Lazlo's Lament: Browne or Whitman: You be the Judge.

Without my new best friend Skip, this site would have no posts at all. My kids tell me it’s because I have only told three people about my Blog. But I thought the word of mouth would have spread this bastion of eclectic art around the globe! Oh bother. Maybe they’re right. Anyway, the only thing that gets a reaction are the Top 5 lists or posts that create controversy. So, here’s some more of the same.

I wrote earlier about using movie lines to speak for us. How about the same for the poetry of music? Certainly some of the best prose modern literature has to offer has come from our generation’s gifted songwriters. Songwriters like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Lennon & McCartney, Richards & Jagger, Bernie Taupin, Carole King, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Marley have had as much an impact on furthering the literary movement in our culture as have, say, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Bellow, and Mc Murtry. Even poets like Frost, Sandberg, Whitman or Dickinson, because, after all, aren’t today’s writers of lyrics the poets of our time? Didn’t Paul Simon foretell the future: the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, tenement halls….

And that’s a good place to start, Paul Simon. Here are some of my favorite lyrics of his:

“Because a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
“And as I watch the drops of rain, weave their weary paths and die, I know that I am like the rain, there but for the grace of you go I."
“Like a poem poorly written, we are verses out of rhythm, couplets out of rhyme, in syncopated time, and the dangled conversation, and the superficial sighs, are the borders of our lives.”
“We come on the ship they call the Mayflower, we come on the ship that sailed the moon. We come in the ages most uncertain hour and sing an American tune.”
“There will never be a father who loves his daughter as much as I love you.” (For some reason I always feel ill after that line. Emily?)

The Beatles had a few:

"And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.”
“Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel tower. Elementary penguin singing Hari Krishna. Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.”

Most people think of Elton John when they hear the following lyrics. However, the large-spending, bespectacled, aging pop star only put Bernie Taupin's fine words to music:

“And tell me grey seal how does it feel to be so wise. To see through eyes that only see what’s real. Tell me grey seal.” (For a Dogg.)
“I’d just allow a fragment of your life to wander free baby, Cause’ losing everything is like the sun going down on me.”
“What happened here, as the New York sunset disappeared? I found an empty garden among the flagstones there. Who lived here?”

Gail has the same kind of love and affection for Joni Mitchell that most women of her generation have. I could have put "Clouds" in this, but then I would have to kick my own ass for being a big wuss. But I do happen to like this one:

“If I could drink a case of you, I would still be on feet.”

Willie Nelson started out as a singer/songwriter, penning "Crazy" that Patsy Cline made famous. Later, after all the pot slowed down his desire and creativity, he was happy to cover songs from others, most notedly Kris Kristofferson. I think his renditions of Kristofferson are some of the best he did:

“A thousand times I’ve seen you, and a thousand times you take my breath away. Fear and doubts consume me, afraid someone will take it all away.”
“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Nothing ain't worth nothing but its free.”
“Come and lay down by my side till the early morning light. All I'm taking is your time, help me make it through the night. Well I don't care who's right or wrong and I won't try to understand. Let the devil take tomorrow cause tonight I need a friend”
“Just like the sound over the mountain top, you know I always come again. You know I love to spend my morning times, like sunlight dancing on your skin.”

If I don't throw some words from Ian Anderson in here, I will be absolutely flooded with complaints from a certain Pultab site. I was forced to grow up with these, so it's been more of an imprint when I shared a nest and therefore reflexive. For the ill-informed, Ian Anderson is, for all intents and purposes, Jethro Tull:

“He's not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.”
“In the shuffling madness of the locomotive breath.”
"Really don't mind if you sit this one out. My words but a whisper, your deafness a shout.

I like the following line from Kenny Rankin so much that I wrote it on a piece of butcher paper Skip and I had up on our bathroom wall of our apartment. It was naturally surrounded by Tull-isms. Doesn’t the quote fit the bathroom though?

“Cause it’s oh so peaceful here. There’s no one sitting over my shoulder, nobody breathing in my ear.”

Eva Cassidy covered a Sting song, and I think she made it better. However, the lyrics were all from Sting and I think are quite romantic:

“I never made promises lightly. And there have been some that I've broken. But I swear in the days still left, we'll walk in fields of gold.”

