Acid Fizz - 10

Ten, X, TEn, tEN, teN, x, vv, IIIIIIIIII, 10, tEn, vV, ixi, TEN, ten

This is the tenth episode of the WWD online serial, Acid Fizz.  Below are the previous chapters if you have not been keeping abreast:
Acid Fizz - 1
Acid Fizz - 2
Acid Fizz - 3
Acid Fizz - 4
Acid Fizz - 5
Acid Fizz - 6
Acid Fizz - 7
Acid Fizz - 8
Acid Fizz - 9

click picture & open link in a new tab for a song while you read

VIRGINIA HOLZKORN

If today was not an endless highway, if tonight was not an endless train, if tomorrow wasn’t such a long time, then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all, yes and only if my one true love was waiting, if I could hear her heart softly pounding, only if she was lying by me, then I’d lie in my bed once again.

            Elvis doing Dylan and didn’t Dylan say that was one of the most flattering moments of his life?  And didn’t Dylan do Elvis too?  He did.  Can’t Help Falling in Love, off Dylan.  It’s funny because as soon as I think of that song I realize that I’ve had it in my head without realizing it and Tomorrow is a Long Time was just my brain’s roundabout way of getting to it.  Dylan is a funny album, all stuff Dylan would have tossed out if he’d owned it but Columbia released it anyway and it’s actually good, but of course it is.  Like the Beatles thought Let It Be was all crap, but that was a bunch of crap because that album rocked.

            The rest of the show is shaping up.  As soon as Smiley’s done, I’ll go into this little symmetrical medley, Elvis doing Dylan, then Dylan doing Elvis.  I just have to get back to the studio.  When did I leave?  Can’t Help Falling in Love is really the same melody as Plaisir D’amour, which was written around 1780 something, I think.  So Dylan is in a daisy chain from a two hundred something year old French composer to all the people, French and otherwise, who sang Plaisir to Elvis doing his knockoff to Dylan and then to UB40 and whoever else covering the knockoff.  So Dylan and Elvis are hubs in this kind of daisy-chaining musical evolutionary anthropology, with all the covers of their songs that have been recorded and covers of other peoples’ songs, and they have more chain links spoking from them than they lived days on Earth.  So in the show I’ll focus on the two shortest chains between them, Tomorrow is a Long Time and Can’t Help Falling in Love, then play Plaisir D’amour, which was composed around the time of the French Revolution, creating some context for Elvis and Dylan, a context big enough to fit the galaxy and the two musical gods will shrink relatively from killer whales to killer bees.

            My mother had a Joan Baez album with Plaisir d’Amour on it – I wonder if she still does.  I could go by and see before Smiley’s done.  Actually Dylan is hers as well (actually they both might have been Dad’s to begin with), but I think the Joan Baez is still in the basement at her house.  I used to listen to that song over and over when I was little.  I don’t know why I did that because now I think about listening to the record and I remember the rain weighing down our lawn and the road outside and rolling down the window in Texas, a place I never want to see again.  Maybe that was around the time after Dad, it’s hard to say.  I guess it must have been if I can remember it, the whole of childhood was the time after Dad because seven, eight, nine years isn’t really that long to get over someone dying even if I don’t remember him now and maybe never really did.

            Now that I think of it, Plaisir D’amour might be the song I’ve been thinking of all along and the other two songs were just my brain’s really roundabout way of getting there.  I got the damn radio show wired into my subconscious.  When did I leave the studio?  Plaisir D’amour is about the pain of love, even though the title means pleasure of love and Joan sang it as joys of love.  Can’t Help Falling in Love is about the inevitability of love, not the pain or pleasure of it although it has a pleasant sense to it.  The two of them were in love at some time, Dylan and Joan.  They were in love and then they split ways (ain’t no use to sit and wonder why if’n you don’t know by now) and one sang Plaisir and the other sang Can’t Help Falling in Love, two different songs that were in fact the same song but about two different things even though they were about one thing really, which is love.  The pain of it and the inevitability of it and the pleasure of it are all part of the same thing contained within four letters like a prisoner between four walls, L-O-V-E.  What do I know about love?  I don’t know what I know, don’t know if I’ve been in love, I mean real love.  (Bobby).  (carl, harry, john).

So the whole two hundred and something year life of one song collapses in on two musicians who were once for a few months or maybe just a night in love and each later found themselves caught in the same river of that song that stretches all the way back to that French composer and all the way up until the last man sings Can’t Help Falling in Love or the last woman sings Plaisir D’amour or maybe there’s another progeny song waiting to hatch.  Who knows?  Probably.  Who says Plaisir D’amour was a totally original song anyway?  How many totally original songs could there really be?  I bet there were two songs in the beginning and they met like Adam and Eve and made babies and their babies made babies and Milk Cow Blues and Too Much on My Mind and Sufragette City and Ragged Wood and Who Loves the Sun? and Hold On, I’m Coming and Yakety Yak and I Got Friends in Low Places and every other song ever are the inbred offspring of two songs that fucked good back in the garden.

            I could think forever.  That one time I tried meditating with Helen when I visited home after my first semester away and she had learned it in jail and she told me it was about my breath.  Breathe in, breathe out.  Stay on that.  It’s not about emptying your mind, she said, because that is nearly impossible.  It’s about learning to label your thoughts.  A thought comes and you punch it with a “thought” tag and you throw it out and then another one comes and you punch it.  You never run out, or at least she never had.   Monks do, I guess, maybe some others.  It’s just labeling your thoughts for what they are, which isn’t you, they float around you like clouds or satellites and they have a lot to do with your atmosphere but there’s a whole planet in the middle of it pulling all that gravity and that’s something else.

            I remember that it was noisy and laborious to label them all instead of just letting them swim over me like usual.  Helen said it was like sitting under a waterfall and I agreed and I never tried it again.

            I’ll just get Joan from my mom’s basement and then take the car back to the studio and I’ll have the rest of the show figured out I think.  Cousin songs, sister songs, lover songs, father songs, daughter songs, which is all the same thing because the geneology is so criss-crossed now you couldn’t read it on a map and everyone has fucked everyone and given birth to everyone and combed the other ones’ hair and every other fucking thing.  I could go for a fuck now but I wouldn’t even know where to put it.  Which way is the studio?  Or am I headed toward my mom’s house?  Where am I?  “Thought.”