest of his friends, except for the girl who crushes on him, run about having varied success trick-or-treating. (One kid, I hear, only seems to get rocks in his bag...)

I don't have a lot of time left on Halloween to get this thing knocked out, but I wanted to round out my 2017 mixtape to a perfect 13 songs. I got a little behind here and there; as a result, there were a few songs I selected to be used for this year that I didn't get to yet, so I have decided to save them for next year's mixtape. (I own them, so I can listen to them all I want already. I just won't tell you what they are until then.)

So, for my last selection, I ran into a song a few days ago on a site called The FuMP, which stands for The Funny Music Project. The FuMP has been around for a few years, and specializes in promoting comedy and novelty records. New songs are featured on the site every week, the 128k versions of which you can download for free for a short while or you can always purchase the larger, prettier sounding 320k files of the songs. I check in to The FuMP now and then to see what new comedy music is out there, and was surprised to find a couple of pretty decent Halloween tunes that had recently been released on there.

My favorite of the pair was Great Pumpkin by Mikey Mason, a professional standup comic who also has released a couple of geek topic-based comedy albums in recent years. I have sort of missed Mason's music to this point, but I really like this track. Perhaps it is because it is directly about Linus' thoughts as he spends yet another cold, fruitless Halloween night waiting for his other personal deity to arrive. And yet, he never loses his faith throughout the song. No, really... he will be proven right... eventually...

This is the point where I normally post a video of the song from YouTube so you can listen to the song while you read the lyrics below. However, there is no video as of yet for this song on either Mason's YouTube channel or The FuMP's, and while there is an embed code on The FuMP official site for this song, Blogger tells me the code is incompatible with my own site. It is probably bullshit, and there is likely a workaround out there, but I don't have time right now. Maybe I will experiment with it tomorrow. Maybe not.

In the meantime, you can follow this link directly to the song's page on The FuMP: http://www.thefump.com/fump.php?id=2251. You can listen to it there or download it (for the moment).

Great Pumpkin by Mikey Mason

"Tonight
It’s gonna happen tonight
I’ve waited all of my life 
for this moment to arrive 

I’m here
I’ve suffered all of the jeers
The Halloween sky is clear
I’ve never felt so alive

You can have your trick or treating 
Keep your candy, you’ll be eating 
Crow tomorrow
Anyway

So go
I think you already know
You’re gonna reap what you sow
You think this all is just some story but… 

At last
All of October has passed
And here in the pumpkin patch
I’ll be waiting on his Glory

You can keep your masks and candy
I’ll be doing fine and dandy
As one of the anointed 
on All Hallow’s Day

[Chorus]
When the Great Pumpkin comes
I will be the one
who finally gets to laugh at all of you
who think I’m crazy
When the Great Pumpkin comes
shining like the sun
I will choose forgiveness over vengeance
Okay maybe
Maybe not. 

It’s here
And I can see it so clear
This pumpkin patch is sincere
and sincerely here I wait 

Each Halloween
Waiting just to be seen
Just like I am in my dreams
chosen by his orange greatness

While you’re at your parties dancing, 
Trick or treating or romancing, 
I’ll be waiting chastely,
prostrate in my fear… 

[Chorus]
When the Great Pumpkin comes
I will be the one
who finally gets to laugh at all of you
who think I’m crazy
When the Great Pumpkin comes
shining like the sun
I will choose forgiveness over vengeance
Okay maybe
Maybe not. 

Maybe I’ll come riding in with him 
in all his blazing orange greatness, 
And all the infidels will flee
or fall beneath our justice! 
And I’ll be laughing heartily 
as all the unbelievers cry, 
"Forgive us! Linus, please forgive us!" 

What’s that?
I must’ve taken a nap.
And now my head feels like crap,
and out over the horizon is... 

The sun
November first has begun
Another Halloween done 
with nothing left to show for it

But just you wait until next year, 
I’ll be waiting right back here 
And next year he will visit,
and next year you will pay!

[Chorus]
When the Great Pumpkin comes
I will be the one
who finally gets to laugh at all of you
who think I’m crazy
When the Great Pumpkin comes
shining like the sun
I will choose forgiveness over vengeance
Okay maybe
Wait and see..." 

Hope you had a Happy Halloween and a marvelous October. Halloween is never over in my world, but I hope to see most of you next year. Unless you stick around, then I will be glad to see you soon. :)

RTJ

P.S. Remember, if you like it, buy it at http://www.thefump.com/fump.php?id=2251.