I used to listen to Cat Stevens incessantly as a kid, so, this is for a boy I once knew:

"Now every second on the nose, the humdrum of the city grows. reaching out beyond the throes of our time. We must try to shake it down. Do our best to break the ground. Try to turn the world around one more time.”
“All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside, It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it. If they were right, I'd agree, but it's them you know not me. Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away. I know I have to go.”
“Her eyes like windows, trickle in rain. Upon the pain getting deeper. Though my love wants to relieve her. She walks alone from wall to wall. Lost in her hall, she can't hear me. Though I know she likes to be near me. Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa, Lisa.”

It took me a long time to come around to Bob Marley as I judged him for his odd religion and his devotion to ganja. But I learned more and, as an aside, it’s still a weird religion but has this interesting bit of trivia: In the Rasta religion, Haile Selassie, the former leader of Ethiopia, is considered a saint. It seems Jamaica was in the midst of a terrible drought. Salasi came for a state visit and the moment his airplane arrived, it began to rain. It rained for his entire visit and the drought was over. He was hailed as the savior. So, the poor guy has a bad vacation, and they found a religion on him.

Anyway, I became more interested in Bob Marley because of his lyrics. I think he has written incredible lyrics, especially taken into the context of where he came from and the feeling he put into his words. Here are some of my favorites:

The road of life is rocky
And you may stumble too.
So while you point your fingers
Someone else is judgin' you.
Love your brotherman.
I wanna love you and treat you right.
I wanna love you every day and every night.
One love, one heart.
Let's get together and feel all right.
Good friends we have had, oh good friends we've lost along the way.
In this bright future, you can't forget your past,
So dry your tears I say.
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Don't worry about a thing
'Cause ev'ry little thing gonna be alright.

I could make this post quite a bit longer with a number of other favorites, and not even scratch the surface of Dylan, which we will just leave for others to post their favorites. But I have to end with, dare I say, one of the best poets of our time, Jackson Browne. While anyone who has head him speak on, like, ah, man, like this big, ah, like problem, of, you, know, man, this nuclear, ah thing, well, man, that’s, ah, a problem, you know?, and believe him to be actually retarded, he is undeniably a bit of a savant when it came to writing lyrics. Here are some oldies but goodies (warning, there are a lot):

Jamaica, say you will help me find a way to fill these sails
And we will sail until our waters have run dry.
It's such a clever innocence with which you show myself to me
As if you know how it feels to never be who you wanted to be.
Now we're lying here
So safe in the ruins of our pleasures.
Laughter marks the place where we have fallen.
And our lives are near
So it wouldn't occur to us to wonder,
Is this the past or the future that is calling?
Who'll come along and hold out that strong and gentle father's hand?
Long ago I heard someone say something 'bout Everyman.
Now for me some words come easy
But I know that they don't mean that much
Compared with the things that are said when lovers touch.
You never knew what I loved in you,
I don't know what you loved in me.
Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be.
I'm just one or two years and a couple of changes behind you in my lessons at love's pain and heartache school.
You go and pack your sorrow,
Trash man comes tomorrow.
Leave it at the curb and we'll just roll away
I don't remember losing track of you.
You were always dancing in and out of view.
I must've always thought you'd be around.
Always keeping things real by playing the clown,
Now you're nowhere to be found.
Baby if you need me like I know I need you
There's just one thing I'll ask you to do.
Take my hand and lead me to the hole in your garden wall,
And pull me through
And when you've found another soul
Who sees into your own,
Take good care of each other.
Make room for my forty-fives
Along beside your seventy-eights
Nothing survives
But the way we live our lives.
I'm going to find myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means.
And we'll fill in the missing colors
In each other's paint-by-number dreams.
Love won't come near me, she don't even hear me
She walks past my vacancy sign.
Love needs a heart, trusting and blind
I wish that heart was mine.
Give up your heart and you lose your way,
Trusting another to feel that way
Give up your heart and you find yourself,
Living for something in somebody else.
Sometimes you wonder what happens to love
Sometimes the touch of a friend is enough.
Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capitol.
The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will.
Now we've got all this room, we've even got the moon,
And I hear the U.S.S.R. will be open soon.
As vacation land for lawyers in love.