The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: songs

  • Songs with Moon in Title

    There’s a full moon this week, the daytime temps near 100, so we’ve been out walking late, out for some cooler air, the house so hot. A while back I made a playlist of songs with the word moon in the title:

    It’s Only a Paper Moon, Moonlight in Vermont, Moon River, Fly Me to the Moon, Moonglow, Paper Moon, Moondance, Moonlight in Vermont, Havanna Moon, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Blue Moon, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, The Moon Song, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Moonlight Serendade, Moonlight Becomes You, No Moon at All, Oh You Crazy Moon, Shame on the Moon, Walking on the Moon, How High the Moon, When My Moon Turns to Gold Again, Au Clair de la lune, The Stars the Night the Moon, Shine on Harvest Moon, Harvest Moon, Moonlight (Claro de Luna).

    When we got back from our walk I played a few of the moon songs on the acoustic guitar. Still later, still unable to sleep, I got out of bed and from the open window took a photo of the moon. There’s nothing special about that photo, taken with my cell phone, of the moon over the fir trees over the old they say extinct volcano in the city.

    “Ah, they’ll never ever reach the moon, at least not the one we’re after,” sang Leonard Cohen, in “Sing Another Song, Boys” (1971), which doesn’t have the word moon in its title, so it didn’t make the playlist.

    Things appear different at night, are different. There are so many distractions during the day, chores, reels, but it’s different at night.

    “It’s easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing,” says Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, in “The Sun Also Rises,” from 1926.

    But a full moon can take the edge off of things at night, soften the heat. Draws you up. And besides, unlike Hemingway’s Jake, lately I’ve been looking forward to the night, a book waiting on the nightstand, moonlight streaming through the open window, lucky to have Susan by my side, not having Jake’s problem, my playlist of songs with moon in the title streaming in the kitchen earlier while I put together something cold for dinner, playing in my memory. Memories of the Moon. Moon Momentoes.

    And you don’t want to go getting too literal about it, so-called science of the thing, the light of the silvery moon, how it’s dead, and it doesn’t really have its own light, but is simply reflecting the sun. The mechanics of the thing. There you go again. See, you’ve ruined another night. The moon is a cartoon.





  • Song Stuff

    Dolly Parton has written over 3,000 songs. We used to say we “made up” a song, since we didn’t write anything down, notes or lyrics. We made up our songs guitar in hand. It would take about 150 hours to play 3,000 songs, or you could play the same song on repeat for a week, which you might if you thought you had a hit. If you draw your song subjects from the lives of your intended audience, you’ll probably gather some listeners, if not reach the top 40. Dolly, born and raised in the Great Smoky Mountains, no doubt heard as a child ballads that originated in the British Isles. These ballads came from an oral tradition, told stories, the setting often changed to fit a new environment. The accompaniment might drone wearily to an exaggerated wintery fiddle pathos. On the other hand, songs of spring might jump, jig, and reel. Ballads are folk songs, and while anything can be a song subject, songs of love and hate, war and peace, life and death, faith and betrayal – those subjects are ever popular. Songs are made using all kinds of rhetorical devices. We might think of songs as meant primarily for entertainment, but songs can teach, preach, tickle, and scratch. A good musician can make a bad song sound good, and a bad musician can make a good song sound bad. The Psalms are songs. What’s good is what’s real, even if it’s bad.

    I was perusing Greil Marcus’s updated “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music.” This sixth revised edition (2015) contains “Notes and Discographies” that run over 200 pages. But Dolly’s only mentioned twice, once in the original section, in the Elvis chapter: “Listen to Dolly Parton’s downtown hooker yearning for her Blue Ridge mountain boy; listen to the loss of an America you may never have known” (129), and again in the notes section under “Cameos: From Charlie Rich to ‘Louie Louie’” (360-363), where “A Real Live Dolly Parton” (1970) is said to include her song “‘Bloody Bones,’ a ditty about orphans who burn down their orphanage.” But while that Dolly album does contain a piece called “Bloody Bones,” it’s not a song but a story she tells, and it’s not about orphans but about her family growing up and how they all went to bed at the same time, and mostly in the same bed, there were 12 kids in a little country house, and they stayed in bed afraid of the boogie man and such tales their Mom shared. Well, Dolly’s not rock n roll, so maybe Marcus hurried through it. That’s likely going to be a problem for your discographers if you go around putting out 3,000 songs. The prolific Bob Dylan has only written about 600 songs. Anyway, Dolly did write a song about kids cooped up under some sort of evil matron, and they do burn the place down, sort of Matilda style. It’s titled “Evening Shade,” and it’s on the album “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” (1969).

