Dream Songs
IT'S GETTING LATE
Galaxie 500
Today
Aurora : 1988
20-20-20 : 2009
[Buy It]
HERE
Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted
Matador : 1991
[Buy It]
NOTHING CAME OUT
The Moldy Peaches
The Moldy Peaches
Rough Trade : 2001
[Buy It]
6AM MORNINGSIDE
The Clientele
Suburban Light
Merge : 2001
[Buy It]
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
The Shangri-Las
Red Bird : 1966
Available on: Myrmidons of Melodrama
RPM : 1994
[Buy It]
In my late, tormentative twenties, I used to dream a lot, or at least remember the few dreams I had, and six or seven times my sleep brought me entire new albums by singers and bands I admired. There was, for instance, a live Grateful Dead album, a two-record set, on which the band, treading water in an improvisation that consumed one entire side, found themselves drifting weirdly and involuntarily into the currents of "Moon River" and, after no little resistance, gave the song a lyric-fumbled go before Garcia delivered himself of the most aphoristic, grief-haunted solo I had ever heard. (I later realized that my brain must have been conjuring and deforming Garcia's anguishful virtuosities on the Europe '72 version of "Morning Dew" - landmarks, I feel, of guitared sorrow.) Another dream brought me a complete Velvet Underground album, one that could have been recorded only after their third, self-named record: it had all the hollow-voiced, flat-toned loveliness of that dear, dire masterwork, but the sound seemed to be prowling around within itself, trending off in fresh directions.
I later came to learn that sleep-born albums were not uncommon, that lots of dozing people were extending or deepening the repertoires of their favorite bands, then waking up and realizing, traumatically, what had been lost. (This must have been happening all the time to listeners whose lives, unlike mine, had not turned away from music during long whiles of erosional adulthood.) But what undid me was eventually confronting in daylight some songs that sounded as if they had been recovered from my long-ago, agonied slumbers. These were songs that seemed too unearthly in their beauty to be available to wide-awake, job-holding citizens of the quotidian. I'll mention just a handful. I stumbled onto all of them in the space of just one summer, in 2001, when, after a catastrophic breakup, I threw myself into music that, in most instances, I should have heard years, sometimes whole decades, earlier.
The first three seemed to be straight off that dream-begotten Velvet Underground album. For starters, Galaxie 500's "It's Getting Late." The simple, ruminant chord cycle, the struggled and sometimes unintelligible vocals (vague but burdened declarations in the lyrics giving way to even vaguer admonitions), and then, after the second and final verse, in lieu of a notey solo: four unbroken, identical, queasily pitched but unhistrionic four-measure moans of controlled, even stately feedback - a condensed and perfected history of all our misery and grievance, or at least most of mine at the time. I dubbed ninety minutes' worth of the song onto a cassette that became my daily fare in extrametropolitan traffic.
That tape was later replaced, though, by a continuous feed of Pavement's "Here." This time the parallels to the Velvet Underground were a little more obvious - monologuish lyrics vouchsafed impassively (everything is elegized the instant it happens); the depressive chug of the rhythm guitar; the lead guitarist's cleaving pickily but shakily to a single note during the verses but then, at the start of the chorus (as Stephen Malkmus invites the listener to share in a prayer), managing a tiny, solemn filigree in the spirit of VU's "Jesus"; and, of course, the closing line's "I guess a guess is the best I'll do" answering and none too subtly paraphrasing Lou Reed's climactic "I guess that I just don't know" in "Heroin" - but this was a VU updated and aired out and relocated to a sprawl of freeways and outlets, a little giddy from new vistas. There's such a flattening finality to the song's tentativeness that it was all I could listen to for weeks.
I had much better timing with the Moldy Peaches: I glommed onto a steeply discounted secondhand copy of their first and apparently final official album not soon after its release and took first to Kimya Dawson's new slant on Moe Tucker's drowsy and senseless sincerity. The Moldy Peaches were a sort of junior VU, scootering back to middle school or even earlier, but without the determined purity of Velvets candlelighter Jonathan Richman, another of my favorite unsongish songsters of loopily American teenhood and lifelong aftermath. The Moldy Peaches might have been a grimy duo, but "Nothing Came Out," notwithstanding its snickery, latrine-minded title, is a full-blown ballad of unrequited love: the overknowing girl in whose voice Dawson is singing wants only to ride bikes, watch cartoons, and spoon with her beloved. The musical backdrop of the song, though, is undreamily stark; when a real-world landline phone rings twice during the second verse, Dawson laughs off the intrusion, and the song's cozy hopelessness survives even a mood-killing guitar solo (overdubbed?) of blustery bar-band fury. In sum, it's a kind of "Afterhours" for those too young to lie their way into even the "under 21" twilights at the clubs.
I've got just two more - one I must have heard in some batch of Beatles curios and novelties deemed too slight for release to the conscious, and one that might have been given a berth on a best-of-the-girl-groups anthology, a repackaging of stray plaints of late adolescencia.
The first is the Clientele's "6am Morningside." The littlest slip of a song (two murmury verses, and then it's gone), it's wispily of a piece with the Beatles early in their heyday, when drums and bass and two guitars fingered just so could summon moods not previously available in anyrock venaculars. Alasdair MacLean shimmers himself into a love-laden, Lennoned voice and offers fugitive glimpses of Penny Lane in hushabye moments when adult locals aren't astir.
And the other? The Shangri-Las' fraught and encompassing "Past, Present and Future." Lasting all of two minutes and forty seconds, and declaimed in a halting, catch-in-the-voice recitative over lunar symphonics looted from Beethoven, the song is a compact confessional memoir in three parts: innocence, experience, and fatalistic regret. (The experience, one gathers, was what therapists of our later era like to call "acquaintance rape.") It feels even a bit unseemly to imagine such messily rueful truth-telling gushing out of very specific transistor radios and bedroom record players circa 1966.
These days, sadly, I remember little of my dreams, and it's probably for the better, but the downside is that no spectral albums have come to me in ages. I am thus all the more grateful for songs that tip me back into what I once thought I might have somehow had.
Garielle Lutz lives and works in metropolitan Pittsburgh
Moistworks is on vacation for some of this month, posting a few favorite old pieces. This one’s from June 26, 2006.