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #12 – "Sea Monster" by Elephant Revival

In my post about the Eddie Noack song, Psycho, the other day, I went through various other versions of the same tune. One more recent attempt, that committed to recorded life by the husband-and-wife team of author Neil Gaiman and performer Amanda Palmer, rather annoyed me. First, the versions that I have heard (all of them live) were rather lackluster in performance, which disappointed me mainly because I thought the idea of Gaiman – an author and personality whom I admire most highly – striving to croak his way through a country song could at least have been a little fun. 

The end result wasn't fun for me; it was clumsily staged and no two elements from the selection of the song to the pairing of guest musicians with star performers seemed to fit together at any time. I blamed it mostly on a rampant mood of unchecked hipsterism dominating the stage, replete with a group of weirdos delivering some OK singing saw atmosphere that might have worked just fine with this particular song had a little more thought gone into the arrangement and genuine interest in the actual audience bled through the whole affair.

Now, it might sound like I am playing Pick on the Hipster here, and maybe I was to a certain degree. It is, after all, kind of fun and easy to do. But I did state in my original post that I would, as an example, love to find an entry point into the music created by Ms. Palmer, but just haven't been given one yet. I don't want to go through life simply hating certain music without a very good reason; I would rather call a Nickelback a Nickelback, and be done with it. I would point to my forays in facing off with Rolling Stone's Best 50 Songs the past two years as further examples that I am willing to take a chance on music that I normally avoid or just don't encounter in my day to day life. (And there will be a new version of Best 50 Songs coming up in early December, most likely. Watch for it... I have been pleasantly surprised with the past results.) And maybe I went into Gaiman and Palmer's version of Psycho hoping too hard for a decent take on the song to come out of it, after having listened to four good to great versions before it. Still, that hipster vibe of insincerity, unchecked irony, and self-possessed cool just came at me too hard, and I couldn't let it pass with comment.

A slight detour...

Let's skip to archive.org for a moment. One of the things that I love most about this public domain website – aside from the easy access to just about every p.d. film in existence – is their Live Music Archive. There are thousands and thousands of free, accessible concerts available in their archive, many of them recorded openly by visitors to these concerts, and many also coming directly from soundboard recordings (much better quality in general, but I have heard some great ones made right in the crowd). Now, before you get on me about artists' rights and all that, there is one notable point to add about the Live Music Archive: to add any concert to the site, the user and/or the site must have published direct permission from at least one member of a band or the band's management to post said concerts. When one finds a Man or Astro-Man, Robyn Hitchcock, or Camper Van Beethoven performance available for legal download on archive.org, one does it with the knowledge on the artist's page that said performer has approved such posting and further sharing with their audience.

So, you won't find a Radiohead, Wilco, Muse or Red Hot Chili Peppers concert on there; most of the bigger name artists and groups don't allow such easy access. There are, however, some surprises to be found. Some in my list of personal faves do show up in the Live Music Archive, such as Warren Zevon, Cracker, the Drive-By Truckers, Smashing Pumpkins, Ryan Adams, Elliott Smith, and Ween. Mostly though, given the rather socialist notion behind the sharing of all information on the site, it is not surprising that the vast majority of bands to be found there are – ahem – ahem again – jam bands.

That's right... so many jam bands. Hippie jam bands. Stoner jam bands. Hipster jam bands. Psychedelic jam bands. Bluegrass jam brands. Electronica jam bands. Hippie stoner hipster psychedelic bluegrass electronica jam bands. Jam bands from just about every place in the world (but no strawberry jam bands... gotta go to Knott's to score some of that...) At the top is the biggest jam band ever of all time, the Grateful Dead, who have somewhere in the neighborhood of over 11,000 concert recordings ready for either streaming or download on the site. (They have a special page set up on the site.) And then, after the Dead, come all the Dead spinoff groups, many of them containing at least one or two members from the band's past (Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, etc., etc.) After that, you've got Disco Biscuits, the String Cheese Incident, moe., Umphrey's McGee, Yonder Mountain String Band, the Radiators, and eventually Little Feat and Blues Traveler. (Surprisingly, Phish  is not on archive.org officially, and I find that a truly stunning fact.)

As it turns out, while I love 22-minute guitar solos and 12-minute drum solos if either the right guitarist or right drummer are performing them – I would never turn off an Allman Brothers album if given the choice – I am not really a jam band guy. The same way that Seinfeld wasn't an orgy guy; I'd have to go buy jam band clothes, get new jam band friends, and with them came new jam band drugs. Incessant noodling without real purpose except to stretch out an already long concert can often be annoying. I wouldn't mind being at any of these concerts, but that's not really what I listen to normally (with the open admission that some groups I adore, such as Built to Spill, Frank Zappa, Wilco, Cream, and early Pink Floyd – none of them on archive.org, mind you –  are or were really jam bands at heart or started out that way). 

