It's been a while since we've had a Song of the Newsletter but I finally got some usable video of myself. This is a brandy new song. I'm still working out the kinks, to be honest, but I liked this version enough to slap it up on YouTube. It was recorded at last week's open mic at the Steel String Brewery in Carrboro. Thanks to comedian, musician and Zog's
open mic host Josh Rosenstein for the use of the tripod and microphone.
I'm
playing at a dive bar Saturday, so the timing of this Song of the Newsletter couldn't be better because it was inspired by another dive bar: Spec's Adler Alley in San Francisco.
While the Cave is a rock 'n' roll dive and Spec's is a neighborhood dive, that's a subtle difference that only matters to true degenerates. Here's a 20,000-word essay I wrote about that difference.
Spec's is a legendary
non-tourist joint in North Beach and Thelonious Monk and I used to go there a lot, though not in the same decade. On weeknights there would be baskets of postcards on the bar that had been sent by regulars during their travels. There were hundreds of them, and my friends and I used to read through them, searching for the cards written by a single traveler.
He must have been a traveling salesman
or something, because he was on the road a lot. His postcards formed a disjointed, surreal, hilarious narrative about his ongoing search for the American Dream.
A typical card would have him describing some minor adventure in whatever town he was writing from. Although he rarely used the phrase "the American dream," his cards would sometimes involve him actually seeing it, or thinking he'd seen
it, or following someone who'd told him they'd seen it and promised to show it to him. But it never worked out. His postcards all ended the same way: "Dream not found."
The first two verses of Dream Not Found are based on those postcards, name-checking American locations as the singer chases "it" —the dream — and it keeps eluding him. The third verse is an encounter with someone who knows the score,
which is maybe why there are so many numbers in it.
I think that guy playing five-card stud in the third verse is me, even though I've never played poker in Three Rivers, California. I've never even heard of it. But "That's a lump of coal at the end of the rainbow, no matter how it gleams," yeah, that's me.
See if you can spot references to Big River by Johnny Cash, This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie and — this one's kind of written on the answer sheet for you — All I Have to Do Is Dream by the Everly Brothers. For musical types, I think this is the first time I've ever used a minor second, or at least the first time I've used it on purpose. It comes up the first time when I sing "what it seems" about 30 seconds in.
Hit play
That thing you're doing right now would be so much better with my single There Goes the Neighborhood playing in the background don't you agree? Of course you do. You can play it on Spotify or wherever else you stream music, unless you do that someplace really obscure. The video's on YouTube. Why not all of them?
Thanks for the boost.
