She Will Be

We live in a culture that's trashed a lot of the levels of substance about an Adam, Abel, or Cain. Can't disable all the puns without a little Cain. Me, I write to entertain. Self-entertain, that is, contained, even here on the cyber-plane. I'm reminded of a Bugs Bunny cartoon where he shows a film he's made and everything - all the credits - is by Bugs Bunny. At 11 Water I'm my own songwriter, singer, player, sound man, critic, host, interview, audience, and remembrance.

She Will Be

Inside her mother's house she waits to see, if the man of style will come, ring the bell and set her free

I've dreamed so many years of just her company

It brought me her way and now we sing in harmony

She will be, she will be, she will be, she is with me

She will be, she will be

She will be ................!

We have no more money left laying in the bank, no friends or family left for us to thank

Our old-fashioned piano is so badly out of tune

But it sounds all right when we gather round to croon

She will be, she will be, she will be, she is with me

She will be, she will be

She will be ................!

She is the sea ......................................................

We've thought of days gone by and things we could not see

We take it easier now that my love lies with me

Someone will still shed a tear for love not meant to be

While out of what we have become are the people we will be

And she will be, she will be, she will be, she is with me

She will be, she will be

She will be ................!

(SaveLove Music 2011)

                                                                     

"She Will Be" began in tribute to Paul McCartney, thinking of the bass accents and humor that spoke his own version of the British Music Hall meeting American Country & Western. Would the song be taken as cavalier? The pun, or rather, the fun of looking at which sense of the word most closely applies, is that either way cavalier comes from caballero, horseman, gentleman, knight. There are plenty of Mexican barrios where it's said as an insult or jest, not an honor. My friend Stephen Alcorn is an embodiment of the primary usage, the Italian cavaliere, a man dedicated to the aesthetics, morals, and manners of wholesome sensual beauty.

 "Perhaps your lyric is too cavalier, John." That could be where the word becomes its opposite, meaning haughty, self-serving, toying, ungentlemanly, unthinking. By the time it trickles down to such a criticism, it means I may have gotten a little too cute, maybe made too much of contacting Sir Paul at his most insipid. Which is all fodder for my questions about why children's music has done so little to insure an ethical familial society as run by adults.

The gentle liberation of the chords to the chorus and the notes on top cannot be heard until the song is presentable. "She is the sea" signals an instrumental bridge that extends this music. How long it took to finish writing this song is unimportant. What matters is that it is done.

New Verses to "Quinn the Eskimo"

It all started with imagining Katharine Hepburn performing "Quinn the Eskimo". She'd use that schoolmarm voice on the verses, then in the circus barker chorus turn New England ebullient, heralding this great hero of children and animals: "Come all without, come all within, you'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn!" I could just taste that gasp of joy as she pronounced "nothing". So I took it for my own in the endless set list, and soon realized that as much as the song speaks for me, I was making up new lines. Thus - for your eyes only - the first self-aggrandized collaboration between Bob Dylan and myself. His third verse was altered a little by Manfred Mann on their hit version, or can be found as published in Dylan's Lyrics 1962-1985. I've cut that one out entirely. My third is a complete rewrite and the fourth takes it from there. His verses are copyright 1968 by Dwarf Music. We are both licensed by ASCAP, although only two John Savlove songs are specifically registered along with my membership. Someday SaveLove Music could be as corporate as Bob Dylan, in which case business people would take an interest in the enforcement of both of our permissions and ownerships. And now, the newly expanded Zimmerman/Savlove canvas that IS
"Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)"

Ev'rybody's building
Big ships and boats,
Some are building monuments,
Others, jotting down notes
Ev'rybody's in despair,
Ev'ry girl and boy
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
ev'rybody's gonna jump for joy
Come all without, come all within, you'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn

I like to do just like the rest, I like my sugar sweet
But jumping queues and making haste, it ain't my cup of meat
Ev'rybody's 'neath the trees, feeding pigeons on a limb
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
all the pigeons gonna run to him
Come all without, come all within, you'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn

My looks are longer than my leaps, 'specially by degrees
Just tell me where you're landing, honey, and I'll be there if you please
Ev'ryone's fighting over lamb's blood
Then sippin' it proper and prim
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
all the people gonna fall for him
Come all without, come all within, you'll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn

Ev'rybody's doing what's best for them
Ev'rybody's staying inside
But dryin' out anger on an old wire hanger
Won't be my orphan's pride
Nobody knows the original
It's always just a secondhand sin
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
all the sinners gonna come to him
Come all without, come all within, you'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn

Sorry, conservaliberAlls, consciousness is still sacred

    I was doing some relaxed breathing the other day with a friend. It is engaged work that helps create a more vibrant living. I mentioned how suspect it is that both liberals and conservatives have bought into the cliche that "nothing is sacred" for so long that a slew of new rules, laws and deregulations serve to justify that, or take it for granted. The Left and the Right are only pretending to be at war with each other; they actually both feed off the inept assumption that a living can be made off of everybody else's mistakes.