Despite all that, I quite often check out concerts by any group that seems interesting to me, whether they eschew needless jamming or not. I've dipped a toe into the offerings of some of the jam bands I mentioned earlier and even partake of an occasional concert by the Dead, even adding some of the better shows to my own collection. At my collector's core, I have a basic urge to find new music constantly, and the Live Music Archive makes it easy to do at the only cost that I can currently afford: free. (And without annoying commercials like on Spotify or Pandora; I only have the free versions of those apps/sites as well.)

... eventually leads me to...

Elephant Revival. That was the name of the band I encountered on archive.org. A very simple name. The "elephant" part was attractive to me because I love those creatures dearly, and also because of some residual love for the Elephant 6 record label (home of Apples in Stereo and Of Montreal) from way back. "Revival" made me think immediately, of course, of CCR, and there is nothing not to love about that, unless it is a version not involving John Fogerty. The name "Elephant Revival" seems like maybe it is missing a couple of words in the middle, like their real name should be "Elephant Foot Massage Revival" – itself a dangerous proposition – the way that "Monty Python" is not nearly complete without the apostrophe and "s" and the "Flying Circus" part. But still, even the short name "Elephant Revival" intrigued me enough to make me click on the concert first over shows from other bands that had been uploaded that day.

Now, I was guessing that "jam band" would be the eventual outcome of my first listen to Elephant Revival. Past experience had given me a working knowledge of the basic audience on the Live Music Archive, including those who relentlessly tape and post new concerts. The law of averages sees to it that the majority of bands encountered on archive.org are jam bands, and I believe, by and large, that law still stands. And, of course, I always do some research first before digging into anybody's music. Before I even heard a note, I found out that Elephant Revival was a bluegrass/folk contingent, and while I do like bluegrass far more than I usually acknowledge, I still feared the "H" word in all of this. Folk hipsters are over the radio these days, and while I do like some of the sounds I hear, the songs quite often leave me pretty cold. I can find no connection to them. Most of the time, when a pack of Mumfords with crazy facial hair, antique instruments and toothy grins show up knocking on the door to my iTunes, I turn them away roughly 90% of the time.

The first listen to the band floored me. Absolutely floored me. At first, it was the lush instrumentation; the usual suspects as far as mandolin, guitar, and fiddle went, but even if they turned into a jam band, the assured picking told me they could keep up with just about anyone. But this was a hybrid that had bluegrass at its center but seemed informed by nearly every style of music available, including pop, reggae, jazz, and even the occasional electrified solo that rocked the house as assuredly as the sharpest axeman.

And it is of significant note that the first song I heard, Will Carry On, featuring vocals by one Bonnie Paine, who may be changing my listening life as we know it. Her quavering voice on this song seems so odd on that initial encounter, and I was slightly reminded of the first time I heard Katherine Whalen on a Squirrel Nut Zippers record doing her Billie Holiday riffing. (Not a dig, just a note.) But then, a few songs later, Paine lets loose with wailing along the lines of early Grace Slick, and then I understood that Bonnie Paine was capable of so much more. When I finally watched a few live clips, I realized that Paine is also the band's main (and sometimes sole) percussionist as well, thumping a djembe or stomp box while singing the band's introspective lyrics. (She also plays cello and musical saw at times.) She is not the only vocalist though; all five members split duties here and there, and all of them are multi-instrumentalists, easily and eagerly swapping the tools of their trade between songs.

The songs were largely original, but on that first concert listen, there was the remarkable inclusion of Pink Floyd's Have a Cigar, usually a rock monster of a song with heavy guitar licks. In the Elephant Revival version, Paine takes up the role of the sleazy record agent, and the song loses none of its nastiness in being transposed to the folk/bluegrass world. In fact, it seems rather... er... revived from it. And that comparison to Ms. Slick a bit ago? In listening to a second downloaded concert from archive.org, Elephant Revival launched into their own stab at Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, and I realized that I must not be the only one who stumbled into that comparison. And if it wasn't quite as surprising as their cover of Floyd, it was still really great.

But where is the monster stuff?

OK, Elephant Revival is not a band that you would immediately think would have some horror cred, but keep in mind their folk traditionalist roots and you realize that a walk along the dark side is not that far from their repertoire. I would not be surprised to hear them do a murder ballad or two in their career, but for now, they have a couple of interesting songs that nearly cross over to the Halloween path. The Paine-penned track, Raven Song (which they used to open at least one concert taking place on Halloween), takes on the notion of the raven as a presager and messenger of death, carrying loved ones to the great beyond. It's not necessarily dark in concept, though, and is more lovely than anything, but it still fits the mood.

