the brief
an eclectic, comicly surreal take on old Harleys, motorcycle thieves and damn damsels; and a partial answer to the question "how wierd can a song get and still be meaningful?"
I came across Jesse Cook's Beneath Your Skin sometime in 2020. I found it interesting but couldn't figure it out musically. It was too experimental, too surreal. Still I had put it on my youtube maybes playlist and it stayed there until early November 2021 when the fourth phase started. It was one of the tracks in my 'pick any song and it will channel' experience so it was put over to the 'channeling' playlist and the song sheet was started.
Even so, I had little feel for what the karosong might be, and there was no progress for several sub-vocal sessions. Then I began sensing that the song would be a narrative, a 'story' if you like. That already made it unusual as this is the least common narrative point of view for a karosong. (See "common features" in the karo'esque tour for more on the narrative points of view found in karosongs.)
And then I suddenly recalled a 'stub' that had channeled in a single session the year before. At the time I thought it might be a poem, but it hadn't progressed past what seemed to be the opening scene(s) of a longer story.
Man what a weird trip that was
Julian George and me
Riding down Dixie
Where mountains push at the sky
Coming up on a hog broke down on the side
Like an old joke I won't repeat
Unless you ask
Stopping to help and getting ambushed
Three really big leathers stepping up out of
The ditch
Watching our bikes rode off
From the side of the road
Wondering just what the fuck we were going to do now
And a pickup drives up says need a lift then
We're in the back and giving chase
Even if they don't know it yet
Even if we don't know it yet.
Was it just an interesting 'coincidence'? My experience working with karosongs says 'nope'. So I put them together to see if they'd fit, listening to Beneath Your Skin while sub-vocally trying out the stub lyrics. There wasn't a eureka moment, but I could feel a definite match between the music's patterns and the flow of the stub as lyrics. There was a song there.
It was the 47th karosong to start channeling, the first of four asynchronous collaborations with Jesse Cook in the 4.1 set and — despite having the stub as a major headstart — the very last song in the set to complete.
what a strange weird trip that was
george and julian and me
riding down south where mountains push at the sky
and curves pull at your wheels
and up ahead on the side of the road
like an old joke that shouldn't be retold
but I will if you ask because there's nothing better
than an old harley joke
Although I knew quite a bit about the song from the stub, I first had to figure out the async track. Beneath Your Skin reminded me of Yanni's Nostalgia, the async track for Proposal 2.0. Both of these instrumental tracks had multiple distinct sections that built across their lengths, and the transitions between the sections were musically dramatic.
That structural complexity made this an interesting but difficult song to channel, especially sub-vocally. Each section seemed distinct, almost its own song with its own learning curve. But the song was a single overall story so everything had to fit together within the larger track of the song.
And, hardest of all, all that had to be done without losing track in my head.
Although the lyrics evolved quite a bit, the story content of the stub turned out to cover sections 1 to 3 and then into the start of section 4. I got a strong sense the remainder of section 4 would be about being in the truck during a highspeed chase, then section 5 would be a super slow motion fight scene when the truck caught up to the bikes. Both sections felt movie-like.
But there were few lyrics past the original stub, just bits and pieces through sections 4 and 5, and still little sense of sections 6 and 7. The song would mostly mark time until mid June.
well we're all yucking it up over the intercoms
as we get get off our bikes and get a first good look
at the rider ... ette i guess is the etiquette
and we all thought it was our lucky day
and ordered out for white suits
By then, I had mostly worked through 'refinding' my voice after the cardiac event, and I was sensing a difference in my singing. Its source was shifting down into my chest, and there was a new openess in the larynx, even a never-before-felt sense of vibration there. While I was exploring that change in my voice, I was also trying to figure out what it meant for the multiple sections of this particular song.
just then three big leathers step up out of the ditch
and before you know it we three knights
are down on our asses
watching them leathers ride off . . . on our steeds
followed by that damn . . . damsel
and the harley she fishtailed off on
laughing
It wasn't easy to figure out, even though I had most of the lyrics and singing for the first 3 sections. Those seemed to be a more or less traditional karosong delivery, though perhaps a bit more to the folk singer side in keeping with the narrative.
/ sec 2 - white suits
/ sec 3 - leathers
/ sec 4 - truck
/ sec 5 - dream
/ sec 6 - ???
/ sec 7 - denouement
But the later sections were mostly undefined. I had a sense that sections 4 and 5 would be spokesong but I wasn't sure, given the few lyrics I actually had. And I still had little sense of the last two sections, except section 6 would be more like the first three sections, and 7 would resolve the story with a joke.