    So I’ll take this opportunity now to lighten the load for my future discographers and say I’ve written (made up) only around 6 songs, with lyrics, that I keep in my active repertoire, another 8 or so instrumentals.

    With lyrics: “Bury My Heart in the Muddy Mississippi” (1978); “Pretty Vacant and We Don’t Care” (1985); “Goodbye, Joe” (1995); “Two Riders Were Approaching” (2021); “Down by the Bay” (2022); “I Talk to Myself” (2023). Dates I’m just guessing, plus revisions are always ongoing. There is no right or wrong but how you feel at the moment. When you get stuck, improvise your way out of it.

    Instrumentals: no dates shown – been playing and improvising most of these for years, but I’ll list them in approximate order, beginning with the oldest, from around 1970, which contains a riff an Army sergeant showed me. I just title them to remind myself of the idea and where it came from: “Sergeant Oliphant’s Blues;” “Saddle Up and Go;” “Double D;” “Em Surf;” “Good to Go;” “Patio #1;” “Patio #2;” “Blues for Tommy.”

    You can hear versions of my made up songs on my Live at 5 Instagram channel. Live at 5 was a Pandemic exercise that brought the extended family and friends together almost nightly for songs and comments and sharing while we were all hiding out from the virus.

    https://instagram.com/joe.linker?igshid=ZDc4ODBmNjlmNQ==

  • Me and Midnight

    I talk to myself
    I’ve not much to say
    I talk to myself
    just like to say hey.

    I talk to myself
    and oh by the way
    I put in a good
    word for you.

    When I’m out on the road behind the wheel
    I talk to myself and away I peel
    When standing in line at the DMV
    I talk to myself as if I believed.

    All around town as I walk down the street
    I talk to myself as I meet and greet
    After midnight and I’m awake in bed
    I talk to myself in the back of my head.

    Midnight is my cat a Persian Blue
    she hangs out late shooting pool
    down on the corner she curls the poles
    finally comes home up the back ladder
    looking for a hot cup of black coffee.

    Midnight drinks coffee all night long
    plays guitar and sings nine minute songs
    If you’ve never seen a cat play and sing
    come on up my back stoop after midnight.

    And while Midnight plays guitar and sings
    her songs I talk to myself all night long
    I’ve not much to say but hey I say
    I talk to myself and satisfy the blues.

  • Rain

    As said of politics, all rain is local, parochial. It may seem frivolous to a parish under water that in a neighboring bureau filled with sun denizens are dressed in shorts and sleeveless shirts drinking dizzy fizzy wine coolers in the town square park sitting in beach chairs on the warm dry grass listening to a gypsy jazz band play La Mer, while next door, where rain falls, Leonard Cohen indoors on a turntable sings, “All the rain falls down amen, on the works of last year’s man.” Yet in rain country umbrellas are not as ubiquitous as one might expect, nor are they absent in the sunny clime. The rain falls through hair, straightening the curl, seeps through flannel and wool, fills the shoes and soaks the socks, wrinkles the skin. The rain bounces off the asphalt street, runs down the gutters carrying along leaves summer and fall debris: a dirty tennis ball, a burnt out sparkler, a used up crumpled face mask. The rain overflows the curb down at the corner and a car spins by splashing a muddy wave across the sidewalk. A city bus sploshes around the corner, windows fogged, the driver and riders masked and anonymous. There are no cats to be seen out and about, a few dogs hunkered up on their porches. A woman with no umbrella scurrying shoulders hunched head down misses her bus and takes shelter under the awning in the doorway of a closed cafe, pulls out her phone and votes for sun, but the polls are closed for the winter.