The howling of wolves is also represented in their track, Sing to the Mountain. In the chorus, we are told "Go and sing to the mountain, go and sing to the moon". When " sing to the moon" is offered, other band members – and in live versions, the more than willing audience – howl wildly and without concern for stepping on the lyrics. I guess it is their version of making an impromptu shark fin on top of their heads while Jimmy Buffett sings "You got fins to the left, fins to the right". Despite being a huge shark fan, as you know, I will take the wolf howls over drunken island hoppers in this instance.

But let's get to the track I have chosen to be added to my Countdown to Halloween mixtape for 2017. The song is called Sea Monster, and immediately, it seems like, yes, such a song belongs here. One could easily read the lyrics and see little more than a purposefully vague imagery involving a possible siren of the sea, calling out to sailors to lead them to their doom. That is fine for any song with that title and surely belongs in any Halloween collection. But what if the monster is not what it seems at first?

Let's listen to the song and read its lyrics first before continuing...

Sea Monster by Elephant Revival

(Music and lyrics by Elephant Revival / ℗ 2016 Itz Evolving/Thirty Tigers, Elephant Revival Publishing]

I’m going out over the sea,
I’ve got a boat, I’ve got a dream.
I trim the sails with my own hands

The song Sea Monster can be
purchased on this album.

leave all my thought back on the land.

I’m going out over the sea,
I won’t be back until I’m free.

I hear a voice, a siren’s review,
I hear it calling out of the blue.
A song of a strange unbearable thing,
it grows in the water, it goes unseen.

I’m going out over the sea,
hearing the song I’ve come to see.

What is this monster in the gyre?
All that’s thrown over the side,
And I want to know…

How we live in a world that provides and expires,
How we grow, come to know our hearts desire.

I’m going out over the sea,
All I have heard, all I have seen,
We are all out, out in a dream,
We are a boat, we are the sea.

After all the rise and fall is all that still remains.

At the end of the second verse, there is the line, "A song of a strange unbearable thing, it grows in the water, it goes unseen." In the bridge, the singer has encountered what it takes to be the true beast and asks, "What is this monster in the gyre? All that's thrown over the side..."

Before you groan and think you are being lectured on the horrors of pollution when you thought you were merely delving into a folksy tune about a sea monster, keep in mind that Puff the Magic Dragon has already had his day. Mere child's novelty has given way to a darker turn of mood. I don't suffer gladly those who pretend that mankind has no sway over the destruction of the natural world, and I suspect that Elephant Revival doesn't either. In the introduction to this song on that first concert listen, Paine attempts to set up the song but encounters some slight difficulties in doing so: chiefly, the type of audience members who grouse when bands try to bring something deeper to the stage than the mere strumming of acoustic instruments. Paine said...

"The Sea Monster in some aspects is a collection of plastic bottles and trash that have accumulated in the gyre of the ocean, which is a large thing...(laughs)... not to cause boos or anything before you sing a song... (laughs)... but it is something worth bringing consciousness to."

That "something" is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive man-made "soup" that was discovered in the mid-'80s  in a place known as the North Pacific Gyre. Not the only such vortex in the oceans of the world, just the most prominent in size, the "patch" is largely made up of minute particles but is thought in the public eye to be almost like an island or a creature made of garbage, though it is actually thin enough in most places (and chiefly under the surface of the water) as to be undetectable even from those floating through it, let alone be seen from space. This is not to say that there aren't vast areas where plastic is to be clearly seen. Whatever the imagery the patch invokes, whatever its true visibility, it is almost certainly a monster of our own devising, a Frankenstein's Monster of pollution that could be altered and even stopped if mankind changed its ways drastically.

I was not expecting any of this when I encountered Elephant Revival for the first time. For all my wailing about millennials and annoyance and ironic stances, Sea Monster is a reminder that sometimes even possible hipsters can pass by and leave us something small, sad, and crystalline in its fragility. It's a crushingly lovely song with a hard truth buried deep within it. If the siren that sings to us from the depths of the ocean is merely a call to responsibility for our world, I can live with that. Until then, we have a monster on the loose, and the death of marine life from the increased ingestion of our plastics is a horror that I cannot accept. It's probably a horror more true than anything you would normally encounter on a mere Halloween mixtape, with its usual focus on silly supernatural things.

Elephant Revival. When I get into some spending cash again, I will own all of their available material in one fell swoop. Or one swell shop. Take your pick; I will make them mine. And I will order one Bonnie Paine to go, please...

RTJ

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #11 – "Werewolf" by the Violent Femmes

Only two of these three guys are still
with the Femmes...

