A sort of heavy metal protest song. Words and music (such as it is) by David Harley. I always meant to launch a band called The Grating Deaf for which this would be the opening number, but I never got round to it. When I used to perform this with Rick Brandon, he used to introduce it as “Well, I feel just like a waitress but where will I get one at this time of night…”
Just an acoustic guitar with an electric guitar overdubbed. The full version will probably be completely electric and hopefully much tighter!.
Backup:
Copyright David Harley 1986
I feel just like a waitress dropping 16 antique china plates (x2)
And no-one laughing but some juggler who never made the grade
I’m a poor wayfaring stranger, a stranger at this end of town (x2)
I never knew how far I’d travelled till the vigilantes rode me down
And it’s dog eat dog when no-one can raise the price of beef (x2)
No-one bites harder than an old man with a brand new set of second-hand teeth
I’m a poor wayfaring stranger, a stranger at this end of town (x2)
I never knew that I was winning till some loser tried to slow me down
If your axe catch fire and there ain’t no water to be found (x2)
You’ll never know you’re hot till some turkey tries to damp you down
It’s front-page news, paranoia on the inside lane (x2)
They might even take your picture
But they’re setting you up and knocking you down
They’re fitting you up for the frame
Quiet days / Slow march past of the minutes
Remorseless progression / of the hours
The sun burns out / in a mock tropic sky
The sands run down / and time holds its breath
Waiting, ever waiting for the stranger in uniform
To shatter the mirror-still days
Quiet days / counting falling leaves
Stripping petals / from a scrap of bush
Nights under the trees / hiding from the world
Singing wild songs / to a gypsy moon
Waiting, ever waiting for the stranger in uniform
To shatter the cut-crystal days
Quiet days / sunrise leaps from tree to tree
A small boy with a fishing rod / re-lives jam-jar days
Ripples smooth away / the wrinkled image
Waiting for history / to rewrite the page
Waiting, ever waiting for the stranger in uniform
to shatter the diamond-cut days
Quiet country days / in a honeymoon paradise
Raindrops / dancing tiptoe on the glass
Clouds hang heavy / as time and history
Hiding in each other / in autumn 1939
Waiting, ever waiting for the stranger in uniform
To shatter the looking glass days
How does it feel to be proved right
When everything just fell apart?
Does it buy you sleep through long cold nights?
Does it ease your aching heart?
Score two points, scratch one lover:
You said it’s too good to be true.
Why don’t you run back to your mother?
She always knows what’s best for you.
All those black moods and jealousies,
Now you know they were justified.
She looks so happy, holding hands with someone else:
Was it worth it, being right?
Hold on to all that righteous anger
But don’t forget who set it up for her.
If she’s easier in someone else’s arms,
She might be telling you you were unfair.
Score two points, scratch one lover:
Let it ride, it’s just the gypsy’s curse.
But people tend to give you what you ask for:
Maybe you only got what you deserved
Alison and I (among others) ran a folk club in London (at Jacksons Lane Community Centre, Highgate) for a while, and later on lived in the same part of Tottenham for several years. It’s only recently – when we haven’t met face-to-face in decades and now live in different counties – that we’ve started to collaborate on songs, though.
This is a very young, very bitter song. I was actually playing with it in Garageband recently as a guitar piece, but the words came back to haunt me. I think I may change them, but the arrangement has promise.
(Vocal is a bit ropey: heavy cold…)
Backup:
Miles of air is all I need
Jab on the starter and pick up speed
Stand back lady and watch me feed my heels
Got to get you out of my head
There’s new juice keeping my motor fed
From today I’m the fastest thing on wheels
You’re birdlime baby
And you should know
You’re bad news baby
Everywhere you go
Turn to the morning and trust to the dawn With the sun in your face take the chance to be born Leave all the leavings that time has outgrown Turn to the morning and trust to the dawn
Ice to the flame, the sun to the rain I am Life, I am Death, and Love is my name
Wind on the water, a blight on the heart The fall of the dice and the turn of the card Axe to the tree, the scythe to the corn Turn to the morning and trust to the dawn
Ice to the flame, the sky to the sea All is One and All is in me
Tongue to the bell, an end to the start Trust to time, lend an ear to your heart Wax to the candle and brass to the horn Turn to the morning and trust to the dawn
Ice to the flame, the sun to the rain I am Life, I am Death, and Love is my name
Rust to the sword, an edge to the blade The Healer, the Scourge, the Price to be Paid Love is the Singer and Love is the Song Turn to the morning and trust to the dawn
Ice to the flame, the sky to the sea All is One and All is in Me
Blood on the dagger, a fire in the veins The sweet and the bitter, rainbow and rain The Knight and the Jester, the Queen and the Pawn Turn to the morning and trust to the dawn
Ice to the flame, the sun to the rain I am Life, I am Death and Love is my name
The sort of song I never, ever write. But I’d had a couple of very bad years. And that’s all I’m going to say about that right now.