    "If nothing is sacred," he said, "it follows that the very best thing we can do is nothing. And the vacuum filled by liability laws confirms that. The concept of home economic regulation is treated as nothing, when actually it has only been lost in the dismantling of neighborhood economies. So we shall safely do nothing all day. A blow to consumerism, but a bow to the State nonetheless!"

     Yes, my friend. "Nothing" is a code word for so much more than the void, or Seinfeld's "nothing", or for appearing to contain an idle yoga.

    Then I went on back to the Old Souls home.

     What is so invested with god's grace that today it can be called sacred? Already the tea drinkin' motorcycle gangs are gearing up slurs of elitism. "You think you're one of a special breed, Savlove. Well let me tell you - you ain't no more sacred than us."

       And so begins the apocalypse. Trees are no longer sacred. Water is no longer sacred. Marriage is no longer sacred. Sex is no longer sacred. That which gives life is no longer sacred. That which hastens death is worshipped and adored, more so when chemically addictive.

    Why disparage a whole class of priests when only some of them are pederasts? There is an answer to that question that only further embarrasses any dominant religion where priests are trusted to be moral paragons. Priests and popes are not vested with God's Word. The laws and morals of a community are consistently founded in ever-shifting interpretations of God and Man. A personification named Allah or U-No-Who does not see all the pomp and circumstance. Prayers are heard according to their vibratory quality. The factors in the total quality are not the topic here. There is no separation of Church and State. Attempts to separate them will fail just as disappointingly as attempts to make Church and State a seamless autocratic prosperity.

    "God consciousness." That's a phrase from the Hare Krishna books devotees used to hand out in airports. You don't see them anymore. There's probably a law against that kind of loitering now. And that phrase, so off-putting. How in hell does a guy with a little pony tail and a glaze of contentment expect someone waiting for a plane to get off on "god consciousness"? Screweth Youeth. You make no sense to me.

    The good news is that consciousness is still sacred. Consciousness can still turn this debacle around. Consciousness does come from god (and all that entails).

 

"face the void" is on YouTube!!

   Before we go any further with the merry-making, to the last piece this additional hint about breaking up the logjam intensified by calcified oldsters rooting about in the new technology: The impersonal is just as subjective as the personal.

  And with that I announce how I finally owned up to the Info Age myself today, posting an object on YouTube containing sound and 4 more than the requisite 1 visual image to qualify it as a video. "face the void" was written in 1987, recorded in 1997, and was considered complete. This was partly because the solo piano/vocal performance Joel and I caught for the Genital Soul CD pretty much articulated it for good and partly because I tend to feature other sentiments from my catalogue besides the tried and true abhorrence with society. Friends are like, "Oh, Sav, I don't know. I really like that song. It's right up there with Joy Division, or Warren Zevon in a less arch moment!"

   The dating of "face the void" is in the period details fleshing out the usual kind of timeless alienation a would-be John Savlove might use to qualify him as an open romantic. And by open I mean transparent, as in a guileless approach to life or a tendency to use "savlove" as my user name wherever. The link to the song: face the void. It's all behind me now, that particular abyss.

   So there I was taking up a page in the Powers Market guest book of North Bennington, Vermont. Drew a couple of faces, one of them thinking, "Gawd - since when did it become DARING and REVOLUTIONARY to be GENTLE and HONEST?!!" My friend Libby had just shown me the vulgar cartoons a boy/man had made to deface her entry a few days earlier.

   See, 1985, 1986, and 1987 - those were huge songwriting years for me. I wrote around 80 each of those years, and when I wasn't becoming them I was rehearsing them or taking a break from them. The deeds other people were doing as youngish adults in the late Eighties - they were more divorced from the melange of cornball ballads and spiritual discoveries I was making than I thought even then. It was enough that I eschewed synthesizers! I wasn't a folkie, a New Age relaxant, a punk, or an aesthete: I just always managed to find a way to apply those viewpoints and more to any given mood as I made my way from piano to cat litter box to country road and home again. It was my own little version of the Let It Be sessions, with me breaking into whatever I liked and spouting witticisms as if good friends were in the room.