I have mentioned the Violent Femmes a couple of times in these mixtape pieces this month, but only in speaking tangentially to the main subject at hand. However, I did so knowing full well that I had a Femmes song on tap for later as we neared Halloween. Well, that "later" is now...

The song is called, simply, Werewolf. It's not an original song by the band, but a classic folk tune that the Femmes have occasionally covered in concert. The original song is by Michael Hurley, a revered troubadour of our modern times (and still performing at age 76) who has recorded multiple versions of the song. (Hurley is also known for drawing his own comics and album covers featuring werewolf characters, so the creatures are a regular motif in his work.)

This song, as you will hear, is perfectly suited to lead singer Gordon Gano's voice, and given his penchant for off-kilter subject matter and dark humor, not really a surprise to hear coming from the band. I had first thought about including their original song Fool in the Full Moon, with its creepy lyrics about "following women after dark," until I decided that perhaps a full-on monster song was made to order after we just had five straight versions of Psycho in this countdown.

Let's have a listen, while you read the lyrics for this version below the video...

Werewolf [Live] by the Violent Femmes
(Music and lyrics by Michael Hurley; lyrics from Hurley's 1971 recording)

Oh the werewolf, oh the werewolf comes stepping along
He don't even break the branches where he's been gone
You can hear his long holler from way across the moor
That's the holler of the werewolf when the werewolf's feeling poor

Oh the werewolf, oh the werewolf, have sympathy
For the werewolf he's somebody like you or me
Once I saw him in the moonlight where the bats were a-flyin’
All alone I saw the werewolf, and the werewolf was cryin’

Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…
Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…

Michael Hurley

Crying nooo-body, nooo-body, nobody knows
How much I love the maid as I tear off her clothes
Crying nooo-body, nooo-body knows my pain
When I see that its risen, that full moon again

Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…
Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…

Crying nobody, nobody knows my pain
When I see that its risen, that full moon again

And ol' Igor, he said to me "man, its this little flute I play
But I never play in the light of day"
(spoken: Well, when you your flute, what do you play on your flute?)

Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…
Eeeee Eeeee Eeeee…

The "Eeeee" moments in the lyrics don't really approximate the sounds that Gano is making onstage, but they were already in the lyrics for Hurley's version. "Ooooo", "Eeeeee", or even "Oo ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang"... who cares? As long as whatever actual sounds the singer makes fit the mood of the song, I don't care how they are spelled out in the lyric sheet.

But do the words match the song? They matched the words that still hung in my head from hearing Gordon's brother Glenn, a close friend of mine, perform the song in coffeehouses around Anchorage and Eagle River, Alaska for many years. Glenn's performances of the song were my first exposure to Michael Hurley and many other folk artists, and strengthened my regard for others that I already knew, such as John Prine and Richard and Linda Thompson. On a side note, when I inadvertently published this post earlier this morning before it had fully baked, Glenn messaged me on Facebook to remind me that he used to play it – which he needn't have, for I did remember the song very well. As a Halloween fanatic, I rarely miss out on monster songs, and Glenn mentioned it was the only Halloween type song that he performed. (He would do a murder ballad here and there, such as the Femmes' Country Death Song, and I kind of count those.) He also added that he and Gordon learned Hurley's Werewolf from their older brother, Christopher, when they were growing up.

In looking up Michael Hurley's versions of the song, I found that the version I owned already had vastly different lyrics to it. It turns out, I owned Hurley's original 1964 recording, from his album for Folkways Records called First Songs. This version is where the "Eeeeee" noises didn't live yet, nor did the weird business with the flute-playing "Igor".

Here are the lyrics from Hurley's original 1964 version, then called The Werewolf Song:

Oh the werewolf, oh the werewolf
Comes a-stepping along
He don't even break the branches
Where he's been gone

You can hear his long holler from away across the moor
That's the holler of a werewolf when he's feeling poor

He goes out in the evening when
The bats are on the wing
And he's killed some young maiden before the birds sing

For the werewolf, for the werewolf
Have sympathy
Because the werewolf he is someone
Just like you and me

Once I saw him in the moonlight
When the bats were a-flying
All alone I saw the werewolf and
The werewolf was crying

The band's most recent recording from 2015.
Only two of these three guys are still with the Femmes
 as well. I don't know about the giraffe... 

