Three Days of the Condor

This is another song that has been languishing in my mind for more than 10 years. Last month I finally got around to fixing some clumsy verses and recording it. It's one of three or four songs where I've borrowed the title from a movie or a TV series.

I've never seen Three Days of the Condor, but lately I've started asking for it in video stores. The lyrics have nothing to do with the movie, except that the title was the phrase to be guessed in an awkward game of Charades that I found myself playing when I was in my mid-twenties.

My favorite part of this song is the piano solos, which are me. I transposed the piano so that I only had to play white keys, then flailed away one take without much practice or planning. Imagine if you farted and it came out sounding like a Dizzy Gillespie solo. That comes close to how surprised I was.

Dechromium Cob

This is one of the first songs I ever wrote, nearly 30 years ago. Last year I re-recorded it to share with my friends from my high-school band, The Nutrients. (I got the idea to record this version after our unplanned performance at my wedding reception.)

When we were in high school, "dechromium cob" was our code word for how some of the weightlifters walked. We got it second hand from a Frank Zappa song via Ward Aycock, a salesclerk at Rolling Stone Records in west Phoenix.

See, I had a big mancrush on Ward. I created the first verse to Dechromium Cob while walking to Rolling Stone. I sang it again and again and laughed to myself. When I presented it to Ward, he was unimpressed. I was disappointed, but a day or so later I hummed the main riff to Ron (the guitarist for The Nutrients) and asked if he could play it on guitar.

I never heard the Zappa song myself until today--about 30 years after I wrote the iconic song. (Iconic, that is, for the five guys in The Nutrients.) I had tried to find it by searching "dechromium" (a nonexistent word), "dichromium" (a type of chemical bond), but today I tried "de chromium" and found it. And heard it.

The song is Sy Borg from the rock opera Joe's Garage. The song is an account of how Joe inadvertently destroys a "model XOJ-37 Nuclear Powered Pan-Sexual Roto-Plooker."

NSFW

Somehow I feel dirty (well, dirtier) now knowing the full musical and lyrical context from which this seminal song was taken.

Anarchist Heart

At this point, this is kind of an old song, but a fairly successful recent home recording.

I wrote most of the lyrics at the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991, and really only changed the third verse during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq--making it less specific to "Operation Desert Storm" and more generally about any war conducted in my name with my money, by any president. (No, it didn't end with the inauguration of the 44th president--although I do have a song about him that I'll post eventually.)

The original third verse began, "Desert Storm. Desert shame. Desert sham done in Exxon's name." That was all I had to change.

In 2003 I recited the lyrics as a poem at an anti-war meeting held at City Hall in Takoma Park, MD, which was carried by local access cable TV. I got recognized (and complimented, thankfully) on the street several times over the next month.

And, no, I don't consider myself an Anarchist. Got that, DHS?

UPDATE (7/29/2009): I found out yesterday that this song inspired a video that was on YouTube. The video is no longer available, and I never got to see it, but apparently the video-maker credited me. I'd love to see it, or find out more information.