  • Pretty, vacant, and we don’t care

    Pretty, vacant, and we don’t care

    Watch the stars as they collide
    Erase the dots in your eyes

    What do the lyrics say we can’t hear
    The singer and the song disappear

    Pretty vacant and we don’t care
    Pretty vacant and we don’t care

    What’s your name the color of your hair
    Saw you down at the LA fair

    Have so much no need to share
    Look at us oh what a pair

    Pretty vacant and we don’t care
    Pretty vacant and we don’t care

    “Pretty, vacant, and we don’t care”
    was part of an originals set played on
    Live at 5 from the Portland Joe Zone last night,
    and included:
    “Bury My Heart in the Muddy Mississippi”
    “If You’ll Be My Love”
    “Two Riders Were Approaching”
    “Goodbye, Joe”
    “She Shakes Me Out“

  • Virtually Nowhere

    Virtually Nowhere

    Writing for the New York Times Sunday edition for June 28, California veteran-reporter Shawn Hubler, reporting from Davis, California, on the ghost town effect Covid-19 is bringing to college towns across the country, and wandering around the abandoned town UC Davis keeps flush, notes, apparently sans irony: “Outside the closed theater, a lone busker stood on a corner playing ‘Swan Lake’ on a violin to virtually no one.” I know the feeling.

    Meanwhile, musicians across the globe are turning to virtual possibilities to keep their chops up in front of a live audience. Amateurs too are getting into the act, as evidenced by the creation of the “Live at 5 from the Joe Zone” shows, nearly nightly live broadcasts (5 pm PST) via Instagram “stories” and “IGTV” posts, featuring myself, a nephew, and three brothers, to wit: “The Joe Zone nightly Live at 5 with Joe, @ketch3m, @johnlinker, @charleslinker, @kevin_linker: Portland, Salem, Healdsburg, Ione, Drytown.” Listeners tune in to hear music and stories while watching the player, and comment live, often talking, virtually, to one another, via their online comments.

    The shows last anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. These are not group performances. If we could figure out how to do that virtually, we might give it a go, but for now, each of us takes a night in our respective hometown pandemic quarantine digs and creates a solo show for the live entertainment of our loyal followers. The other night, I had 5 listeners in my audience (go ahead: irony, satire, and sarcastic comments all accepted with good grace). There were, at one point, 6 listeners, but one apparently came and went. It happens. But that was also a slow night. I’ve had as many as 14 live listeners, at once. Ok, ok, still not exactly Arena Rock. And, but, in any case, that’s not the point.

    If one saves the live show via IGTV, most followers eventually find it, but at which point it’s a kind of rerun. The key is to catch it live. But of course 5 in the evening is not necessarily the best time-fit for any given listener. I’ve not saved my shows beyond a few hours, if at all. I caught grief last week for an immediate delete, since Susan thought it was my best show yet, but the rerun dilutes the live effects. And the show is intended as a real quarantine activity, a virtual get-together, a virtual hoedown or hootenanny.

    Of course, all towns are potential ghost towns (there appears to be a gene for it they are born with), and all performances are played potentially “for virtually no one.” Still, Davis is but a rock’s throw from the much larger Sacramento (about a 20 minute drive) and just over an hour to the Bay. Not to mention it’s a major Amtrak stop for the north-south Starlight Special. In many other small college towns across the country you can already hear the whistle’s last blow and watch the tumbleweeds filling the streets.

  • “Bury My Heart in the Muddy Mississippi”

    Dancers with Band The Touch Yous

    “Bury My Heart in the Muddy Mississippi”
    A Country Music song
    Guitar Chords: GAD

    (Slow intro with a little lilt)
    G                             A
    I took my girl to the Friday night dance,
    D                                 G
    But she said, “I really don’t like to dance.”

    (Lively now)
    (G) Then some handsome fella
    with the (A) swagger of Godzilla,
    (D) asked her do you wanna (G) dance,
    (G) and the next thing I knew
    (A) away they flew.
    (D) He’s got her in a (G) trance.

    Chorus
    G                          A
    Hey, Baby, don’t drive me crazy,
    D                                                      G
    I thought you said you didn’t like to dance.
    G                                        A
    Well, bury my heart in the muddy Mississippi,
    D                                                      G
    I thought she said she didn’t like to dance.

    So I walked on down and I put my money down
    On the counter of the mausoleum,
    And I asked the mortician how much it cost to die
    But he said I was a buck too short.

    Repeat Chorus

    Late one night I was stopped at a light,
    Revvin’ up my hot rod Ford.
    Along comes a Chevy, at the wheel’s my Baby,
    Askin’ do I wanna dance.
    I took her off the line, pink slips on a dime,
    And the rest I’m happy to tell.
    The moral of this story,
    The letter of this tale (D – G…)

    Repeat Chorus