Crying, "Nobody, nobody, nobody knows
How much I love the maiden as I tear off her clothes"
Crying, "Nobody, nobody knows of my pain
When I see it has risen that full moon again"

When I see that moon moving
Through the clouds in the sky
I get a crazy feeling and I wonder why

Oh the werewolf, oh the werewolf
Comes traveling along
He don't even break the branches
Where he's been gone

For the werewolf have pity, not fear, and not hate
Because the werewolf might be someone
That you've known of late

Oh the werewolf, oh the werewolf
Comes traveling along
He don't even crush the leaves
Where he's been gone

The concepts are generally all intact, except that flute-playing, and the words are a little fuller and seem in need of some pruning. The version that the Femmes play comes off of Hurley's 1971 re-recording, for his next album (and what some consider his "true" debut album), Armchair Boogie, where Werewolf has been greatly altered to its current, more streamlined but even stranger form. The song's reworking was obviously a deliberate effort by Hurley and important to me as well, for not only does it lead off the album, but the record's cover shows off one of his trademark werewolf art designs. 

It's rather neat to see the song go through variations like this, seeing the songwriter rework the lyrics and elements of the tune over the years, almost like a painter reconsidering a stroke or a splash of color here and there further down the line. Does the creative process ever end for an artist's output? In this case, Hurley condensed a song written in his youth to its most impactful moments and was able to work in a new effect that made the song deeply stranger and more eerie.

If you can find this, good luck.
I can't...

Well, maybe reconsidering one's works is neat in regards to songwriting and painting, but not so much in Star Wars films. Let us please not go through that b.s. ever again, eh? :)

RTJ

[Note: The live recording of the Femmes' version of Werewolf was included on their 2001 E-Music compilation, Something's Wrong, but if you can find a copy, good luck. That company went out of business a while ago (and took my money with it). Oh, and go check out some Michael Hurley as well. His music is strange and wonderful. And sometimes quite beautiful.]

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Tracks #6-10 – Variations on "Psycho"

In 1968, Leon Payne wrote a dark, little murder ballad called Psycho. According to Payne's daughter Myrtie Le Payne in an article on the Nashville Scene website, it was conceived out of a conversation with a fellow musician regarding the Richard Speck nurse murders that occurred in 1966, and then the talk continued to expand and include other famous killers throughout the century to that point. America's fascination with mass murdering fuckheads was still in the building stages – the term "serial killer" would not even reach the popular vernacular until the late '70s – and Leon Payne was simply as following suit. From out of that fascination, Leon Payne spun one of the darkest, strangest ballads ever put out as a single to the record-buying public. While the song has never gone on to be a real hit, it has been covered by a wide variety of artists, mostly due to the subject matter and the slyness of Payne's lyrics mixed with the song's oddly plaintive melody.

Leon Payne and his wife were both blind, but Payne had a long career as both a performer and a songwriter before Psycho came to him. Known as "The Blind Balladeer," Payne wrote hits such as I Love You Because and You've Still Got a Place in My Heart, but he is perhaps most famous for composing (and originally recording) a pair of songs that Hank Williams turned into huge hits: Lost Highway and They'll Never Take Her Love From Me. In 1968, he suggested his new song, Psycho, to his old friend Eddie Noack, who then recorded it as a single for K-Ark Records. The song really didn't go anywhere, but Noack's delivery made this the definitive version of the composition. 

Have a listen while you read along with the lyrics below...

Psycho by Eddie Noack (1967)
(Words and music by Leon Payne)

Can Mary fry some fish, Mama?
I'm as hungry as can be
Oh lordy, how I wish, Mama
You could keep the baby quiet 
'Cause my head is killing me

I've seen my ex last night, Mama
At a dance at Miller's store
She was with that Jackie White, Mama
I killed them both, and they're buried
Under Jenkins sycamore

[Chorus]
Don't you think I'm psycho, Mama?
You can pour me a cup
If you think I'm psycho, Mama,
You better let 'em lock me up

Don't hand the dog to me, Mama
I might squeeze him too tight
And I'm as nervous as can be, Mama
So let me tell you 'bout last night

I woke up in Johnny's room, Mama
Standing right by his bed
With my hands near his throat, Mama
Wishing both of us was dead

[Chorus]
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
I just killed Johnny's pup
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
You'd better let 'em lock me up

You know the little girl next door, Mama?
I think her name is Betty Clark
Oh, don't tell me that she's dead, Mama
Why I just seen her in the park

She was sitting on a bench, Mama
Thinking of a game to play
Seems I was holding a wrench, Mama
Then my mind walked away

[Chorus]
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
I didn't mean to break your cup
You think I'm psycho don't you, Mama?
Mama, Mama why don't you get up?
Say something to me Mama
Mama?

I have a weird, knee-jerk reaction to most murder ballads when I first hear them; sometimes when I have heard them a thousand times. I laugh. I laugh despite myself. It doesn't matter how much gravity there may be in the singer's voice or how sombre the instrumentation. They sound odd to my ear, and part of this comes from a slight shock that someone would stoop to sing about such a thing as murdering another human being.