Not necessarily a bad joke. But you never know with karosongs.*
Of course, all that was much easier summarized than actualized, which only happened gradually across the summer, into the fall and then the early winter. Bits of lyric here. A sense of structure there. Some firming. Some delivery refinements.
Burton Cummings as a guest artist.
(Just thought I'd throw that in. Though it's actually just a sample of his iconic "laughing" that appears in the demo. It's courtesy fair use, but I still want to express my thanks to Burton for his guest appearance, and then get on with the chase.)
but before we have time to say what the f…
this old pickup pulls up, yells out need a lift and
we say yes and all jump in, me in the front
thinking the universe is looking after us for a change
and the chase was on
yeah, the chase was on . . .
That first sense I had of section 4 as a cinematic high speed car chase? It hit the brakes. It wasn't that at all. Not at all. And it turned out to be more 'talksong' than spokesong, the narrator just talking, describing an increasingly surreal scene . . . **
you see billie bob the driver was you might say a few bob short of a bill ... seemed to think he was driving cane toad patrol in north Queensland, swerving and schwoomping that old truck to pancake every last one of those ugly little f... schmuckers
now it might have been terrifying except that old truck couldn't do no more than 20 with a tailwind and a good fart so it was mostly just making us nauseous but reality was already doing a pretty good job of that anyway
And that sense of section 5 as an equally cinematic slow motion fight scene? With the heros heorically reclaiming their machines? Wrong again. It became a meandering dream state where disembodied voices floated into and out of consciousness as the three riders lost any hope of getting their bikes back.
because all we could see was our bikes getting further and further away and shit we didn't want getting closer and closer
police reports . . .
insurance claims . . .
gotta call the little women
better talk it over first
get the story straight
And that of course required a different delivery again — a sparse drifting vocal that interwove with section 5's eerie and equally drifting instrumentation.
Once again, all more easily summarized than actualized, especially given the many life challenges that happened as the song came. Still, I pretty much had the lyrics for the first five sections by December when the Vancouver recording sessions started. I was however still working on their delivery, trying to find the flow of the overall song that would stitch these disparate parts together.
But I couldn't because — even after a year of working with Beneath Your Skin — section 6 remained a musical black hole. It was one of those indicipherably building crescendos my ears struggle to parse and understand. So I couldn't isolate a lead instrument for my vocals to track.
Which meant I couldn't get the lyrics. So, like a Harley broken down on the side of the road, the song could not move forward.
Ah the joys of being an idiot musant.
and up ahead on the side of the road
three bikes in a row we could tell they were ours
so we asked billie bob to drive normal
while we took a good look see going past
then to let us out up where we couldn't be seen
Section 6 wasn't entirely blank when the Vancouver sessions started. I had a sense it would reveal the theft of the bikes was just a prank, a game or play put on by that 'damn damsel' and her accomplices (possibly including billie bob, the truck's driver).
I also had glimmers of an 'old fart' theme making a sort of Wild Hogs movie. You know the plot, over-the-hill boomers trying to recapture their manhoods and pride on overpowered phallic symbols. (Been there, done that. Gave the tee-shirt to Jeff Bezos.)
But it was the old bumper cars problem — thoughts and concepts bashing into each other repeatedly, never breaking out of their useless circling. Not compressing into lyrics.
seemed straightforward enough
a little roadside restaurant
no kerbs to block the bikes getting out
tree cover to get us close enough for a dash to the bikes
with that and the spare keys in our jackets
because we're old farts
we had a plan!
yeah we had a plan
There's only one solution to the bumper cars problem: just keep on smashing until some part finally falls off and becomes a lyric. Then another. And another.
That was the first several weeks of the Vancouver sessions for this part of the song. By early February however, the storyline through section 6 was falling into place, not yet precise enough to be actual lyrics, but getting close. Close enough I could feel their rhythms and sort of talk them through with the music.
and lemme tell you that old jungle training kicked in
gggg
hhhh
Then another delay. A trip to Australia to see my younger daughter (for the first time in three years because of Covid 19). Then another delay while I returned to Canada then drove back to Ontario from Vancouver.
more to come...
more to come...
more to come...
them three leathers standing like maitre dees showing us to our bikes
keys were already in the ignition
bastards even waved as we rode off
but we never saw hide nor oil slick
of that damn damsel
and the harley she fishtailed off on
laughing
...
...
