have a chorus - if it was going to be a hit.
It really should.
I told him in no uncertain
terms that we were not in it for the money and if all he wanted was
commercial success, he should get the hell out of the basement and
out of the band. I actually camouflaged my anger and said this
politely. But it was still a SurfPoet chastisement of monumental
proportions. I saw the look on Stan's face and then I remembered
that Stan had recently been fired after his public on-air stand
against automated radio and, suddenly realizing I had hurt his
feelings, I relented. Okay, we could try a chorus. “You mean like
'Help me Rhonda, Help, Help me Rhonda?'” I asked.
“Yeah,” Stan said. “Or 'Round,
round get around, I get around.'”
We were talking sacred texts
here.
I mulled and mired over it. I
did not want us to be “like every other band” using a flashy
elaborate number of chords, harmonies, and choruses up the ying
yang. But I had a fairly small pool of talent and realized I needed
my band members more than they needed me. Okay, I said
again.
I went out onto the street
then to breathe in the diesel fumes from a couple of buses going by
and watch kids spray-painting their names on empty store fronts. In
my poem, I had already configured beauty as a character: the
abstract represented by an ideal. She was a shadowy, beautiful
woman who herself was the embodiment of beauty and sadness at once.
She was a kind of fatal attraction as well. The narrator in the
poem was me-but-not-really-me: also a sad, but not beautiful,
character. Deep down I envisioned myself as a very sad, lonely
person even though I really wasn't. It was a pose like that of the
public persona of so many other poets before me. Poets must really
like to feel sorry for themselves even though they have nothing to
feel sorry about.
The streets were slushy that
day. Slush was good for musical melancholia. I would later enshrine
that slush as well as my old car, an insanely unreliable Skoda, in
the poem/song:
I was always afraid of
Beautiful Sadness
Because I believed she was
friends with despair and misery
But now, driving on the slushy
Halifax street
I realize I want to know
Beautiful Sadness.
I'm only driving a small
Czechoslovakian car
But I want to stop and open
all the doors to the beautifully lost
I want to drive them anywhere
they want to go because someday
I know I'll be one of them and
I want to know what it's like.
And so it
was time to introduce a chorus. Something basic, Stan had said,
something regular people could relate to. (I didn't know what he
meant by regular - people who were not SurfPoets, I
figured.) I'm in love with
Beautiful Sadness? I'm a fool for Beautiful
Sadness?
Back inside,
Stan suggested, “A date with Beautiful
Sadness . . . Got a date with Beautiful
Sadness.”
I didn't know if people even
still used the word “date.” I figured it came from the country
music world Stan had been escaping to since he had stormed off the
radio. Oh, what the hell. I gave in altogether. A chorus was
born:
Got a date with Beautiful
Sadness
Down by the corner of possible
madness
Turn right at
fear
In a desperate
year.
A minor chord after that over
and over into infinity.
We recorded
those two tracks in Terry Pulliam's (upstairs) recording studio,
Sound Market, and they became cornerstones for a CD
called Long Lost
Planet . I learned that in the
recording studio you could make mistakes over and over and all you
had to do was get it right once and get that one “take” on tape.
And even if you couldn't get it right you could sometimes fix up
your errors by a kind of cutting and pasting of
sound.
We would eventually get back
to the roots of surfing with a Ventures-like backdrop for “Big
Left” and a rap-like Dylanesque “Nova Scotia Surf Scene Blues.”
Over the years the SurfPoets would expand and contract, add and
lose saxophones, fiddles, singers, drummers, dreamers and
techno-artists. In our own small universe we
It really should.
I told him in no uncertain
terms that we were not in it for the money and if all he wanted was
commercial success, he should get the hell out of the basement and
out of the band. I actually camouflaged my anger and said this
politely. But it was still a SurfPoet chastisement of monumental
proportions. I saw the look on Stan's face and then I remembered
that Stan had recently been fired after his public on-air stand
against automated radio and, suddenly realizing I had hurt his
feelings, I relented. Okay, we could try a chorus. “You mean like
'Help me Rhonda, Help, Help me Rhonda?'” I asked.
“Yeah,” Stan said. “Or 'Round,
round get around, I get around.'”
We were talking sacred texts
here.
I mulled and mired over it. I
did not want us to be “like every other band” using a flashy
elaborate number of chords, harmonies, and choruses up the ying
yang. But I had a fairly small pool of talent and realized I needed
my band members more than they needed me. Okay, I said
again.
I went out onto the street
then to breathe in the diesel fumes from a couple of buses going by
and watch kids spray-painting their names on empty store fronts. In
my poem, I had already configured beauty as a character: the
abstract represented by an ideal. She was a shadowy, beautiful
woman who herself was the embodiment of beauty and sadness at once.
She was a kind of fatal attraction as well. The narrator in the
poem was me-but-not-really-me: also a sad, but not beautiful,
character. Deep down I envisioned myself as a very sad, lonely
person even though I really wasn't. It was a pose like that of the
public persona of so many other poets before me. Poets must really
like to feel sorry for themselves even though they have nothing to
feel sorry about.
The streets were slushy that
day. Slush was good for musical melancholia. I would later enshrine
that slush as well as my old car, an insanely unreliable Skoda, in
the poem/song:
I was always afraid of
Beautiful Sadness
Because I believed she was
friends with despair and misery
But now, driving on the slushy
Halifax street
I realize I want to know
Beautiful Sadness.
I'm only driving a small
Czechoslovakian car
But I want to stop and open
all the doors to the beautifully lost
I want to drive them anywhere
they want to go because someday
I know I'll be one of them and
I want to know what it's like.
And so it
was time to introduce a chorus. Something basic, Stan had said,
something regular people could relate to. (I didn't know what he
meant by regular - people who were not SurfPoets, I
figured.) I'm in love with
Beautiful Sadness? I'm a fool for Beautiful
Sadness?
Back inside,
Stan suggested, “A date with Beautiful
Sadness . . . Got a date with Beautiful
Sadness.”
I didn't know if people even
still used the word “date.” I figured it came from the country
music world Stan had been escaping to since he had stormed off the
radio. Oh, what the hell. I gave in altogether. A chorus was
born:
Got a date with Beautiful
Sadness
Down by the corner of possible
madness
Turn right at
fear
In a desperate
year.
A minor chord after that over
and over into infinity.
We recorded
those two tracks in Terry Pulliam's (upstairs) recording studio,
Sound Market, and they became cornerstones for a CD
called Long Lost
Planet . I learned that in the
recording studio you could make mistakes over and over and all you
had to do was get it right once and get that one “take” on tape.
And even if you couldn't get it right you could sometimes fix up
your errors by a kind of cutting and pasting of
sound.
We would eventually get back
to the roots of surfing with a Ventures-like backdrop for “Big
Left” and a rap-like Dylanesque “Nova Scotia Surf Scene Blues.”
Over the years the SurfPoets would expand and contract, add and
lose saxophones, fiddles, singers, drummers, dreamers and
techno-artists. In our own small universe we
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