The second (and under-appreciated) Violent Femmes album, Hallowed Ground, has a tune titled Country Death Song on it, and I really love it. The title tells you exactly what you need to know before going into it and the lyrics do not hold back on the horror of killing one's own family to spare them the slow death of gradual starvation. And yet, when my friend Glenn asked me my thoughts on Country Death Song, I told him I thought it was hilarious. He seemed astonished by this and asked me to explain why, but I really had a hard time doing so. At the time, I just thought it was funny but hadn't carried through on examining exactly why I felt that way. I know now why I did. 

I thought it was because I found, at the time, the lowbrow antics of what I considered to be hicks, bumpkins and poor white trash ridiculous. But I know full well that I am no better than anyone out there, and that are very few of us who know how we might react in similar, desperate situations. And following my first hearing of Country Death Song, I began to listen with greater interest to the murder ballad genre – mostly because of Nick Cave; hell, he eventually even did a full album called Murder Ballads – and it finally dawned on me that my early laughter was a cover for my own nervousness. I was uneasy about hearing such such gruesome detail via music, in a completely opposite reaction to how I feel about the same topics in film and books. Or even sexual details in music; totally fine with it. But such violence was different. For me, there is something more intimate when hearing the human voice confess to low, dangerous behavior on a record that makes it seem more real to me.

Eddie Noack, the singer of this original version of Psycho, also released two other songs about a year later with K-Ark that each had very dark premises to them: Dolores, another murder ballad in which the narrator is singing to the woman he loves after he has killed her; and Barbara Joy, in which Noack plays the part of a man accused of raping another man's wife after she went to him for comfort. He begs Barbara to help him, singing "Say that you were willing/Don't let me die". These last two songs were written by Noack himself, so to say he was like-minded with Payne in those years is an understatement.

Psycho by Jack Kittel (1973)

Noack's version of Psycho didn't really go anywhere, and it would be a while before his song took on a cult status of its own. Psycho was resurrected five years later in 1973 by an obscure Michigan singer named Jack Kittel. (I'm not being mean by calling him obscure. It's just that Kittel doesn't have a Wikipedia page nor a biography on AllMusic, and if you don't rate a bio on AllMusic, you are obscure...)

Kittel's voice in this version is almost too lovely to sell the notion that the character is as psychotic as he is telling us he is. At the least, it is far prettier recording than Noack's quite stark original take on the song. This guy doesn't sound like he killed anyone, most especially "Johnny's pup". He might be a guy down the road relating a story he heard form the neighbors, but I doubt he did anything but make sure he put the empty milk bottles out on the stoop. Still, it is a nice version of the ballad, if nice is what you are looking for from it. I am not.

Psycho by Elvis Costello and the Attractions (1981)

Apparently along the way, Elvis Costello, whose musical interests are about as wide as anyone's ever have been, revealed a great fondness for Psycho. He would do the song live in the '70s, and eventually, a recording of the song was released as the "B" side to his other studio cover of Patsy Cline's Sweet Dreams, itself recorded during the sessions for his Almost Blue album in 1981.

While it seems at first that Costello's voice is almost as sweet as in Kittel's version, Costello has that "extra gear," along with a true sense of nervous urgency, both of which have served him well over decades of singing about a wide variety of not necessarily all-upright types. He can go from measured to manic in seconds and back again, and it is possibly that his accent adds even greater to the delivery. 

The hushed tone he starts with here, in concert with a steel guitar weeping in the background, almost makes the character seem like he is whispering straight into his mother's ear after he has already murdered her. The tentativeness of some of the lines he sings also lends a possible sense that he is crying during his confessions to his mother. While Noack's is the standard, especially for creepiness, this one is pretty good. It seems gentle, but there is a lot bubbling under the surface. Most surprisingly, this is a live track in front of an audience, but it sounds like a studio track for the bulk of it's running time. A terrific take on the song, and exactly what I except from Costello, one of my very favorite artists of all time.

Psycho by Beasts of Bourbon (1988)

The terrific Australian alternative band, the Beasts of Bourbon, released their own version of Psycho in 1988. I own a couple of the group's albums, and if it is good, sweaty, hard-edged swamp blues-rock (albeit a swamp from Down Under) that you want to hear, I can recommend them heartily. Some contingent of the band still exists today, but Psycho appeared on their very first album, when they were introducing themselves to the world as a kind of Aussie supergroup, featuring members from groups such as Hoodoo Gurus and the Scientists.

