"He lied to us through song..."
"...I hate when people do that!"
That is my memory of Homer's response to Apu admitting, after a rousing singalong to the contrary, that he did, in fact, need the Kwik-E Mart. That came to mind as I listened to an old playlist on the train this morning.
"My mama told me, 'Son,
always be a good boy,
don't ever play with guns,'
but I shot a man in Reno,
just to watch him die.
When I hear that train a-movin',
I hang my head and cry."
I am on record, long since, as finding this stanza, especially the famous verses about the man in Reno, to be more a dreadful lapse in Johnny Cash's controlled economy of verse than a sign of his genius. It all turns, I think on his use of "just." It is generally read to mean that he shot the main for the sole purpose of watching him die. I think, in context of a mournful, not sociopathic, narrator, it refers more to the fact that, whatever quarrel or purpose led up to it, the only significant outcome of shooting that man in Reno was that he watched him die. One man is dead, and another will never deserve freedom. Whatever happened before that is as immaterial as half remembered admonishments he received as a boy. I don't know that this was Cash's intent, but the song would be so much better if that were his intent. But the verse structure of what was, let's face it, a pop song, paid for coin by coin in juke boxes, demanded abbreviation.
I was thinking of this when another song I seldom listen to anymore came on my headphones. A spare acoustic guitar, catchy but evocative, then:
"Oh, the night, here it comes again.
It's on with the jeans, the jacket and the shirt..."
Ryan Adams' whole schtick, in contrast to Cash is that he could come up with melodies and hooks and put them together with cocktail napkin sketches of verse, and release albums at rates more akin to a champion laying hen than more tortured artists. And they were good, or at least better than they had any right to be. "La Cienega Smiled" is a good song, but I only just noticed that his need to end the verse at "shirt," to set up the half-rhyme with "girl" and maintain the metrical feet, means that his narrator is getting his inner wear and outer wear confused. Sigh.
What do you do with these things--little artifacts of the craft of versifying?
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