On the Demise of Ethics

How is it that professionals pride themselves on the impersonal and yet politics is all about the personal?

How is it that moral value is constantly touted and yet love making is constantly demonized?

Why has civil discourse become so vulgar and uncivil behavior so expected?

These are the kinds of questions I find myself asking aloud to no one in the quiet hours before dawn.

If this were a hundred or a thousand years ago, I'd be asking the same questions.

Yet it could take only until tomorrow for someone with enough dignity and grace and inspiration and power to locate this private media campaign and help me piece these questions apart to provide positive answers on a commercial scale.

Savivity

Yesterday's post torn down for being too esoteric. The sincerity/irony duality mentioned a few entries back was taken to the universal level.  Sincerity is sun and light and yang, irony is ocean and dark and yin - objective applications for the man-made mechanisms of our compromised morality. Strictly academic. Less so as we remember how our culture is too overly yin, in the humor as well as the diet.

Now I'm thinking I should just full out wallow in self-definition, what this blog always does. And what better way than to look back on someone else's definition of your own inimitable character? Anthony Wilson did just that when he dedicated first an elusive jazz ballad and then a whole dictionary style encapsulation of what it is about me for the booklet. Savivity is the title cut of  his 2005 trio release.

Why can't I bring myself to throw a link under his name? Why have I only made copies of the jacket for less than half a dozen people? Is modesty inherent to all things Savlove by definition? 

It's easier to wave the SaveLove banner over a revelation I had this week: That public libraries and Wilson's authoritative gift to me are two more examples of the philosophy I wrote almost 30 years ago, "The love you save is the love you give away." That complete line has been rendered safe by cosmic copyright law to be lifted as it is here out of context and applied to any other surrounding condition.

The "Save Love" song itself has been fully protected under copyright law since 1981 and is registered with ASCAP.

Such reveling. Such pride of exclusivity. Such work for anyone who senses a sweet aroma in the room but can't be moved to explore the multi-levels of my simple song if the topic can't be clicked. The good news is that I'm still the same guy who wrote the song and still the same guy my friend described. The predictably ironic news is that the bridge of the song, about loving someone from afar and waiting until it's right because that's the only way it can be, is that there are too many human types to generalize about monogamy and related issues. Sure, John Savlove is so unique among the 7 billion that he gets a whole other noun to corroborate his self-actualization. But what about the rest of us? We are commonly misunderstood, constantly made to feel vulnerable, under intense pressure as civilized creatures, more than ever in some ways as cushy as the creature comforts may be. To anyone out there looking for some comfort here in my cyber-space...it's not about the shades of gray between black and white, it's about the spectrum of color.

The black/white duality gets played up a lot in American history, the good guys and bad guys thing. The ability of the human to hold two opposing concepts in his or her mind at once distinguishes man as the most complex thought form on earth. There's a lot of gray area between those two behavioral formats too, eh? Anyway, Obama is of mixed origin, so one can only hope his determined impression catches up with a lot of the damage done to the societal psyche simply because incompetence breeds corruption and vice versa. Good will is efficient when applied with a firm spine. But good will is notoriously mushy. Good will can blow it just like ill will. The thing about the dualities is that one can't exist without the other. The seed of irony is planted in the blossom of sincerity. The trick is to ride the waves accordingly, spiral the heaven or hell as events may occur.

That's it for now, readers. I'm thankful for my anonymity. I feel too sensitive for reality TV, yet comfortable picturing myself with Oprah. There's still time to write for laptop demo tracks. Still got a lot of rewriting to do before I make a product.

Sav's response to Big Brother

Thanks for all the love, honesty, and support, John.
We can always count on you for that.
But I can work around Athena as necessary, dude.
She's pretty much made it clear that the difference between her sewer and the rest is that hers is titanium plated.
Not going so far as to say "telepathy be damned", only saying that you old dead stars still have the myths as written firmly in hand, live rocket men too, my rewrites await another day.
"Watch That Man
Oh honey watch that man!
Well he talks like a jerk
But he could eat you with a fork and spoon"
--- David Bowie/Aladdin Sane