Highly charismatic, original lead singer Tex Perkins, who would go on to success in the '90s with The Cruel Sea, is the focal point of the video that was filmed for Psycho. With his mane of perfectly coiffed hair, his prominent brow, and his dark eyes pushed forward toward the camera lens, Perkins almost comes across in the video as a proto-troglodyte as he grimaces through the song. Are we really looking at a man or some monstrous creature as he sneers during some of the wickeder turns of phrase in the lyrics? This is a man we can fully believe is capable of the violence in the song.

But is this a trick of the video used to sell the song to the public? Do we only believe him because of Perkins' almost frightening conviction (i.e., overacting) into making the viewer believe he is insane (obvious twitching, sneering, smirking) along with the way he is filmed (lighting him to create those dark shadows over his eyes and having him lean forward constantly so that he utterly dominates the frame)? In the background, a father figure sits on a couch reading a paper, unaware that a domestic drama is erupting at the kitchen table between a mother and her son. As Perkins continues to sing and glare, the unheard drama becomes more and more heated – as other members of the band, playing their instruments, glide past on an unseen track behind the couch between the drama and the unaware father – eventually culminating in the son picking up an axe and swinging it at the mother. Has he killed her or is the drama just a manifestation in Perkins' mind of what he wishes he had the courage to do? (I ask, because if you look very closely at the corner of the frame, you can see the mother's leg sneaking back into the kitchen. Perhaps the drama is simply going to recycle itself?)

Listening to the song apart from the video, the Beasts of Bourbon deliver a faithful version of Noack's original, though updated to their style with bursts of wistful slide guitar accompanying Perkins' solid vocal turn. Perkins, who is definitely less monstrous-looking elsewhere and has been considered something of a sex symbol over the years, is given a fair shake by the recorded version of the song, delivering the dark threat of the narrator's words with the proper impact while still not denying the honeyed undercurrent in his voice as he relates his grim tale. I think this is a marvelous version of the song, and while the corresponding video is a lot of fun, give the song a listen apart from actually watching the video to hear it properly.

Psycho by Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra with Adrian Stout and the Singing Saws (2012)

I have one final, rather prominent version of Psycho that I want to get to, and it is one from more recent years. If there is a properly recorded version done by this pair, I am unaware of it, but there are loads of live videos available online, which is how I ran across it...

I will state outright: I really, really like Neil Gaiman, but I hate this version of the song. This is along the lines of me really, really liking Stephen King, but wishing he wouldn't act or attempt to direct feature films. Stick to what you do best. If it turns out that you are also really good at doing another thing, that is fine too, but you had better be really good at it.

I know that Gaiman and his wife Amanda Palmer were regularly performing this song when they were touring both before and after they were married a few years ago. Gaiman would mainly do staged readings as his part of the pairing, but they would come together for the occasional song like Psycho. Whether the selection was a favorite of Gaiman's or Palmer's I have yet to find any proof, though I am sure Gaiman has an interview somewhere where he discusses it. (Whether I take the time to find it, I doubt it.)

As said, there were a lot of videos of the pair doing this song, but I selected the one that had the best sound to give the song half a chance. And it may turn out that this version is right up your alley. Not mine. To me it is a case of "hipsters ruining everything". Some people get into that "whatever happens is fine" aspect that seems to be at large in the videos I watched for the Gaiman-Palmer version of this song, but that is not my thing. Cabaret shows, saws as musical instruments, spoken word versions of country songs... all of those elements are just fine on their own. Here, the mix of those components just doesn't come together for me into anything I consider as memorable. Or as anything that I would like to hear repeated.

I have some friends who like Amanda Palmer, either with or without the Dresden Dolls. I have met others who really hate her. I have a couple of songs she has done, but I have to say I remain largely unimpressed with her. (Believe me, when I like something even halfway, I tend to stock up on it.) I am glad that these two weirdos found each other, because all of us weirdos need someone to love too, but that doesn't mean that I have to like everything they produce. 

And I did not put their version of Psycho here at the end because I wanted to save up and give a bashing to Palmer – because I would if I really felt the need to – but only because it was the most current version, and I waited to write this bit about it until I had heard it several times over a couple of weeks. (I first heard them sing this a couple of years ago, which is how I remembered it.) I wanted to give the song a fair shake, but to me it is mere novelty, and really unworthy of any reverence.

I am sure now that I will hear from those who worship at Amanda Fucking Palmer's feet, and that is fine. Tell me song titles and albums; point me to videos where her talent is clear. I have looked and have thus far come up empty. I welcome your input as to why I should get into her music, but believe me, I have tried again and again to find that entry point.

I guess Neil Gaiman beat me to it...

RTJ