No, nothing to do with Dionne Warwick or the Gibb brothers.
Written back in the 80s, and turned up in my box of half-written songs today. The tune needs work, and the words have already changed a bit since the recording. And yes, it was intended for a female singer, but I don’t have one handy right now.
Backup:
Alternative take:
Backup:
Heartbreaker (Harley)
Look at you – you’re such a heartbreaker
You’ve not yet said a word that anyone has heard
You know that all you have to do is smile
To capture any male – I’ve never seen you fail
To captivate every man in miles
Look at you – you’re such a foxy lady
Your table manners won’t win prizes; it’s really not surprising
That you’ve got broth all down your bib
But all your male relations are stood at battle stations
With the Kleenex to wipe down that greasy chin
Look at you – you’re such a heartbreaker
I can’t turn my back for a minute and a half
Without your creating mess
You’re taking years off my life – your dad says “Leave her, she’s all right”
But if he cleaned up I might be more impressed
Look at you – you’re such a heartbreaker
If I’d as many men as you to give my kisses to
I wouldn’t have much reason to complain
You’re a pain sometimes, it’s true, but I’d be heartbroken too
To be without you now, it’s so plain
Rough demo: vocal needs redoing completely when (if) my voice recovers from present croakiness, and guitars could be improved. But at least the tune is now out there.
Groping through the wavebands for a time-check
On a local music station I caught the tail end of the news
Of a singer in New York who’d committed suicide
Too late to catch the name, still I knew that it was you
The way that bad news comes as no surprise
Though till you hear it, you can’t think what could be wrong
In fact I thought of you just the week before
For the first time in years when someone asked me for a song
I’d learned from you
I don’t know how to define what you mean to me now
I never met you, of course, and I don’t sing your songs
Though I did long ago and even now, in a way
There are things I learned from you in songs of my own
I first heard your songs second-hand – the sweeter ones, of course
and bought an album on spec that raised blisters on my soul
In an era where ‘protest’ meant ‘hey man, it’s all wrong’
You were raising real issues and aiming at real goals
And I heard that you’d dried up, or did you just let it pass?
Did you find songs weren’t the weapon we were told that they could be?
No doubt someone has some answers but I’ll never really know
If you just decided snapshots don’t alter history
I’ve been thinking for hours there should be better songs to write
But thinking just makes circles in my head
There’s just a vague ache where my conscience ought to be
And a sour conviction that something true is dead
Only time will tell if I’m repeating your mistakes
Perhaps you’d have survived turning redneck like your peers
The romantics seem to be the real cynics after all:
Could it be the escapists really have the right idea?
And did you just decide living was a bind?
Slops for the body and musak for the mind?
Phil Ochs hanged himself in April 1976, after several very troubled years. Michael Schumacher suggested in his biography that “By Phil’s thinking, he had died a long time ago: he had died politically in Chicago in 1968 in the violence of the Democratic National Convention; he had died professionally in Africa a few years later, when he had been strangled and felt that he could no longer sing; he had died spiritually when Chile had been overthrown and his friend Victor Jara had been brutally murdered; and, finally, he had died psychologically at the hands of John Train.” [The strangling took place when he was travelling in Tanzania – the assault left him with his vocal range seriously reduced. For some months in 1975 he told people that he was John Butler Train, saying that he’d killed and replaced Phil Ochs.]
The lyric is fairly literal. I did hear the ‘tail end of the news’ on a local station in Berkshire, where I was living at the time. The ‘song I’d learned from you’ was Ewan MacColl’s Ballad of the Carpenter, which I still sing from time to time, and the album I bought was “I ain’t marching any more“. (I often sing the song of that name and go straight into this song – or did when I performed regularly.) At the time I bought it, I was only aware of a couple of his songs sung by others, notably Joan Baez – whose version of ‘There but for fortune’ had made the UK top ten – and ‘Changes’, which I think I first heard sung by Julie Felix. The album actually has a wider range of material than the topical/’protest’ label might indicate, with a couple of the verse settings he did so well and the descriptive song ‘Hills of West Virginia’, as well as the searing ‘Talking Birmingham Jam’ and the darkly comical ‘Draft Dodger Rag’.
Ochs didn’t exactly ‘go redneck’ but his later concerts did reflect an urge to get the attention of the public by mixing his own material with covers of older rock and country material, and I certainly preferred at that time the straightforward topical material of ‘Marching’ and ‘All the news that’s fit to sing’ to the more self-consciously poetic material like ‘Crucifixion ‘. But there may be a hint there that I was already aware that the very English school of socially and historically aware singer-songwriter that I was loosely aligned to (Bill Caddick, Peter Bond et al) was already outgrowing its one-voice-one-guitar roots.
David Harley
Small Blue-Green World
ESET Senior Research Fellow
Wheal Alice Music 