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Wednesday, March 21, 2007
FROM LITTLE THINGS BIG THINGS GROW
The Waifs
Cannot Buy My Soul: The Songs Of Kev Carmody
EMI : 2006
[Buy it]
NASTY DAN
Johnny Cash
The Johnny Cash Children's Album
Columbia : 1975
[Buy it]
NASTY DAN
 Video
Johnny Cash and Oscar The Grouch
Sesame Street
available on The Stars Come Out on Sesame Street
1979
SALE BONHOMME (NASTY DAN)
Video
Claude Francois
1976
CHARLIE ON THE M.T.A.
Kingston Trio
1959
Kingston Trio Greatest Hits
[Buy it]
The MW Brooklyn bureau just returned from the fatal shores of Australia, where I participated in the Running of the Bogans, and spent a great deal of time with a riotously articulate 2 year old, my Upper West Side nephew Alfred. When Alfred was born, I made my sister a mix-CD of baby music. The Jolie Holland/Be Good Tanyas song "The Littlest Birds" was a popular lullaby in the early days, and he could only sleep on car trips if Paul Kelly's "From Little Things Big Things Grow" was playing on endless repeat. The song is about an aborigine called Vincent Lingiari and his decades-long land rights struggle. For his first Christmas, I gave Alf this historic photo of Vincent to hang above his crib (next to the one of Muhammad Ali that already hung - such is young life in the Oceanic-American diaspora). My sister said she and her husband listened to "From Little Tings" so many times, that they would quiz each other on the song's more trivial points:
"So, what was Vincent's wage?"
"Well, the 'Vestey man' said 'I'll double your wages, Eighteen quid a week you'll have in your hand,' which means his regular wage must have been 9 quid , paid weekly."
"From Little Things" was co-written by Indigenous Australian songwriter Kev Carmody. A Carmody tribute album, produced by Kelly, was just released. You can buy it here. It includes this cover of "Little Things" by The Waifs that, despite the over baked accents, still gives me chills.
I recently gave Alfred The Johnny Cash Children's Album, and we spent much of the last few weeks hooning around The Great Ocean Road listening to his new favorite song, "Nasty Dan." It is a sublime thing - and even more so when sung to Oscar The Grouch. A couple years before recording this album, Cash had become much more PG-13: losing drugs and finding God. After perhaps the 100th listen, Alfred asks the carpool: "What's a wife?" but pronounces 'wife' as 'whaahf' in his best Johnny Cash drawl. Alfred then begins to develop a cunning Nasty Dan alter ego:
Q: "Alfred! Why did you smash the remote control?"
A: "That's something Nasty Dan would do."
Claude Francois's french pop cover "Sale Bonhomme" is frightening and amazing. Claude perished shortly after while replacing a light bulb while in the bath tub.
My earliest personal musical memories only go back as far as age 8 or 9 or so. At my funky little progressive school in the Maryland suburbs, we had a music teacher called Thayer Baine. At age 10 I expect it's common for a young man to fall for an older women. (I did fancy one girl my age, Lauren Thorpe, but that ended the day I got a look at her smokin' mom.) But the crush I had on Thayer was supreme. She was a gloriously earthy hippie-chick with flared corduroys and long, straight hair. Like a young, extra wholesome Joni Mitchell. She would take the class into the gully - a crude wooded amphitheatre behind the school - and teach us folkie protest songs on her acoustic guitar. We did Kumbaya, Blowin' In The Wind. And we did this song called "Charlie On The M.T.A." It was a song written in the '40s or '50 to protest transit fare hikes in Boston, but for a 10 year-old it was a disturbing and insane song about a man being trapped on the subway for the rest of his life.
Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie
On a tragic and fateful day
He put ten cents in his pocket,
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MTA
Charlie handed in his dime
At the Kendall Square Station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there the conductor told him,
"One more nickel."
Charlie could not get off that train.
Chorus:
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd
He may ride forever
'neath the streets of Boston
He's the man who never returned.
What do you mean, he never returned?!
I thought about Charlie's fate for years after. Why didn't someone just give him the nickel? Why didn't he just run for it? Did his wife bring back-issues of Life magazine to show him the ways in which time was marching on without him? I feel a bit better about it all now. This comprehensive history of the song reassures me that sometime in the 1980s Charlie would have qualified for the 5 cent senior citizen discount, and walked free, like a ghost, back into the world.
Thayer left the school a couple of years later and was replaced by Lenna. Lenna was everything Thayer was not. A divorcee, with a garish red perm and long lacquered nails. She looked like a poorly maintained Bette Midler, and taught us songs from tacky Broadway shows. Lenna made extra cash as the bus driver, and made us stop at her place one day after school. She lived in an small apartment. I had never been in an apartment before. It was way too adult for me. The wet towels and half-eaten toast and ashtrays made me feel deeply queasy and alone.
I googled Thayer Baine today and it appears she is still singing, now with the Washington Chorus. And if this is in fact her, second from the left, then she is still getting it done.
(As is Lauren Thorpe, if this is in fact her.)Labels: James
posted by James
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