Dune.  This song is called “Dune” because (a) that’s the book the red-headed woman at Jim’s Restaurant in Oak Hill was reading when I stopped in there to get a root beer float in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon[1], (b) it seems to work well with the whole “disappearing footprints” theme, (c) I noticed that I’m covering the alphabet pretty well in my song titles but was lacking one that started with “d”, and (d) what would you call it? 

In a later entry I’m going to address the whole issue of autobiographical writing and what that question means at all, but the short answer is that whether you’re Sylvia Plath, Stephen King or Beethoven all writing is autobiographical, though that doesn’t necessarily mean it really happened.  In this case I really did see a redheaded woman in Jim’s (though it was this past January, not September) and was so struck by her childlike serenity reading that ratty-ass old copy of an unreadable sci-fi novel and the weirdness of her being there at all in the middle of a weekday afternoon—she’d finished her meal before I arrived and was still reading after I left—that on a romantic impulse I anonymously bought her lunch.  Going to Austin always gets me down these days, and I’d stopped in there because I thought a root beer float would cheer me up.  It did, but so did seeing the redheaded woman reading that ratty-ass paperback.

Weatherfield.  That’s only half the story of the song, though.  The other half is that I’ve owed my friend Weatherfield a song ever since I screwed up way back in Week 3 and put the wrong picture of her in the “My Facebook Page” video—wrong in the sense that it wasn’t a picture of her at all.  It was in fact her friend Julie.  I haven’t seen Weatherfield since 1993.  I don’t know Julie at all.  Under those two circumstances, they look a lot alike.  You be the judge:

Julie

Weatherfield

Since Weatherfield (a/k/a Sudie Spiegel, a/k/a Pseudonymous Spiegel, a/k/a Cindy) is one of only four people mentioned by name in that song, all of whom were supposed to be identified by their photographs as their names came up, the mistake probably qualifies as blatant.  I told her I’d make it up to her by writing her a song.  I’d been working on that song, off and on, since March, but it wasn’t going anywhere, and I also had known ever since that day in Jim’s Restaurant that I wanted to write a song about the redheaded woman, but I didn’t realize until this week that the song I wanted to write for Weatherfield was the redheaded woman song.  The guitar part was meanwhile its own separate thing, and they all three came together this past Thursday.

Keep Austin.  It’s Weatherfield’s song because it’s about the role she plays in anchoring me to a particular time of my life that would otherwise be in danger of lapsing into the hypothetical.  I have a year in St. Louis that disappeared that way.  I lived in Austin on four separate occasions over a fourteen-year period.  Every time I came back, I’d be different and Austin would be different, and we never did really get our act together.  The third time—1991-94, my grad school years—is the most fragile and endangered, the time when Austin hated me the most.  I hated it right back.  That kind of hate is how some people, including me, eventually find themselves in Arkansas.  That’s a different story.

But I’m not going to go into my Austin rant (except to point out that a bumper sticker that says “Keep Austin Weird” is wrong in at least two ways.)  Like everybody else in Houston, we still talk about moving there.  It’s sick.  I probably will wind up there again, if for no other reason than to tie Bjorn Borg’s Wimbledon record.  Bjorn Borg and I have the same birthday.  In his honor I played this song on a wooden racket.

Receipt.  Weatherfield left Austin in 1993 to return to California, apparently not realizing that Austin is in California.  Ten days older than me and thinking that makes her the boss of me, she’s still in my world, along with a handful of others, to provide evidence that it really happened, that I really was there.  She’s my fourteen dollar and eighty-seven cent receipt.

Recording.  I’m pleased with how this one came out—by my modest standards, it sounds pretty good—but a little haunted by the sense that it could have sounded better.  Though all these songs are meant to expire in their individual capacities after a week, eventually becoming at one with the nutcracker whole, there are a few songs I want to re-do at some point, maybe after this nutcracker thing is over, when I get better equipment and learn more about this stuff, and this is one of them.  I’m quite proud of that guitar part—it’s in an alternate D-based tuning but played in C, which means you get lots of second and sixth notes ringing through the chords, giving it a simple, summery-jazzy kind of sound, or at least that’s the way I think of it.  I doubt I’m the first one who’s played those chord forms from that tuning, but I’m not aware of it anywhere else, and I was pretty sussed when I stumbled across it.[1]  I didn’t start experimenting with alternate tunings until a couple of years ago, and that experimentation more than anything else is the reason for my renewed interest in the guitar.  I’ve used a few already:  Last week’s song was in drop-D, and the Bobbie Gentry cover and “Something’s Gone Wrong in Houston” were in DADGAD, but those were all played in the key of the tuning, unlike this week’s.  And now I realize I’ve tried the patience of all non-guitar fetishists out there and will stop talking about alternate guitar tunings.[2]

The problem with the guitar part, though, is it’s too pretty and therefore kind of cloying over the course even of a mere three-minute song.  Putting the harmonica and second guitar on there counteracted that, I think, by distracting from the drone of the second and sixth notes.  The problem with that, however, is I didn’t know I was going to need to do that until I’d done the first guitar and vocal, and I didn’t really take much care in adding those two additional tracks, which are first-takes and pretty sloppy.  The second guitar part was played on the Guild and isn’t loud enough (the first guitar part is played on the Daion doing its impression of a banjo), and the strings needed changing, but I spend half my life changing guitar strings these days and wasn’t going to stop at 11:00 p.m. on Friday night to change the strings just to get that soloing a little cleaner-sounding.   And I was using the .8mm pick instead of the 1.0mm I usually use . . . .  Kidding!  Even I can’t be so boring as to fetishize guitar picks.

MTB Revisited.  After dissing the Marshall Tucker Band last week for rock flute propensities (and offending my international audience, which consists of John MacKenzie in Edinburgh, who, as it turns out, is a big Toy Caldwell fan—sorry, John) I confess I think a Jerry Eubank flute solo would sound pretty good in this song. 

Video.  Thomas turned seven on the 22^nd.  The footage is from his party Saturday (“If it ain’t Star Wars it’s Legos but it’s usually both!”) except for the beginning overture, which was Weatherfield’s daughter Afton (on the right) and her friend playing the piano.  Or maybe those are Julie’s kids.[3]

Nobody Died this Week.  So here’s a Joni Mitchell song that’s in an alternate tuning (open C, I think.)  Joni Mitchell is like Tom Waits to me:  I love half their stuff and can merely tolerate the other half, but none of it is dull.  This is part of the half of her stuff that I love.

 [1] It was also in the song as “I stole a glance and saw that it was Dune.”  That didn’t sound right, though, so I changed it what you hear in the song.

[1] I mentioned in an earlier post that iTunes always tries to guess what the song is when you import it from a CD, and it always guesses crap I’ve never heard of and may not exist at all.  This time, though, it guessed “Comes a Time” by Neil Young, which is a pretty good guess just based on the root chords.  This song and “Comes a Time” share the C-Em-F-C pattern on the verses.  That’s not a terribly uncommon pattern.  “Early Morning Rain,” “Tupelo Honey,” “Riding My Thumb to Mexico,” and most sad rodeo songs have that pattern, too.

[2] (Hey, you know who else sometimes plays in D-based alternate tunings?  Bob Dylan!)

[3] I didn’t realize you could do footnotes on a blog.  This changes everything.  I mainly think in footnotes.