BOC: La Verne and Shirley and Buck

[Nebosuke]

I’d like to state at the beginning of this that I love Heaven Forbid.  I think
it’s got the most consistently excellent guitarwork ever on a BOC album, which
means to me that I think it’s got the most consistently excellent guitarwork
ever on a hard-rock album.  As for the songs and how this fits into the
overall BOC oeuvre:  this is still way too new and I’m still way too close to
the first blast of it to have any perspective.  Regarding the increased
prominence of Buck Dharma:  Al and Joe have been gone a long time, and their
replacements don’t seem to be songwriters.  Even if they are - and in the case
of Bobby R., if he’s even in it for the long haul - they don’t exactly have
seniority, so it was no surprise not to see much by them.  Seeing nothing new
from Allan Lanier didn’t surprise me; if he was ever particularly prolific, it
didn’t translate into his songs making the albums.  As for Eric Bloom…well,
I’m not one of the people who was crushed (or surprised) when his late-80’s
solo album never materialized.  (I’m one of the people who took "Eyes on Fire"
and "Feel the Thunder" as twin slaps).  I would hate to see either of these
guys go:  Bloom’s voice is good on the stuff he sings and Lanier contributes
some very good guitar and keyboards.  But it’s clear who the prime mover
behind this band is, and has been for some time.

As John Swartz mentioned, on AOL a few nights ago E. Bloom asked for a vote on
what "other" songs from HF should be incorporated into the live show.  (SYIB,
Harvest Moon and Live for Me are currently in the set -- In Thee, too, if
we’re counting that).  I cast my vote for "Hammer Back" and "Damaged", and
this seems to have been the overall consensus, although everything got votes.
(As for me, "Power…", "Still Burnin’" and "Cold Gray Light of Dawn" have all
been featured enough in the past that I’ve heard them live several times each,
so I didn’t consider them).

It was interesting to read (in some mail I've misplaced, sorry) that someone
liked "Hammer Back"'s lyrics but not guitar, since my feelings are just the
opposite.  I look at this song as a fairly thin idea (lyrically and
structurally) that nonetheless provides an ace framework for BD to hang some
fine soloing off of.  (Actually the riff underlying the verses reminds me of
the "You Really Got Me"-fueled guitar break in the middle of the old BOC live
cover of "Soul Kitchen").  I haven’t yet sorted out my feelings about John
Shirley’s lyrics in general, or gotten HF as a whole into any kind of
perspective - not surprisingly, since my assessments of the older stuff
changes periodically.  But I’m finding some of his stuff irritating because
he’s got lines that I like a lot, followed by lines that I don’t like at all…I
find some of this stuff maddeningly inconsistent.

>From "Hammer Back":

"Everybody else has got one
Packing high-caliber heat
If you don’t want to be dancing
You don’t dare miss the beat"

What images are supposed to be conjured up by "dancing"?  Death spasms?  Or
are we supposed to think that the well-armed "everybody else" will be shooting
at our feet to make us dance?  "Dance!…Dance!"  That old wheeze isn’t even
from westerns, it’s from cartoon parodies of westerns, and hardly seems a
proper fit with the steely urban menace that Shirley is purveying.  And
"missing the beat" = "not keeping the hammer back"?  Well I guess so, but I
think those lines just thud, double "don’t"s and all.  That "quick
carjack"…why’s it quick?  Because a syllable was needed there, I suspect;  few
people think of carjacks as being leisurely transactions.

I do like "Secrets wound around their bones", though.

Regarding the "repetitiveness" of J. Shirley’s lyrics:  I think there is some
truth to this, however I also believe it is BD’s song structures that
exacerbate the problem on HF.  Remember "Dragon Lady"?  "Still Burnin’" is ,
to me, the prime offender in this regard and Shirley had nothing to do with
it.  And I do not believe that lyrics by JS specifically called for "4X
repeats", or whatever…even if they did this could have been disregarded.

I think BD’s instincts to keep the repetition of the chorus to a minimum in
"Live For Me" was exactly the right decision to make, in exactly the right
song.  This song sank its hooks (double-meaning intentional) into me when I
first heard it live two times in February, a week apart.  My sense from the
live shows was that it was unusually structured, it turns out it’s just a lot
less over-emphatic than some of the choruses here.  I think repetition would
have lessened the effectiveness of the chorus considerably.

I’ve been surprised by the hostility towards the lyrics in "SYIB".  I think
it’s a very good idea myself, and my main problem with it is the same one I
have with a bunch of his stuff here…there are lines that I think took some
time to get right (or that he was lucky and got right fast), and other ones
that look slapped on to fill out the metric requirements of the line.  I don’t
know what to make of "We’ll drink ouzo in our cup", if that’s in fact what it
is…from the live tape of this song I had thought it was "…in our caique",
which at least made some sense given the geography.  "We’ll drink <anything>
in our cup" is awkward, sounding almost like it was translated from another
language.  And there’s already been a coffee cup, isn’t this too many cups for
one short lyric?

While I’m on the subject-

"I saw the marks on your hands
I saw the blood on your coffee cup…"

Why aren’t the marks on HIS (the husband’s) hands?  They are on the old live
tape I’ve got, and they are in Shirley’s original lyric (don’t have the lyric
book with me and I can’t remember how it appears there).  OK, if she’s being
beaten by this guy she might have some marks on her hands as well, but isn’t
this is kind of muddying the imagery?  I can only assume this was a mistake by
E. Bloom.  As has been pointed out, there is a blown line in "In Thee" too.
("The dice roll much too easily"…huh?).  Why neither got fixed, I dunno…of
course the album was such a rush job it’s understandable that some stuff
slipped by…

I believe this is the first album that does not mention Donald Roeser in the
credits, just Buck Dharma.  I wonder whether he had a premonition that CMC was
going to butcher the spelling of his last name…given the typos in the booklet,
maybe his first name too…

-Chris Baker