Pocket Mouse Moon

It’s my site and if I want to do a silly two-chord song and slideshow for my little girl then that’s what I’ll do.

The plan for this week went through a few revisions over the weekend.  Last week I’d planned to do a song called “Staying in a Motel in My Hometown,” which I recorded and which sounds awful and which may not be a good song at all–in fact, it may be unintentionally funny–but I was going to post it anyway because it would let me write about early nineties country music, the Garth era.  (We were so hard on Garth, but don’t you miss him now?  I mean, compared to what we have now?)  But this weekend was the Houston Art Car Parade, and that gave me some footage for my worst song (so far), a smug, nasty thing called “Quirky People.”  I knew there’d be lots of quirkiness at the Art Car Parade, so I thought I’d go ahead and get “Quirky People” out of the way and do my penance for having thought of the song at all, much less having recorded it.

The problem, though, is that I know some friends watch these videos with their kids, so I try to keep things at no racier than a PG level, and “Quirky People” is probably closer to a PG-13 (for “mature themes” or more accurately “immature themes.”  You’d have to be prepared to explain what a lesbian is if you let your kid listen to the song.  And I recorded it nude.)  I didn’t want the kids not to be able to see the funny cars, so I thought I’d do a double-feature, using the same footage for two different songs, one for the adults and the other, “Pocket Mouse Moon,” for the kids. 

But “Pocket Mouse Moon” is for my little girl, whose nickname is Pocket Mouse (or “the Pocket Mouse” in the third person), and she should have her own video for her song.  So all that stuff above will have to wait.  This week is all Rona and Rona’s world.  (The song’s too short for the pictures, which I didn’t notice until I’d already finished the video.)

Thomas suggested the song and gave it the title, by the way.  We were playing Legos a few weeks ago (of course) and Rona ran past the doorway naked (of course).  I mentioned, “There goes a nekkid pocket mouse,” and Thomas said immediately, “You should write a song called ‘Pocket Mouse Moon.'”  I don’t think he even knows what “moon” means in that sense, so I have no idea where he came up with the phrase.

By another way, when you import a song into your iTunes library and iTunes doesn’t recognize it, iTunes bluffs:  “Multiple matches were found online for this CD.  Please choose the correct one.”  The list of choices I get is always bizarre.  The first time I tried to import this song, it gave me only one choice–a Perry Como song.  The next time (after I’d remixed it), the choices were “Wedding March” by Hirioshi Yamashita, “Dog Life Taker” by Irritating and “Long John Shitbird” by Old Man Metal Jesse Death.

P.S., don’t send me any money for this one because I’ll have to pay a royalty to Lucinda Williams, whose song is heard coming from the car stereo at the beginning of the video, and that’s a real bookkeeping  hassle.  Just make sure your checks are designated for one of the other videos.

Shout Out to Ruby and June.  Ruby and June are the Bledsoe sisters, our friends in Austin we don’t see often enough.  Ruby has chicken pox, and June is next in line, so get well to Ruby, and get sick and get well to June!

Roger Miller 

Since I can’t write about nineties country music this week, which is something I know very little about but have strong opinions on nonetheless, I’ll write about Roger Miller, the king of novelty songs and one for whom no song was so sacred that you couldn’t just stop right in the middle of it and jabber a bunch of nonsense syllables.

I’m interested in Roger Miller because he doesn’t really add up–he never really fell into any particular slot.  He’s best known for the eternally hip “King of the Road,” which everybody knows and nobody doesn’t like a lot and sounds just as cool sung in a Scottish accent.  The next best thing he’s know for is the novelty songs like “Dang Me,” “Chug-a-Lug,” “My Uncle Used to Love Me But She Died,” and lots of others.  He was a ubiquitous television presence on variety shows and talk shows in the late sixties and early seventies (he used to guest-host The Tonight Show for Johnny Carson.)  He also wrote serious songs, some of which have become semi-standards, such as “When Two Worlds Collide,” “The Last Word in Lonesome is Me” and “Husband and Wives.”  He won an armload of Grammys in 1965 and a Tony in the early eighties for the musical Big River, probably the only person associated with country music who has won a Tony.  He was seemingly equal parts Nashville, Vegas and Hollywood, but first and mostly Nashville.  He was the first person to find the wreckage of Patsy Cline’s plane immediately after it went down.  I’d say that’s pretty Nashville.

So why is he not in the pantheon like his old running mates Willie, Waylon and Kris Kristofferson?  Why wasn’t he a Highwayman?

For one thing, he just wasn’t much around in the late seventies and eighties, not as far as recording goes anyway.  He had a serious pill addiction most of his adult life (but apparently drank very little), which may have had something to do with it also.  Mostly, though, I think it was he spread himself too thin, his work isn’t held together by any obvious unifying vision or voice.  He wrote funny songs and some pretty good but not really great serious songs (“King of the Road” being the best thing he did but rather sui generis), and that wasn’t enough.  He had a very pleasing voice–a warm, wry baritone (did you remember that he was the voice of the rooster in the 1973 Walt Disney animated Robin Hood?  We rented that recently and the kids watched it a few dozen times; it’s great)–and though the voice served him very well on his own songs, his covers of other people’s songs went pretty much nowhere; in fact, he had a habit of recording songs that would later be huge hits for other people and not at all for him:  “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” “Little Green Apples,” and “Me and Bobby McGee” being the most notable.

I have a book called Ain’t Got No Cigarettes, which is a series of interviews a guy named Lyle E. Style did with people who knew Roger Miller, most of them from the Nashville days.  Style says he came up with the book because he fell in love with Miller’s music and couldn’t find anything about the guy-no biographies, not even a complete discography. 

The portrait that emerges from the book is that of a very funny, very intelligent, very loved, very pill-addicted guy.  You also get a good flavor of Nashville in the sixties, which is the place in history I’d most want to visit, ahead of Paris in the twenties.  Roger was too hip to be Old Guard and probably already too successful or too Nashville (in 1965 he was huge) to be part of the outlaw movement, though his friends certainly considered him to be one of them, no matter which group you’re talking about.  He was already well established when what would become the new breed of songwriter began showing up, and though you don’t think of these names as being part of the same group of people, they were some of the songwriters who hung around the fabled Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge: 

• Roger Miller
• Sheb Wooley (the “Purple People Eater” guy and an actor in Westerns)
• Mel Tillis (see Week 10)
• Shel Silverstein (children’s writer and illustrator, Playboy mansion resident, writer of Dr. Hook songs and “A Boy Named Sue”)
• Tom T. Hall (storyteller songwriter)
• Faron Young (bleak honky-tonk singer and suicide)
• Ray Price (old school honky-tonk singer turned countrypolitan crooner whose band included Roger Miller, Willie Nelson and Johnny Paycheck, among others)
• Tompall Glaser (“outlaw” and producer)
• Bobby Bare (laidback singer whose genius was spotting great songs by little known songwriters and recording them, including Billy Joe Shaver and Shel Silverstein)

along with the aforementioned Willie, Waylon and Kristofferson.  Most of them found their niches or were claimed by some particular movement or group-all except Roger Miller.  He spent the latter part of his career holding court in the (presumably Mob-owned) King of the Road hotel, going on crazy trips in Lear jets and taking pills by the briefcase-ful, dying of throat cancer at the age of 56 in 1992.

I have no conclusion to draw from any of that, except that maybe no matter the effort you put into it, you’re never going to get absolutely everything organized in a way that makes sense.   Or, as Roger Miller put it, doo wacka doo.