The lyrics were only finally finished in _____, 2023, __ months after the song started channeling. And the song was mastered about ____ months later.
singing
Beneath Your Skin was one of the tracks I'd sensed 'karo' really wanted to play with, that karo thought would be 'fun'. And it was fun I guess, in a sort of masochistic sense.
Eventually. Meaning almost a year. Once I'd managed to get all the lyrics and began to find the flow of the whole song across its sections. Once I'd found and integrated the performer into the whole/full/on karo.
Yeah it got fun. There was lots of drama, pathos and comedy, with lots of room for the full-on karo to perform its growing magic. It most reminded me of a silly witty ditty by George Thoroughgood.
Even then, it was one of the most challenging karosongs to sing, most akin in its delivery complexity to Brick walls 3.2 and Got to get back 3.1. (Like this one, those were songs based on 'atypical' async tracks with multiple distinct sections and deliveries.)
Post-script
There's a long backstory to this song, one I first encountered in 1993 when I bought and rode a GL1100 Honda GoldWing coast-to-Canadian-coast-and-back. ***
Harley-Davidson motorcycles had a well-deserved reputation for breaking down at the time and 'harley jokes' were common among the riders of other brands. For instance:
Q: How do you find a harley in a blizzard?
A: Follow the oil slick.
Q: What can you tell a harley rider?
A: Nothing. Their bikes are too loud.
(Harley riders of course are known to make their own jokes about non-harley machines and their riders.)
(They're just not as funny.)
* Literally. See The phoenix must burn 3.3 and Ah humanity 3.2 for examples of song ending bad jokes.
** There's actually a range of spokesong sub-styles, from the more poetic to the more conversational to the more formally narrative. Chase seemed to use slightly different sub-styles in its different major sections, and that added to its channeling difficulty.
*** That ride provided the roadmap and much texture for tHe PoEt & i*, the comic spiritual-adventure novel I channeled between the first and second phases. One focus of the novel is self-awareness, a topic often illustrated by Harley riders and their particular fixations.
Q: What's the difference between a honda and a harley?
A: You buy a honda to ride; a harley to polish.
the lyrics
. . . opening credits
& the chase was on
a 4.1 karosong with
Beneath Your Skin by Jesse Cook &
his always driving band
-- 1 --
. . . versewhat a strange weird trip that was
george and julian and me
riding down south where mountains push at the sky
and curves pull at your wheels
and up ahead on on the side of the road
like an old joke that shouldn't be retold
but i will if you ask because there's nothing better
than an old harley joke
(bandmember inserts harley joke here)
-- 2 --
. . . versewell we were yucking it up over the intercoms pretty good as we got off our bikes and got our first real look at the rider ... ette i guess is the etiquette and we all thought it was our lucky day and ordered white suits
just then three big leathers step up out of the ditch and before you know it we three knights are down on our asses watching them leathers ride off on our steeds followed by that damn . . . damsel
and the harley she fishtailed off on
laughing
-- 3 --
. . . versebut before we have time to say what the f…
this old pickup pulls up, yells need a lift and
we all jump in, me in the front, the others in the back
thinking the universe is looking after us for a change
and the chase was on . . .
yeah, the chase was on . . .
you know all those hollywood car chase cliches?
you know ... the closeups on squinting eyes
the sun flashing behind trees the near misses
it's like a deck of cards you deal out however many
you need, shuffle'em up & voila! a new car chase
no i'm not being cynical, it's just that it wasn't like that at all. not at all.
. . . short bridge into eerie with spokesongyou see billie bob the driver was you might say a few bob short of a bill ... seemed to think he was driving cane toad patrol in north Queensland, swerving and schwoomping that old truck to pancake every last one of those ugly little f... schmuckers
now it might have been terrifying except that old truck couldn't do no more than 20 with a tailwind and a good fart so it was mostly just making us nauseous but reality was doing a pretty good job of that anyway
because all we could see was our bikes getting further and further away and shit we didn't want getting closer
. . . deeper into eeriepolice reports . . .
insurance claims . . .
better call the wives
tbetter alk it over first
get the story straight
-- 4 --
. . . short bridge out of eerieand up ahead on the side of the road
three bikes in a row we could tell they were ours
so we asked billie bob to drive normal
while we took a good look see going past
then to let us out up where we couldn't be seen
looked straightforward a roadside restaurant a clear ride out for the bikes trees to cover our approach so with the spare keys in our pockets because we're good old farts we had a plan — yeah we had a plan
all the old jungle training came back
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
them three leathers standing like maitre dees showing us to our bikes
keys were already in the ignition
bastards even waved as we rode off
but we never saw hide nor oil slick
of that damn damsel
and the harley she rode off on